Baumard's perspective asserts that “opportunity is the mother of innovation,” in contrast to the adage ascribing this role to necessity. Drawing on behavioral ecology and cognition, we propose that both extremes – affluence and scarcity – can drive innovation. We suggest that the types of innovations at these two extremes differ and that both rely on mechanisms operating on different time scales.

To formalize the human judgment of rhythm complexity, we used five measures from information theory and algorithmic complexity to measure the complexity of 48 artificially generated rhythmic sequences. We compared these measurements to human prediction accuracy and easiness judgments obtained from a listening experiment, in which 32 participants guessed the last beat of each sequence. We also investigated the modulating effects of musical expertise and general pattern identification ability. Entropy rate and Kolmogorov complexity were correlated with prediction accuracy, and highly (...) correlated with easiness judgments. A logistic regression showed main effects of musical training, entropy rate, and Kolmogorov complexity, and an interaction between musical training and both entropy rate and Kolmogorov complexity. These results indicate that information-theoretic concepts capture some salient features of the human judgment of rhythm complexity, and they confirm the influence of musical expertise on complexity judgments. (shrink)

Inserido no ambiente universitário do século XIII do ocidente cristão, Tomás de Aquino lança-se à linha de frente dos debates de sua época, propondo uma crítica ao que chamará de platonismo e às leituras por ele consideradas errôneas de Aristóteles, imbuídas de interpretações de filósofos como Avicena e Averróis, que chegam à Europa latina nos últimos séculos do medievo. Um de seus alvos é a consideração sobre o intelecto agente e o ato de intelecção. Em Suma de Teologia Iª, 84, (...) o autor descreve o funcionamento deste ato, situando seu início na impressão causada pelos sensíveis nos sentidos, e, apontando como determinante para tal, a condição do homem no estado da vida presente como um conjunto composto de alma e corpo. (shrink)

Ayn Rand, née Alise Rosenbaum en URSS en 1905 et disparue en 1982 à New York, est aux antipodes de la pensée critique européenne : son éthique de l'égoïsme, son culte de la rationalité doublé d'une ode à la liberté, sa pensée capitaliste intransigeante, sa brutalité intellectuelle en font un personnage controversé. Anticonformiste radicale, elle reste aussi une curiosité en Amérique, puisqu'elle parvient tout à la fois à fustiger l'interventionnisme économique de Roosevelt et Kennedy, condamner la guerre du Vietnam, défendre (...) l'avortement, critiquer la religion et tailler en pièces le racisme. S'il importe de comprendre son œuvre, c'est au moins à double titre. D'abord pour saisir sa popularité aux États-Unis, où son roman La Grève reste considéré comme un des ouvrages les plus influents après la Bible. Ensuite, pour opérer un droit d'inventaire sur une pensée de l'émancipation qui exalte la confiance en l'individu, acteur de son propre destin. Elle réhabilite ainsi la notion d'héroïsme, à la croisée des idées et d'une passion pour le cinéma qui imprègne toute son œuvre. Mathilde Berger-Perrin s'essaie avec brio et empathie à ce difficile exercice d'admiration et de distanciation."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Este estudo incide sobre o primeiro estásimo da Antígona de Sófocles e procura analisar o seu significado. A questão a que tenta responder é a seguinte: que imagem do ser humano se encontra expressa nesta ode coral? Tal questão encerra várias outras: 1) Em, que sentido se diz que o homem é algo δεινόν – e mesmo até o mais δεινόν de tudo? 2) Qual a relação entre esta característica e o ser auto-inventado ou auto-inventor de que falam as três (...) primeiras estâncias deste estásimo? 3) Que significa exactamente παντοπόρος? É este conceito decisivo para se entender o ser humano? 4) É o homem efectivamente παντοπόρος? 5) Por que razão os anciãos de Tebas sustentam que, ainda que o epíteto “assente como uma luva”, παντοπόρος está longe de ser a última palavra sobre o ser humano? (shrink)

A joke is amusing if and only if it’s fitting to be amused by it; an act is regrettable if and only if it’s fitting to regret it. Many philosophers accept these biconditionals and hold that analogous ones obtain between a wide range of additional evaluative properties and the fittingness of corresponding responses. Call these the _fit–value biconditionals_. The biconditionals give us a systematic way of recognizing the role of fit in our ethical practices; they also serve as the bedrock (...) of various metaethical projects, such as fitting-attitude analysis of value and the ‘fittingness first’ approach. Yet despite the importance of the biconditionals, there is very little discussion of their proper interpretation. This paper argues that any plausible interpretation of the fit_–_value biconditionals must disarm several kinds of apparent counterexample. For instance, that an achievement is pride-worthy doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to take pride in it because the achievement might not be mine or that of anyone close to me; that a joke is amusing doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to be amused by it for six straight months; and that a person is loveable doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to love him romantically because that person might be my sibling. We consider possible responses to such counterexamples and develop what we consider the most promising interpretation of the biconditionals. The upshot is that certain widespread assumptions about fit and its relation to value and reasons should be reconsidered. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Some epistemologists hold that all rational norms are fundamentally concerned with the agent’s states or attitudes at an individual time [Hedden 2015, 2016; Moss 2015]; others argue that all rational norms are fundamentally concerned with processes [Podgorski 2017]. This distinction is not drawn in discussions of emotional rationality. As a result, a widely held assumption in the literature on emotional rationality has gone unexamined. I employ Abelard Podgorski’s argument from rational delay to argue that many emotional norms are fundamentally (...) concerned with emotional processes. I also claim that the main response available to the synchronist about belief is not available to the synchronist about emotions and, therefore, fundamental process norms are more plausible than epistemologists tend to believe. (shrink)

Surprises are important in our everyday lives as well as in our scientific and philosophical theorizing—in psychology, information theory, cognitive-neuroscience, philosophy of science, and confirmation theory. Nevertheless, there is no satisfactory theory of what makes something surprising. It has long been acknowledged that not everything unexpected is surprising. The reader had no reason to expect that there will be exactly 190 words in this abstract and yet there is nothing surprising about this fact. We offer a novel theory that explains (...) when and why an unexpected fact is surprising. We distinguish between descriptive and normative notions of what is surprising; clarify the sense in which surprising facts are unexpected; and, finally, develop and defend the significance account of surprise, according to which a fact is surprising to an agent if and to the extent that it is both unexpected and significant to the agent. Since a surprising fact can be significant to an agent in various ways—personal, moral, epistemic, and aesthetic—surprise is not merely or primarily epistemic. Fitting surprise reflects more than a person’s view of what is; it reflects a person’s view of what is significant. (shrink)

The philosophy of measurement studies the conceptual, ontological, epistemic, and technological conditions that make measurement possible and reliable. A new wave of philosophical scholarship has emerged in the last decade that emphasizes the material and historical dimensions of measurement and the relationships between measurement and theoretical modeling. This essay surveys these developments and contrasts them with earlier work on the semantics of quantity terms and the representational character of measurement. The conclusions highlight four characteristics of the emerging research program in (...) philosophy of measurement: it is epistemological, coherentist, practice oriented, and model based. (shrink)

Resumen A partir de la formulación weberiana de teodicea, esta pesquisa sostendrá la centralidad de la cuestión de la teodicea para la religión. No obstante, la definición weberiana de teodicea presenta problemas para su aplicación a textos de la antigüedad, pues, a juicio de Sarot, la teodicea sería un fenómeno moderno que marcaría una nueva manera de pensar sobre el mal. A partir de lo cual, el artículo pasa revista a diversas teodiceas mostrando la variedad de respuestas, colocando en evidencia (...) un panorama distinto al presentado por Weber y Berger. La pregunta sobre el porqué del sufrimiento que hace el visionario y profeta trasciende los modos habituales de pensar la existencia del sufrimiento y del mal en un tiempo específico para abrirse a la interrogación y protesta contra todo sufrimiento llevando a pensar de nuevo la relación de Dios en el mundo, de tal manera que más que hablar de una justificación de Dios por el sufrimiento y el mal en el mundo, la teodicea interroga y desafía al creyente y a Dios para buscar otras respuestas. Summary From the weberian formulation of theodicy, this inquiry will hold the centrality of the question of theodicy for religion. However, the weberian definition of theodicy presents problems for its application to texts of antiquity, because, according to Sarot, theodicy would be a modern phenomenon that would mark a new way of thinking about evil. From which the article reviews various theodicy showing the variety of responses, highlighting a different picture than that presented by Weber and Berger. The question about the suffering of the visionary and the prophet transcends the habitual ways of thinking about the existence of suffering and evil at a specific time to be open to interrogation and protest against all suffering, leading us to think again about God's relationship in the world, in such a way that rather than talking about a justification of God for suffering and evil in the world, theodicy interrogates and challenges the believer and God to look for other answers. (shrink)

Human beings seem to have been always aware of something they called consciousness and have not stopped wondering what it is, what it does, where it came from, and why we have it. This book is testimony to the continuous attempts to crack the riddle, in the 21st century no less, if not even more than before. The book expresses two major convictions. One is that consciousness has a multiplicity of aspects, which need to be considered in order to deepen (...) understanding of this phenomenon and of ourselves. These include in the very least biology, philosophy, religion, mathematics, physics, physiology, and psychology. The other is that the next phase of human evolution may well be the evolution of consciousness - its expansion, development, and enhanced ability on our part to recognise and control it, shape it and put it to our use for improving our chances of survival and enhancing our happiness. This book is aimed at contributing towards the attainment of this goal. (shrink)

This article develops a model-based account of the standardization of physical measurement, taking the contemporary standardization of time as its central case-study. To standardize the measurement of a quantity, I argue, is to legislate the mode of application of a quantity-concept to a collection of exemplary artefacts. Legislation involves an iterative exchange between top-down adjustments to theoretical and statistical models regulating the application of a concept, and bottom-up adjustments to material artefacts in light of remaining gaps. The model-based account clarifies (...) the cognitive role of ad hoc corrections, arbitrary rules and seemingly circular inferences involved in contemporary timekeeping, and explains the stability of networks of standards better than its conventionalist and constructivist counterparts. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Communication Emerging? On Simulating Structural Coupling in Multiple Contingency” by Manfred Füllsack. Upshot: Our criticism aims at the premises of Füllsack’s simulation model, i.e., we claim that his interpretation of the Luhmannian concept of double contingency contradicts the systems theoretical approach in fundamental ways. Neither the view of communication as an emergent system, nor the theory of double contingency is addressed in an adequate manner. Thus Füllsack in fact does not simulate a systems theoretical (...) approach to double contingency but simulates a mere reduction of the social to the individual psyches. (shrink)

In Marx’s posthumously published manuscripts from 1857–1863, we find a systematic exposition of his concept of subsumption. Though much has been written about it, significant interpretative gaps persist. In this article, I begin filling these gaps by examining the emergence of Marx’s concept of subsumption. I will argue that in the Grundrisse Marx brings together distinct but complementary elements from Hegel’s theories of judgment and teleology to coin two new and well delineated concepts of subsumption that prefigure his later concepts (...) of formal and real subsumption. These two concepts may be defined as: (a) the process of acquiring the social relational property of being a means to an end; (b) the process by which changes in non-relational properties occur in something due to this acquisition – and occur to better suit said end. (shrink)

Engels explained his admiration for Balzac by pointing to an apparent discrepancy between Balzac’s literature and his politics. Despite his sympathies for the French nobility, Balzac’s realism “compelled” him to portray this class in unflattering terms. In this article, I challenge Engels’s reading, arguing that Marx’s scattered remarks on Balzac take us in a different direction. Specifically, I argue that in his remark on Balzac’s The Peasants Marx pinpointed the author’s preoccupation with the spread of bourgeois ideology into the nobility. (...) Building on this remark, I analyze several of Balzac’s works showing that insofar as Balzac lambasted the nobles, his critique was primarily directed towards nobles who had adopted bourgeois ways. In this light, and against Engels’s observation, Balzac’s critique of the nobles appears to stem from his sympathy to aristocratic values rather than conflicting with them. In showing that affinities between Balzac, Marx and Engels did not depend on Balzac expressing anti-noble sentiment, I argue that the admiration the fathers of communism had for the monarchist’s prose exemplifies a partial, yet typical convergence between socialists and conservatives in their critique of modern bourgeois society. (shrink)

El tema de los vivientes animales escasi ignorado hoy por la filosofia de origentomista, poco y nada hablan de él exponentes dela escuela en este sigla. Santo Tomás mismo sibien no les dedicá un estudio especial, enreiterados pasajes se refirió ai tema comonecesario desde la perspectiva de Comentador ode Teólogo. En muchos lugares habla de la vidasensitiva que en estado puro se halla en losanimales, como siendo las creaturas vivientes quecomparten con el hombre la misma naturalezagenérica que él debe tratar (...) como parte de suconsideración teológica o filosófica. Los textossorprenden por su cantidad, su penetranteobservación sobre el reino al)imal y su carácterfilosófico, pudiendo ser la base para un estudioque yo llamaria zoología filosófica. Tal vez uno delos temas más interesantes sea la consideraciónsobre la potencia sensitiva denominadaestimativa, y sus posibilidades para explicaralgunos rasgos dei comportarniento animal. En lavisión creacionista de Santo Tomás nuestroshumildes he~anos en el género adquieren todoel valor creatural que les corresponde y exigen deihombre considerarlos como imagen de Dios. Lascircunstancias históricas actuales apoyan estavisión revaloradora. (shrink)

Many existence propositions in constructive analysis are implied by the lesser limited principle of omniscience LLPO; sometimes one can even show equivalence. It was discovered recently that some existence propositions are equivalent to Bouwer's fan theorem FAN if one additionally assumes that there exists at most one object with the desired property. We are providing a list of conditions being equivalent to FAN, such as a unique version of weak König's lemma. This illuminates the relation between FAN and LLPO. Furthermore, (...) we give a short and elementary proof of the fact that FAN is equivalent to each positive valued function with compact domain having positive infimum. (shrink)

Hegel contends that judgements are contradictory, finite and untrue. Prominent schol- ars argue that Hegel’s issue with judgements is resolved in the later stages of his Logic. Specifically, Ng suggests that this solution is found in Hegel’s discussion of life. In this article, I argue that not only does life fail to resolve Hegel’s problem with judgement— death highlights its insolubility. To support this claim, I examine Hegel’s discussion of judgements in the Logic, showing that judgements are inherently contradictory because (...) they both unite and separate individuals and universals. Instead of being resolved ret- rospectively, I demonstrate that contradiction, finitude and untruth are intrinsic to judgements. Moreover, since judgements play a constitutive and determinative role in Hegel’s metaphysics, they pass their contradictions, finitude and untruth onto the objects they constitute. Specifically, I argue that for living beings, judgement is literally a matter of life and death, because the contradiction of judgements implies the finitude of the objects they constitute—namely, the perishability of things and the mortality of organisms. (shrink)

The present study was motivated by the hypothesis that inputs from internal states in obsessive–compulsive individuals are attenuated, which could be one source of the pervasive doubting and checking in OCD. Participants who were high or low in OC tendencies were asked to produce specific levels of muscle tension with and without biofeedback, and their accuracy in producing the required muscle tension levels was assessed. As predicted, high OC participants performed more poorly than low OC participants on this task when (...) biofeedback was not available. When biofeedback was provided, the difference between the groups was eliminated, and withdrawing the monitor again reversed this effect. Finally, when given the opportunity, high OC participants were more likely than low OC participants to request biofeedback. These results suggest that doubt in OCD may be grounded in a real and general deficiency in accessing internal states. (shrink)

A teoria do mercado religioso parte da constatação do pluralismo religioso e chega à conclusão que, em tal situação, religião se torna um assunto de escolha pessoal ou familiar e se estabelece uma situação de concorrência entre as religiões subordinada à lógica da economia de mercado. Assim, as religiões reduzidas à esfera da vida privada não podem mais realizar a função tradicional das religiões de legitimar a totalidade da ordem social. Este artigo analisa a tese da subordinação da religião à (...) lógica da economia de mercado e propõe como hipótese de que a tradicional função da religião de “absolutizar o relativo e legitimar o arbitrário” é exercida hoje pelo próprio sistema de mercado capitalista e que, por isso, a lógica da economia de mercado se tornou o modo de pensar “natural” nos dias de hoje, até mesmo para pensar a religião. Para isso, dialoga principalmente com o pensamento de P. Berger, P. Bourdieu, M. Weber, W. Benjamin, K. Marx, F. Hinkelammert, H. Assmann e mostra como o tema da fé no e sacralização do mercado aparece nos discursos dos economistas. Palavras-chaves : Mercado religioso. Capitalismo. Idolatria. Economia e religião. Teologia e economia.The theory of the religious market begins with the observation of religious pluralism and comes to the conclusion that, in this situation, religion becomes a matter of personal or family choice and it is established a situation of competition among religions subordinated to the logic of the market economy. Thus, religions reduced to the sphere of private life can no longer perform the traditional role of religions in legitimizing the whole social order. This article analyzes the thesis of the subordination of religion to the logic of the market economy and puts forward the hypothesis that the traditional function of the religion of "absolutizing the relative and legitimizing the arbitrary" is exercised today by the capitalist market system itself; and, because of that, the logic of the market economy has become the "natural” way of thinking today, even to think about religion. To this purpose, it dialogues mainly with the thought of P. Berger, P. Bourdieu, M. Weber, W. Benjamin, K. Marx, F. Hinkelammert and H. Assmann, showing how the theme of faith in and sacralization of market appears in discourses of economists. Keywords : Religious market. Capitalism. Idolatry. Economy and religion. Theology and economics. (shrink)

Privacy is a sociocultural perception, depending on the dominant values of a society, sociocultural heritage, and contemporary technological developments. This article focuses on privacy perception among adolescents based on a European school survey (PRACTIS), and presents comparative results of an exploratory study conducted among over 1,428 adolescents in six countries. The results reveal that adolescents attribute high value to privacy and are prepared to actively oppose if an online corporation is challenging their personal interests. However, they tend to trade off (...) privacy for other perceived benefits. Adolescents’ privacy perception and data protection are affected by cultural diversity, age, gender, and most of all their various social network sites activities and their attitudes toward importance of sharing and controlling personal information. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 7, Page 51-53, July 2011.

Previous research has focused on the relation between social class and prosocial behavior. However, this relation is yet unclear. In this work, we shed light on this issue by considering the effect of the level of empathy and the social class of the recipient of help on two types of prosociality, namely helping and caring. In one experimental study, we found that for high-class participants, empathy had a positive effect on helping, regardless of the recipient’s social class. However, empathy had (...) no effect for low-class participants. When it comes to caring, empathy had a positive effect for both high and low-class participants, but only when the recipient of help belonged to the same social class. This highlights that empathy by itself is not sufficient to promote cooperative relations and that the social class of the recipient of help should be taken into account to shed light on this issue. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 2 Seiten: 532-580.

Spina bifida is a neurodevelopmental disorder that results in a broad range of disability. Over the last few decades, there have been significant advances in diagnosis and treatment of this condition, which have raised concerns regarding how clinicians prognosticate the extent of disability, determine quality of life, and use that information to make treatment recommendations. From the selective treatment of neonates in the 1970s, to the advent of maternal–fetal surgery today, the issues that have been raised surrounding spina bifida intervention (...) invoke principles of medical bioethics such as beneficence and nonmaleficence, while also highlighting how quality of life judgments may drive care decisions. Such changes in treatment norms are also illustrative of how disability is viewed both within the medical community and by society at large. An examination of the changes in spina bifida treatment provides a model through which to understand how ethically complex decisions regarding care for children with disabilities has evolved, and the challenges faced when medical information is combined with value-based judgments to guide medical decision making. (shrink)

Kwaku Marfo, Danielle Garcia, Saira Khalique, Karen Berger, Amy LuMontefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY, USABackground: Medication errors are a prime concern for all in healthcare. As such the use of information technologies in drug prescribing and administration has received considerable attention in recent years, with the hope of improving patient safety. Because of the complexity of drug regimens in renal transplant patients, occurrence of medication errors is inevitable even with a well adopted computerized physician order entering system. Our objective (...) was to quantify medication error type and frequency in an inpatient renal transplant unit.Methods: Systemic evaluation of all medication errors during an initial 10-day audit and a 28-day follow-up audit in an inpatient renal transplant unit. Each error was concurrently evaluated for potential to result in adverse patient consequences, error type and associated medication class.Results: A total of 103 clinically significant medication errors were detected during the 10-day and 28-day audit time periods. The most common errors were wrong medication dose ordered and wrong time of drug administration. Thirty-six out of 66 prescribing/ordering errors reached the patient.Conclusions: Even with utilization of computerized physician order entry system in an inpatient renal transplant unit, post-kidney transplant patients are at risk for adverse outcomes due to medication errors. The risk factors may be multifactorial and will require both organizational and technical approaches to resolve.Keywords: medication errors, CPOE, inpatient, renal transplant patients. (shrink)

For over twenty years Douglas Berger has advanced research and reflection on Indian philosophical traditions from both classical and cross-cultural perspectives. This volume reveals the extent of his contribution by bringing together his perspectives on these classical Indian philosophies and placing them in conversation with Confucian, Chinese Buddhist and medieval Indian Sufi traditions. Delving into debates between Nyaya and Buddhist philosophers on consciousness and identity, the nature of Sankara's theory of the self, the precise character of Nagarjuna's idea of (...) emptiness, and the relationship between awareness and embodiment in the broad spectrum of Indian thought, chapters exhibit Berger's unusually broad range of expertise. They connect Chinese Confucian and Buddhist texts with classical Indian theories of ethics and consciousness, contrast the ideas of seminal European thinkers like Nietzsche and Derrida from prevailing themes in Buddhism, and shed light on the spiritual and political dimensions of the Mughal prince Dara Shukoh's immersion into Vedantic thought. Always approaching the arguments from an intercultural perspective, Berger shows how much relevance and resonance classical Indian thought has with ancient Confucian views of ethics, Chinese Buddhist depictions of consciousness and medieval Mughal conceptions of divinity. The result is a volume celebrating the rigor, vitality and intercultural resonance of India's rich philosophical heritage. (shrink)

Incapacitated adult patients are commonly divided into two groups for purposes of decision making; those with a surrogate and those without. Respectively, these groups are often referred to as represented and unrepresented, and the relative ethics of decision making between them raises two particular issues. The first issue involves the differential application of the best interests standard between groups. Second is the prevailing notion that representedness and unrepresentedness are categorical phenomena, though it is more aptly understood as a multidimensional and (...) continuous variable based on relational moral authority. This paper examines the nature of representedness as it relates to ethical norms of surrogate decision making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Non-Cartesian Psychotherapeutic Framework: Radical Pragmatism as an AlternativeLouis S. Berger (bio)AbstractPostmodern criticism has identified important impoverishments that necessarily follow from the use of Cartesian frameworks. This criticism is reviewed and its implications for psychotherapy are explored in a psychoanalytic context. The ubiquitous presence of Cartesianism (equivalently, representationism) in psychoanalytic frameworks—even in some that are considered postmodern—is demonstrated and criticized. The postmodern convergence on praxis as a (...) desirable alternative to Cartesianism is reported, and its relevance for psychoanalysis is considered. The severe conceptual difficulties entailed in formulating such an alternative are discussed, as are those difficulties that would be encountered were psychoanalysis to attempt the shift from explanatory mental science to praxis. The principal psychoanalytic problematics explored are: the paradoxical relationships between theory and therapeutic technique; the therapeutic action; and validation of clinical practices. Initial, nontraditional suggestions for addressing these problems are offered.Keywordspsychoanalysis, therapeutic action, representation, state space, praxis, hermeneutics, Descartes, Heidegger, Wittgenstein“But the inability to bring one’s subject under conceptual control, fixing it propositionally, is not the end of thinking; on the contrary, it were better to say that the breakdown of concepts and the failure of words is an opening that takes us out of the realm where representation and calculation are all that matter to thinking.... [T]his is what happens in the Socratic dialogue where the negativity in which one ends up at a loss for words is at the same time that which sets thinking free.”Bruns 1989, 9“To evolve theory as though our methods and processes of study were essentially the same, or could be the same, as those of other sciences, or could be disregarded when it comes to theory, implies a view of reality that is no longer tenable, least of all in that ambiguous area which we call psychic reality. Nevertheless, all of us are still more or less captives of an erroneous understanding of objectivity and objective reality....”Loewald 1970, 45 [End Page 169]CartesianismCartesianism still underlies and dominates much of today’s thought. It is the label for a network of interrelated ideas and themes:the ontological duality of mind and body; the subjective individualism implicit in the ultimate appeal to direct personal verification; the method of universal doubt which was supposed to lead us to indubitable truths; the doctrine that language and signs are an external disguise for thought; the doctrine that vagueness is unreal and that the philosophic endeavor is one of knowing clearly and distinctly a completely determinate reality; and most fundamentally, the doctrine that we can break out of the miasma of our language or system of signs and have direct intuitive knowledge of objects. (Bernstein 1971, 5–6)[The Cartesian assumptions] constitute a picture of science and the world somewhat as follows: there is an external world which can in principle be exhaustively described in scientific language. The scientist, as both observer and language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in propositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties, or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is, the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observation. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately.(Hesse 1980, vii)Hesse goes on to say that “almost every assumption underlying this account has been subjected to damaging criticism,” a view echoed by others: “Most contemporary philosophers have been in revolt against the Cartesian framework” (Bernstein 1971, 5); “A rejection of the Cartesian view is a central theme for both of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, Heidegger and Wittgenstein” (Sass 1992, 444n 77); and “The notion of alternative conceptual frameworks has been a commonplace of our culture since Hegel” (Rorty 1982, 3).These criticisms arise... (shrink)

This book reformulates the sociological subdiscipline known as the sociology of knowledge. Knowledge is presented as more than ideology, including as well false consciousness, propaganda, science and art.

These essays engage Jin Y. Park’s recent translation of the work of Kim Iryŏp, a Buddhist nun and public intellectual in early twentieth-century Korea. Park’s translation of Iryŏp’s Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun was the subject of two book panels at recent conferences: the first a plenary session at the annual meeting of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the second at the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association on a group program session sponsored by the (...) International Society for Buddhist Philosophy. This exchange also includes a response from Park. (shrink)

This collection, published in 1988, brings an innovative perspective to research in social cognition.

This paper draws attention to an increasingly common method of using computer simulations to establish evidential standards in physics. By simulating an actual detection procedure on a computer, physicists produce patterns of data (‘signatures’) that are expected to be observed if a sought-after phenomenon is present. Claims to detect the phenomenon are evaluated by comparing such simulated signatures with actual data. Here I provide a justification for this practice by showing how computer simulations establish the reliability of detection procedures. I (...) argue that this use of computer simulation undermines two fundamental tenets of the Bogen–Woodward account of evidential reasoning. Contrary to Bogen and Woodward’s view, computer-simulated signatures rely on ‘downward’ inferences from phenomena to data. Furthermore, these simulations establish the reliability of experimental setups without physically interacting with the apparatus. I illustrate my claims with a study of the recent detection of the superfluid-to-Mott-insulator phase transition in ultracold atomic gases. (shrink)