This paper looks at the relationship between spacetime functionalism and Harvey Brown’s dynamical relativity. One popular way of reading and extending Brown’s programme in the literature rests on viewing his position as a version of relationism. But a kind of spacetime functionalism extends the project in a different way, by focussing on the account Brown gives of the role of spacetime in relativistic theories. It is then possible to see this as giving a functional account of the concept of spacetime (...) which may be applied to theories that go beyond relativity. This paper explores the way in which both the relationist project and the functionalist project relate to Brown’s work, despite being incompatible. Ultimately, these should not be seen as two conflicting readings of Brown, but two different directions in which to take his project. (shrink)

The term “network” is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word’s ubiquity has also made it a cliché, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with interconnected life, reveals the network’s role as a way for people to construct and manage their world—and their view of themselves. Each chapter considers how popular media and artistic forms make sense of decentralized network metaphors and (...) infrastructures. Patrick Jagoda first examines narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including the novel Underworld, the film Syriana, and the television series The Wire, all of which play with network forms to promote reflection on domestic crisis and imperial decline in contemporary America. Jagoda then looks at digital media that are interactive, nonlinear, and dependent on connected audiences to show how recent approaches, such as those in the videogame Journey, open up space for participatory and improvisational thought. Contributing to fields as diverse as literary criticism, digital studies, media theory, and American studies, Network Aesthetics brilliantly demonstrates that, in today’s world, networks are something that can not only be known, but also felt, inhabited, and, crucially, transformed. (shrink)

This investigation places recent research about changes in wives' and husbands' domestic labor in the context of well-known reporting differences between different kinds of housework surveys. An analysis of the “reporting gap” between direct-question reports of housework hours from the National Survey of Families and Households and time-diary reports from Americans' Use of Time, 1985, shows that both husbands and wives overreport their housework contributions. Furthermore, gender attitudes, total housework, class, education, income, family size, and employment status together significantly affect (...) the overreport, although the variables operate in different ways for wives and husbands. It is concluded that changing and uneven social perceptions of the appropriate domestic roles of women and men have resulted in reporting biases that do not necessarily correspond to actual changes in housework behavior. These findings cast doubt on claims that contemporary husbands are doing more housework than their predecessors. (shrink)

Prelinguistic infants must find a way to isolate meaningful chunks from the continuous streams of speech that they hear. BootLex, a new model which uses distributional cues to build a lexicon, demonstrates how much can be accomplished using this single source of information. This conceptually simple probabilistic algorithm achieves significant segmentation results on various kinds of language corpora - English, Japanese, and Spanish; child- and adult-directed speech, and written texts; and several variations in coding structure - and reveals which statistical (...) characteristics of the input have an influence on segmentation performance. BootLex is then compared, quantitatively and qualitatively, with three other groups of computational models of the same infant segmentation process, paying particular attention to functional characteristics of the models and their similarity to human cognition. Commonalities and contrasts among the models are discussed, as well as their implications both for theories of the cognitive problem of segmentation itself, and for the general enterprise of computational cognitive modeling. (shrink)

(2002). A VERY PECULIAR ROYALIST. HOBBES IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS POLITICAL CONTEMPORARIES. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 167-208. doi: 10.1080/096087800210122455.

Psychologists believe grade schoolers' free play in the United States is universally biased toward single-gender groups. In a study of grade schoolers in a children's museum, already-acquainted kindergartners to sixth graders were observed at three exhibits. While boys chose more automobile play and girls more supermarketing, one-quarter of each group played in settings dominated by the other gender. Boys had no group-size preference; girls had a strong preference for small groups. That preference accounts for most of the gender differences found (...) in children's gender sorting in a novel environment. However, the ubiquity of gender segregation in large groups of grade schoolers was disconfirmed for this setting. (shrink)

The article is built around the analysis of The critique of instrumental reason by Horkheimer, applied to issues connected with the philosophy of economics. Positive economics is under-stood as an example of a discipline where the pragmatic paradigm has been implemented. Therefore, economics functions within the boundaries of what Horkheimer called instrumental rationality. The starting point is the intellectual source shared by economics and the Frankfurt School, namely Kant’s philosophy of rationality. In the first part of the article, three of (...) Kant’s ideas that are fundamental to economics are presented, and then the development of their application in philosophy of science, as seen by Horkheimer in 1947, is laid out. The second part of the article consists of enumerating various distinctive features of economics that set it apart from other social sciences and which constitute factors for which it can be considered a realm of the reign of ‘instrumental rationality’, with all the threats such an approach provokes. The above-mentioned features concentrate on treating humans in economics as a means, not as a goal. This aspect of the philosophy of science of the Frankfurt School (unlike its critique of capitalism as an economic system) has not been widely received. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to analyse the function of the list in the works of Georges Perec, a French writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Writing by enumeration was one of the most important literary strategies practiced by the author and it took various forms depending on the specific text. Enumeration in Perec’s work can thus be perceived as a mnemontechnical tool, thanks to which it becomes a way to force one's memory to remember what (...) is forgotten. This mne-motechnical aspect will be particularly important in the literary project called Lieux où j’ai dormi. Simultaneously, the creation of literary lists and enumerations can be linked to author’s need to control his surrounding reality. From this perspective, the list gives the illusion of double control. On the one hand, it fights the obliteration of traces of the past, and on the other, by recording even the most trivial elements of the reality, it seems to be a way to consolidate it. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł podejmuje próbę odpowiedzi na pytanie, jak wyglądała praca redakcyjna Anny Kamieńskiej nad _Notatnikiem_. Spostrzeżenia na temat procesu twórczego czynione są na podstawie fragmentu rękopiśmiennego dziennika z okresu 31 X 1971–15 II 1972 oraz publikowanych w latach 70. odcinków dzieła na łamach czasopisma „W drodze” i wydanych w latach 80. książek. Analiza zmian redakcyjnych skupia się tu na wybranych formach językowych. Wśród nich możemy wyróżnić np. zamianę rzeczowników w zaimki, zdrobnień w formę neutralną lub skrót, pytania w twierdzenie, eliminację (...) partykuł i osoby „ja” w czasownikach i zaimkach. Wszystkie wymienione zabiegi prowadzą do skrócenia zapisów, nadania im aforystycznego charakteru. (shrink)

This article is an attempt at answering the question about Anna Kamieńska editorial work on Notatnik. The discussion of the creative process applies to a manuscript fragment of the journal from the period 31 Oct 1971–15 Feb 1972, the work published in instalments in the 1970s in the W drodze periodical, and the book releases published in the 1980s. The analysis of editorial changes applies to selected linguistic forms. Those include, e.g., replacement of nouns with pronouns, diminutives with neutral forms (...) or acronyms, questions with ascertainment, and the elimination of particles and first-person singular in verbs and pronouns. All of the listed interventions led to a shortening of passages and assigning them the nature of aphorisms. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s influential concept of epistemic injustice has recently seen application to many areas of interest, with an increasing body of healthcare research using the concept of epistemic injustice in order to develop both general frameworks and accounts of specific medical conditions and patient groups. This paper illuminates tensions that arise between taking steps to protect against committing epistemic injustice in healthcare, and taking steps to understand the complexity of one’s predicament and treat it accordingly. Work on epistemic injustice is (...) therefore at risk of obfuscating legitimate and potentially fruitful inquiry. This paper uses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis as a case study, but I suggest that the key problems identified could apply to other cases within healthcare, such as those classed as Medically Unexplained Illnesses, Functional Neurological Disorders and Psychiatric Disorders. Future work on epistemic injustice in healthcare must recognise and attend to this tension to protect against unsatisfactory attempts to correct epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Background People who are at elevated risk of suicide stand to benefit from internet-based interventions; however, research in this area is likely impacted by a range of ethical and practical challenges. The aim of this study was to examine the ethical issues and practical barriers associated with clinical studies of internet-based interventions for suicide prevention. Method This was a mixed-methods study involving two phases. First, a systematic search was conducted to identify studies evaluating internet-based interventions for people at risk of (...) suicide, and information pertaining to safety protocols and exclusion criteria was extracted. Second, investigators on the included studies were invited to complete an online survey comprising open-ended and forced-choice responses. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. Results The literature search identified 18 eligible studies, of which three excluded participants based on severity of suicide risk. Half of the 15 suicide researchers who participated in the survey had experienced problems obtaining ethics approval, and none had encountered adverse events attributed to their intervention. Survey respondents noted the difficulty of managing risk in online environments and the limitations associated with implementing safety protocols, although some also reported increased confidence resulting from the ethical review process. Respondents recommended researchers pursue a collaborative relationship with their research ethics committees. Conclusion There is a balance to be achieved between the need to minimise the risk of adverse events whilst also ensuring interventions are being validated on populations who may be most likely to use and benefit from them. Further research is required to obtain the views of research ethics committees and research participants on these issues. Dialogue between researchers and ethics committees is necessary to address the need to ensure safety while also advancing the timely development of effective interventions in this critical area. (shrink)

The received view in Thomas Hobbes scholarship is that theindividual rights described by Hobbes in his political writings andspecifically in Leviathan are simple freedoms or libertyrights, that is, rights that are not correlated with duties orobligations on the part of others. In other words, it is usually arguedthat there are no claim rights for individuals in Hobbes''s politicaltheory. This paper argues, against that view, that Hobbes does describeclaim rights, that they come into being when individuals conform to thesecond law of (...) nature and that they are genuine moral claim rights, thatis, rights that are the ground of the obligations of others to forebearfrom interfering with their exercise. This argument is defended againstboth Jean Hampton''s and Howard Warrender''s interpretations of rights inHobbes''s theory. The paper concludes that the theory of rightsunderlying Hobbes''s writing is not taken from Natural Law but isprobably closer to a modern interest theory of rights. (shrink)

I argue that the best spacetime setting for Newtonian gravitation (NG) is the curved spacetime setting associated with geometrized Newtonian gravitation (GNG). Appreciation of the ‘Newtonian equivalence principle’ leads us to conclude that the gravitational field in NG itself is a gauge quantity, and that the freely falling frames are naturally identified with inertial frames. In this context, the spacetime structure of NG is represented not by the flat neo-Newtonian connection usually made explicit in formulations, but by the sum of (...) the flat connection and the gravitational field. 1 Introduction2 Newtonian Gravity: The Orthodox Approach3 Newtonian Gravity: Additional Symmetries4 Cosmological Considerations5 A Newtonian Equivalence Principle: Inertial Frames in Newtonian Gravitation6 Theory Equivalence?7 Conclusion. (shrink)

Combining insights from narrative analysis in sociology and trope theory in anthropology, this article develops a theory of tropes that emphasizes their historical production and political effects. Tropes function politically to enable some narratives, identities and resolutions while foreclosing others. As a powerful tool for socio-historical analysis, a consideration of tropes is crucial for deconstructing the taken-for-granted predicates and the `dangerous' consequences of political narratives. To illustrate the argument, the trope of `the Sixties' is analyzed as a case study.

It is well-known that Newton’s theory of gravity, commonly held to describe a gravitational force, can be recast in a geometrical form: Newton- Cartan theory. It is less well-known that general relativity, an apparently geometrical theory, can be reformulated in such a way that it resembles a force theory; teleparallel gravity does just this. This raises questions. One of these concerns theoretical underdetermination. I argue that these theories do not, in fact, represent cases of worrying underdetermination. On close examination, the (...) alternative formulations are best interpreted as postulating the same spacetime ontology. In accepting this, we see that the ontological commitments of these theories cannot be directly deduced from their mathematical form. The geometrical nature of a gravitational theory is not a straightforward consequence of anything internal to that theory as a theory of gravity. Rather, it essentially relies on the rest of nature (the nongravitational interactions) conspiring to choose the appropriate set of inertial frames. (shrink)

In response to a series of allegations of scientific misconduct in the 1980’s, a number of scientific societies, national agencies, and academic institutions, including Harvard Medical School, devised guidelines to increase awareness of optimal scientific practices and to attempt to prevent as many episodes of misconduct as possible. The chief argument for adopting guidelines is to promote good science. There is no evidence that well-crafted guidelines have had any detrimental effect on creativity since they focus on design of research studies, (...) documentation of research findings, assignment of credit through authorship, data management and supervision of trainees, not on the origin and evolution of ideas. This paper addresses a spectrum of causes of scientific misconduct or unacceptable scientific behavior and couples these with estimates of the potential for prevention if guidelines for scientific investigation are adopted. The conclusion is that clear and understandable guidelines should help to reduce the chance that flawed research will escape from our institutions. However, they cannot be relied upon alone to prevent all instances of scientific misconduct and should be regarded rather as one means of bolstering the integrity of the entire scientific enterprise. (shrink)