This paper develops an analysis of non-epistemic deniability. On my analysis, a speaker has non-epistemic deniability for G-ing when non-acknowledgment social norms make it impermissible for others to retaliate against the speaker for G-ing. I identify two kinds of non-acknowledgment norms that generate non-epistemic deniability: two-tracking norms, which function to contain conflict within a group, and open secrecy norms, which function to inhibit the group from acting on shared knowledge. Narrowly, this paper builds on Alexander Dinges and Julia Zakkou’s recent (...) landmark analysis of deniability. Dinges and Zakkou argue that non-epistemic deniability does not exist. I disagree. But I also use their account of epistemic deniability in order to motivate my own analysis of non-epistemic deniability. Broadly, my paper provides a case study in how speakers strategically leverage non-acknowledgment norms in order to protect their own interests at the expense of others’. (shrink)

This paper develops an analysis of non-epistemic deniability. On my analysis, a speaker has non-epistemic deniability for G-ing when non-acknowledgment social norms make it impermissible for others to retaliate against the speaker for G-ing. I identify two kinds of non-acknowledgment norms that generate non-epistemic deniability: two-tracking norms, which function to contain conflict within a group, and open secrecy norms, which function to inhibit the group from acting on shared knowledge. Narrowly, this paper builds on Alexander Dinges and Julia Zakkou’s recent (...) landmark analysis of deniability. Dinges and Zakkou argue that non-epistemic deniability does not exist. I disagree. But I also use their account of epistemic deniability in order to motivate my own analysis of non-epistemic deniability. Broadly, my paper provides a case study in how speakers strategically leverage non-acknowledgment norms in order to protect their own interests at the expense of others’. (shrink)

In conversation, we often do not acknowledge what we jointly know to be true. My aim in this paper is to identify a distinctive kind of non-acknowledgment norm, open secrecy, and analyze how such norms constrain our speech. I argue that open secrecy norms are structurally different from other everyday non-acknowledgment norms. Open secrecy norms iterate: when p is an open secret, then there’s a norm not to acknowledge that p, and this norm is itself an open secret. The non-acknowledgment (...) at issue in open secrecy norms, I argue, motivates a more complex understanding of discourse. When interlocutors are conforming to open secrecy norms, they rely on at least two disjoint common grounds, one of which has a privileged status. To understand why and how it is privileged, I develop Erving Goffman’s notion of defining a social interaction. Finally, I show how strategic speakers can exploit the structure of open secrecy in order to both communicate about the open secret and shield themselves from retaliation for what they communicate. (shrink)

Many authors have commented on the relative frequency of the present tense—and the relative infrequency of the past tense—in mathematical writing. However, none (to our knowledge) have provided an estimate for the size of this effect or explored how universal it is. In this short note we report an analysis of corpora of mathematical and day-to-day English. We conclude that the present-to-past ratio of tenses is at least 3:1 in mathematical English, compared to approximately 5:7 in day-to-day English. Further, we (...) show that this tendency to favour the present tense is almost universally present in written mathematics. (shrink)

In this article, we report a study in which 109 research-active mathematicians were asked to judge the validity of a purported proof in undergraduate calculus. Significant results from our study were as follows: (a) there was substantial disagreement among mathematicians regarding whether the argument was a valid proof, (b) applied mathematicians were more likely than pure mathematicians to judge the argument valid, (c) participants who judged the argument invalid were more confident in their judgments than those who judged it valid, (...) and (d) participants who judged the argument valid usually did not change their judgment when presented with a reason raised by other mathematicians for why the proof should be judged invalid. These findings suggest that, contrary to some claims in the literature, there is not a single standard of validity among contemporary mathematicians. (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects (...) persist by enduring rather than perduring. Second, that most people have a view of change on which enduring but not perduring objects count as changing. Third, that one reason why the folk represent time as dynamical is because it seems to them, and they believe that, they endure through time. We found no evidence to support these claims. While there are certainly plenty of ‘folk’ endurantists in the population we tested, there are also plenty of ‘folk’ perdurantists. We did not find robust evidence that a majority of people believed that, or it seemed to them as though, objects endure rather than perdure. We conclude that many arguments in favour of endurantism that appeal to folk beliefs about, or experiences of, persisting objects and change rest on views about those beliefs and experiences that are empirically unsupported. There is no evidence to suggest that endurantism is the folk friendly view of persistence, and so we should stop treating it as such without argument. (shrink)

Nonsymbolic comparison tasks are commonly used to index the acuity of an individual's Approximate Number System (ANS), a cognitive mechanism believed to be involved in the development of number skills. Here we asked whether the time that an individual spends observing numerical stimuli influences the precision of the resultant ANS representations. Contrary to standard computational models of the ANS, we found that the longer the stimulus was displayed, the more precise was the resultant representation. We propose an adaptation of the (...) standard model, and suggest that this finding has significant methodological implications for numerical cognition research. (shrink)

Mathematical notation includes a vast array of signs. Most mathematical signs appear to be symbolic, in the sense that their meaning is arbitrarily related to their visual appearance. We explored the hypothesis that mathematical signs with iconic aspects—those which visually resemble in some way the concepts they represent—offer a cognitive advantage over those which are purely symbolic. An early formulation of this hypothesis was made by Christine Ladd in 1883 who suggested that symmetrical signs should be used to convey commutative (...) relations, because they visually resemble the mathematical concept they represent. Two controlled experiments provide the first empirical test of, and evidence for, Ladd's hypothesis. In Experiment 1 we find that participants are more likely to attribute commutativity to operations denoted by symmetric signs. In Experiment 2 we further show that using symmetric signs as notation for commutative operations can increase mathematical performance. (shrink)

‘Globalization’ has become in recent years one of the central themes of social scientific debates. Social theories of globalization may be regarded as specific academic and analytic manifestations of wider forms of ‘global consciousness’ to be found in the social world today. These are ways of thinking and perceiving which emphasize that the whole world should be seen as ‘one place’, its various geographically disparate parts all being interconnected in various complex ways. In this article we set out how both (...) a general ‘ecumenical sensibility’ involving such ways of thinking, and its specifically academic variant, an ‘ecumenical analytic’, are simultaneously responses to ‘globalizing conditions’ and also products of the latter. We demonstrate how social theories of globalization, locatable in the overall set we call the ‘ecumenical analytic’, are reflexive thought-products, in that they both seek to investigate, and are made possible by, ‘globalizing conditions’. Rejecting the view that both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic are solely products of modernity, we show how such modes of consciousness and analysis were present in the period of Greek history between the death of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Empire. We show how at that period a socio-political situation akin in certain ways to modern ‘globalizing conditions’ generated both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic, the latter most forcefully represented by a revolutionary new genre in historiography called Universal History. By examining the ideas of its most famous practitioner, the historian Polybius, we demonstrate that Universal History both provided a framework for understanding what we today would call ‘globalization’, and exhibited a remarkable degree of reflexive awareness about its own conditions of possibility. We seek to show that an attentiveness to ‘global’ processes and a reflexive understanding of what makes that form of thinking possible in the first place, are not solely confined to modernity but were identifiable features of intellectual production in the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. In this way we argue that scholars today should not imagine that the contemporary ‘global turn’ in social thought is either unique or wholly historically unprecedented. (shrink)

There has been a surge of interest in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). It is commonly claimed that explainability is necessary for trust in AI, and that this is why we need it. In this paper, I argue that for some notions of trust it is plausible that explainability is indeed a necessary condition. But that these kinds of trust are not appropriate for AI. For notions of trust that are appropriate for AI, explainability is not a necessary condition. I thus (...) conclude that explainability is not necessary for trust in AI that matters. (shrink)

A common description of a mathematical proof is as a logically structured sequence of assertions, beginning from accepted premises and proceeding by standard inference rules to a conclusion. Does this description match the language of proofs as mathematicians write them in their research articles? In this chapter, we use methods from corpus linguistics to look at the prevalence of imperatives and instructions in mathematical preprints from the arXiv repository. We find thirteen verbs that are used most often to form imperatives (...) in proofs, and that these show up significantly more often within proofs than in the surrounding mathematical writing. We also show that there are many more verbs used to form a diverse selection of instructions in proofs. These findings are at odds with the view of proofs as sequences of assertions. Instead, we argue in favour of the recipe model of proofs: that proofs are like recipes, giving instructions for mathematical actions to be carried out. (shrink)

Mathematicians often conduct aesthetic judgements to evaluate mathematical objects such as equations or proofs. But is there a consensus about which mathematical objects are beautiful? We used a comparative judgement technique to measure aesthetic intuitions among British mathematicians, Chinese mathematicians, and British mathematics undergraduates, with the aim of assessing whether judgements of mathematical beauty are influenced by cultural differences or levels of expertise. We found aesthetic agreement both within and across these demographic groups. We conclude that judgements of mathematical beauty (...) are not strongly influenced by cultural difference, levels of expertise, and types of mathematical objects. Our findings contrast with recent studies that found mathematicians often disagree with each other about mathematical beauty. (shrink)

The so-called “New Atheism” is a relatively well-defined, very recent, still unfold- ing cultural phenomenon with import for public understanding of both science and philosophy. Arguably, the opening salvo of the New Atheists was The End of Faith by Sam Harris, published in 2004, followed in rapid succession by a number of other titles penned by Harris himself, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, and Christopher Hitchens.

In the mathematics education research literature, there is a growing body of scholarship on how mathematicians practice their craft. The purpose of this chapter is to survey some of this literature and explain how it can contribute to the philosophy of mathematical practice. We first describe how mathematics educators use empirical methodologies to investigate the behaviors of mathematicians and argue that findings from these studies can inform the philosophy of mathematical practice. We then illustrate this by summarizing research on mathematicians’ (...) understandings and mathematicians’ proof reading. (shrink)

The modality of normality distinguishes states of affairs which are normal from those which are abnormal. Existing work on the modality of normality assumes that it is a restriction of metaphysical modality. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is inappropriate and explore the consequences of abandoning it. -/- After preliminary discussion (§1), we introduce the dominant framework for reasoning about normality (§2) and argue that it ascribes implausibly strong structural properties to the modality. In its place, we propose (...) a new framework, which avoids this commitment (§§3-5). This account has a number of interesting features, which we explore in both an informal and formal setting. If correct, it implies that the modality of normality occupies a distinctive place in the space of modalities. Before concluding, we consider some of the wider implications of our account (§6), focusing on the role normality has played in epistemic theorizing. (shrink)

In recent times developments in the natural sciences and in the sphere of environmental politics have compelled social scientists, and also some natural scientists, to rethink the relations that hitherto have been held, in Western thought generally and within particular disciplines, to characterize ‘nature’ on the one side and ‘culture’ on the other. This article considers the history of this conceptual boundary and looks at new conceptualizations of nature/culture, stimulated by developments both in biotechnology and in the ongoing controversies about (...) environmental degradation. It argues that while some of the contributions to reconfiguring, or abolishing, the nature/ culture division have been productive and stimulating of new ways of conceiving the world, there has nonetheless been an unfortunate tendency for social scientists to bring to bear inherited analytic dispositions on biotechnological and environmental matters. Instead of using these issues as means of challenging social scientific disciplinary dogmas and of engaging in constructive rapprochement with natural scientists, social scientists have in their analyses of such matters often merely asserted the hegemony of ‘culture’ over ‘nature’, and thus in effect the superiority of social scientific over natural scientific conceptualizations of the world. Far from overcoming the nature/culture boundary, social scientists have too often merely asserted the primacy of the sorts of subject matters and analytic techniques they feel comfortable with, rather than subjecting their practices to fully reflexive self-scrutiny. (shrink)

We examined a large set of conditional inference data compiled from several previous studies and asked three questions: How is normative performance related to intelligence? Does negative conclusion bias stem from Type 1 or Type 2 processing? Does implicit negation bias stem from Type 1 or Type 2 processing? Our analysis demonstrated that rejecting denial of the antecedent and affirmation of the consequent inferences was positively correlated with intelligence, while endorsing modus tollens inferences was not; that the occurrence of negative (...) conclusion bias was related to the extent of Type 2 processing; and that the occurrence of implicit negation bias was not related to the extent of Type 2 processing. We conclude that negative conclusion bias is, at least in part, a product of Type 2 processing, while implicit negation bias is not. (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel theory of vagueness. Its main aim is to show how naïve judgments about tolerance and indeterminacy can be preserved while departing from classical logic only in ways which are independently motivated. -/- The theory makes use of a bilateral approach to acceptance and rejection. Combined with a standard account of validity, this approach gives rise to an entailment relation which is non-transitive. I argue that this is desirable: it is both pre-theoretically plausible and provides a (...) compelling solution to a number of longstanding puzzles. The theory aims to preserve the naïve picture of vagueness. It combines tools from expressivist and dynamic treatments of information in conversation to show how principles which are generally assumed to be in tension are compatible. The resulting logic departs from classical logic in precisely those places we should expect it to. -/- . (shrink)

Number Nativism is the view that humans innately represent precise natural numbers. Despite a long and venerable history, it is often considered hopelessly out of touch with the empirical record. I argue that this is a mistake. After clarifying Number Nativism and distancing it from related conjectures, I distinguish three arguments which have been seen to refute the view. I argue that, while popular, two of these arguments miss the mark, and fail to place pressure on Number Nativism. Meanwhile, a (...) third argument is best construed as a challenge: rather than refuting Number Nativism, it challenges its proponents to provide positive evidence for their thesis and show that this can be squared with apparent counterevidence. In response, I introduce psycholinguistic work on The Tolerance Principle (not yet considered in this context), propose that it is hard to make sense of without positing precise and innate representations of natural numbers, and argue that there is no obvious reason why these innate representations couldn’t serve as a basis for mature numeric conception. (shrink)

In non‐literal uses of language, the content an utterance communicates differs from its literal truth conditions. Loose talk is one example of non‐literal language use (amongst many others). For example, what a loose utterance of (1) communicates differs from what it literally expresses: (1) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock. Loose talk is interesting (or so I will argue). It has certain distinctive features which raise important questions about the connection between literal and non‐literal language use. This paper aims to (i.) (...) introduce a range of novel data demonstrating certain overlooked features of loose talk, and (ii.) develop a new theory of the phenomenon which accounts for these data. In particular, this theory is motivated by the need to explain minimal pairs such as (2)-(3): (2) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock, but she did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly. (3) ?? Lena did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly, but she arrived at 9 o'clock. (2) and (3) agree in their truth conditions. Yet they differ in felicity. As such, they constitute a problem for any account which hopes to predict the acceptability of the loose use of a sentence from its truth conditions and the context of utterance alone. Instead, it will be argued, to explain loose talk phenomena we must posit an additional layer of meaning outstripping truth conditions. This layer of meaning is shown to exhibit a range of properties, all of which point to its being semantically encoded. Thus, if correct, the theory provides a new example of how semantic meaning must extend beyond literal, truth‐conditional content. (shrink)

This paper offers a new account of metaphysical explanation. The account is modelled on Kitcher’s unificationist approach to scientific explanation. We begin, in Sect. 2, by briefly introducing the notion of metaphysical explanation and outlining the target of analysis. After that, we introduce a unificationist account of metaphysical explanation before arguing that such an account is capable of capturing four core features of metaphysical explanations: irreflexivity, non-monotonicity, asymmetry and relevance. Since the unificationist theory of metaphysical explanation inherits irreflexivity and non-monotonicity (...) directly from the unificationist theory of scientific explanation that underwrites it, we focus on demonstrating how the account can secure asymmetry and relevance. (shrink)

This paper refines a controversial proposal: that core systems belong to a perceptual kind, marked out by the format of its representational outputs. Following Susan Carey, this proposal has been understood in terms of core representations having an iconic format, like certain paradigmatically perceptual outputs. I argue that they don’t, but suggest that the proposal may be better formulated in terms of a broader analogue format type. Formulated in this way, the proposal accommodates the existence of genuine icons in perception, (...) and avoids otherwise troubling objections. (shrink)

We know a lot about what the world is like. We know less, it seems, about what we know about what the world is like. According to a common thought, it is easier for us to come to know about the state of the world than to come to know about the state of our own knowledge. What explains this gap? An attractively simple hypothesis is that our ignorance about what we know is explained by our ignorance about the world. (...) There are things we fail to know about what we know about the world because there are things we fail to know about the world. This hypothesis is often motivated by the idea that knowledge requires a margin‐for‐error. In this paper, I'll argue that this simple hypothesis is inadequate. Not all our ignorance of our knowledge can be explained by our ignorance about the world. In this sense, at least some of our ignorance about what we know is brute. (shrink)

Call an explanation in which a non-mathematical fact is explained—in part or in whole—by mathematical facts: an extra-mathematical explanation. Such explanations have attracted a great deal of interest recently in arguments over mathematical realism. In this article, a theory of extra-mathematical explanation is developed. The theory is modelled on a deductive-nomological theory of scientific explanation. A basic DN account of extra-mathematical explanation is proposed and then redeveloped in the light of two difficulties that the basic theory faces. The final view (...) appeals to relevance logic and uses resources in information theory to understand the explanatory relationship between mathematical and physical facts. 1Introduction2Anchoring3The Basic Deductive-Mathematical Account4The Genuineness Problem5Irrelevance6Relevance and Information7Objections and Replies 7.1Against relevance logic7.2Too epistemic7.3Informational containment8Conclusion. (shrink)

It has been claimed that naïve realism predicts phenomenological similarities where there are none and, thereby, mischaracterises the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. If true, this undercuts a key motivation for the view. Here, we defend naïve realism against this charge, proposing that such arguments fail (three times over). In so doing, we highlight a more general problem with critiques of naïve realism that target the purported phenomenological predictions of the view. The problem is: naïve realism, broadly construed, doesn’t make (...) phenomenological predictions of the required sort. So, as a result, opponents must resign themselves to attacking specific incarnations of naïve realism, or approach matters quite differently. (shrink)

According to the KK-principle, knowledge iterates freely. It has been argued, notably in Greco, that accounts of knowledge which involve essential appeal to normality are particularly conducive to defence of the KK-principle. The present article evaluates the prospects for employing normality in this role. First, it is argued that the defence of the KK-principle depends upon an implausible assumption about the logical principles governing iterated normality claims. Once this assumption is dropped, counter-instances to the principle can be expected to arise. (...) Second, it is argued that even if the assumption is maintained, there are other logical properties of normality which can be expected to lead to failures of KK. Such failures are noteworthy, since they do not depend on either a margins-for-error principle or safety condition of the kinds Williamson appeals to in motivating rejection KK. “Introduction: KK and Being in a Position to Know” Section formulates two versions of the KK-Principle; “Inexact Knowledge and Margins for Error” Section presents a version of Williamson’s margins-for-error argument against it; “Knowledge and Normality” and “Iterated Normality” Sections discuss the defence of the KK-Principle due to Greco and show that it is dependent upon the implausible assumption that the logic of normality ascriptions is at least as strong as K4; finally, “Knowledge in Abnormal Conditions” and “Higher-Order Ignorance Inside the Margins” Sections argue that a weakened version of Greco’s constraint on knowledge is plausible and demonstrate that this weakened constraint will, given uncontentious assumptions, systematically generate counter-instances to the KK-principle of a novel kind. (shrink)

Joint actions often require agents to track others’ actions while planning and executing physically incongruent actions of their own. Previous research has indicated that this can lead to visuomotor interference effects when it occurs outside of joint action. How is this avoided or overcome in joint actions? We hypothesized that when joint action partners represent their actions as interrelated components of a plan to bring about a joint action goal, each partner’s movements need not be represented in relation to distinct, (...) incongruent proximal goals. Instead they can be represented in relation to a single proximal goal – especially if the movements are, or appear to be, mechanically linked to a more distal joint action goal. To test this, we implemented a paradigm in which participants produced finger movements that were either congruent or incongruent with those of a virtual partner, and either with or without a joint action goal (the joint flipping of a switch, which turned on two light bulbs). Our findings provide partial support for the hypothesis that visuomotor interference effects can be reduced when two physically incongruent actions are represented as mechanically interdependent contributions to a joint action goal. (shrink)

A fragmented and unfirnished exploration into the realist and anti-realist debate in mathematics. And the subsequent exploration of how novelty and creation works on a fundemental epistemic scale. The paper puts forth two major frameworks that attempt to bridge realism and anti-realism and provides a novel solution to the epistemic problem of true novelty and idea generation.

As central as the method of forcing is within set theory, it has yet to be incorporated into the philosopher's toolbox. That strikes me as a shame, since it may well have important applications within philosophy. One barrier is that typical presentations of forcing are overly dry and technical and make it seem inherently bound up with its applications within set theory. The purpose of this note is to try to rectify this. In particular, I will explain how the method (...) of forcing can be seen as a way of constructing a certain kind of intensional model that philosophers are already interested in: namely, possibility models. (shrink)

Surface presentism is the combination of a general relativistic physics with a presentist metaphysics. In this paper, we provide an argument against this combination based on black holes. The problem focuses on the notion of an event horizon. We argue that the present locations of event horizons are ontologically dependent on future black hole regions, and that this dependence is incompatible with presentism. We consider five responses to the problem available to the surface presentist, and argue that none succeed. Surface (...) presentism thus faces the prospect of refutation based on evidence that confirms the existence of black holes. (shrink)

What distinguishes causation from grounding? One suggestion is that causation, but not grounding, occurs over time. Recently, however, counterexamples to this simple temporal criterion have been offered. In this paper, we situate the temporal criterion within a broader framework that focuses on two aspects: locational overlapping in space and time and the presence of intermediaries in space and time. We consider, and reject, the idea that the difference between grounding and causation is that grounding can occur without intermediaries. We go (...) on to use the fact that grounding and causation both involve intermediaries to develop a better temporal criterion for distinguishing causation from grounding. The criterion is this: when a cause and effect are spatially disjoint, there is always a chain of causal intermediaries between the cause and the effect that are extended in time. By contrast, when the grounds and the grounded are spatially disjoint, there is always a chain of grounding intermediaries, but the chain need not be extended in time, it can be purely spatial. The difference between grounding and causation, then, is that causation requires time for chaining in a way that grounding does not. (shrink)

Civilizational analysis of the kind propounded by Eisenstadt and globalization theory are apparently wholly incommensurate paradigms, with radically differing visions of the contemporary world order, the former championing the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ and the latter envisioning a world of trans-national processes and institutions. This articles challenges such a dichotomizing view, and seeks to illustrate how in various ways they overlap and can come to inform each other. Particular attention is given to how a focus on inter-civilizational interactions can lead (...) to productive rapprochements between civilizational analysis and globalization theory, as it allows some of the themes of the latter to be analysed through civilization-analytic lenses. The pioneering work in this regard of Benjamin Nelson is shown to provide a basis for future civilizational analyses of globalization, especially in the pre-modern world. (shrink)

As the millennium approaches, the United States is on the verge of major health care reform. While swallowing scarce national resources, our health care system produces unenviable results and major inconsistencies. In 1992, $838.5 billion were spent on health care, biting more than 14 percent out of our gross national product. From 35 to 37 million Americans, or approximately 14 percent of the populationn, are uninsured. Our health care system is inherently inconsistent: We have the highest birthweight-specific survival rate of (...) any country in the world, yet we rank 19th worldwide in infant mortality rate, i.e., state-of-the-art medical technology allows us to save a 500-gram infant, yet the mother of that infant may not have had access to basic, minimal prenatal care. (shrink)

Global climate change is complex to address. It will require people to interact publicly as well as set policy, as a crucial part of addressing it. To date, skills for effective public interaction—where such interactions even exist—do not measure up to the demands of such global complexity. Hierarchical complexity is used to analyze common forms of public talk and interaction. Its premises are applied to approaches to conduct public discourse, including postformal approaches. The Scale of Public Interactions is introduced and (...) indicates that Metasystematic stage approaches to climate change hold the most potential for addressing it. (shrink)

Philosophical issues of hospitality are bound up with broader issues of cosmopolitanism in thought and in practice. This paper considers the interplay of human faces, masks, forms of hospitality, and cosmopolitanizing and anti-cosmopolitanizing socio-political dynamics in the time of Covid-19. Despite confident assertions by some interested parties that it is now finished and past history, Covid-19 remains a major challenge across the globe, and so reflections on the interplay of masking, cosmopolitanism, and hospitality remain pertinent today and are not merely (...) a quaint feature of life during the early years of the pandemic. Voluntary acts of self-masking are argued to be more than just mundane forms of micro-level action and interaction among persons. Instead, freighted sometimes with political meaning, and certainly loaded with ethical force, the donning of a face mask can operate as a small but compelling quotidian act of cosmopolitan concern and hospitableness towards other people, including those perceived to be very unlike oneself. (shrink)

Many influential stances within the social sciences regard nature in one of two ways: either as none of their concern (which is with the social and cultural aspects of human existence), or as wholly a social and cultural fabrication. But there is also another strand of social scientific thinking that seeks to understand the interplay between social and cultural factors on one side and natural factors on the other. These volumes contain the main contributions that have been made within each (...) of these streams of thought. The selections illustrate to the reader the complexity of the various positions within these streams, and the strengths and limitations of each perspective. A new introduction places these articles in their historical and intellectual context and the volumes are completed with an extensive index and chronological table of contents. (shrink)

Real Life in China at the Height of the Empire: Revealed by the Ghosts of Ji Xiaolan. Translated by DavId E. Pollard. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2014. Pp. xl + 334. $45.

Cambodia's higher education institutions (HEIs) face a number of challenges. Academics require increased access to resources and funding, as well as restrictions on academic freedom and significant language and cultural barriers. The purpose of this chapter is to identify and analyze the individual factors influencing academicians' research productivity in Cambodian higher education institutions, to examine and evaluate the impact of institutional factors on research productivity, to investigate and assess the external factors affecting research productivity, and to develop strategies to mitigate (...) negative impacts while increasing positive influences. This study employs a qualitative approach, with insights gained through interviews and policy analysis. This comprehensive approach provides a thorough understanding of Cambodia's current academic research landscape, highlighting areas that require policy-driven solutions. The findings emphasize the critical need for policies that are tailored to the Cambodian academic context. There is a clear need to foster stronger domestic and international research collaborations as well as mechanisms that encourage long-term research development. The study proposes a set of focused policy recommendations designed to overcome these challenges and enhance the research productivity of Cambodian HEIs. These policies, if implemented, have the potential to significantly improve the research landscape in Cambodian HEIs, fostering a sense of hope and optimism among the academic community. (shrink)

Visual illusions provide a means of investigating the rules and principles through which approximate number representations are formed. Here, we investigated the developmental trajectory of an important numerical illusion – the connectedness illusion, wherein connecting pairs of items with thin lines reduces perceived number without altering continuous attributes of the collections. We found that children as young as 5 years of age showed susceptibility to the illusion and that the magnitude of the effect increased into adulthood. Moreover, individuals with greater (...) numerical acuity exhibited stronger connectedness illusions after controlling for age. Overall, these results suggest the approximate number system expects to enumerate over bounded wholes and doing so is a signature of its optimal functioning. (shrink)