Emoji faces, which are ubiquitous in our everyday communication, are thought to resemble human faces and aid emotional communication. Yet, few studies examine whether emojis are perceived as a particular emotion and whether that perception changes based on rendering differences across electronic platforms. The current paper draws upon emotion theory to evaluate whether emoji faces depict anatomical differences that are proposed to differentiate human depictions of emotion. We modified the existing Facial Action Coding System to apply to emoji faces. An (...) equivalent “emoji FACS” rubric allowed us to evaluate two important questions: First, Anatomically, does the same emoji face “look” the same across platforms and versions? Second, Do emoji faces perceived as a particular emotion category resemble the proposed human facial expression for that emotion? To answer these questions, we compared the anatomically based codes for 31 emoji faces across three platforms and two version updates. We then compared those codes to the proposed human facial expression prototype for the emotion perceived within the emoji face. Overall, emoji faces across platforms and versions were not anatomically equivalent. Moreover, the majority of emoji faces did not conform to human facial expressions for an emotion, although the basic anatomical codes were shared among human and emoji faces. Some emotion categories were better predicted by the assortment of anatomical codes than others, with some individual differences among platforms. We discuss theories of emotion that help explain how emoji faces are perceived as an emotion, even when anatomical differences are not always consistent or specific to an emotion. (shrink)

Do English-speakers think about anger as “red” and sadness as “blue”? Some theories of emotion suggests that color(s) - like other biologically-derived signals- should be reliably paired with an emotion, and that colors should differentiate across emotions. We assessed consistency and specificity for color-emotion pairings among English-speaking adults. In study 1, participants (n = 73) completed an online survey in which they could select up to three colors from 23 colored swatches (varying hue, saturation, and light) for each of ten (...) emotion words. In study 2, different participants (n = 52) completed a similar online survey except that we added additional emotions and colors (which better sampled color space). Participants in both studies indicated the strength of the relationship between a selected color(s) and the emotion. In study 1, four of the ten emotions showed consistency, and about one-third of the colors showed specificity, yet agreement was low-to-moderate among raters even in these cases. When we resampled our data, however, none of these effects were likely to replicate with statistical confidence. In study 2, only two of twenty emotions showed consistency, and three colors showed specificity. As with the first study, no color-emotion pairings were both specific and consistent. In addition, in study 2, we found that saturation and lightness, and to a lesser extent hue, predicted color-emotion agreement rather than perceived color. The results suggest that previous studies which report emotion-color pairings are likely best thought of experiment-specific. The results are discussed with respect to constructionist theories of emotion. (shrink)

Taking a cue from remarks Thomas Kuhn makes in 1990 about the historical turn in philosophy of science, I examine the history of history and philosophy of science within parts of the British philosophical context in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, ordinary language philosophy's influence was at its peak. I argue that the ordinary language philosophers' methodological recommendation to analyze actual linguistic practice influences several prominent criticisms of the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation and that these criticisms (...) relate to the historical turn in philosophy of science. To show these connections, I primarily examine the work of Stephen Toulmin, who taught at Oxford from 1949 to 1954, and Michael Scriven, who completed a dissertation on explanation under Gilbert Ryle and R.B. Braithwaite in 1956. I also consider Mary Hesse's appeal to an ordinary language-influenced account of meaning in her account of the role of models and analogies in scientific reasoning, and W.H. Watson's Wittgensteinian philosophy of science, an early influence on Toulmin. I think there are two upshots to my historical sketch. First, it fills out details of the move away from logical positivism to more historical- and practice-focused philosophies of science. Second, questions about linguistic meaning and the proper targets and aims of philosophical analysis are part and parcel of the historical turn, as well as its reception. Looking at the philosophical background during which so-called linguistic philosophers also had a hand in bringing these questions to prominence helps us understand why. (shrink)

Recent work in the history of philosophy of science details the Kantianism of philosophers often thought opposed to one another, e.g., Hans Reichenbach, C.I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap, and Thomas Kuhn. Historians of philosophy of science in the last two decades have been particularly interested in the Kantianism of Reichenbach, Carnap, and Kuhn, and more recently, of Lewis. While recent historical work focuses on recovering the threatened-to-be-forgotten Kantian themes of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, we should not elide the differences between (...) the Kantian strands running throughout this work. In this paper, I disentangle a few of these strands in the work of Reichenbach and Lewis focusing especially on their theories of relativized, constitutive a priori principles in empirical knowledge. In particular, I highlight three related differences between Reichenbach and Lewis concerning their motivations in analyzing scientific knowledge and scientific practice, their differing conceptions of constitutivity, and their relativization of constitutive a priori principles. In light of these differences, I argue Lewis’s Kantianism is more similar to Kuhn’s Kantianism than Reichenbach’s, and so might be of more contemporary relevance to social and practice-based approaches to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This article motivates a shift in certain strands of the debate over legitimate roles for nonepistemic values in scientific practice from investigating what is involved in taking cognitive attitudes like acceptance toward an empirical hypothesis to looking at a social understanding of assertion, the act of communicating that hypothesis. I argue that speech act theory’s account of assertion as a type of doing makes salient legitimate roles nonepistemic values can play in scientific practice. The article also shows how speech act (...) theory might provide a framework for fruitfully extending aspects of the social and pragmatic turns in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

In this paper, I fill out the received view of logical positivism within professional philosophy against which Thomas Kuhn’s Structure appeared. To do this, I look at the methodological dimensions of ordinary language criticisms of logical positivist analysis from P.F. Strawson and J.L. Austin. While no one would confuse Strawson and Austin for philosophers of science, I look to their criticisms given the general porousness of sub-disciplinary boundaries in mid-20th century philosophy, the prominence of ordinary language philosophy in the 1950s, (...) and also because Kuhn was likely aware of their criticisms via Stanley Cavell. Their main charge is that the positivists base their ideal language analysis on an impoverished, yet overreaching account of meaning because they ignore ordinary linguistic practices. I then show how these methodological criticisms run parallel to points Kuhn makes against logical positivist approaches to the study of scientific knowledge. The parallels I draw emphasize methodological, rather than doctrinal dissatisfaction in mid-20th century philosophy with logical positivism’s perceived neglect of linguistic and scientific practices. An insight shared by these parallel criticisms is that logical positivists cannot declare linguistic and scientific practices irrelevant to their philosophical aims without an antecedent investigation of the practices under question. (shrink)

I explore three points about the relationship between C.I. Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism and W.V. Quine’s naturalized epistemology inspired by Robert Sinclair’s Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction. First, I highlight Lewis’s long-standing commitment to Platonism about meaning and its connection to his reflective philosophical method and rejection of a linguistic account of analyticity. Second, I consider Sinclair’s claim that “Lewis’s epistemology provides no indication concerning how, despite different sensory experiences, we still come to agree on what we are talking (...) about and what counts as evidence” (2022, 113). I find more hints, especially in Lewis’s account of how we verify that two people share meaning in common. However, some of the pragmatic and broadly empirical factors Lewis appeals to are not part of Quine’s naturalized epistemology. Finally, I relate these points to Quine’s (1953/1980) claim to advance a more “thorough pragmatism” than Lewis. Quine does not say much about action, value, and ethics, but these are central parts of Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism and a source of his reluctance to abandon those parts of his epistemology that Sinclair argues Quine found dispensable. (shrink)

I draw upon speech act theory to understand the speech acts appropriate to the multiple aims of scientific practice and the role of nonepistemic values in evaluating speech acts made relative to those aims. First, I look at work that distinguishes explaining from describing within scientific practices. I then argue speech act theory provides a framework to make sense of how explaining, describing, and other acts have different felicity conditions. Finally, I argue that if explaining aims to convey understanding to (...) particular audiences rather than describe literally across all contexts, then evaluating explanatory acts directed to the public or policymakers involves asking nonepistemic questions. (shrink)

In this paper, I look at Susan Stebbing’s articles and reviews that critically engage logical positivism. These appeared before the publication of A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and helped shape the early British reception of logical positivism. I highlight Stebbing’s adoption of G.E. Moore’s tripartite distinction between knowing a proposition, understanding it, and giving an analysis of it and, in light of this distinction, her focus on whether the principle of verifiability can ground a plausible account of communication. Stebbing (...) thinks not, and I reconstruct her reasons, as well as her own account of communication. In doing this, I relate her criticisms to her rejection of methodological solipsism and her dissatisfaction with the logical positivist treatment of statements about other minds and the past. I also argue that Stebbing’s work provides a bridge to later criticisms of logical positivism from ordinary language philosophers. Foregrounding Stebbing’s engagement with logical positivism, especially her focus on communication, paints a fuller picture of how the logical positivists came to be part of analytic philosophy despite having different concerns than many of the British philosophers engaging their work. (shrink)

Sympathetic commentators on Kant’s account of physical knowledge agree that while philosophy of science has much to gain from Kant’s notion of constitutive a priori principles, Kant’s conceptual and methodological resources are inconsistent with the possibility of scientific change. In this article, I argue that this received view is lacking since Kant’s claim that a unique set of a priori principles structures our knowledge for all time is not central to his account of the constitutive a priori. Two underemphasized points (...) of Kant’s theory bear this out. First, Kant applies ‘a priori’ widely to include non-truth-evaluable elements of knowledge. As such, Kant primarily understands the necessity that attaches to these elements in light of the constitutive role they play in knowledge rather than in terms of truth for all time. Second, Kant uses two methods to establish the existence of constitutive a priori principles: the analytic and the synthetic. On my interpretation, while scientific change has discredited the analytic method, the synthetic method remains viable. In this way, I offer a new perspective on the ways in which Kant’s theory of the constitutive a priori can ground Neo-Kantian philosophies of science like those of Hans Reichenbach and Michael Friedman. (shrink)

In this review, I talk about the essays dealing with C.I. Lewis's place in the history of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy of science.

This article discusses changes in post-apartheid South Africa’s economy and society in relation to the country’s re-insertion in the Empire. South Africa ’s specificity in the African context is largely related to the crucial role played in this case by the factory proletariat in defining the collapse of apartheid. Therefore, neoliberalism and the entry in the Empire in this case have to be understood in terms of state responses to a class composition that starting from workplace organisation has expressed a (...) resistance to the imposition of wage labour discipline. While the government of the African National Congress has successfully recodified its nationalist discourse to suit the requirements of capitalist globalisation and liberalization, this process has also been very contradictory. The adoption of a neoliberal agenda has, in particular, emphasized the ANC’s abdication from state sovereignty as a vehicle of strategies of control based on social citizenship. New movements, largely made of multitudes left out of waged employment, have therefore emerged to challenge the ANC’s pro-Empire choice. However, these movements are not based on a « souverainniste » agenda, or on delegation to the state of resistance to the Empire. Rather, in their conscious departure from nationalist and wage-based mythologies, they clarify the biopolitical nature of current processes of contestation and are able to combine grassroots struggles with cognitive abilities of reappropriation. (shrink)

This essay is focused on a difficult passage in Varrò, rust. 2,5,3-4, which is quoted, explained and partially corrected by Columella. Both passages are for us a valuable source of information about the capital sentence inflicted, in a very early age, on the person who caused the death of the ploughing ox. However, a contradiction or apory can be observed in the attitude of the two authors. On the one hand - as admirers of the mos maiorum - they seem (...) to praise the innocence and the restraint of the ancients, who showed so much respect for so beneficent an animal. On the other hand, in their roles as instructors of the most efficient farming techniques, they are keen on the profits assured by the raising of farm animals, and discuss without embarrassment the slaughter of oxen and the eating of beef. In Greece, the Attic Bouphonia, with all their functional ambiguities, marked the transition from the age of the bloodless sacrifice - praised and placed forever in the archives of history - to the "modern" age of slaughter; on the contrary, Roman culture lacked a similar rite that could somehow reconcile the two antithetical ideas, the ancient taboo about the slaying of domestic animals and the actual killing as performed in historical times. (shrink)

Résumé Dans sa configuration actuelle, l’intellect général est à la fois fragmenté et dépourvu de perception collective et de conscience de soi. Seule l’émergence consciente du travail cognitif comme incarnation sensible et sociale de l’intellect général permettra l’avènement d’une recomposition de notre connaissance commune, scientifique, technique, affective, organisatrice, ainsi que de notre intérêt commun.

Dans un travail anterieur j’ai essaye de montrer que Heidegger a finalement refuse de faire place, dans sa philosophie, a la notion platonicienne d’idee, bien qu’elle semblait, selon un certain point de vue, etre une figure capable de representer l’ouverture originelle de l’être qui était au coeur des recherches de Heidegger dans les annees qui entourent Etre et Temps. La raison de cela, a mon avis, est que l’approche aristotelicienne de la philosophie de Platon par Heidegger explicitement adoptee conduisait au (...) bout du compte a interpreter l’idee de Platon comme une substance. Mais qu’en est‑il de l’idee du bien, qui pour sa determination teleologique et pour sa collocation au‑dela de l’ousia d’un cote semblait repondre aux besoins propres a la pensee heideggerienne, et d’un autre cote etait plus refractaire a la substantialisation aristotelicienne? La these que je soutiens est que Heidegger, tout en ayant cultive pour longtemps le projet d’utiliser l’idee du bien comme un precedent important de son ontologie, a finalement decide que ce projet n’etait pas possible, parce que la connotation ethique de cette idee etait largement dominante sur l’aspect ontologique. (shrink)

The Commentary on the Psalms is a monumental work which for more than thirty years consumed the energies of Augustine as exegete. The extraordinary quantity of this work as well as the exceptional number of manuscript traditions which it has spawned has delayed until now the production of a critical edition carried out according to the exacting criteria of modern textual criticism. The part of the editorial project which the Vienna Academy entrusted to the Patristic Institute, the «Augustinianum» has now (...) been completed in five volumes published in the CSEL series. The editor’s intention was to incorporate the progress made in modern textual criticism to the specific case of Augustine’s treatment of the Psalms, giving due attention to the peculiar characteristics both of the text and of the manuscript tradition. (shrink)

Une théorie de la politique n'existe pas dans la pensée libertine intéressée à l'élaboration d'un modèle moral concentré sur la dimension de la vie privée. Pourtant à l'intérieur de cette tradition dans la deuxième moitié du VIIe siècle en France, s'amorce un filon à cheval entre utopie et roman d'aventure dans lequel apparaissent des formes d'organisation sociétales modelées selon les principes de la liberté, égalité, tolérance qui constitueront les mots d'ordres des philosophes des lumières.