Research on conspiracy theories has proliferated since 2016, in part due to the US election of President Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, and increasingly threatening environmental conditions. In the rush to publication given these concerning social consequences, researchers have increasingly treated as definitive a 2016 paper by Michael Wood (Political Psychology, 37(5), 695–705, 2016) that concludes that the phrase “conspiracy theory” has no negative effect upon people’s willingness to endorse a claim. We revisit Wood’s findings and its (re)uptake in the recent (...) literature. Is the label “conspiracy theory” a pejorative? If so, does it sway or affect people’s belief in specific claims of conspiracy (i.e. particular conspiracy theories), or is the effect one that concerns claims of conspiracy more generally (i.e. all conspiracy theories)? Through an examination of the conceptual and methodological scope of Wood’s work and the results of our similar quasi-experimental design, we argue that it is premature to suggest the label “conspiracy theory” has no impact on the believability of a claim, or that it has no rhetorical power. (shrink)

In the literature on conspiracy theories, the least contentious part of the academic discourse would appear to be what we mean by a “conspiracy”: a secretive plot between two or more people toward some end. Yet what, exactly, is the connection between something being a conspiracy and it being secret? Is it possible to conspire without also engaging in secretive behavior? To dissect the role of secrecy in con- spiracies – and thus contribute to the larger debate on the epistemology (...) of conspir- acy theories – we dene the concepts of “conspiracy,” “conspirator,” and “secret,” and argue that while conspirators might typically be thought to commit to keeping secrets once their conspiracy is underway, the idea that conspiracies are necessarily secretive to start with is not as obvious as previously thought. (shrink)

R.I.G. Hughes presents a series of eight philosophical essays on the theoretical practices of physics. The first two essays examine these practices as they appear in physicists' treatises (e.g. Newton's Principia and Opticks ) and journal articles (by Einstein, Bohm and Pines, Aharonov and Bohm). By treating these publications as texts, Hughes casts the philosopher of science in the role of critic. This premise guides the following 6 essays which deal with various concerns of philosophy of physics such as laws, (...) disunities, models and representation, computer simulation, explanation, and the discourse of physics. (shrink)

R.I.G Hughes offers the first detailed and accessible analysis of the Hilbert-space models used in quantum theory and explains why they are so successful.

A reply to Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger's piece, '“They” Respond: Comments on Basham et al.’s “Social Science’s Conspiracy-Theory Panic: Now They Want to Cure Everyone”.

In 1962 appeared one of the classic articles in Anglo-Saxon manuscript studies, the publication of two eleventh-century fragments of leaves of Old English found in the binding of a seventeenth-century printed book in the library of the University of Kansas, Lawrence. The fragment that more nearly concerns the present article now carries the shelf mark Pryce MS C2:1 in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library . It is a large part of a single leaf from The Legend of the Holy Cross (...) before Christ, an edifying work known in full only in a twelfth-century copy, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, fols. 14v–20v . Working from a photograph the great paleographer and codicologist N. R. Ker attributed the hand of the Kansas fragment to the scribe who also wrote the texts of two bits of the same work found in the library of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury , at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, now MS 557 . He concluded, no doubt rightly, that all three are part of one manuscript. (shrink)

Data on the number of adults that an individual contacts at least once a month in a set of British populations yield estimates of network sizes that correspond closely to those of the typical “sympathy group” size in humans. Men and women do not differ in their total network size, but women have more females and more kin in their networks than men do. Kin account for a significantly higher proportion of network members than would be expected by chance. The (...) number of kin in the network increases in proportion to the size of the family; as a result, people from large families have proportionately fewer non-kin in their networks, suggesting that there is either a time constraint or a cognitive constraint on network size. A small inner clique of the network functions as a support group from whom an individual is particularly likely to seek advice or assistance in time of need. Kin do not account for a significantly higher proportion of the support clique than they do for the wider network of regular social contacts for either men or women, but each sex exhibits a strong preference for members of their own sex. (shrink)

During the second half of the XX century drug addiction ceased to be only the epiphenomenon of crime, prostitution and a number of other social-relations deviation, and became a constant value of post-industrial society and at the end of XX century turned into a global problem of mankind. A new form of mass neurosis shows that drug dependence is nowadays socially conditioned mental degeneration, caused by activation of unconscious collective archetypes that are experienced depending on the corresponding situation. The identification (...) of the sacred plant soma/haoma with the marihuana enables us to not only to make clear the light and the dark sides of this archetype, but also to figure out that the reduction of the drug addiction problem, to the acceptable for the society level, is possible only if a man will be able to satisfy his “life-asserting, vital needs”, if he will be able to regain the true meaning of life. (shrink)

Group size is a function of relative neocortical volume in nonhuman primates. Extrapolation from this regression equation yields a predicted group size for modern humans very similar to that of certain hunter-gatherer and traditional horticulturalist societies. Groups of similar size are also found in other large-scale forms of contemporary and historical society. Among primates, the cohesion of groups is maintained by social grooming; the time devoted to social grooming is linearly related to group size among the Old World monkeys and (...) apes. To maintain the stability of the large groups characteristic of humans by grooming alone would place intolerable demands on time budgets. It is suggested that (1) the evolution of large groups in the human lineage depended on the development of a more efficient method for time-sharing the processes of social bonding and that (2) language uniquely fulfills this requirement. Data on the size of conversational and other small interacting groups of humans are in line with the predictions for the relative efficiency of conversation compared to grooming as a bonding process. Analysis of a sample of human conversations shows that about 60% of time is spent gossiping about relationships and personal experiences. It is suggested that language evolved to allow individuals to learn about the behavioural characteristics of other group members more rapidly than is possible by direct observation alone. (shrink)

Contributed articles on literary theory.

Книга предназначена для философов, социологов, историков, студентов гуманитарных специальностей и всех интересующихся панорамой развития русской историко-философской мысли.

In the preceding Part 1 of this two-part paper, I set out the background necessary for an understanding of the current status of the debate surrounding the relationship between science and religion. In this second part, I will outline Ian Barbour’s influential four-fold typology of the possible relations, compare it with other similar taxonomies, and justify its choice as the basis for further detailed discussion. Arguments are then given for and against each of Barbour’s four models: conflict, independence, integration and (...) dialogue. In contradiction of the recent trend to dismiss the conflict model as overly “simplistic”, I conclude that it is the clear front-runner. Critical examination reveals that theology (the academic face of religion) typically proceeds by first affirming belief in God and then seeking rationalisations that protect this belief against contrary evidence. As this is the very antithesis of scientific endeavour, the two disciplines are in unavoidable and irreconcilable conflict. (shrink)

Purpose. The article analyzes the role of such a phenomenon as tolerance in a partnership between a man and a woman, emphasizing its importance and necessity in their relations. The purpose of the study is to estimate the role of the tolerance phenomenon in the process of gender partnership. Theoretical basis. The works of domestic and foreign scientists contributed to estimate the function of tolerance during communication, cooperation and co-creation. In this paper the methodology of E. Fromm and N. Khamitov’s (...) metaanthropology is used. Originality. It was proved that the success of a gender partnership depends on how tolerant its participants are to each other. Besides this, it has been established that tolerance is the main criterion for gender partnership. The idea of tolerance is considered as the way to fruitful development of human relations. For the first time it has been determined that gender partnership can be manifested on the ordinary, frontier and metafrontier levels of human existence. Tolerance has its own specifics and a manifestation on each of them. Conclusions. Metaanthropology has helped to estimate the role of tolerance among men and women in the partnership process. So, it can be stated that tolerance is a basis for gender partnership that harmonizes the relationship among a man and a woman and makes them egalitarian. Only on the metafrontier level of human being tolerance can be manifestation of individual integrity. Sincere, open interaction and creative work with Other are formed on this foundation. Thus, gender partnership with inexhaustible, complementary potential is the vector of development of human relations. (shrink)

Uninformed learning mechanisms will not discover “type- 2” regularities in their inputs, except fortuitously. Clark & Thornton argue that error back-propagation only learns the classical parity problem – which is “always pure type-2” – because of restrictive assumptions implicit in the learning algorithm and network employed. Empirical analysis showing that back-propagation fails to generalise on the parity problem is cited to support their position. The reason for failure, however, is that generalisation is simply not a relevant issue. Nothing can be (...) gleaned about back-propagation in particular, or learning in general, from this failure. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “How and Why the Brain Lays the Foundations for a Conscious Self” by Martin V. Butz. Excerpt: Surprisingly, the paper entirely neglects the issue of the dynamic properties of our environment. Focusing on (static, inanimate) objects only, it fails to acknowledge that anticipation becomes especially relevant when things around us change without being under our control: this is when we are forced to adapt quickly to new circumstances. To estimate as precisely as necessary (...) what will when be where is of vital meaning. Surprisingly though, this issue is not addressed at all. Although it is acknowledged that the environment contains dynamics that are to be predicted somehow (§3) and that have to be represented in the brain somehow (§28), concepts about and empirical data on the prediction of external events are not dealt with further. (shrink)

There has been a revival of interest in Hegel of late among English-speaking philosophers. Although he is still regarded as maddeningly obscure, a number of important philosophers have been attracted by a doctrine prominently associated with Hegel, the coherence theory of truth. In order to hold the coherence theory of truth, it is obvious that you must hold what might be called the coherence theory of truth-testing as well: for if this theory is wrong and we can test some statements (...) by, for example, introspection as well as in terms of coherence, truth must involve something more than just coherence. My arguments against the coherence theory of truth-testing, since it is implied by the coherence theory proper, are indirectly against the coherence theory as well. I also argue that unless some version of the Private Language Argument is successful, it is virtually impossible to defend the coherence theory of truth-testing without denying the existence of experiences, thereby committing oneself to materialism. (shrink)

The fierce propaganda campaign against the CPSU and other Marxist-Leninist parties developed in the 1960s by the Mao Tse-tung group in China confronted the international communist movement with the fact that a new front in the ideological struggle had come into being. The significance of this struggle is defined by the fact that the matter at issue is what constitutes a contemporary, truly scientific interpretation of the principles of revolutionary theory, and the determination of the future of socialism and communism.

Clark & Thornton take issue with my claim that parity is not a generalisation problem, and that nothing can be inferred about back-propagation in particular, or learning in general, from failures of parity generalisation. They advance arguments to support their contention that generalisation is a relevant issue. In this continuing commentary, I examine generalisation more closely in order to refute these arguments. Different learning algorithms will have different patterns of failure: back-propagation has no special status in this respect. This is (...) not to deny that a particular algorithm might fortuitously happen to produce the “intended” function in an parity-generalisation task. (shrink)