I examine some aspects of Mach’s concern for photographs and phonographs. I start with the phonographs, and I examine in particular Mach’s reference to this device in his account of the development of written language. My second point is a comparison between Mach's reference to phonographs and hieroglyphs and some very similar insights in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Lastly, I address some aspects of Mach’s interest in photographical techniques, and I try to draw a parallel between Mach’s conception of mental economical pictures (...) and the method of composite portraiture developed by Galton. (shrink)

A widespread view among philosophers and scientists is that recorded sounds and assisted hearing differ fundamentally from natural sounds and direct hearing. It is commonly claimed, for example, that the sounds we hear over the phone are not sounds emitted by the voice of our interlocutor, but the sounds reproduced by the phone’s loudspeaker. According to this view, hearing distant sounds through communication and audio equipment is at best indirect and at worst illusory. In what follows, I shall reject these (...) claims and argue in favor of a transparent view of auditory media, including radio, telephone, phonograph, etc. According to this approach, the great gift of Scott de Martinville and Edison is not to have invented devices able to reproduce vanished sounds but rather to have created technological instruments literally able to store and transmit them to future and distant listeners. (shrink)

The book addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the nascent twentieth century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas---cultural, social, and personal---associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development (...) of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

We present a novel model of individual people, online posts, and media platforms to explain the online spread of epistemically toxic content such as fake news and suggest possible responses. We argue that a combination of technical features, such as the algorithmically curated feed structure, and social features, such as the absence of stable social-epistemic norms of posting and sharing in social media, is largely responsible for the unchecked spread of epistemically toxic content online. Sharing constitutes a distinctive communicative act, (...) governed by a dedicated norm and motivated to a large extent by social identity maintenance. But confusion about this norm and its lack of inherent epistemic checks lead readers to misunderstand posts, attribute excess or insufficient credibility to posts, and allow posters to evade epistemic accountability—all contributing to the spread of epistemically toxic content online. This spread can be effectively addressed if people and platforms add significantly more context to shared posts and platforms nudge people to develop and follow recognized epistemic norms of posting and sharing. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to give a philosophical analysis of the relationship between contingently available technology and the knowledge that it makes possible. My concern is with what specific subjects can know in practice, given their particular conditions, especially available technology, rather than what can be known “in principle” by a hypothetical entity like Laplace’s Demon. The argument has two parts. In the first, I’ll construct a novel account of epistemic possibility that incorporates two pragmatic conditions: responsibility and (...) practicability. For example, whether subjects can gain knowledge depends in some circumstances on whether they have the capability of gathering relevant evidence. In turn, the possibility of undertaking such investigative activities depends in part on factors like ethical constraints, economical realities, and available technology. In the second part of the paper, I’ll introduce “technological possibility” to analyze the set of actions made possible by available technology. To help motivate the problem and later test my proposal, I’ll focus on a specific historical case, one of the earliest uses of digital electronic computers in a scientific investigation. I conclude that the epistemic possibility of gaining access to scientific knowledge about certain subjects depends (in some cases) on the technological possibility for making responsible investigations. (shrink)

David Chalmers thinks his iPhone exemplifies the extended mind thesis by meeting the criteria ‎that he and Andy Clark established in their well-known 1998 paper. Andy Clark agrees. We take ‎this proposal seriously, evaluating the case of the GPS-enabled smartphone as a potential mind ‎extender. We argue that the “trust and glue” criteria enumerated by Clark and Chalmers are ‎incompatible with both the epistemic responsibilities that accompany everyday activities and the ‎practices of trust that enable users to discharge them. Prospects (...) for revision of the original ‎criteria are dim. We therefore call for a rejection of the trust criterion and a reevaluation of the ‎extended mind thesis.‎. (shrink)

Leading prescriptions for addressing the spread of fake news, misinformation, and other forms of epistemically toxic content online target either the platform or platform users as a single site for intervention. Neither approach attends to the intense feedback between people, posts, and platforms. Leading prescriptions boil down to the suggestion that we make social media more like traditional media, whether by making platforms take active roles as gatekeepers, or by exhorting individuals to behave more like media professionals. Both approaches are (...) impracticable and wrong. (shrink)

This slim volume contains much that is suggestive, but little that is substantive. This is unfortunate, as there is need of a sustained analysis of the epistemology of instruments.

Since Robert Hooke published Micrographia, scientists have been expanding the boundaries of science to new scales, giving rise to questions about epistemology and ontology and challenging perceptions of objectivity, life, and artifact. Recent developments in areas such as nanotechnology and synthetic life have not only pushed these boundaries, but have called their very existence into question. In this issue, Spontaneous Generations examines science at the nanoscale from ten perspectives...

To one side of the wide third-floor hallway of Victoria College, just outside the offices of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, lies the massive carcass of a 1960s-era electron microscope. Its burnished steel carapace has lost its gleam, but the instrument is still impressive for its bulk and spare design: binocular viewing glasses, beam control panel, specimen tray, and a broad work surface. Edges are worn, desiccated tape still feebly holds instructive reminders near control (...) dials; this was once a workhorse in some lab. But it exists now out of time and place; like many of the scientific instruments we study, it has not been touched by knowing hands in decades. (shrink)

People increasingly form beliefs based on information gained from automatically filtered Internet ‎sources such as search engines. However, the workings of such sources are often opaque, preventing ‎subjects from knowing whether the information provided is biased or incomplete. Users’ reliance on ‎Internet technologies whose modes of operation are concealed from them raises serious concerns about ‎the justificatory status of the beliefs they end up forming. Yet it is unclear how to address these concerns ‎within standard theories of knowledge and justification. (...) To shed light on the problem, we introduce a ‎novel conceptual framework that clarifies the relations between justified belief, epistemic responsibility, ‎action, and the technological resources available to a subject. We argue that justified belief is subject to ‎certain epistemic responsibilities that accompany the subject’s particular decision-taking circumstances, ‎and that one typical responsibility is to ascertain, so far as one can, whether the information upon which ‎the judgment will rest is biased or incomplete. What this responsibility comprises is partly determined by ‎the inquiry-enabling technologies available to the subject. We argue that a subject’s beliefs that are ‎formed based on Internet-filtered information are less justified than they would be if she either knew how ‎filtering worked or relied on additional sources, and that the subject may have the epistemic ‎responsibility to take measures to enhance the justificatory status of such beliefs.‎. (shrink)

Information providing and gathering increasingly involve technologies like search ‎engines, which actively shape their epistemic surroundings. Yet, a satisfying account ‎of the epistemic responsibilities associated with them does not exist. We analyze ‎automatically generated search suggestions from the perspective of social ‎epistemology to illustrate how epistemic responsibilities associated with a ‎technology can be derived and assigned. Drawing on our previously developed ‎theoretical framework that connects responsible epistemic behavior to ‎practicability, we address two questions: first, given the different technological ‎possibilities available (...) to searchers, the search technology, and search providers, ‎who should bear which responsibilities? Second, given the technology’s ‎epistemically relevant features and potential harms, how should search terms be ‎autocompleted? Our analysis reveals that epistemic responsibility lies mostly with ‎search providers, which should eliminate three categories of autosuggestions: those ‎that result from organized attacks, those that perpetuate damaging stereotypes, and ‎those that associate negative characteristics with specific individuals.‎. (shrink)

Internet Alley is much more a book about regional history than about politics, economics, or history of technology, yet it draws extensively on all of these fields. The book is stronger for its interdisciplinarity, but as a result does not sit comfortably within any traditional historical discourse. Historians of science or technology not dealing with northern Virginia in the twentieth century will find little of help in this book.

Talk at the Philosophy [in:of:for:and] Digital Knowledge Infrastructures online workshop 2023 (28/09/2023).

Despite evidence indicating that public health services are the most effective means of improving the population's health status, health care services receive the bulk of funding and political support. The recent passage of the Affordable Care Act, which focused on improving access to health care services through insurance reform, reflects the primacy of health care over public health. Although policymakers typically conceptualize health care and public health as two distinct systems, gains in health status are most effectively and cost-efficiently achieved (...) through their integration into a single health system. The Act does little to compel integration; however, there are numerous opportunities to encourage the coordination of public health and health care in the Act's implementation. (shrink)

Heath care and public health are typically conceptualized as separate, albeit overlapping, systems. Health care’s goal is the improvement of individual patient outcomes through the provision of medical services. In contrast, public health is devoted to improving health outcomes in the population as a whole through health promotion and disease prevention. Health care services receive the bulk of funding and political support, while public health is chronically starved of resources. In order to reduce morbidity and mortality, policymakers must shift their (...) attention to public health services and to the improved integration of health care and public health. In other words, health care and public health should be treated as two parts of a single integrated health system. Furthermore, in order to maximize improvements in health status, policymakers must consider the impact of all governmental policies on health. (shrink)

The “information age” is often thought in terms of the digital revolution that begins with Turing’s 1937 paper, “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” However, this can only be partially correct. There are two aspects to Turing’s work: one dealing with questions of computation that leads to computer science and another concerned with building computing machines that leads to computer engineering. Here, we emphasize the latter because it shows us a Turing connected with mechanisms of information flow (...) rather than solely with the mathematical and logical problems of computability for which he is better known. Our reasons for doing so will become clear in what follows. In fact, the 1937 paper just mentioned provides a general schematic for building a computing machine; this mechanical connection puts Turing on an historical continuum with others who discovered mechanisms to cope with information. Of those involved in this quest in the 19th Century, two people in particular, Edison and Bell, had explicit visions of an information age that would follow from their work. Because they were explicitly aware of what they were doing and partly brought it about long before 1937, they deserve substantial credit for the information age they set out to inaugurate. Regarding one purely mechanical and non-electronic technology, Edison noted ten uses for the phonograph, including not only the replication of sound, but also “connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication”. Even though the telephone was only two years old when Edison wrote of a network made up of mechanical hard storage systems and people connected by wire, the network vision was already clearly in his head. (shrink)

In the early 1890s the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine—one of the technological wonders of the age—to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered “the simian tongue,” made up of words he was beginning to translate, and containing the rudiments from which human language evolved. Yet for most of the next (...) century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery. Both returned to great acclaim only in the early 1980s, after a team of ethologists announced that experimental playback showed certain African monkeys to have rudimentarily meaningful calls. -/- Drawing on newly discovered archival sources and interviews with key scientists, Gregory Radick here reconstructs the remarkable trajectory of a technique invented and reinvented to listen in on primate communication. Richly documented and powerfully argued, The Simian Tongue charts the scientific controversies over the evolution of language from Darwin’s day to our own, resurrecting the forgotten debts of psychology, anthropology, and other behavioral sciences to the Victorian debate about the animal roots of human language. (shrink)

From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and (...) twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.” Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general. (shrink)

The playback experiment -- the playing back of recorded animal sounds to the animals in order to observe their responses -- has twice become central to celebrated researches on non-human primates. First, in the years around 1890, Richard Garner, an amateur scientist and evolutionary enthusiast, used the new wax cylinder phonograph to record and reproduce monkey utterances with the aim of translating them. Second, in the years around 1980, the ethologists Peter Marler, Robert Seyfarth, and Dorothy Cheney used (...) tape recorders in a broadly similar way to test whether the different predator calls of one monkey species, vervet monkeys, warn about different kinds of predator. This paper explores the circumstances leading to the ca. 1890 invention and the ca. 1980 reinvention of the primate playback experiment. In both instances, I show, the experiment served as a riposte to those arguing, on scientific grounds, that an unbridgeable gap divides human language from animal communication. I also consider how far progress in technology explains the timing of invention and reinvention. I conclude with some reflections on sifting contingent from inevitable aspects of the history of the primate playback experiment, and of scientific achievements more generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 485-494 [Access article in PDF] Art of the Piano Denis Dutton CHARLES ROSEN is so familiar to readers as an acute music theorist and historian of European ideas and literature that it is easy to forget that he is one of most stimulating and compelling pianists of the last fifty years. In Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (Free Press, $25.00), he combines (...) his intellectual and musical gifts to take stock of his profession as concert pianist. The result is engaging, insightful, and for lovers of piano artistry, not a little disturbing.The piano, in case no one has noticed, is in steep, serious decline. My piano tuner, Adam Linning, began his career in Glasgow. He worked for the largest piano retailer in the city: it had seventeen tuners on the road in 1954, the year Glaswegians first got television. By 1959, when he left for New Zealand, there were three other tuners working with him. Adam explains the decline in terms of Glasgow apartment space. The piano and the TV had to share the living room, and so long as the room flickered with gray-blue light, the piano had to remain silent.People used to gather around and sing together at the piano—in my childhood experience, any group of a dozen middle-class adults would contain at least one competent sight-reader who could play, if not Beethoven, then Christmas carols, reductions of Your Hit Parade songs, or scraps of boogie-woogie. This meant that there was abroad in the land a critical mass of amateur pianists who knew enough about music literature, notation, and performance to constitute a core audience for the piano masters of the day—Horowitz, Rubinstein, Arrau, Cherkassky, and the like—and who also had an appreciation of jazz greats such as Art Tatum.The decline in the number of amateur pianists, people with knowledgeable admiration of piano playing, has tracked the decline of the [End Page 485] piano virtuoso as classical star. Recording too has played a role in these changes. I doubt that there was a greater love of classical music fifty years ago than now. But attendance at live performances of anything is no longer required in order to attain familiarity with repertoire. Recording, particularly from the LP era on, enormously enlarged general knowledge of the musical literature: people who a hundred years earlier would have been lucky to hear three Haydn symphonies or two Handel operas in a lifetime can now, no matter where they live, listen to them all. Recording did to music something like what the Roman alphabet and moveable type did for news and literature: it enabled the universal dispersal of all of music's products, the worst to the best. For years professional musicians tended not to appreciate this. While it is true that there are fewer people about who can actually play Scarlatti sonatas, that has to be balanced against the agreeable fact that knowledge of these small masterpieces is no longer limited to the fifty or sixty included in early editions, from which was derived the same two dozen that we would hear from pianists over and over. Now we can hear all 550+, and learn about them for ourselves (Arts & Letters Daily even links to a website where you can find any Scarlatti sonata in seconds, click on it, and listen.)This is a big change. Keyboard virtuosity goes back a long time, even before Bach, although it was Liszt, as inspired by Paganini, who gave the piano its first real idol. Enter Edison a few decades later, and with his appearance it became possible for people to joke, "The only instrument I play is the phonograph." If there are fewer pianists able to make a living performing the classical repertoire today, it is because a world of mostly non-pianists that is oversupplied with CDs just doesn't need them all, either to hear the playing or enjoy the music.A notable aspect of Charles Rosen's regard for piano playing is that he conveys no dewy-eyed nostalgia about... (shrink)

The ArgumentThis article uses the history of early sound recording technology in the united States between 1878 and 1915 to show how published discourse contributed to the way the talking machine was defined and situated as a commercially viable product. Comparing the published accounts of Edison's phonograph and Berliners gramophone in popular scientific articles between 1878 and 1896 illustrates that technological advances in sound recording technology take on important cultural meanings. Critical to these meanings is the way in which (...) the technological “fidelity” is linguistically transformed into an aesthetic quality, projected and interpreted within demonstrable values of musical culture. Beginning in 1902, the Victor Talking Machine Company, formed to market the gramophone, took advantage of these cultural meanings to claim a technological advantage over Edison's cylinder recorder. Whose voice was recorded became part of the claim to technological superiority. The Victor Company succeeded in capitalizing “Culture” by promoting their recordings of opera stars like Enrico Caruso as technologically and culturally faithful to live musical performance and as a democratically available access to a privileged lifestyle. Thus did the Victor Company use a terrier and a tenor to legitimate their talking machine as an American musical instrument. (shrink)

Islamic law employs a classification of acts that divides each into one of five categories, ranging from forbidden to obligatory. When the phonograph became a popular instrument at the end of the nineteenth century, the use of this new machine, which reproduced both the Quran being recited and the song of an unknown woman, had to be categorized. The present article presents the edition for the first time, with translation and analysis, of a fatwa on the permissibility of the (...) phonograph, issued in 1908 by the Meccan scholar ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ al-Zawāwī. Fatwas on phonography by the Indonesian scholar Sayyid ʿUthmān and the later shaykh al-Azhar Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī are also analyzed. Two European scholars who recorded Quranic phonography are paid attention as well: Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje and Gotthelf Bergsträsser. Their involvement with Quranic sound recording is placed within its historical context. Finally, a short impression is given of what survives of these early recordings. (shrink)

Because English faculty are the ones most commonly trusted with the historic, aesthetic, and ideological study of verbally based art forms, they are the ones who will ultimately decide the fate of studies in American phonographic rhapsody . Thus, it is a significant problem that English faculty neither study American rhapsody nor receive training in the art and science of analytic listening, a prerequisite to the successful study of U.S. recorded poetic sound art. More importantly, they have failed to develop (...) field related information and understanding necessary to the development of criticisms of American phonographic rhapsody. This dissertation seeks to redress the present circumstance by providing English faculty with the kinds of rudimentary, foundational knowledges they would need if they were to open the history of U.S. recorded sound poetries to academic inquiry. Chapter One establishes that English faculty turned their back on sound art studies for reasons having nothing to do with the historic importance, artistic merit, and ideological content of poetic sound art. Rather, departments of English, under the direction of an extra-literary historical process, encountered and passed over the historic study of American recorded sound art without ever knowing why they did it. Chapter Two proceeds from the newly established position that English faculty are unjustified in their continued neglect of American phonographic rhapsody. Having noted that English faculty achieve their rank without learning how to think about recorded sound as an object of investigation, the chapter offers a short treatise on the fundamental principles of sound art research which include radio and phonography are divergent modeling systems; the phonographic medium is a first content of any recording; sound art recorded prior to broadcast is recorded sound art; phonographic intention accounts for the "live radio" recording; recorded poetic sound art is "Rhapsody." In the end, this dissertation refrains from attempting to stimulate interest in poetic sound art, opting instead to lay solid historic and theoretic foundations upon which scholars may base and steady their future studies of American rhapsody. (shrink)

A search for traces of the voice before the phonograph, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Long before the invention of musical notation, and long before that of the phonograph, the written word was unrivaled as a medium of the human voice. In The Ancient Phonograph, Shane Butler searches for traces of voices before Edison, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, (...) and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods. The resonant world we encounter in ancient sources is at first unfamiliar, populated by texts that speak and sing, often with no clear difference between the two. But Butler discovers a commonality that invites a deeper understanding of why voices mattered then and why they have mattered since. With later examples that range from Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice—as an anatomical presence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strengths and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice by Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time. The Ancient Phonograph will appeal not only to classicists and to voice theorists but to anyone with an interest in the verbal arts—literature, oratory, song—and the nature of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Glitch composition is a meta-discursive practice: rather than writing new music inspired by older recordings, it constructs new music inspired by the technological conditions and limitations in which those recordings emerged. For those listeners who aren’t particularly interested in technology theories, such music is particularly alienating—an in-joke that one doesn’t get. When glitch becomes pop, it loses its theoretical savvy, replacing the “synth pad” in a contemporary pop song. Glitch’s subversion of the bad value judgment placed on damaged media is (...) only a partial one—as scratched CDs (whether they be glitch ones or not) remain economically worthless commodities. (shrink)

In this paper I address the topic of sport records and concentrate on the ontology of sport records. I argue that sport records are social facts in the sense that sport records not only depend on the physical facts of sport competitions, but also on the attitude we take towards the phenomenon—our attitude is partly constitutive of the phenomenon of sport records. In particular, the Mieto–Wassberg incident and the Larsson–McKee incident show that performance records should also be regarded as social (...) facts. Lastly, I show how my view sits with the view that sports are response-sensitive. I argue that the latter gives us further reason to believe that sport records, in particular performance records, are social facts. (shrink)

It is proposed that our memory is made up of individual, unconnected Records, to each of which is attached a Heading. Retrieval of a Record can only be accomplished by addressing the attached Heading, the contents of which cannot itself be retrieved. Each Heading is made up of a mixture of content in more or less literal form and context, the latter including specification of environment and of internal states (e.g. drug states and mood). This view of memory allows (...) an easy account of a number of natural memory phenomena as well as a variety of laboratory findings such as the differences between recall and recognition. The theory further proposes that Headed Records can neither be deleted nor modified. Data apparently against such a hypothesis can be accounted for in terms of the retrieval process. (shrink)

I will explore possibilities for formulating linguistic semantics in terms of records and record types of the kind used in recent developments of Martin-L¨of type theory (Betarte, 1998, Betarte and Tasistro, 1998, Coquand, Pollock and Takeyama, 2003, Tasistro, 1997). I will suggest that they give us the tools to develop a theory which includes aspects of Montague semantics, using the lambda calculus1, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT)2, situation semantics3 and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)4 in a single theory. I will (...) also argue that formulating these theories in terms of record types may provide us not only with a unified approach but also with certain improvements over the individual theories. (shrink)

Video‐recording healthcare interactions provides important opportunities for research and service improvement. However, this method brings about tensions, especially when recording sensitive topics. Subsequent reflection may compel the researcher to engage in ethical and moral deliberations. This paper presents experiences from a South African genetic counselling study which made use of video‐recordings to understand communicative processes in routine practice. Video‐recording as a research method, as well as contextual and process considerations are discussed, such as researching one's own field, issues of trust (...) and anonymity, the challenge of providing true informed consent and capturing details which may cause psychological harm. Several recommendations for research practice in diverse healthcare settings are made. This includes the value of reflective pieces, the importance of retrospective consent, disclosure of the limitations to anonymity, as well as the collective responsibility of those involved to produce ethical research. These recommendations have value for genetic counselling and other healthcare fields. (shrink)

Brain reading technologies are rapidly being developed in a number of neuroscience fields. These technologies can record, process, and decode neural signals. This has been described as ‘mind reading technology’ in some instances, especially in popular media. Should the public at large, be concerned about this kind of technology? Can it really read minds? Concerns about mind-reading might include the thought that, in having one’s mind open to view, the possibility for free deliberation, and for self-conception, are eroded where (...) one isn’t at liberty to privately mull things over. Themes including privacy, cognitive liberty, and self-conception and expression appear to be areas of vital ethical concern. Overall, this article explores whether brain reading technologies are really mind reading technologies. If they are, ethical ways to deal with them must be developed. If they are not, researchers and technology developers need to find ways to describe them more accurately, in order to dispel unwarranted concerns and address appropriately those that are warranted. (shrink)

How can dispute records shed light on the study of dispute settlement processes and their social and political underpinnings? This volume addresses this question by investigating the interplay between record-making, disputing process, and the social and political contexts of conflicts. The authors make use of exceptionally rich charter materials from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Scandinavia, including different types of texts directly and indirectly related to conflicts, in order to contribute to a comparative survey of early medieval dispute records (...) and to a better understanding of the interplay between judicial and other less formal modes of conflict resolution. Contributors are Isabel Alfonso, José M. Andrade, François Bougard, Warren C. Brown, Wendy Davies, Julio Escalona, Kim Esmark, Adam J. Kosto, Juan José Larrea, André Evangelista Marques, Josep M. Salrach, Igor Santos Salazar, and Francesca Tinti. (shrink)