ABSTRACTThere is surprisingly little empirical evidence supporting theoretical and anecdotal claims regarding the spontaneous production of prototypic facial expressions used in numerous emotion re...

This paper considers the implications of precautionary restrictions against technologies, in the context of the potential for creating and sustaining rumours. It focuses on the restriction against mobile phone use at petrol stations, based on the rumour that a spark might cause an explosion. Rumours have been substantiated by precautionary usage warnings from mobile phone manufacturers, petrol station usage restrictions, and a general lack of technical understanding. Petrol station employees have themselves spread the rumour about alleged incidents, filling the information (...) gap about the basis for the restriction. (shrink)

I provide an account of precision testing in particle physics that makes a virtue of theory-ladenness in experiments. Combining recent work on the philosophy of experimentation with a broader view of the scientific process allows one to understand that the most precise and secure knowledge produced in a mature science cannot be achieved in a theory-independent fashion. I discuss precision tests of the muon’s magnetic moment and effective field theory as a means to repurpose precision tests for exploratory purposes.

The resemblance is plain to see between Kripke’s Wittgenstein introducing bizarre rules such as quaddition (in illustrating the sceptical paradox against theories of meaning) and Goodman’s introducing the equally bizarre grue (in generating the new riddle of induction). But the two sorts of bizarre cases also differ in interesting respects. For those familiar with Goodman’s case, this similarity sparks a strong temptation to enlist to the meaning sceptic’s cause key elements of Goodman’s new riddle, which are missing from Kripke’s case. (...) In this essay, I characterize a natural way of doing just this, which targets dispositionalist solutions to the sceptical paradox. I also show that, despite initial appearances, this new objection to dispositionalism (the symmetry problem) is not nearly as worrisome as originally thought. The solution offered on behalf of semantic dispositionalists does require a trade-off, though, from the severe form of indeterminacy advanced by the meaning sceptic to a much milder thesis. (shrink)

Adam Graves presents a new framework for understanding the importance of the concept of revelation in the development of phenomenology while also charting a path towards a more fruitful understanding of the relationship between reason and revelation, one that is rooted in a deeper appreciation of the complexities of our linguistic inheritance.

The recognition and reconciliation of ‘opposites’ lies at the heart of our most personal and global problems. These problems are ‘wicked’ in the sense that they are difficult or impossible to solve and arise at the interface of interdependent polarities. By exploring the human tendency to divide the world into two parts, _Wicked Problems & the Reconciliation of Opposites_ argues that our relationship with such pairings and polarities is profoundly important to the way we recognise and resolve wicked problems. Using (...) an original theory of bi-relational development, Adam proposes that our everyday ways of knowing and being can be powerfully located and understood in terms of the creation, emergence, opposition, convergence, collapse and trans-positioning of dyadic constituents. Chapters use this concept to frame key debates in and across domains of knowledge, including education, psychology, law and theology, as well as to offer a new perspective on the most profound problems of the twenty-first century: globalisation, sustainability and secularisation. This book is a comprehensive study of dyadic structrures and relationships and provides a multidisciplinary and original approach to human development. It will be of great interest to students and academics of social psychology, psychosocial development, psychoanalysis and transpersonal psychology, but it is also relevant within the fields of education, human development and theology. (shrink)

Textbooks for social science research suggest that studies are necessarily grounded in foundational philosophies that shape the research process. However, the literature does not provide a consistent picture of how philosophical positions shape research, and few studies have investigated researchers’ own ideas about this process. This study aimed to classify researchers’ descriptions of how philosophical positions connect to aspects of the research process and to investigate metaphors used to describe these connections. From a sample of 1500 journal articles, 73 papers (...) were found that directly mentioned a philosophical position. The analysis found that philosophical positions are most often connected with study design and methodology, or with concepts and theories. The connections include that philosophical positions result in, support, match and result from aspects of the research process, and that philosophical assumptions could be inherent in methodologies and theories. Metaphorically, philosophical positions were a tool, path, location, support, resource, person and seeing. These classification frameworks can be used in future research to understand how researchers conceptualize philosophical positions and how this influences their decision making. (shrink)

Some theorists argue that appropriate responses to terrorism are in part shaped by popular sentiment. In two experiments, using representative design and ecological stimuli (e.g. actual news reports), we present evidence for some of the ways popular sentiment about terrorism tracks theory and can be constructed. In Experiment 1, we document that using the word ‘terrorist’ to describe a group of people decreases willingness to understand the group's grievances, decreases willingness to negotiate with the group, increases perceived permissibility of violence (...) against the group, and decreases the perceived rationality of the group. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate that judgment about the permissibility of the use of force against terrorist groups can be biased by simple memory-priming manipulations. Results are interpreted in terms of (1) implications for philosophical theories about terrorism and (2) the role that experimental investigation can play in applied ethics. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 539-550.

As a unique work of reference, The Cambridge Handbook of Australian Criminology covers the broad range of contemporary and historical subjects of criminology, combining statistical and narrative analyses. The book provides the most up-to-date figures and facts, traces historical trends in Australian crime and criminal justice, and comprehensively covers the key contemporary issues in Australian criminology. Including valuable crime statistics compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this book is the complete companion to Australian criminology - the single most important (...) resource for Australian criminology and criminal justice. (shrink)

Thinking about the representational qualities of maps and models allows one to offer a new perspective on the nature of mindreading. The recent critiques of our dominant paradigms for mindreading, theory theory and simulation theory by enactivists such as Daniel Hutto reveal a flaw in the standard options for thinking about how we think about others. Views that rely on theorizing or simulation to account for the way in which we understand others often appear to over-intellectualize social interaction. In contrast, (...) enactivists champion embodied, non-representational forms of engagement with others. I claim that one can improve on the representational views of social cognition by moving away from talk of the mental manipulation of propositions in favor of the construction of maps and models of others. Furthermore, I claim that the current state of social neurobiology lends itself towards such a view. (shrink)

In the current paper, the author offers a philosophically informed history of the present to address the evolving intersections of gender identity and sexuality within the K-12 student body. The author returns to the case of Lawrence/Leticia/Latisha King, a murdered middle schooler, to unpack the evolving frames that have been developed since King’s murder in 2008. To do this, the author addresses the ways King’s name and clothing choices were used to frame King’s life and death in diverse ways at (...) school. Schools, of course, are a space and time where youth come into presence and where decades of research have documented the less than ideal climate of schools for LGBTQ + students. King’s school experiences represent a challenge to the typical narrative of victimization that often frames LGBTQ + issues in education. The author argues engaging King’s life contributes to the need to address the everyday agentive practices of youth, particularly queer youth of color, in educational scholarship. As the author argues, King’s school experiences represent a challenge to the frame of victimization providing a key inflection point for understanding twenty-first century students. (shrink)

The Group Cohesiveness Scale measures patient-rated group cohesiveness. The English version of the scale has demonstrated good psychometric properties. This study describes the validation of the Czech version of the GCS. A total of 369 patients participated in the study. Unlike the original study, the ordinal confirmatory factor analysis supported a two-dimensional solution. The analysis demonstrated the existence of two moderately to highly associated domains of group cohesiveness—affective and behavioral. The two-dimensional model was invariant across genders, age, education, and time (...) up to factor means level. Internal consistency reached satisfactory values for both domains. In terms of convergent validity, only weak association was found between the GCS domains and the group working alliance measured by the Group Outcome Rating Scale. This is the first revision of the factor structure of the GCS in the European context. The scale showed that the Czech version of the GCS is a valid and reliable brief tool for measuring both aspects of group cohesiveness. (shrink)

These are some responses to an early version of Johnston's paper "The Personite Problem" (now published in Nous).

The Confederated Colville Tribes collaborated with DroneSeed, a forestry drone start-up, to use drones to replant their tribal forest after a devastating fire. Using concepts from Bernard Stiegler to interrogate ethnographic data, this article argues that forestry drones are pharmaka: their biopolitics can be therapeutic, that is, negentropic, capable of reversing ecological simplification. Drone forestry is a type of arborescent governmentality, a tree-based computer-coded attempt to control the growth of a forest. For the Colville, this negentropy is also an act (...) of sovereignty that protects culture and honors multispecies relationships. For DroneSeed, it is an experiment in negentropic geoengineering, an attempt to profitably leverage technologies and biological regeneration to sequester carbon and reduce global existential risk. Ultimately the project was not the success desired; the failure of technoliberal projects that blend ecological and economic liberalism shows that a more radical approach might be necessary to root carbon and slow capitalism. (shrink)

Unlike many countries across the world, in Chile after 1968 a radical socialist government came to power with the electoral victory of Salvador Allende and Popular Unity underpinned by a whole range of movements toward a socialism “from below”. Using fragments gathered from workers’ newspapers produced during the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s, the aim of this article is to identify the changing content of radical socialist politics that coalesced by the time of this electoral victory in and through the “everyday” (...) experience of workers in the textile industry. Workers in this sector were at the forefront of the profound changes underway during the prior period of import-substitution industrialisation from the 1930s and the “pre-revolutionary” moment of 1970-1973, where major textile firms were amongst the first to be occupied and nationalised under the Allende government. By tracing the evolution of socialist ideas in these publications —published by trade unions, political parties and, in the 1970s, by workers in the occupied factories themselves— I unravel the development of a radical socialist politics through these decades that then coalesced with the electoral victory of the UP in 1970. Methodologically, I draw on the work of Chilean sociologist Tomás Moulian (1993) and his concept of ideas “en uso” to examine how radical socialist ideas developed and changed in their interaction with workplace conflicts of the time. Consequently, I identify four areas in which these ideas developed: expression of the changing workplace; interpretation of discontent through legalist and radical discourse; the complexities of Chilean socialist and anti-imperialist ideas; and the construction of historical memory. I demonstrate how the interplay of these four features of Chilean socialist ideas were represented in an “everyday socialism” that informed the factory occupations and nascent social transformations after 1970. (shrink)

In a letter to Franz Overbeck from 1883 Nietzsche confessed that the more he read the German philosopher Gustav Teichmüller the more he realized »how poorly« he understood Plato and »how much Zarathustra Platonizes«. This is a striking admission from a thinker who defined his own philosophy as »inverted Platonism« and it has yet to be adequately explained. This article examines what Nietzsche may have meant by the verb »to Platonize« by drawing an explicit connection to Teichmüller's controversial views on (...) Platonic psychology. Two possible meanings of the verb are put forth, a weak and a strong meaning and a case in defense of the latter is made. In the strong sense of the word »to Platonize« meant that the Overman was a mythos in the Platonic sense, in that it made Nietzsche's much more recondite »Bundle Theory« of the self accessible to the average reader, but it did not correspond to a view of the self which Nietzsche espoused in his own voice. (shrink)

We define two maps, one map from the set of conditional probability systems (CPS’s) onto the set of lexicographic probability systems (LPS’s), and another map from the set of LPS’s with full support onto the set of CPS’s. We use these maps to establish a relationship between strong belief (defined on CPS’s) and assumption (defined on LPS’s). This establishes a relationship at the abstract level between these two widely used notions of belief in an extended probability-theoretic setting.

In the sixteenth-century book Utopia, Thomas More argues that philosophers can play an effective role in the public sphere. This article builds from More’s argument to develop a theory of public philosophy centered on dialogue or rhetoric. It contrasts this public philosophy with the disciplinary form of philosophy that emerged in the twentieth century. The discipline constitutes philosophers as experts and limits them to a dialogue only with their peers. By contrast, public philosophers can be in dialogue with anyone involved (...) in a public issue. The article discusses some key challenges to doing public philosophy. It then gives an account of the methods and central features of field philosophy, one kind of public philosophy. (shrink)

Field philosophy is both a collaborative practice of engaged scholarship and a theory of knowledge that contrasts with the model of disciplinary knowledge production. I briefly describe the origins...

This paper looks at the question of sustainability through the prism of a collective action problem fundamentally driven by human desires and needs. It ftrst characterizes the problem of non-sustainability by combining environmental ethics with the philosophy of technology. The paper then considers four basic strategies for resolving the collective action problem: virtue, regulation, price, and innovation. Each solution has its own set of weaknesses and strengths, meaning that achieving sustainability will remain a difficult balancing act.

This chapter offers a rough sketch of the history and sociology of public philosophy. For philosophy, the crucial historical period of professionalization in the US is roughly 1865–1920 and slightly earlier than that for Germany and some other European countries. The chapter discusses the pre‐disciplinary hodgepodge of philosophy and its public nature. Around the time of the founding of the American Philosophical Association in 1900, William James lamented the barriers being erected between the new disciplines of philosophy and psychology as (...) well as the growing distance between knowledge workers and lived experiences in real social contexts. The process of professionalization can become counterproductive: a dynamic often described as professional deformation. Criticisms of professionalization never entirely went away, but they were confined to the margins of the growing disciplinary matrix. The chapter considers attempts to theorize and practice new relationships between philosophy and various publics, given the institutional and social characteristics of the twenty‐first century. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s treatment of death has a great deal in common with Heidegger’s notion of “authentic Being-towards-death.” Most importantly, both thinkers argue that an individual’s death, rather than simply annihilating an individual’s life, meaningfully impacts this life while it is still being lived. Heidegger, like Kierkegaard before him, provides an anti-Epicurean account in which life and death are co-present. Despite this kinship, there have been numerous efforts from both the Kierkegaardian camp and from Heidegger himself to distinguish sharply the one from (...) the other. While Heidegger makes several somewhat condescending comments about Kierkegaard’s endeavors, many Kierkegaardians are wary of associating him too closely with Heidegger. After a brief description of their largely shared philosophy of death, I would like to consider what I take to be the most significant complaint from each side and suggest a more nuanced understanding of their relationship. (shrink)

The concept of Islamic economics as a coherent economic and financial system basically does not exist. Some authors take it, however, for simplicity, under-standing by this description any entities and legal regulations, mainly in the financial markets, driven – either declaratively or in fact – on the principles derived from religious precepts of Islam. The emphasis is put on so-called inter-est-free banking, which involves the concept of usury (riba). By referring to the essence of Islamic economics, the author shows the (...) dif-ferences and similarities between "interest-free" Islamic banking and conven-tional banking (Western-style). It turns out that the differences are almost exclu-sively at the level of declarations and similarities that arise from attempts to circumvent religious regulations, as in the riba, are much more numerous than it might seem. They result from the need to fuse Islamic finances with global fi-nancial markets, which at least at the point of contact eliminates the capability of maintaining the autonomy of the local banking system. In addition, interest-free Islamic banking development meets an obstacle in the shape of the market pres-ence of conventional banks, which are its natural ideological competition. Thus, although the Islamic Development Bank estimates the size of the market of the Islamic system of financial services in 2015 at between 2 to 8 trillion dollars, one seems to be entitled to conclude that, in practice, between Islamic economics and capitalist economies of the West, at least in terms of banking services, the dif-ferences are purely semantic, and both Western and Islamic deposit, credit and investment products are in fact identical. (shrink)

In psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, “prediction” is widely recognized as central to cognition. Mental time travel into the future is the form of cognitive prediction most intimately connected to adaptive human functioning. It underpins explicit goal-setting, collaborative planning, and the pursuit of creative innovation. Theories focusing on prediction have a long intellectual history. Broadly construed, they offer perhaps the best opportunity yet for a global picture of neural and cognitive functioning. Exploiting this opportunity requires building bridges between prediction—as (...) instantiated in perception or reinforcement learning—and full-fledged mental time travel into the future. The surge of recent work on these topics indicates consensus about the promise of prospection for understanding diverse aspects of cognition, but subfields still lack theoretical synthesis. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Beitrag konzeptualisiert die Geschwisterbeziehung objektbeziehungstheoretisch. Dabei wird die Annahme verfolgt, dass die Subjekt-Objekt-Trennung zwischen Geschwistern oftmals durchlässiger und fragiler bleibt als die zu den elterlichen Objekten. Die Autorin macht dafür überdauernde frühe Abwehrmechanismen wie Projektion, Idealisierung und Spaltung geltend, die die Individuationsentwicklung und die Fähigkeit zur Selbst- und Beziehungsregulierung zwischen ihnen belasten, was an einem Fallbeispiel illustriert wird. Darüber hinaus wird die Ursache konflikthafter und traumatisierender Geschwisterbeziehungen in Beziehung gesetzt zu Juliet Mitchells Konzept des »Gesetzes der Mutter«.