Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to diversification, and focused on understanding sources of variation.

In chapter 3, we reflected on the view that the fallacies on the traditional list are inherently dialectical. The answer proposed there was that, with the possible exception of, e.g., begging the question and many questions, they are not. The aim of the present chapter is to cancel theispossibility by showing that begging the question and many questions are not in fact dialectical fallacies. The reason for this is not that question-begging and many questions aren’t (at least dominantly) dialectical practices. (...) The reason is that, dialectical or not, they are not fallacies. That begging the question, BQ for short, is a fallacy is an idea which originates with Aristotle. Given logic’s already long history, it should not be surprising that Aristotle’s views of these matters have in some ways been superseded. But the traditional view retains the original connection between conception and instantiation. Whereas BQ in Aristotle’s sense is said to be a fallacy in Aristotle’s sense, so too is BQ in the modern sense said to be a fallacy in the modern (i.e., EAUI) sense.[1] As currently conceived of, BQ and fallacies can be characterized in the following ways. (shrink)

Kochen has suggested an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which he denies that wavepackets ever collapse, while affirming that measurements have definite results. In this paper I attempt to show that his interpretation is untenable. I then suggest ways in which to construct similar, but more satisfactory, hidden variable interpretations.

We present empirical evidence from social psychological research which suggests that standard methods employed when teaching the heuristics and biases program in the context of critical thinking instruction are likelier to facilitate the discernment and correction of biases in others’ reasoning than to have a similar effect in the self-monitoring case. Exemplified by the social phenomenon of false polarization, we suggest that CT instruction may be improved by fostering student’s abilities at counterfactual meta-cognition, and present a corresponding teaching and learning (...) activity. (shrink)

Produced in honor of White's eightieth birthday, _Re-Figuring Hayden White_ testifies to the lasting importance of White's innovative work, which firmly reintegrates historical studies with literature and the humanities. The book is a major reconsideration of the historian's contributions and influence by an international group of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines. Individual essays address the key concepts of White's intellectual career, including tropes, narrative, figuralism, and the historical sublime while exploring the place of White's work in the philosophy (...) of history, postmodernism, and ethics. They also discuss his role as historian and teacher and apply his ideas to specific historical events. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate some problems of using finite (or *finite) computational arguments and of the nonstandard notion of an infinitesimal. We will begin by looking at the canonical example illustrating the distinction between classical and constructive analysis, the Intermediate Value Theorem.

The book offers the first systematic comparative treatment of the thoughts of Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty. Through an account of each philosopher's thought as organized around their ambiguous relationship with the concept of truth, the book offers an elucidation of the concept of ambiguity and its dependence on the absolute as one of the determining features of modern thinking.

Was ist und wie funktioniert praktische Normativität? Können Soll-Sätze aus Ist-Sätzen abgeleitet werden? Gibt es so etwas wie objektive Werte und moralische Tatsachen? Oder beziehen sich normative Aussagen in Wirklichkeit auf mentale Vorgänge in den Subjekten? Welchen Geltungsanspruch haben normative Überzeugungen im Allgemeinen und moralische Überzeugungen im Besonderen? Welche Rolle spielen Wünsche, Emotionen und die (reine) praktische Vernunft? Erkennen wir moralische Regeln und Eigenschaften intuitiv? Beruht alle Moral nur auf Übereinkunft? Diese und weitere Fragen und Probleme sind heute Gegenstand einer (...) umfangreichen, interdisziplinär geführten Normativitäts-Debatte. Auf systematischer Ebene diskutieren Internalisten und Externalisten über das Wesen praktischer Gründe, Realisten und Antirealisten über den ontologischen Status praktischer Normen sowie Kognitivisten und Non-Kognitivisten über die Wahrheitsfähigkeit normativer Aussagen und die Art und Weise, wie das praktisch Gesollte erkannt werden kann. Geführt werden diese Debatten unter Rückgriff auf Positionen, die je nach Selbstverständnis der Teilnehmer aristotelisch, humeanisch, kantisch, utilitaristisch oder pragmatistisch sind. Dieser Band möchte dazu beitragen, Vertreter der unterschiedlichsten Konzeptionen praktischer Normativität in einen konstruktiven Dialog miteinander zu bringen. (shrink)

It has often been argued – especially by historicists – that history deals with the individual where science focuses on the universal. But few philosophers would nowadays express their agreement with the historicist’s demarcation between history and the sciences. A standard criticism is that knowledge of the individual can only be expressed by an appeal to universals. This essay is an effort to rehabilitate the historicist argument by means of a closer and more accurate analysis of the notion of the (...) individual than is given in the traditional historicist account of the nature of historical writing. Leibniz’s conception of the substance or the monad proves to be quite helpful here. (shrink)

The story in "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" and its telling are above all funny, but Twain himself was keenly interested in its philosophical content. Writing about the first reading of “Carnival” Twain referred to the “exasperating metaphysical question which I mean to lay before them in the disguise of a literary extravaganza.” There are at least two candidates for the operative “metaphysical question,” both of them quite “exasperating.” The first concerns the origin and valuation (...) of moral values. On this reading Twain may appear to be making a point similar to the central thesis of a number of Nietzsche’s most important works. Indeed, this Nietzschean reading of Carnival has been suggested before. Another possible interpretation is that Twain’s first concern was not with the nature of moral values so much as moral psychology. On this reading, “Carnival” may seem at first to be making a more or less Humean point about moral motivation. I argue that that Twain is presenting neither a Nietzschean nor a Humean position so much as presenting the questions that these theories purport to answer. Certain details of “Carnival” suggest that Twain had a remarkably nuanced understanding of these questions and the problems they produce. (shrink)

Josiah Royce (1855-1916), philosopher of community, taught that social consciousness arises from ego-alter contrasts and is guided by taboos and, before George H. Mead, by reciprocal gestures. A major Roycean contribution was his five conditions for coexperiencing consciousness of genuine community. Related to Freud (via Putnam), Royce did early work on “identification theory” and helped midwife psychotherapy’s birth in America. Contrasting with William James’s basic differentiation of consciousness according to the quality of its contents (feeling, thought, and conduct), Royce preferred (...) a norm of increasing self-agency (shown in sensitivity, docility, and initiative). The temperaments of James as artist and of Royce as rational interpreter differentiated their approaches to psychology. (shrink)

The article attempts to develop a diagonal towards classical readings of the humanism of early Marx. Traditionally, referring to early Marx meant to either affirm a substantialist conception of human beings or to criticize the same conception by insisting on a break between early and late Marx. By presenting a lecture badiousienne of early Marxian texts, the article shows how an affirmative reference to man as species-being and as part of a ‘generic humanity’ can be thought without falling back into (...) the substantialist traps of classical humanism. In a systematic and forced construction of the Marxian idea of the evental character of actual communist action and of universal production, the article shows how Marx’s concept of human species life can be understood as the central source of a transformed thinking of humanism. Consequently, neither Badiou nor Marx will be rendered as classical humanists or pure anti-humanists, rather the early Marxian thought will be presented as a philosophical armoury of in-humanism that is still of great use for sharpening one’s conceptual tools. (shrink)

The essential task of the philosophy of style is to uncover the irreducibility of the singular to any kind of universal, static structure or metalinguistic code. Style is not only a surplus element that exceeds propositional meaning, but also a clue of the ineradicable contingency of “intersubjective”‐communicational relationships. The receiver must respect the unique individuality of the sender's style as what demonstrates the cognitive inexhaustibility of the world. Consequently, philosophy can no longer regard literature as foreign and incorrigible by asserting (...) a radical difference of genre and thereby reserving truth exclusively for itself. Rather, I go on to argue, the difference is merely one of quantity. The picture of the world drawn by literature is simply fuller and richer than any comparatively monochromatic system of philosophical propositions. However, within the history of philosophy, there have been instances when the philosophical import of literature has been accorded its due. One example is the dialogical approach of early German Romanticism. The other example is a writer most frequently considered the purest thinker of philosophical sense and meaning – namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein. I conclude by reading Wittgenstein as a philosopher concerned, above all, with the ineffable that style reveals. (shrink)