In a recent issue of Nature Communications Ukleja and co‐workers reported a cryo‐EM 3D reconstruction of the Ccr4‐Not complex from Schizosaccharomyces pombe with an immunolocalization of the different subunits. The newly gained architectural knowledge provides cues to apprehend the functional diversity of this major eukaryotic regulator. Indeed, in the cytoplasm alone, Ccr4‐Not regulates translational repression, decapping and deadenylation, and the Not module additionally plays a positive role in translation. The spatial distribution of the subunits within the structure is compatible with (...) a model proposing that the Ccr4‐Not complex interacts with the 5′ and 3′ ends of target mRNAs, allowing different functional modules of the complex to act at different stages of the translation process, possibly within a circular constellation of the mRNA. This work opens new avenues, and reveals important gaps in our understanding regarding structure and mode of function of the Ccr4‐Not complex that need to be addressed in the future. (shrink)

In this article Zoltán Somhegyi investigates the aesthetic qualities of Northern landscape representations, with a special focus on how contemporary examples are connected to classical ones. First he examines the history of the aesthetic appreciation of these sites, starting from their early modern reception and from the differentiation of “Northern” and “Mediterranean” landscapes: while the Mediterranean ones were highly valued already from the 15th–16th centuries on, the “wilder” Northern landscapes were admired mainly from Romanticism onwards. This has, among others, an (...) aesthetichistorical reason, namely the birth of the category of the sublime; and in this case the harmonious Mediterranean landscapes and the irregular yet impressive Northern ones relate to each other as the category of beautiful does to the sublime. This is why from Romanticism on Northern landscapes became not only aesthetically valuable, but even more capable than the Southern ones to move the spectator. This is especially because, from a gnoseological point of view, the landscape might be a place – and the landscape representation a means – of self-interpretation. The historical overview is then used to better understand some of the most important characteristics of contemporary Northern landscape interpretations and representations from leading artists of the region, which are analysed in the second part of the article. (shrink)

This article focuses on the perception of the importance of business ethics among Czech and Slovak entrepreneurs (this includes business owners and managers) within the SME sector. The comparison is based on an analysis of the approach to business ethics according to a set of parameters, namely company size, years in business, and the gender and education of the entrepreneurs. Empirical research was conducted in 2020 on a sample set consisting of 454 respondents in the Czech Republic and 368 respondents (...) in Slovakia. The most important outcome of the research was the finding that business ethics is considered extremely important in both countries. The research results not only revealed that just over 90% of Czech entrepreneurs and 88% of Slovak entrepreneurs within the SME sector agreed that they should take into account the moral and ethical consequences of their decisions, but that the structure of their answers was very similar. Also, of interest were the findings that women were more aware of business ethics than their male counterparts, as were those entrepreneurs who possessed a higher education over those with a secondary education. (shrink)

Combining up-to-date scholarship with clear and accessible language and helpful exercises, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction is an invaluable resource for all readers interested in metaphor. This second edition includes two new chapters--on 'metaphors in discourse' and 'metaphor and emotion' --along with new exercises, responses to criticism and recent developments in the field, and revised student exercises, tables, and figures.

Avia Pasternak’s admirably clearly and tightly argued book defends four broad theses. First, it argues that contemporary states are appropriately regarded.

The implicit-explicit distinction is applied to knowledge representations. Knowledge is taken to be an attitude towards a proposition which is true. The proposition itself predicates a property to some entity. A number of ways in which knowledge can be implicit or explicit emerge. If a higher aspect is known explicitly then each lower one must also be known explicitly. This partial hierarchy reduces the number of ways in which knowledge can be explicit. In the most important type of implicit knowledge, (...) representations merely reflect the property of objects or events without predicating them of any particular entity The dearest cases of explicit knowledge of a fact are representations of one's own attitude of knowing that fact. These distinctions are discussed in their relationship to similar distinctions such as procedural-declarative, conscious unconscious, verbalizable-nonverbalizable, direct-indirect tests, and automatic voluntary control. This is followed by an outline of how these distinctions can be used to integrate and relate the often divergent uses of the implicit-explicit distinction in different research areas. We illustrate this for visual perception, memory, cognitive development, and artificial grammar learning. (shrink)

A traditional explanation that dates back to Aristotle is that we access color in one perceptual modality only, whereas shape we perceive via two different modalities: visual and tactile. Two independent modalities make possible a verification of our percepts which is not possible for qualities accessed in one modality only.

In the following text I provide my response to the three reviewers of my book titled “Reviewing the Past. The Presence of Ruins”. First I list a few elements that all the reviewers highlighted. Then, I answer the insightful comments and detailed observations brought forward by them, organised in thematic structures. In this part I start with the three main criteria and the agency of Nature in ruination. Then I investigate the issues regarding the so-called “contemporary ruins”. Ruins’ environmental character, (...) context and sitedness are put into focus in the next section, to finally arrive to the equally inspiring questions of picturesque, sublime and to the issues of representation. (shrink)

No scientific conclusion follows automatically from a statistically non-significant result, yet people routinely use non-significant results to guide conclusions about the status of theories (or the effectiveness of practices). To know whether a non-significant result counts against a theory, or if it just indicates data insensitivity, researchers must use one of: power, intervals (such as confidence or credibility intervals), or else an indicator of the relative evidence for one theory over another, such as a Bayes factor. I argue Bayes factors (...) allow theory to be linked to data in a way that overcomes the weaknesses of the other approaches. Specifically, Bayes factors use the data themselves to determine their sensitivity in distinguishing theories (unlike power), and they make use of those aspects of a theory’s predictions that are often easiest to specify (unlike power and intervals, which require specifying the minimal interesting value in order to address theory). Bayes factors provide a coherent approach to determining whether non-significant results support a null hypothesis over a theory, or whether the data are just insensitive. They allow accepting and rejecting the null hypothesis to be put on an equal footing. Concrete examples are provided to indicate the range of application of a simple online Bayes calculator, which reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of Bayes factors. (shrink)

We examined two potential correlates of hypnotic suggestibility: dissociation and cognitive inhibition. Dissociation is the foundation of two of the major theories of hypnosis and other theories commonly postulate that hypnotic responding is a result of attentional abilities . Participants were administered the Waterloo-Stanford Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C. Under the guise of an unrelated study, 180 of these participants also completed: a version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale that is normally distributed in non-clinical populations; a latent inhibition (...) task, a spatial negative priming task, and a memory task designed to measure negative priming. The data ruled out even moderate correlations between hypnotic suggestibility and all the measures of dissociation and cognitive inhibition overall, though they also indicated gender differences. The results are a challenge for existing theories of hypnosis. (shrink)

A central puzzle of contemporary moral and political philosophy is that while most of us believe that all or almost all human beings enjoy the same moral status, human beings possess the capacities that supposedly ground moral status to very unequal levels. This paper aims to develop a novel strategy to vindicate the idea of moral equality against this challenge. Its central argument is that the puzzle emerges only if one accepts a usually unstated theoretical premise about value and the (...) proper response to value. The premise holds that if the presence of a valuable property warrants a certain kind of response towards its bearers, then every variation in the degree to which the property is present necessarily constitutes a reason for a corresponding variation in the response that is warranted towards its bearers. It argues that despite its intuitive appeal, the premise is not plausible as a general view about the proper way of responding to value, and as a view about responding to the value of rational beings in particular. It proposes an account of the proper manner of valuing rational beings that supports a distinctive version of the so-called threshold approach to justifying equal moral status. (shrink)

To the best of my knowledge, no one in recent decades has written a book of this magnitude about the semantics of natural language. Certainly, nothing available today matches this volume in depth, precision, and coherence. The authors present classical and recent results of linguistic semantics within the framework of interpretative T-theories and defend the philosophical foundations of their approach by showing how it fits into the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics. The book also includes an array of excellent exercises (...) and a good list of references. (shrink)

This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian “collective memory” of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but cannot be treated as epiphenomenal to their propagation. The diffusion of bodies tasked with establishing the “true” history of communism reflects, first and foremost, a shift in the region’s approach to its past, one driven by (...) the right’s frustration over an allegedly pervasive influence of former communist cliques. Memory institutes spread as the CEE right progressively perceives their emphasis on research and public education as a safer alternative to botched lustration processes. However, the field of anticommunism extends beyond diffusion by seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticommunist narratives. This results in an entirely different challenge, which requires reconciling of disparate ideological and national interests. In this article, I illustrate some of these nationally diverse, but internationally converging, trajectories of communist extrication from the vantage point of its main exponents: theanticommunist memory entrepreneurs, who are invariably found at the helm of memory institutes.Inhabiting the space around the political, historiographic, and Eurocratic fields, anticommunist entrepreneurs weave a complex web of alliances that ultimately help produce an autonomous field of anticommunism. (shrink)

Contrary to some well-known views in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, in general it is not the case that the felt character of sensory experiences is determined by the information that these experiences pick up, or represent, about the world. In this dissertation I shall focus on a particular sensory modality, namely color vision, to support this thesis. ;Recently there has arisen a strong and popular view of phenomenal consciousness according to which the two fundamental problems about the (...) mind: intentionality and phenomenal experience, can be traced back to just one: intentionality. On this view, the phenomenal aspect of experience is a special case of intentionality, or our mental states' carrying information about the external world. For instance, when we see the colors of objects, we see, in a direct and transparent way, exactly those kinds of properties that the external objects have. Not only are the colors of objects causally responsible for our experiences as of color, object colors crucially determine what is called the phenomenal character of color experience. ;In this dissertation I shall argue that this view of color experience---the view called representational externalism---cannot be correct. I shall argue that from the empirical facts about object color and color vision we need not conclude that object colors do not exist, hence color vision is a grand illusion, however, we do have to conclude from these facts that though object colors are the causes of our color experience, what it is like to see the colors is not, in any theoretically interesting sense, determined by the colors themselves. To the contrary, what it is like to see the colors is crucially determined by how our color vision systems are constructed. In this dissertation I offer two independent arguments to support this claim. (shrink)

This is the first systematic survey of modern nominalistic reconstructions of mathematics, and for this reason alone it should be read by everyone interested in the philosophy of mathematics and, more generally, in questions concerning abstract entities. In the bulk of the book, the authors sketch a common formal framework for nominalistic reconstructions, outline three major strategies such reconstructions can follow, and locate proposals in the literature with respect to these strategies. The discussion is presented with admirable precision and clarity, (...) and should be accessible even to readers with only minimal background in logic and mathematics. There will be many who will turn directly to these pages and use them as a brief manual on the state of the art of nominalism in mathematics. But the most intriguing parts of this elegant book—at least in my view—are the introduction and the conclusion, where the authors examine the significance of reconstructive nominalism. (shrink)

We explore three methods for measuring the conscious status of knowledge using the artificial grammar learning paradigm. We show wagering is no more sensitive to conscious knowledge than simple verbal confidence reports but is affected by risk aversion. When people wager rather than give verbal confidence they are less ready to indicate high confidence. We introduce a “no-loss gambling” method which is insensitive to risk aversion. We show that when people are just as ready to bet on a genuine random (...) process as their own classification decisions, their classifications are still above baseline, indicating knowledge participants are not aware of having. Our results have methodological implications for any study investigating whether people are aware of knowing. (shrink)

The paper examines the so-called principle of all-affected interests (PAAI), which holds that political decisions ought to be made in such a manner that all those whose interests are affected by them have appropriate opportunity to participate in them. In conjunction with factual observations regarding global economic interdependence, the PAAI is frequently proposed as the normative premise of arguments for global democracy. The paper argues that these arguments underspecify the supposed wrong of affectedness. It argues that the perceived wrongness of (...) some situations of being affected without an opportunity to participate can be fully captured in terms of inequality rather than exclusion. (shrink)

Dickie (2020) presents an argument against the traditional, broadly Gricean view of conversation. She argues that speakers must sometimes be more specific than required for sharing knowledge on a topic of common concern. Her proposed solution is to claim that the goal of conversation is not just sharing knowledge but also sharing cognitive focus. In response, I argue that her proposal faces both conceptual and empirical difficulties, and that the traditional view can handle the problem of non-specificity by acknowledging that (...) in order to sustain mutual trust, conversational participants should be less than optimally efficient. (shrink)

Do metonymies play any role in the emergence of metaphors? There is a debate between scholars who suggest that many metaphors are based on, or derive from, metonymies, versus those who do not see such connection between the two. “Resemblance metaphors” do not seem to have anything to do with metonymy. However, in the case of “correlation metaphors” (see, e.g., CitationGrady, 1997a, Citation1997b, Citation1999; CitationLakoff & Johnson, 1980, Citation1999), several researchers argue that metaphors arise from, and are not independent of, (...) metonymies. My specific proposal in the article is that correlation-based metaphors emerge from frame-like mental representations through a metonymic stage. I suggest this happens when one of the elements of a frame-like mental structure is generalized (schematized) to a concept that lies outside the initial frame in a different part of the conceptual system. The generalization process leads to sufficient conceptual distance between the initial and the new frame on which metaphors can be based. (shrink)

How do we make sense of our experience? In order to understand how we construct meaning, the varied and complex relationships among language, mind, and culture need to be understood. While cognitive linguists typically study the cognitive aspects of language, and linguistic anthropologists typically study language and culture, Language, Mind, and Culture is the first book to combine all three and provide an account of meaning-making in language and culture by examining the many cognitive operations in this process. In addition (...) to providing a comprehensive theory of how we can account for meaning making, Language, Mind, and Culture is a textbook for anyone interested in the fascinating issues surrounding the relationship between language, mind, and culture. Further, the book is also a "practical" introduction: most of the chapters include exercises that help the student understand the theoretical issues. No prior knowledge of linguistics is assumed, and the material is accessible and useful to students in a variety of other disciplines, such as anthropology, English, sociology, philosophy, psychology, communication, rhetoric, and others. Language, Mind, and Culture helps us make sense of not only linguistic meaning but also of some of the important personal and social issues we encounter in our lives as members of particular cultures and as human beings. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relational critique of distributive conceptions of justice, according to which the proper focus of egalitarian justice is the egalitarian nature of social relations rather than the equal distribution of certain goods. It maintains that the relational critique constitutes a fundamental challenge to distributive egalitarianism only if it rejects the “core distributive thesis” that holds that the distribution of some nonrelational goods has relation-independent significance for justice. It argues that several relational proposals are compatible with that thesis, (...) and therefore constitute extensions or revisions of the distributive conception rather than alternatives to it, and that those relational views that reject the core distributive thesis are the least plausible ones. Finally, the chapter shows that relational views are often ambiguous regarding the nature of the significance of egalitarian relations, i.e. whether it consists in their contribution to well-being, or in being the fitting response to equal moral status. (shrink)

Disagreement in politics is ubiquitous. People disagree about what makes a life worthy or well-lived. They disagree about what they owe to each other in terms of justice. They also disagree about the proper manner of dealing with the consequences of disagreement. What is more, they disagree about the normative significance of moral and political disagreement. Disagreement has been, for at least three decades now, the focus of a series of major works in political philosophy. It has been called one (...) of the fundamental ‘circumstances of politics’ by Waldron. Rawls took disagreement to be at the heart of the problem of political legitimacy. Gerald Gaus takes it to be the most important task of liberal political theory to justify political institutions in the face of ‘evaluative diversity’. For Thomas Christiano, disagreement is part of the basis of the authority of democracy.Political institutions make decisions and rules that are binding f. (shrink)

Probability kinematics is studied in detail within the framework of elementary probability theory. The merits and demerits of Jeffrey's and Field's models are discussed. In particular, the principle of maximum relative entropy and other principles are used in an epistemic justification of generalized conditionals. A representation of conditionals in terms of Bayesian conditionals is worked out in the framework of external kinematics.

ABSTRACT The paper discusses a possible political theological interpretation of arguments developed in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. What emerges is that Musil pose a fundamental challenge to the possibility of any real analogy between God and the political sovereign, as suggested by Carl Schmitt. At stake is Austria as a yet-to-be-born modern sovereign. However, the novel shows why attempts to conceive it in an image of God all fail. After surveying four such attempts, the main focus will be (...) the discussion of Anselm of Canterbury’s existential argument in this secular context. At Diotima’s inspiration it is General von Bordwehr, a largely neglected figure, who makes the most serious attempt to argue for the political sovereign as the greatest conceivable thing. The argument is that greatness entails containing every idea and its opposite, and this yields the concept of order. But order means the frozen end of everything. Hence, instead of a living God, we end up with a political sovereign marked by death. (shrink)

Though it may sound awkward to ask whether the political sovereign is happy or unhappy, the question is relevant to political theory, especially within a political theological perspective. Because man was created in the image of God, human happiness needs to be a reflection of divine beatitude, and as divine sovereignty is, at least analogically, related to political sovereignty, the conceptual coherence is secured. The main argument is, however, that the analogy does not hold. I shall show how St Thomas (...) Aquinas’s short treatment of God’s beatitude may mislead us about power, fame, riches, and dignity being essential to happiness, based on an analysis of Franz Kafka’s major novel, The Castle, and a few other writings by him. I shall argue that our tradition of political thinking and behavior remains ambivalent on this issue. The political sovereign is born out of our unhappy condition, yet its power, fame, riches, and glory suggests to us that it has appropriated our happiness. But for this very reason it cannot be happy, and it therefore suggests a false analogy between the divine and the political sovereign. It is fundamentally at variance with our happiness, which incites us to abandon, reject, and eventually, kill it. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with what I believe is the epistemological mission of Kant’s doctrine of taste. The third Critique inherits two problems from the first. The evident one is that the categorial constitution of nature must be complemented with the notion of purposiveness. The less evident one is that the transcendental theory of experience needs a common sense in order to secure a common objectivity. The judgment of taste, conceived of by Kant as a ‘cognition in general’ not restricted (...) to either the particular subject or the particular object, offers a solution. It turns out to be a judgment that cannot be made without assuming the purposiveness of nature and the uniformity of the cognizing subjects. (shrink)

This essay draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work to argue for a practice-oriented concept of expertise. We propose that conceptualizing types of expertise as having a family resemblance, relative to the problems such expertise addresses, escapes certain limitations of defining expertise as primarily epistemic. Recognizing the pragmatic purchase on actual problems a Wittgensteinian approach provides to discussions of expertise, we seek to understand the nature of expertise in situations where the people who need to make a difficult decision do not possess (...) or have access to the epistemic status that traditionally confers expertise. These are situations where people need to answer difficult questions that, while they may be informed by expertise in the epistemic register, are ultimately decided by expertise that weighs certified knowledge against the intractable characteristics of a particular situation. We suggest that there is not—even deep down on a conceptual level—only one kind of expertise, but multiple kinds of expertise that resonate with diverse kinds of problems. (shrink)

I argue against the standard view that ontological debates can be fully described as disagreements about what we should believe to exist. The central thesis of the paper is that believing in Fs in the ontologically relevant sense requires more than merely believing that Fs exist. Believing in Fs is not even a propositional attitude; it is rather an attitude one bears to the term expressed by 'Fs'. The representational correctness of such a belief requires not only that there be (...) Fs, but also that the term expressed by 'Fs' should not misrepresent them. In certain cases we might believe that there are Fs without believing our conception of Fs applies to them. This may well be the situation we are in with regard to abstract entities of various sorts. (shrink)

Subjects exposed to strings of letters generated by a finite state grammar can later classify grammatical and nongrammatical test strings, even though they cannot adequately say what the rules of the grammar are (e.g., Reber, 1989). The MINERVA 2 (Hintzman, 1986) and Medin and Schaffer (1978) memory‐array models and a number of connectionist outoassociator models are tested against experimental data by deriving mainly parameter‐free predictions from the models of the rank order of classification difficulty of test strings. The importance of (...) different assumptions regarding the coding of features (How should the absence of a feature be coded? Should single letters or digrams be coded?), the learning rule used (Hebb rule vs. delta rule), and the connectivity (Should features be predicted only by previous features in the string, or by all features simultaneously?) is investigated by determining the performance of the models with and without each assumption. Only one class of connectionist model (the simultaneous delta rule) passes all the tests. It is shown that this class of model can be regarded by abstracting a set of representative but incomplete rules of the grammar. (shrink)

The article examines whether realist theory should adopt a philosophical anarchist position concerning political obligation. The conclusions are mixed. Drawing on a distinction between strong and weak theories of political obligation (in the terminology of the paper, strong theories are committed to morality-based theorizing while weak theories depart from it), the article argues that philosophical anarchism and realist theory are natural allies against strong theories of political obligation but they must part company when it comes to weak theories because it (...) is exactly their departure from morality-based theorizing that can make weak theories especially appealing to realists. In addition, two further objections can be raised against philosophical anarchism on realist grounds: first, philosophical anarchists are drawn to undesirably sweeping conclusions about the non-existence of legitimate political authority or the extreme scarcity of genuine political relations by their Kantian or Lockean background assumptions and, second, Simmons seems to have an implicit weak theory of political obligation which could be, ironically, much more appealing to realists than his overall Lockean anarchism or his sweeping criticism of weak theories. All in all, can a realist be an anarchist? Probably, but definitely not on philosophical anarchist grounds. (shrink)