Interview of Katrin Flikschuh, Rainer Forst and Darrel Moellendorf by Valentin Beck and Julian Culp for Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric.

Predictability is a prerequisite for effective human control of artificial intelligence (AI). The inability to predict malfunctioning of AI, for example, impedes timely human intervention. In this paper, we empirically investigate how AI’s predictability compares to the predictability of humans in a real-effort task. We show that humans are worse at predicting AI performance than at predicting human performance. Importantly, participants are not aware of the differences in relative predictability of AI and overestimate their prediction skills. These results raise doubts (...) about the human ability to effectively exercise control of AI — at least in certain contexts. (shrink)

L'Abrégé de l'Almagested'Averroès, conservé uniquement en traduction hébraïque, reste inédit et peu étudié. Cet article a pour but de le faire connaître. Après avoir retracé l'histoire de l'Abrégé: date de rédaction, traduction, transmission de cette traduction, diffusion et audience, nous procédons à une première étude du texte: aperçu commenté du contenu, identification des sources et examen de leur exploitation critique par Averroès. Nous donnons également une traduction d'extraits significatifs du Prologue de l'Abrégé, avec une brève analyse. Avec l'Abrégé, nous disposons (...) d'un témoignage direct et relativement précoce, dû à l'un des plus importants artisans du mouvement de contestation et de réforme de l'astronomie ptoléméenne, animé au XIIe siécle par des penseurs andalous, philosophes aristotéliciens pour la plupart. (shrink)

Este estudo investigou a prevalência de problemas de comportamento, medidos através do CBCL, em uma amostra de 366 crianças, estudantes de primeira a quarta série do ensino fundamental da cidade de Porto Alegre, RS. Os dados foram coletados a partir das informações obtidas por pais, mães ou demais c..

Der Gegenstand des vorliegenden Beitrags ist die Entwicklungstheorie von Paul Alsberg (1883-1965) und deren Prinzip der Körperausschaltung. Erkenntnisleitend ist die Frage, wohin diese Ausschaltung führt, wenn sie realisiert wird. Ein Szenario, das – so die hier vertretene These – das vollzogene Prinzip der Körperausschaltung mit den Mitteln des ästhetischen Ausdrucks thematisiert, ist der Film Matrix (1999). In diesem Sinne wird zuerst Alsberg und dessen Werk vorgestellt. Anschließend folgt eine kurze Einführung in seine Theorie der menschlichen Entwicklung durch Körperausschaltung in ihren (...) wesentlichen Gesichtspunkten. Darauf basierend werden durch die Brille dieser anthropologischen Theorie des Menschen als Mängelwesen einzelne, die Thematik des Films Matrix konstituierende Aspekte beleuchtet. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to American Islam offers a scholarly overview of the state of research on American Muslims and American Islam. The book presents the reader with a comprehensive discussion of the debates, challenges and opportunities that American Muslims have faced through centuries of American history. This volume also covers the creative ways in which American Muslims have responded to the myriad serious challenges that they have faced and continue to face in constructing a religious praxis and complex identities that (...) are grounded in both a universal tradition and the particularities of their local contexts. The book introduces the reader to some of the many facets of the lives of American Muslims that can only be understood in their interactions with Islam's entanglement in the American experiment. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOrganization and management researchers praise the value of care in the workplace. However, they overlook the conflict between caring for work and for coworkers, which resonates with the dilemma of care allocation highlighted by ethicists of care. Through an in-depth qualitative study of two organizations, we examine how this dilemma is confronted in everyday organizational life. We draw on the concept of boundary work to explain how employees negotiate the boundary of their caring responsibilities in ways that grants or denies (...) care to coworkers. We argue that the possibility of an ethics of care for coworkers requires boundary work that suspends the separation of personal and professional selves and constitutes the worker as a whole person. We contribute to research on care in organizations by showing how care for coworkers may be enabled or undermined by maintaining or suppressing the care allocation dilemma. (shrink)

The discovery of RNA interference in 1998 has made a lasting impact on biological research. Identifying the regulatory role of small RNAs changed the modes of molecular biological inquiry as well as biologists' understanding of genetic regulation. This article examines the early years of small RNA biology's success story. I query which factors had to come together so that small RNA research came into life in the blink of an eye. I primarily look at scientific repertoires as facilitators of rapid (...) scientific change. I show that for a short period of time, between the years 1998 and 2002, different model organism communities, investigative strategies, technological innovations, and research interests could be successfully aligned to take small RNA research off the ground. I discuss how the keystone discoveries were situated in specific experimental traditions and what strategies were employed to establish these discoveries as more general phenomena. Providing thus a practice-based approach of rapid scientific change, I ask how to relate the change in propositional bits of scientific knowledge with changes in scientific practice. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) aspirations by companies have been identified as a motivating factor for active employee participation in CSR implementation. However, a failure to practise what one preaches can backfire and lead to attribution of hypocrisy. Drawing on a qualitative study of an award-winning sustainability pioneer in the cosmetics sector, we explore the role of moral judgement in how and when employees interpret word–deed misalignment in CSR implementation as hypocritical. First, our case reveals that high CSR aspirations by companies (...) raise employees’ moral expectations. Second, we develop a framework that explains variations in employees’ hypocrisy interpretations based on consequentialist and deontological forms of moral judgement. Our research advances a contextual view of hypocrisy, not as an objective characteristic of an organisation, but as an outcome of interpretative processes of perceived motives and results in CSR implementation. Our framework thereby explains why even highly committed organisations may face accusations of hypocrisy. (shrink)

Applying the framework of ecological rationality, the authors studied the adaptivity of group decision making. In detail, they investigated whether groups apply decision strategies conditional on their composition in terms of task‐relevant features. The authors focused on the recognition heuristic, so the task‐relevant features were the validity of the group members' recognition and knowledge, which influenced the potential performance of group strategies. Forty‐three three‐member groups performed an inference task in which they had to infer which of two German companies had (...) the higher market capitalization. Results based on the choice data support the hypothesis that groups adaptively apply the strategy that leads to the highest theoretically achievable performance. Time constraints had no effect on strategy use but did have an effect on the proportions of different types of arguments. Possible mechanisms underlying the adaptive use of recognition in group decision making are discussed. (shrink)

Since the advent of industrial animal farming in the mid-nineteenth century, works of fiction have played a vital role in bringing to light the dynamics of violence, resistance, and sabotage that inhabit its spaces. This article addresses the latest configuration of this phenomenon, examining a selection of twenty-first century novels (among them Isabelle Sorente’s _180 jours_, Deb Olin Unferth’s _Barn 8_, and Nadja Niemeyer’s _Gegenangriff_) that confront the sites of large-scale automated breeding, feeding, slaughter, and processing that are the factory (...) farms of today. At the core of these novels are episodes of transgression – break-ins, escapes, abductions – that implicate the whole network of actors involved: humans, animals, machines, and matter. Disrupting the flows of bodies, the rhythms of conveyor belts, and the logistics of transport, these episodes highlight not only the rigorous disciplinary power, but also the permeability of the boundaries, and the fragile interplay of _kinesis_ and _stasis_ that sustain modern meat production. The article thus elucidates how these works crystallize what Georges Bataille characterized as “the chaotic aspect” of abattoirs, theorizing an aesthetics of transgression as the hallmark of contemporary factory-farm fiction and the key vector of its socioethical ambitions. (shrink)

The text of this interview is based on a conversation between Bagryana Popov and Juliane Römhild on 1 September 2021. In this interview, Bagryana discusses two works which unite her research into political trauma and site-specific performance in the context of political repression under the communist regime in Bulgaria. For her choreography He is not here and the performance event Traces (2011) Bagryana returned to Sofia, the city of her birth, to explore her own family history and her grandfather’s (...) incarceration as a political prisoner. He is not here is a meditation on the body at the receiving end of political power developed in collaboration with dancer Simon Ellis. Traces takes the audience first to the courthouse in Sofia, where Bagryana’s grandfather was trialled, and then to her family’s flat where Bagryana’s daughter reads from the diaries of her grandmother. Both works were a part of Bagryana’s PhD project at Melbourne University. (shrink)

Este artigo tem por objetiva geral descrever a linguagem musical sob a perspectiva da teoria histórico-cultural, conforme Vygotsky, seu principal representante. Neste sentido, procura-se também entender o conceito de mediação, como elemento articulador entre linguagem musical e o fenômeno pedagógico, produzido nos enredos intersubjetivos de professores e alunos. Nessa perspectiva, e com as contribuições da Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), que integra a música no ensino de Arte, identifica-se a relevância da linguagem musical na formação cidadã de estudantes da Educação (...) Básica. O presente estudo se caracteriza como uma pesquisa bibliográfica, amparada em obras originais de Vygotsky e de outros autores que escrevem a respeito da temática em questão, para embasamento aprofundado. Constatou-se que a música, enquanto linguagem, é dinâmica cujas habilidades e ações, construídas socialmente, são mediadas na interação professor-aluno. Portanto, a leitura que se faz da música, enquanto linguagem, não pode prescindir do caráter histórico-cultural, subjacente a toda e qualquer manifestação cultural. (shrink)

In contrast to apes’ seemingly sophisticated skill at producing pointing gestures referentially, the comprehension of other individual’s pointing gestures as a source of indexical information seems to be less pronounced.One reason for apes’ difficulty at comprehending pointing gestures might be that in former studies they were mainly confronted with human declarative pointing gestures, whereas apes have largely been shown to point imperatively and towards humans. In the present study bonobos, chimpanzees and orangutans were confronted with a conspecific’s imperative pointing gesture (...) in a competitive context, therefore mirroring former studies that have investigated apes’ skills at producing these gestures.However, apes in the present study did not use their conspecific’s pointing gestures. Apes have been shown to use indexical information when provided noncommunicatively and to interpret other individuals’ actions in terms of motives. Thus, it is discussed whether apes treat a pointing gesture as intentional act of indexical reference. (shrink)

While scientific pluralism enjoys widespread popularity within the philosophy of science, a related position, epistemic relativism, does not have much traction. Defenders of scientific pluralism, however, dread the question of whether scientific pluralism entails epistemic relativism. It is often argued that if a scientific pluralist accepts epistemic relativism, she will be unable to pass judgment because she believes that “anything goes”. In this article, I will show this concern to be unnecessary. I will also argue that common strategies to differentiate (...) relativism and pluralism fail. Building upon this analysis, I will propose a new way of looking at both positions’ relations. This article aims to understand what explains the friction between scientific pluralism and epistemic relativism. I will demonstrate that conceptualizing both epistemic relativism and scientific pluralism as “stances” sheds better light on their relation and demonstrates that it is, in principle, possible to support both positions at the same time. Preferred policies and levels of analysis, however, cause friction in practice. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore how the development and affordances of predictive analytics may impact how teachers and other educational actors think about and teach students and, more broadly, how society understands education. Our particular focus is on the data dashboards of learning support systems which are based on Machine Learning. While previous research has focused on how these systems produce credible knowledge, we explore here how they also produce compelling, persuasive and convincing narratives. Our main argument is that particular (...) kinds of stories are written by predictive analytics and written into their data dashboards. Based on a case study of a leading predictive analytics system, we explore how data dashboards imply causality between the ‘facts’ they are visualising. To do so, we analyse the stories they tell according to their spatial and temporal dimensions, characters and events, sequentiality as well as tellability. In the stories we identify, teachers are managers, students are at greater or lesser risk, and students’ sociality is reduced to machine-readable interactions. Overall, only data marked as individual behaviours becomes relevant to the system, rendering structural inequalities invisible. Reflecting on the implications of these systems, we suggest ways in which the uptake of these systems can interrupt such stories and reshape them in other directions. (shrink)

How can one distinguish the concept of second modernity from the concept of postmodernity? Postmodernists are interested in deconstruction without reconstruction, second modernity is about deconstruction and reconstruction. Social sciences need to construct new concepts to understand the world dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century.Modernity has not vanished, we are not post it. Radical social change has always been part of modernity. What is new is that modernity has begun to modernize its own foundations. This is what it (...) means to say modernity has become reflexive. It has become directed at itself. This causes huge new problems both in reality and in theory. There has been a pluralization of the boundaries within and between societies, between society and nature, between Us and Other, between life and death. This pluralization also changes the inherent nature of boundaries. They become not so much boundaries as a variety of attempts to draw of boundaries. Border conflicts become transformed into conflicts over the drawing of boundaries. Where postmodernism simply celebrates this multiplication of boundaries, the theory of second modernity starts with the problem this new reality poses for individual and collective decisions, and with the problem that the continued existence of such decisions poses for theory. Institutions that are capable of such conscious boundary drawing are enabled in a way that those of the first modernity were not. But this process also generates qualitatively new kinds of trouble and crises. To investigate those troubles is to unveil the emergence of the second modernity. (shrink)

The discourse on climate politics so far is an expert and elitist discourse in which peoples, societies, citizens, workers, voters and their interests, views and voices are very much neglected. So, in order to turn climate change politics from its head onto its feet you have to take sociology into account. There is an important background assumption which shares in the general ignorance concerning environmental issues and, paradoxically, this is in corporated in the specialism of environmental sociology itself — this (...) is the category of ‘the environment’. If ‘the environment’ only includes everything which is not human, not social, then the concept is sociologically empty. If the concept includes human action and society, then it is scientifically mistaken and politically suicidal. (shrink)

This article differentiates between three different axes of conflict in world risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is global financial crises, which, in a first stage, can be individualized and nationalized. And the third, which suddenly broke upon us on September 11th, is the threat of transnational terror networks, which empowers governments and states. Two sets of implications are drawn: first, there are the political dynamics of world (...) risk society. In an age where trust and faith in God, class and progress have largely disappeared, humanity's common fear has proved the last - ambivalent - resource for making new bonds. Second, the methodological nationalism that preoccupies the sociological imagination has to be overcome and a `methodological cosmopolitism' has to be created. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders the role of irony in the Hegelian project of developing a theory of modern ethical life. It recognizes in Socratic irony the traces of an alternative concept of morality that leads both to an acknowledgement of Hegel’s convincing critique of the Kantian moral principle and to a rejection of Hegel’s misconception of Socratic and Romantic irony. Arguing against Hegel that irony cannot be reduced to a form of alienation from the normative dimension of ethical life as a (...) whole, but should instead be understood as a necessary component of a dynamic mediation between subjective freedom and ethical universality, the author further claims that irony, thus conceived, takes on the productive function that it should actually have had within the Hegelian system. That is, ironyis a phenomenon that, from the standpoint of morality, refers us to a form of ethical life in which subjective freedom and difference are respected. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin a suggéré de voir dans le fascisme une « esthétisation de la politique ». Avant lui, ce même diagnostic était appliqué non pas aux régimes autoritaires, mais, au contraire, aux régimes démocratiques. De Platon à Carl Schmitt, la philosophie a dénoncé la démocratie comme une multitude inconsistante et « bigarrée », qui préfère le jeu à l’ordre. Rebentisch estime que derrière ce jugement dépréciatif, les ennemis de la démocratie ont en fait parfaitement saisi quelques-uns de ses traits distinctifs (...) qu’il s’agit aujourd’hui de défendre dans une culture démocratique. La démocratie ne peut se passer de la mise en scène, car c’est sur scène qu’elle peut figurer le visage qu’elle veut se donner collectivement, consciente de l’écart qui subsiste toujours entre les identités actuelles et les identités possibles. (shrink)

RESUMO: Ao posicionar-se no debate acerca dos fundamentos da moral, David Hume desenvolve uma concepção da moralidade segundo a qual esta diria respeito a ações e sentimentos desinteressados, que, frequentemente, relacionam-se diretamente com o interesse público. Nesse sentido, Hume mostra-se um crítico ferrenho de Bernard Mandeville, que teria defendido que a moralidade teria por base uma natureza humana governada apenas pelo amor próprio e pela vaidade. Ainda assim, não se pode perder de vista que os dois autores parecem se aproximar (...) no que diz respeito à origem da justiça e, por extensão, da sociedade tal como a conhecem. Isso porque ambos consideram que as regras sociais teriam surgido a partir da necessidade de satisfação de interesses. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Hume, Mandeville, moralidade, sentimento, egoísmo. (shrink)

The essay discusses the logic of distinction under the sign of the contemporary culture of difference and proposes a discussion of the relationship between taste and contemporary art. The recent trend toward greater individualization might have rendered social codes more permeable. But this state of affairs is neither the opposite of the standardization nor does it imply that the social logic of distinction has been suspended. It has merely undergone further differentiation, but without abolishing the signifiers of status. On the (...) one hand art as a commodity partakes in the respective developments, on the other, certain strands in contemporary art can also be read as opposing the subject of aesthetic experience to the subject of consumerist taste. (shrink)

Whereas Plato's Protagoras rejects the notion that someone who knows what is good for him can nonetheless do something else of his own free volition, his Republic names the particular conditions under which such an act, an act of weakness of the will, can take place: the conditions of democracy. Because democracy, Plato writes, places an excessive freedom at its centre, it fosters desires, weakening the force of reason, destabilizing the will, and thus engendering an unprincipled human being. This paper (...) defends the democratic conception of freedom against this portrayal by advocating a concept of freedom of the will that does not unilaterally identify it with willpower. (shrink)

This study investigated whether age and/or differences in hearing sensitivity influence the perception of the emotion dimensions arousal (calm vs. aroused) and valence (positive vs. negative attitude) in conversational speech. To that end, this study specifically focused on the relationship between participants’ ratings of short affective utterances and the utterances’ acoustic parameters (pitch, intensity, and articulation rate) known to be associated with the emotion dimensions arousal and valence. Stimuli consisted of short utterances taken from a corpus of conversational speech. In (...) two rating tasks, younger and older adults either rated arousal or valence using a 5-point scale. Mean intensity was found to be the main cue participants used in the arousal task (i.e., higher mean intensity cueing higher levels of arousal) while mean F 0 was the main cue in the valence task (i.e., higher mean F 0 being interpreted as more negative). Even though there were no overall age group differences in arousal or valence ratings, compared to younger adults, older adults responded less strongly to mean intensity differences cueing arousal and responded more strongly to differences in mean F 0 cueing valence. Individual hearing sensitivity among the older adults did not modify the use of mean intensity as an arousal cue. However, individual hearing sensitivity generally affected valence ratings and modified the use of mean F 0. We conclude that age differences in the interpretation of mean F 0 as a cue for valence are likely due to age-related hearing loss, whereas age differences in rating arousal do not seem to be driven by hearing sensitivity differences between age groups (as measured by pure-tone audiometry). (shrink)

Résumé L'article vise à montrer que le langage est intimement lié au monde social et que la clarification d'une telle relation dépend du fait de considérer sur un même plan les énoncés et les actions, ce qui conduit à considérer l'énonciation par le langage comme un type de comportement partagé. Cela signifie que la langue ne sert pas seulement les besoins de la vie sociale en tant que moyen d'intercompréhension. De façon relativement autonome, le langage fonctionne dans des conditions de (...) réalisation qui sont des relations sociales très segmentées et hiérarchisées. L'hypothèse est qu'il est nécessaire, comme point de départ de l'analyse du caractère social du langage, de reconnaître la valeur performative qu'ont les énoncés, du fait qu'ils contiennent, dans le domaine des actes de langage, un certain pouvoir effectif ajusté aux conditions sociales qui détermine leur énonciation. Resumen El artículo tiene el objetivo de mostrar que el lenguaje está íntimamente vinculado con el mundo social y que aclarar tal relación depende de considerar en un mismo plano de dependencia a los enunciados y a las acciones - lo que lleva a considerar al lenguaje como un tipo de comportamiento compartido. Eso quiere decir que el lenguaje no solo sirve a las necesidades de la vida social como medio de intercomprensión. Sobre un fondo relativamente autónomo -caracterizable en las consideraciones sobre los matices semánticos introducidos por las significaciones implícitas- el lenguaje funciona en condiciones de realización que son relaciones sociales altamente segmentadas y jerarquizadas. La hipótesis es que el lenguaje se realiza socialmente en la medida en que facilita a los individuos una forma de contacto. Pero también insistimos en que como punto de partida para el análisis del carácter social del lenguaje es necesario reconocer el valor performativo que tienen los enunciados en cuanto comportan, en el ámbito de los hechos del habla, un cierto poder realizativo ajustado a condiciones sociales que determinan los caminos de tal realización. (shrink)