Our online interaction with information-systems may well provide the largest arena of formal logical reasoning in the world today. Presented here is a critique of the foundations of Logic, in which the metaphysical assumptions of such 'closed world' reasoning are contrasted with those of traditional logic. Closed worlds mostly employ a syntactic alternative to formal language namely, recording data in files. Whilst this may be unfamiliar as logical syntax, it is argued here that propositions are expressed by data stored in (...) files which are essentially non-linguistic and so cannot be expressed by simple formulae F(a), with the inference-rules normally used in Logic. Hence, the syntax of data may be said to define a fundamentally new kind of logical form for simple propositions. In this way, the logic of closed systems is shown to be non-classical, differing from traditional logic in its truth-conditions, inferences and metaphysics. This paper will be concerned mainly with how the reference and certain inferences in such a closed system differ metaphysically from classical logic. (shrink)

This work proposes a logical analysis for the kind of knowledge or insight provided by Buddhist enlightenment, which is often presented only in the form of contradictions and riddles. The comprehension of contradictions is perplexing to most western logic, and yet developed here is a theory demonstrating how a non truth-functional interpretation can be attached to certain naturalistic contradictions. In this way, the logical and psychological status of Enlightenment can be analysed in a manner consistent with the claims of much (...) Eastern thought. For example, it is argued that by breaking the logical principle of identity, it is possible to understand the contradiction "Everybody's friend is nobody's friend" in such a way as to learn something new about friendship, thereby causing us to modify our concept of friendship. In this way our grasp of contradictions can lead to conceptual change. -/- It is further noted that conflicts in all areas of life can be expressed by contradictions, so that our capacity in general to grasp naturalistic contradictions is also a basis for conflict-resolution -thus justifying the term 'Enlightenment'. This pragmatic comprehension of contradictions is thus shown to formalise, not only the Middle Way of Buddhism, but also Socratic dialectic. Finally, the analysis explains why gnomic utterances in every religion and Zen in particular, are sometimes expected to trigger spiritual enlightenment. (shrink)

Both the concept of a Darwinian tree of life (TOL) and the possibility of its accurate reconstruction have been much criticized. Criticisms mostly revolve around the extensive occurrence of lateral gene transfer (LGT), instances of uptake of complete organisms to become organelles (with the associated subsequent gene transfer to the nucleus), as well as the implications of more subtle aspects of the biological species concept. Here we argue that none of these criticisms are sufficient to abandon the valuable TOL concept (...) and the biological realities it captures. Especially important is the need to conceptually distinguish between organismal trees and gene trees, which necessitates incorporating insights of widely occurring LGT into modern evolutionary theory. We demonstrate that all criticisms, while based on important new findings, do not invalidate the TOL. After considering the implications of these new insights, we find that the contours of evolution are best represented by a TOL. (shrink)

The everyday expressions of nursing practices are driven by their entanglement in complex flows of social, cultural, political and economic interests. Early expressions of trained nursing practice in the United States and Europe reflect claims of moral, spiritual and clinical exceptionalism. They were both imposed upon—and internalized by—nursing pioneers. These claims were associated with an endogenous narrative of discipline and its physical manifestation in early nursing schools and hospitals, which functioned as “total institutions.” By contrast, the external forces—diffuse yet pervasive—impacting (...) upon contemporary nursing more closely align with the power dynamics explored in Gilles Deleuze's concept of the Society of Control. The example of sensor technology and telemetric monitoring of nurses’ locations in the clinical setting exemplifies the intense presence of surveillance, performance metrics and the “rationalization” of nursing practice. It falls upon nurses to recognize, accept or challenge these dynamics in order to shape the future of nursing practice into a discipline which embodies our values and priorities. (shrink)

It is shown how mathematical discoveries such as De Moivre's theorem can result from patterns among the symbols of existing formulae and that significant mathematical analogies are often syntactic rather than semantic, for the good reason that mathematical proofs are always syntactic, in the sense of employing only formal operations on symbols. This radically extends the Lakatos approach to mathematical discovery by allowing proof-directed concepts to generate new theorems from scratch instead of just as evolutionary modifications to some existing theorem. (...) The emphasis upon syntax and proof permits discoveries to go beyond the limits of any prevailing semantics. It also helps explain the shortcomings of inductive AI systems of mathematics learning such as Lenat's AM, in which proof has played no part in the formation of concepts and conjectures. (shrink)

This article aims to demonstrate how the formation of ethical subjectivity must be considered in conjunction with the techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure, and it proposes an account of the ways in which the technical transition and ‘democratization’ of archival upload/download capacity associated with digital communications fundamentally challenges the existing structure of control over such things as censorship and cultural memory understood in terms of power of recall. It argues that it is against this background and in view of the (...) mediality of communications that the question of responsibility with respect to secrets and their disclosure must ultimately be posed. It seeks to establish the difference between a purely political and an ethico-political understanding of the secrecy/disclosure dyad as this functions, on the one hand, in relation to philosophical inquiry itself and, on the other, in relation to normative representations of informational events, and it contextualizes its theoretical account of this difference in relation to the ‘Wikileaks phenomenon’ viewed as a disclosive event. It examines how ethical subjectivity is formed in relation to ‘information’ and in the wider context of a digital culture of archivization, characterized by the ubiquitous recording of communications of all kinds. Drawing centrally on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ‘infinite responsibility’ is ‘incarnated’ as the ‘ultimate secret of subjectivity’ in me, and Derrida’s account of both the necessary technicity of the human and the impossibility of ‘saying the event’, it proposes a way of thinking the ethico-techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure in terms of the singularity of the event and the unique responsibility of the ethical Subject in relation to that. (shrink)

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by (...) a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding. (shrink)

Social and linguistic perceptions are linked. On one hand, talker identity affects speech perception. On the other hand, speech itself provides information about a talker's identity. Here, we propose that the same probabilistic knowledge might underlie both socially conditioned linguistic inferences and linguistically conditioned social inferences. Our computational–level approach—the ideal adapter—starts from the idea that listeners use probabilistic knowledge of covariation between social, linguistic, and acoustic cues in order to infer the most likely explanation of the speech signals they hear. (...) As a first step toward understanding social inferences in this framework, we use a simple ideal observer model to show that it would be possible to infer aspects of a talker's identity using cue distributions based on actual speech production data. This suggests the possibility of a single formal framework for social and linguistic inferences and the interactions between them. (shrink)

The development of immersive media-communication environments, and their theorization in terms of the `haptic', calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between sensuality and the ethics of contact. For the most part, the cultural theorization of the virtual which remains preoccupied with the visual has tended to limit its scope to the paradoxes, politics and ethics of representation. Much of media and cultural studies work, for instance, has adopted, directly or indirectly, the traditional visual and ocularcentric paradigm in its analyses (...) of cultural forms and technologies as these have become integrated into contemporary life. Whilst it has been argued, for instance by Mark Hansen in his recent books, that this paradigm is inadequate to digital media and the developments of human-machine interactions the digital introduces, few comentators have addressed how new developments in immersive sensory media environments bear on the ethics of communication. By way of a reflection on the themes of the tactility of contact and the ethics of touch in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this article critically evaluates the ethical significance of the `sensory extension' haptic media represent. It identifies and argues against the neo-positivist tendency of Hansen's reliance on the empiricism of the neurosciences whilst locating the resources for an ethics of touch in Levinas' concept of time as `diachrony'. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of ConfessionDave TellOn October 10, 1979, Michel Foucault revised his thesis on confession. On that day, some three years after the publication of his magisterial treatment of confession in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans had, before the advent of Christianity, their own practices of confession. Yet these practices, unlike their (...) Christian variants, were not complicit with practices of domination (OS 310, 312). In the context of Foucault’s thought theretofore, in which the confession consistently figured as an essential component in the exercise of modern power, this is a radical shift. In lectures given at both Berkeley and Dartmouth in the fall of 1980, Foucault made similar arguments. On these occasions he argued that Seneca’s De ira constituted a “stoic confession,” the object of which was to enable the subject to “live differently, better, more happily, than other people” (AB 210, 205). Judith Butler captures the gravity of the shift: “In the last years of his life, Foucault returned to the question of confession, reversing his earlier critique in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where he indicts confession as a forcible extraction of sexual truth, a practice in the service of a regulatory power” (2005, 112).This reversal was short lived. Although Foucault would celebrate ancient Greek techniques of the self for the rest of his life, he would not [End Page 95] long refer to these techniques in terms of confession. Thus, in another reading of De ira, this one in March 1982, Foucault again noted that the Stoics have “confessional practices” that are “very close to what is found in Christianity” (Herm 482). This time, however, he insisted that the Stoic practices were fundamentally different: “However, all these elements seem to me to be profoundly different from what we should call ‘confession’ in the strict, or anyway, spiritual sense of the word” (Herm 365). In The Care of the Self, Foucault again conceded that De ira—what he now called “the most detailed description” of antique practices of the self—looked “at first glance” like a Christian confession, but he again maintained that it is something quite different: “The purpose of the examination is not therefore to discover one’s own guilt, down to its most trifling forms” (CS 61–62). Foucault concluded that the various “discourses of the self”—the confession and the Greek techniques of the self—could not be placed into a single category (see GE 250). Indeed, the “profound difference” (Herm 299) between these two discourses of the self was perhaps Foucault’s most repeated claim of the 1980s (see Herm 222, 237–44, 299, 308; GE 247–48; WS 237; AB 207–8; RFT 27; UP 89; CS 239; SS 5; FI 5, 12; FS 30, 35, 44, 87, 96, 97, 143–45, 147).It is worth asking why Foucault returned so consistently to the distinction between these two discursive forms. This question gains even more relevance for readers of this journal when we remember that, on at least two occasions, Foucault defined one of these forms, the ancient techniques of the self, in terms of its opposition to rhetoric: the techniques of the self, he claimed, are “nonrhetorical” (Herm 368; FS 20). Thus the question that drives this essay is not so much why Foucault attached such importance to the distinction but rather how rhetoric itself might differentiate the confession from the techniques of the self. Stated differently, Foucault’s work on the confession vis-à-vis the technologies of the self provides a valuable opportunity to study the role of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought—not because they are both rhetorical forms but, curiously, because Foucault insists that one is not.In order to foreground the work of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought, I situate his discourses of the self in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of metonymy. Although this may seem arbitrary, it gains initial plausibility from three facts. First, we know that Foucault understood rhetoric in terms of tropes (OT 84; Cooper 1988, 4). Second, we know too that Foucault had a deep... (shrink)

We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinnings of cognition are inextricable from those of affect, that (...) the phenomenon of cognition itself is essentially bound up with affect, and that the possibility of cognitive extension depends upon the instantiation of a specific mode of skillful interrelation between cognizer and environment. Thus, if cognition is enactive then it is also embodied, embedded, affective and potentially extended. (shrink)

Skepticism about the limits of online learning is as old as online learning itself. As with other technologically-driven innovations in pedagogy, there are deep-seated worries that important educational goods might be effaced or obscured by the ways of teaching and learning that online methods allow. One family of such worries is inspired by reflections on the bodily basis of an important kind of understanding, and skepticism over whether this bodily basis can be inculcated in the absence of actual, flesh-and-blood, classroom (...) interactions. This paper focuses on the ways in which such worries arise in the influential work of Hubert Dreyfus. The negative conclusion for which I argue is that endorsing Dreyfus's Merleau-Pontian picture of the relationship between bodily skill and understanding does not commit us to his general pessimism concerning online learning—bodily, emotional, and interactive dimensions might be essential to learning, but we lack reasons to think that online learning necessarily lacks these dimensions. The negative argument motivates a positive claim: rather than giving up on online learning we should focus on designing courses and pedagogies that scaffold the bodily, affective and interactive dynamics constitutive of understanding in a particular domain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of ConfessionDave TellOn October 10, 1979, Michel Foucault revised his thesis on confession. On that day, some three years after the publication of his magisterial treatment of confession in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans had, before the advent of Christianity, their own practices of confession. Yet these practices, unlike their (...) Christian variants, were not complicit with practices of domination (OS 310, 312). In the context of Foucault’s thought theretofore, in which the confession consistently figured as an essential component in the exercise of modern power, this is a radical shift. In lectures given at both Berkeley and Dartmouth in the fall of 1980, Foucault made similar arguments. On these occasions he argued that Seneca’s De ira constituted a “stoic confession,” the object of which was to enable the subject to “live differently, better, more happily, than other people” (AB 210, 205). Judith Butler captures the gravity of the shift: “In the last years of his life, Foucault returned to the question of confession, reversing his earlier critique in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where he indicts confession as a forcible extraction of sexual truth, a practice in the service of a regulatory power” (2005, 112).This reversal was short lived. Although Foucault would celebrate ancient Greek techniques of the self for the rest of his life, he would not [End Page 95] long refer to these techniques in terms of confession. Thus, in another reading of De ira, this one in March 1982, Foucault again noted that the Stoics have “confessional practices” that are “very close to what is found in Christianity” (Herm 482). This time, however, he insisted that the Stoic practices were fundamentally different: “However, all these elements seem to me to be profoundly different from what we should call ‘confession’ in the strict, or anyway, spiritual sense of the word” (Herm 365). In The Care of the Self, Foucault again conceded that De ira—what he now called “the most detailed description” of antique practices of the self—looked “at first glance” like a Christian confession, but he again maintained that it is something quite different: “The purpose of the examination is not therefore to discover one’s own guilt, down to its most trifling forms” (CS 61–62). Foucault concluded that the various “discourses of the self”—the confession and the Greek techniques of the self—could not be placed into a single category (see GE 250). Indeed, the “profound difference” (Herm 299) between these two discourses of the self was perhaps Foucault’s most repeated claim of the 1980s (see Herm 222, 237–44, 299, 308; GE 247–48; WS 237; AB 207–8; RFT 27; UP 89; CS 239; SS 5; FI 5, 12; FS 30, 35, 44, 87, 96, 97, 143–45, 147).It is worth asking why Foucault returned so consistently to the distinction between these two discursive forms. This question gains even more relevance for readers of this journal when we remember that, on at least two occasions, Foucault defined one of these forms, the ancient techniques of the self, in terms of its opposition to rhetoric: the techniques of the self, he claimed, are “nonrhetorical” (Herm 368; FS 20). Thus the question that drives this essay is not so much why Foucault attached such importance to the distinction but rather how rhetoric itself might differentiate the confession from the techniques of the self. Stated differently, Foucault’s work on the confession vis-à-vis the technologies of the self provides a valuable opportunity to study the role of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought—not because they are both rhetorical forms but, curiously, because Foucault insists that one is not.In order to foreground the work of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought, I situate his discourses of the self in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of metonymy. Although this may seem arbitrary, it gains initial plausibility from three facts. First, we know that Foucault understood rhetoric in terms of tropes (OT 84; Cooper 1988, 4). Second, we know too that Foucault had a deep... (shrink)

This article takes the form of a debate between the two authors on the social ontology of propositional culture. Archer applies the morphogenetic approach, analysing culture as a cycle of interaction between the Cultural System and Socio-Cultural Interaction. In this model, the Cultural System is comprised of the objective content of intelligibilia, as theorized by Karl Popper with his concept of objective World 3 knowledge. Elder-Vass agrees that culture works through an interplay between subjective belief and an external objective moment, (...) but argues that the external moment cannot take the form of ‘objective knowledge’ as this is understood by Popper. Instead, the external moment of culture takes the form of normative pressures exerted by groups of people: norm circles. Ultimately both authors share a commitment to a similar critical realist ontological framework, while offering alternative accounts of the nature of culture within that framework. (shrink)

Responds to the comments by F. Paniagua on the current author's original article, "Meehl revisited: A look at paradigms in psychology" , in which the current author reviewed Paul Meehl's famous article "Theroetical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl; Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology." According to the current author, Paniagua takes exception to two casual remarks made in the current author's paper, one about Kuhn and the other about Skinner, but neither remark is related to the (...) actual thesis. Paniagua's comments do not carry the substantive aspects of the article forward, which is unfortunate asserts the current author, because the theory discussed therein may prove useful in understanding the nature and evolution of psychology. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent’s direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix of possibilities for bodily movement, (...) but as a matrix of possibilities for pursuing and accomplishing one’s intentional actions, goals and projects. If this is correct, the links between planning, intention and perceptual experience are tight, while (contrary to some recent accounts invoking the notion of ‘sensorimotor expectations’) the links between embodied activity and perceptual experience, though real, are indirect. What matters is not bodily activity itself, but our practical knowledge (which need not be verbalized or in any way explicit) of our own possibilities for action. Such knowledge, selected, shaped and filtered by the grid of plans, goals, and intentions, plays, we argue, a constitutive role in explaining the content and character of visual perceptual experience. (shrink)

Big business moguls seem determined to dismantle public schools in the name of a market driven system of educating children via vouchers and charter schools. No Child Left Behind contributes to this business-model and penalizes children and teachers with unrealistic expectations and expensive unnecessary testing. Research indicates that NCLB, charter schools, and vouchers do not improve students’ learning or help educators teach better. The facts presented herein are evidence of public school successes and provide reasons to honor public school educators (...) and support public schools across America. (shrink)

Susan Hurley (1998a, 2003a, 2008) argues that our capacities for perception, agency and thought are essentially interdependent and co-emerge from a tangle of sensorimotor processes that are both cause and effect of the web of interactive and communicative practices they weave us into. In this paper, I reconstruct this view and its main motivations, with a particular focus on three important aspects. First, Hurley argues that an essential aspect of conscious perception – its perspectival unity – constitutively depends on agency. (...) That is, agency is a transcendental condition on the possibility of perception (§3). Second, understanding why this dependence obtains involves understanding why perception and agency emerge together, and how they do so on the basis of a web of interrelated capacities for sensorimotor control (§2, §4). Third, understanding these first two aspects of Hurley’s view is the key to understanding the sophisticated interplay between i) her arguments for the causal interdependence of sensory input and motor output, and ii) her arguments for the essential interdependence of perception and agency. (shrink)

How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle’s contrast between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic ‘additivism’ about the relationship between mature human capacities to think and act for reasons, and sensorimotor capacities to skillfully engage with salient features of the environment. Additivists view rational capacities to reason and reflect as (...) a distinct ‘layer’ or ‘storey’ of human cognition, with a normative structure that differs from that of the sensorimotor coping skills which support it. I argue that emphasizing the embodied and engaged character of human minds is better combined with a ‘transformative’ conception of rationality – one which holds that acquiring abilities to give and ask for reasons transforms the normative structure of our unreflective embodied dealings with the environment. And I argue that a transformative embodied cognitive science of human rationality is not only possible, but underway. Integrating existing work on embodied cognition with work on the cultural and developmental contexts that shape human minds suggests how human immersion in culture transforms the structure of sensorimotor engagements by bringing about the communicability and negotiability of the meanings to which those engagements attune us. (shrink)

Clinical research with adults who are unable to provide informed consent has the potential to improve understanding and care of a number of devastating conditions. This research also has the potential to exploit some of society's most vulnerable members. Recently, a number of task forces and individual writers have proposed guidelines to ensure that such research is both possible and ethical. Yet, there is widespread disagreement over which safeguards should be adopted. In the present paper, I consider to what extent (...) these disagreements can be resolved by appeal to a general account of the interests of subjects who are unable to consent and the conditions that must be satisfied for research enrollment to constitute exploitation of their inability to make their own decisions. (shrink)

__Language Proof and Logic_ is available as a physical book with the software included on CD and as a downloadable package of software plus the book in PDF format. The all-electronic version is available from Openproof at ggweb.stanford.edu._ The textbook/software package covers first-order language in a method appropriate for first and second courses in logic. An on-line grading services instantly grades solutions to hundred of computer exercises. It is designed to be used by philosophy instructors teaching a logic course to (...) undergraduates in philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and linguistics. Introductory material is presented in a systematic and accessible fashion. Advanced chapters include proofs of soundness and completeness for propositional and predicate logic, as well as an accessible sketch of Godel's first incompleteness theorem. The book is appropriate for a wide range of courses, from first logic courses for undergraduates to a first graduate logic course. The software package includes four programs: Tarski's World 5.0, a new version of the popular program that teaches the basic first-order language and its semantics; Fitch, a natural deduction proof environment for giving and checking first-order proofs; Boole, a program that facilitates the construction and checking of truth tables and related notions ; Submit, a program that allows students to submit exercises done with the above programs to the Grade Grinder, the automatic grading service. Grade reports are returned to the student and, if requested, to the student's instructor, eliminating the need for tedious checking of homework. All programs are available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems. Instructors do not need to use the programs themselves in order to be able to take advantage of their pedagogical value. More about the software can be found at lpl.stanford.edu. The price of a new text/software package includes one Registration ID, which must be used each time work is submitted to the grading service. Once activated, the Registration ID is not transferable. (shrink)

Clinical research with adults who are unable to provide informed consent has the potential to improve understanding and care of a number of devasting conditions. This research also has the potential to exploit some of society's most vulnerable members. Recently, a number of task forces and individual writers have proposed guidelines to ensure that such research is both possible and ethical. Yet, there is widespread disagreement over which safeguards should be adopted. In the present paper, I consider to what extent (...) these disagreements can be resolved by appeal to a general account of the interests of subjects who are unable to consent and the conditions that must be satisfied for research enrollment to constitute exploitation of their inability to make their own decisions. (shrink)

Abstract:Although inquiry-based instruction has been a centerpiece of progressive visions of social studies education almost since its inception as a school subject a century ago, teachers often struggle to conceptualize it in ways that make true inquiry possible for their students. In this essay I suggest that social educators strengthen their connection with John Dewey’s pragmatic epistemology as the foundation of inquiry-based teaching in social studies, arguing in support of an approach that holds the promise of advancing goals associated with (...) meaningful democratic citizenship education. (shrink)

The transparency of perceptual experience has been invoked in support of many views about perception. I argue that it supports a form of enactivism—the view that capacities for perceptual experience and for intentional agency are essentially interdependent. I clarify the perceptual phenomenon at issue, and argue that enactivists should expect to find a parallel instance of transparency in our agentive experience, and that the two forms of transparency are constitutively interdependent. I then argue that i) we do indeed find such (...) parallels: the way in which an action is directed towards its goal through our bodily movements parallels the way in which an experience is directed towards its object through our perceptual sensation, and ii) reflecting on sensorimotor skills shows why the two instances of transparency are constitutively interdependent. Section 4 gives reasons for generalizing beyond the cases considered so far by applying the enactive view to Kohler's landmark studies of perceptual adaptation. The final section clarifies the form of enactivism to which the previous sections point. The view that emerges is one whereby our perceptual and practical skills are interrelated aspects of a single capacity to have one's mind intentionally directed upon the world. The transparency of experience, on this view, is achieved in virtue of our capacities as agents as much as it is given in virtue of our capacities as perceivers. (shrink)

I argue that the phenomenal properties of conscious visual experiences are properties of the mind-independent objects to which the subject is perceptually related, mediated by the subject's practical understanding of their sensorimotor relation to those properties. This position conjoins two existing strategies for explaining the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences: accounts appealing to perceivers’ limited, non-inferential access to the details of their sensory relation to the environment, and the relationalist conception of phenomenal properties. Bringing these two positions together by emphasizing (...) their sensorimotor common ground allows each one to respond to damaging objections using the resources of the other. The resulting ‘sensorimotor relationalism’ about conscious vision provides a promising schema for explaining phenomenal properties of perceptual states, replacing ‘Hard’ questions with tractable ones about the perceptual relation and its sensorimotor underpinnings. (shrink)

In at least a few of his formulations of the pragmatic maxim around 1905—those in which he sought to inoculate his brand of pragmatism against misappropriation by other pragmatists and also to supply a demonstration of its truth—Charles Peirce instructs us to look not only at the consequences of affirming some claim or concept, but also at the consequences of denying it. Referring to himself in the third person as "the author," Peirce writes: Endeavoring, as a man of that type (...) naturally would, to formulate what he so approved, he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing on the conduct of life; so that, since... (shrink)

Synaesthetes persistently perceive certain stimuli as systematically accompanied by illusory colours, even though they know those colours to be illusory. This appears to contrast with cases where a subject’s colour vision adapts to systematic distortions caused by wearing coloured goggles. Given that each case involves longstanding systematic distortion of colour perception that the subjects recognize as such, how can a theory of colour perception explain the fact that perceptual adaptation occurs in one case but not the other? I argue that (...) these cases and the relationship between them can be made sense of in light of an existing view of colour perception. Understanding colours as ways in which objects and surfaces modify light, perceived through grasping patterns and variations in colour appearances, provides a framework from which the cases and their apparent disanalogy can be predicted and explained. This theory’s ability to accommodate these cases constitutes further empirical evidence in its favour. (shrink)

Humanity is in a tight race between planetary catastrophe and enlightenment. It’s not clear which will prevail. The old paradigm, that of materialism, individualism, and fierce competition, is failing at all levels—economic, social, political, and environmental—and bringing life as we know it to the edge of a precipice. At the same time, a “new” paradigm is emerging, one that emphasizes interconnectedness, the sacredness of all creation, universal consciousness, and cooperation. In truth, the “new” paradigm is anything but new. What’s new (...) is that scientific discoveries are now beginning to resonate with and reinforce ancient wisdom, wisdom that has been imbedded in indigenous mythologies for millennia. It’s incumbent upon those who have already transitioned to a more sustainable “myth of meaning” to find ways to encourage others along the path. A demographic naturally resonant to holistic worldviews, but largely untapped, is that of undergraduate Honors students. This paper describes a pioneering Honors course at James Madison University that, by many measures, has succeeded in integrating science and spirituality into a new way of thinking and being. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Should “Riskier” Subjects Be Excluded from Research Participation?*Dave Wendler** (bio)AbstractThe exclusion of potential subjects based on increased risks is a common practice in human subjects research. However, there are no guidelines to ensure that this practice is conducted in a systematic and fair way. This gap in the literature and regulations is addressed by a specific account of a “condition on inclusion risks” (CIR), a condition under (...) which potential subjects should be excluded from research on the basis of increased risks. This account provides a general framework for assessing standard exclusions as well as more controversial ones such as the exclusion of pregnant women and women of childbearing potential from certain types of research.The exclusion of potential subjects on the basis of increased risks is a common and, in most instances, noncontroversial practice in human subjects research. Investigators routinely exclude potential subjects with reduced kidney function, bleeding disorders, and allergies to the drugs under investigation. Surprisingly, this use of exclusion criteria takes place in the absence of any explicit guidelines. In the present paper, I attempt to fill this gap in the literature and regulations by offering a specific account of the conditions under which potential subjects should be excluded from research on the basis of increased risk. This account serves two purposes.First, subjects who are excluded on the basis of increased risk are prevented from making their own enrollment decisions. Therefore, it is important to ensure, in spite of the broad range of potential subjects and the varied reasons for excluding them, that potential subjects are excluded in [End Page 307] a systematic and fair way. Second, certain instances of subject exclusion, most notably the exclusion of pregnant women and women of childbearing potential, raise more difficult issues. By providing a general framework for assessing the exclusion of potential subjects based on increased risks, the present analysis covers these cases as well and, thus, offers a solution to one of the thornier ethical dilemmas facing investigators and IRBs today.Briefly, I argue that standard exclusion practices suggest that whenever two groups of potential research subjects offer the same opportunity for scientific and individual benefit, but different levels of risk, the group that would introduce greater risks should be excluded. With this framework in place, I consider potential subjects, such as men and women of child-parenting potential, whose research participation introduces increased risks to third parties. I argue that the present approach is justified, not because it reduces harms to specific individuals, but because it reduces aggregate harms. Therefore, it should be applied to all riskier potential subjects regardless of who faces the risks in question. After defending this approach, I consider several objections.First, I argue that the present approach is not paternalistic; the exclusions it calls for are not justified by what is thought to be in the best interests of the individuals excluded. Rather, the argument is that these exclusions minimize the aggregate harm of human subjects research. In addition, the present approach does not violate the obligation of researchers to respect subject autonomy because it does not reduce the number of potential subjects who are given the opportunity to enroll in a particular protocol. Finally, the exclusions are consistent with reasonable side constraints on attaining the goals of research.“Riskier” SubjectsWhen it comes to evaluating risks, most guidelines on human subjects research stipulate simply that the risks entailed must be reasonable given the potential for benefit. The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council’s guidelines, for instance, require only that “the investigator... must be satisfied that the possible advantage to be gained from the work justifies any discomfort or risk involved” (ANMRC 1992, Clause 3). To determine whether the risks of a protocol are justified, one sums the risks of the various procedures in the protocol, whatever those procedures may be, and compares the result to the procedures’ potential for benefit. This evaluation of risks assumes that the aggregate risks of a [End Page 308] given protocol are fixed and thus will not help to determine whether and when the risks of particular protocols should be reduced by excluding riskier subjects. The United States Department of Health... (shrink)

This paper considers the ontological and political implications of the concept of the subject within structuralism. I turn first to Balibar in order to articulate structuralism as a tendency or movement rather than fixed set of positions, using some indications he has provided in order to demonstrate how thoroughly embedded the subject is as a problem within this tendency. I argue that Laclau and Mouffe’s work on hegemony deepens the political stakes of this problem while also introducing the grammar of (...) strategy in an ambivalent and underdefined manner. Considering some possible options for understanding strategy within a structuralist framework, I contend that a stronger theoretical account of strategy is necessary. In order to provide some outlines for such a project, I conclude the analysis by emphasizing the contribution that George Jackson’s writings can provide to this framework, suggesting that the role of the subject should be assigned to tactics.Cet article analyse les implications ontologiques et politiques du concept structuraliste de sujet. En me tournant dans un premier temps vers les indications de Balibar concernant l’intrication profonde du problème du sujet au sein du structuralisme, je montre que ce dernier devrait être compris comme une tendance ou un mouvement plutôt que comme une position philosophique définitive. Je montre ensuite que le travail de Laclau et Mouffe sur l’hégémonie permet d’approfondir les enjeux politiques de ce problème, tout en introduisant de manière ambivalente et prédéfinie la grammaire de la stratégie. En considérant quelques options possibles pour comprendre la stratégie dans une perspective structuraliste, je soutiens la nécessité de l’approcher théoriquement de manière plus puissante. En guise d’esquisse d’un tel projet, je conclus mon analyse avec la contribution qu’y apportent les écrits de George Jackson, en suggérant que le rôle du sujet devrait revenir à la tactique. (shrink)

In this era of suburban mega-churches and televised Sunday morning services, it is easy to forget that many Americans worship in small, community churches whose sanctuaries are often repurposed commercial spaces. In Articles of Faith, photographer Dave Jordano documents the at once humble and dynamic storefront churches of Chicago’s African American neighborhoods. These churches, which dot the south and west sides of the city, are truly community churches—individualized and idiosyncratic, they cater to the specific needs and wants of their (...) members. For the last five years, Jordano has spent his weekends traveling to different churches in the city, getting to know their pastors and parishioners. And this attention to personal detail is highly evident in his exquisite photographs that capture the identity and personalities of each church, from the hand-lettered signs to the icons. His interior images of the sacred spaces illustrate how the congregants create a comforting environment of affirmation, hope, and family for members who often live in neighborhoods marked by high crime and troubled homes. Infused in the space of these makeshift churches is also a sense of history that traces back to a time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when one of the only forms of open expression available to African Americans was religious practice. These powerful and reverent images illuminate a vital component of urban life for many African Americans and speak to the links between the past and present African American experience. (shrink)

Artistic labour was exemplary for Utopian Socialist theories of 'attractive labour', and Marxist theories of 'nonalienated labour', but the rise of the anti-work movement and current theories of 'fully automated luxury communism' have seen art topple from its privileged place within the left's political imaginary as the artist has been reconceived as a prototype of the precarious 24/7 worker. 'Art and Postcapitalism' argues that art remains essential for thinking about the intersection of labour, capitalism and postcapitalism not insofar as it (...) merges work and pleasure but as an example of noncapitalist production. Reassessing the contemporary politics of work by revisiting debates about art, technology and in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Dave Beech challenges the aesthetics of labour in John Ruskin, William Morris and Oscar Wilde with a value theory of the supersession of capitalism that sheds light on the anti-work theory by Silvia Federici, Andre Gorz, Kathi Weeks and Maurizio Lazzarato, as well as the technological Cockayne of Srnicek and Williams and Paul Mason. Formulating a critique of contemporary postcapitalism, and developing a new understanding of art and labour within the political project of the supersession of value production, this book is essential for activists, scholars and anyone interested in the real and imagined escape routes from capitalism. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive ‘caring’ nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of deathwork as an application of (...) healthcare professionals’ skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states’ death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states’ penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners. (shrink)

Malcolm Quinn’s book,Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain, is an historical study of the birth pangs of the state-funded art school that interrogates the politics of art’s reproduction within the context of Victorian reformism in which the art school was proposed as a mechanism to improve the standards of taste of manufacturers and factory workers, as well as of artists, designers, art teachers and others. The review locates the political and cultural transition from the academy to the art (...) school as the construction of a specifically bourgeois institution of art. (shrink)

This is a review of Patrick Meier’s 2015 book, Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response. The book explores the role of technologies such as high-resolution satellite imagery, online social media, drones, and artificial intelligence in humanitarian responses during disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In this analysis, the book is examined using a humanitarian health ethics perspective.

In this paper, I attempt to argue alongside Clayton Crockett that Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects can be extended to encompass every object, not merely those that are large in comparison to human beings. However, unlike Crockett who uses the works of Derrida and Lacan to achieve this goal, I turn to Husserl’s underdeveloped theory of hyletic phenomenology and hyle. Despite Husserl’s articulation of hyletic phenomenology ending as quickly as it is announced, I argue that three lessons can be learned from what (...) Husserl does have to say about hyle. Specifically, hyle is non-intentional, it is co-constitutive of intentionality, and hyle contains the possibility of broadening our traditional understanding of objects. Taken together, I suggest that Husserl’s understanding of hyle caries considerable overlap with both Crockett and Morton’s understanding of hyperobjects. (shrink)