Pain sensation in autism spectrum disorder has been a growing research field in the last two decades. Existing pain research has focused on pain sensitivity, suggesting either hyposensitivity or hypersensitivity to pain in individuals with ASD. However, research about other aspects of pain experience is scarce. Moreover, most pain-related research in ASD focused on quantitative measures, such as neuroimaging or parental reports. Instead, this paper aimed to illuminate the various aspects of pain experience as perceived by adults with ASD. Its (...) descriptive qualitative research design incorporated semi-structured interviews and deductive thematic analysis. This phenomenological approach captured the subjective pain experience through the lens of people with ASD. Four primary themes emerged from the data: physical pain experience, including the sequence of pain sensitivity, pain awareness, pain-related emotional aspects, and pain communication; direct and indirect coping strategies; function and participation outcomes; and suggestions for Healthcare Providers. The findings echo the crucial role of pain awareness and communication in the pain experience of people with ASD. These two factors have been reported as profoundly influencing coping strategies, function, and participation. The results emphasize the need to expand the exploration of pain in this population, calling for greater understanding, and listening to this population’s unique pain profiles and experiences to promote better-suited evaluation, diagnosis, and intervention in pain conditions. (shrink)

Dorit Bar-On develops and defends a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, she offers original and systematic answers to many long-standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. We are all very good at telling what states of mind we are in at a given moment. When it comes to our own present states of mind, what we say goes; an (...) avowal such as "I'm feeling so anxious" or "I'm thinking about my next trip to Paris," it is typically supposed, tells it like it is. But why is that? Why should what I say about my present mental states carry so much more weight than what others say about them? Why should avowals be more immune to criticism and correction than other claims we make? And if avowals are not based on any evidence or observation, how could they possibly express our knowledge of our own present mental states? Bar-On proposes a Neo-Expressivist view according to which an avowal is an act through which a person directly expresses, rather than merely reports, the very mental condition that the avowal ascribes. She argues that this expressivist idea, coupled with an adequate characterization of expression and a proper separation of the semantics of avowals from their pragmatics and epistemology, explains the special status we assign to avowals. As against many expressivists and their critics, she maintains that such an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states. The view that emerges preserves many insights of the most prominent contributors to the subject, while offering a new perspective on our special relationship to our own minds. (shrink)

While the role of the comic in Søren Kierkegaard’s thought has been thoroughly studied by diverse scholars, in this paper I will ask whether humor in Kierkegaard’s religious sphere amounts to seduction or to temptation. By “seduction” I will mean a luring that can be viewed as positive or neutral, whereas by “temptation” I mean a negative seduction that takes advantage of the tempted fool, leaving him empty-handed. Irony, comic jest and humor are existential categories in Kierkegaard’s three spheres of (...) existence. Irony and comic jest play a seductive role and can be regarded as neutral or even positive. In the religious sphere, humor can be assessed as temptation. Kierkegaard humorously lures the one who wishes to believe. With humor, one is readying oneself for a leap of faith. The leap may fail; one can fall, crash, and be left empty-handed. (shrink)

The capitalism and slavery debate is among the most significant in world historiography. This essay suggests that its main perspectives still use nation-based approaches and employ analytical categories of classical and neoclassical economics that obscure the very notion of capital. As a result, the material relations of slavery are reduced to the problem of profitability within national or colonial contexts, an approach that depicts the nineteenth-century nexus between slavery and capitalism as a transhistorical one. Against this backdrop, this essay proposes (...) that the rise and fall of slavery can be better understood by examining the changing material composition of capital as well as its equally changing cluster of global circuits. Based on critical value theory, it argues that industrialization consistently reshaped spatial and material relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering world geographies of accumulation that both fueled and challenged the reproduction of slave labor in the Americas. (shrink)

People’s attitudes towards social norms play a crucial role in understanding group behavior. Norm psychology accounts focus on processes of norm internalization that influence people’s norm following attitudes but pay considerably less attention to social identity and group identification processes. Social identity theory in contrast studies group identity but works with a relatively thin and instrumental notion of social norms. We argue that to best understand both sets of phenomena, it is important to integrate the insights of both approaches. Social (...) status, social identity, and social norms are considered separate phenomena in evolutionary accounts. We discuss assumptions and views that support this separation, and suggest an integrated view of our own. We argue that we should be open to the early origins of human social complexity, and conjecture that the longer that the human social world involved multi-level societies the more probable it is that norm psychology and social identity interacted in rich ways. (shrink)

This article explores local, national and global aspects of the new national curriculum in South Sudan as reflected in the lived experiences of secondary school teachers. We draw on analyses of the curriculum, semi-structured interviews with 21 secondary school teachers, and classroom observations. We emphasize the need for critical global citizenship education addressing inequity and oppression at national and global levels. We argue that the curriculum rhetoric fostering global citizens is strongly disconnected from the lived experiences of the teachers, where (...) ethnicity is at the centre of their identity and a main obstacle to a unifying national identity and citizenship. (shrink)

This paper examines the negative response to Dalton’s atomic symbols by situating them in the context of the normative eighteenth-century representational system of affinity tables. Aesthetic analysis of the affinity tables reveals them as schema embedded with a potent functionalist empiricism. In contrast, the aesthetics of Dalton's symbols is associated with hypothetico-deductivism and alchemical iconicism.

We propose a modification of the exhaustivity operator from Fox Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 71–120, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210752_4) that on top of negating all the Innocently Excludable alternatives affirms all the ‘Innocently Includable’ ones. The main result of supplementing the notion of Innocent Exclusion with that of Innocent Inclusion is that it allows the exhaustivity operator to identify cells in the partition induced by the set of alternatives whenever possible. We argue for this property of (...) ‘cell identification’ based on the simplification of disjunctive antecedents and the effects on free choice that arise as the result of the introduction of universal quantifiers. We further argue for our proposal based on the interaction of only with free choice disjunction. (shrink)

What I call “Rorty’s Dilemma” has us caught between the Scylla of Cartesian Dualism and the Charybdis of eliminativism about the mental. Proper recognition of what is distinctively mental requires accommodating incorrigibility about our mental states, something Rorty thinks materialists cannot do. So we must either countenance mental states over and above physical states in our ontology, or else give up altogether on the mental as a distinct category. In section 2, “Materialist Introspectionism—Independence and Epistemic Authority”, I review reasons for (...) being dissatisfied with materialist introspectionism as a way out of the dilemma. In section 3, “Constitutivism”, I outline two constitutivist alternatives to materialist introspectionism. In section 4, “A Neo-Expressivist View”, I offer my neo-expressivist view (defended in Bar-On, Speaking my mind: Expression and self-knowledge. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004 ), according to which the distinctive status of mental self-ascriptions is to be explained by appeal to the expressive character of acts of issuing them (in speech or in thought). This view, I argue, allows us to stay clear of eliminativism without committing to Cartesian substance dualism, thereby offering a viable way of slipping between the horns of Rorty’s dilemma. (shrink)

The task of explaining language evolution is often presented by leading theorists in explicitly Gricean terms. After a critical evaluation, I present an alternative, non‐Gricean conceptualization of the task. I argue that, while it may be true that nonhuman animals, in contrast to language users, lack the ‘motive to share information’ understoodà laGrice, nonhuman animals nevertheless do express states of mind through complex nonlinguistic behavior. On a proper, non‐Gricean construal of expressive communication, this means that they show to their designated (...) audience (without intentionally telling)—and their designated audience recognizes (without rationally inferring)—both how things are in the world and how things are with them. Recognizing that our nonhuman predecessors were already proficient—though non‐Gricean—sharers of such information would free us to focus on the more tractable problem of explaining how linguistic expressive vehicles came to replace, augment, and transform the nonlinguistic expressive means to which nonhuman animals are consigned. (shrink)

Researchers have converged on the idea that a pragmatic understanding of communication can shed important light on the evolution of language. Accordingly, animal communication scientists have been keen to adopt insights from pragmatics research. Some authors couple their appeal to pragmatic aspects of communication with the claim that there are fundamental asymmetries between signalers and receivers in non-human animals. For example, in the case of primate vocal calls, signalers are said to produce signals unintentionally and mindlessly, whereas receivers are thought (...) to engage in contextual interpretation to derive the significance of signals. We argue that claims about signaler-receiver asymmetries are often confused. This is partly because their authors conflate two conceptions of pragmatics, which generate different accounts of the explanatory target for accounts of the evolution of language. Here we distinguish these conceptions, in order to help specify more precisely the proper explanatory target for language evolution research. (shrink)