This artists’ text examines the relationship between photographic images and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environments. We note that such scripted image worlds necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of the capacities of image, its formation, reproduction, storage and circulation. As an archaeologist would document an excavation, extending conventional methods through 3D visualization technology to work in new ways with the archaeological record, we chose to document a world built and razed digitally by a now dormant group of anonymous gamers called the Yung (...) Cum Bois (YCBs). We turn to some definitions of griefer as a subcultural phenomenon within online culture to attempt to contextualize our involvement some more, thinking through the forms of image-gathering that grief play has generated, such as scripted object attacks where image-objects spawn and self-replicate, continually spurting out copies of themselves, lagging the region, slowing down frame rates, consuming land resources. Here we witness images blockading network logistics. This was active fieldwork. We got involved. We applied visualization technology learnt from archaeological computing research to the avatars, temporary structures and abandoned ruins of an online world, Second Life (SL). We patched together a kind of virtual photogrammetry, enabling the monumentalization of avatars, objects and scenarios, recompiling these into new configurations and uploading them freely to be reused, detourned and weaponized by our virtual friends. We situate this endeavour within a cobbled history of imaging technology, the networked self and its pathologies, riffling through our own image dump. Here. (shrink)

Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed‐false claims, for instance by merely conversationally (...) implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed‐false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment‐based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment. (shrink)

Louisa Shea explores modernity's debt to Cynicism by examining the works of thinkers who turned to the ancient Cynics as a model for reinventing philosophy and ...

This article asks how the application of digital technologies is changing the organization of the agri-food system in the context of the third food regime. The academic debate on digitalization and food largely focuses on the input and farm level. Yet, based on the analysis of 280 digital services and products, we show that digital technologies are now being used along the entire food commodity chain. We argue that digital technologies in the third food regime serve on the one hand (...) as a continuation of established information and communication technologies, thus deepening certain features of the existing food regime such as the retail sector’s control over global commodity chains. On the other hand, digital technologies also introduce new forms of control and value extraction based on the use of data and pave the way for large tech companies to take over market shares in the agri-food sector. Finally, we find that multinational agri-food companies are starting to take on the business models of leading digital tech companies, for instance by developing digital platforms throughout the agri-food system. We argue that this shows that the broader economic restructuring of neoliberal capitalism towards digital capitalism is also making its way into the agri-food system. (shrink)

The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to _say_ something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies (...) have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample of _N_ = 255 participants from Russia and _N_ = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agent _saying_ something they believe to be false. (shrink)

David Rothenberg, a philosophy professor and Jazz musician, has been improvising with nonhuman animals for years, among his playing partners are birds and whales, known to be territorial animals. As Deleuze and Guattari propose that the origin of art is precisely the territorialising animal and more a function of nature than a specifically human cultural achievement, their concept of territory and rhythm offers a non-anthropocentric way of looking at these encounters. Rothenberg’s sonic experiments in resonance and interspecies interaction do not (...) rely on language, thus I argue that the human and the nonhuman animals form a temporary joint territory via sonic rhythms and engage in a mutual becoming by forming a rhizome. His sound thinking practice thus also helps in decentralising further anthropocentric models of music and art. (shrink)

Felix Mühlhölzer’s book Wissenschaft (“Science”) appeared in the series “Grundwissen Philosophie” (“Basic Knowledge in Philosophy”), whose aim is to give an introduction to different philosophical topics. Thus, Mühlhölzer’s Wissenschaft can be read with profit by beginners, while not providing a straightforward introduction to the subject. Rather, the author puts forward an argumentation of his own, and in so doing, chooses to ignore some essential questions and problems of the Philosophy of Science.On the one hand, some very influential positions are not (...) mentioned or only implied, e.g. Popper’s Falsificationism, Lakatos’ approach to research programs or van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism. On the other hand, a lot of more specific issues are also not considered, e.g. Nancy Cartwright’s dilemma concerning the truth of natural-law-assertions or the regress-argument concerning the relationship between experiments and theories. Therefore my review will not discuss the didactic qualitie. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Layers of Seeing and Seeing through Layers: The Work of Art in the Age of Digital ImageryLouisa Wood Ruby (bio)Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the (...) time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership.—Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936In consulting on or creating a Web site designed to use works of art for teaching purposes, it is extremely important to be aware of the differences between seeing an artwork “in the flesh” and in reproduction. Museum educators are highly aware of this disparity and are therefore eager to have students visit museums to experience authentic works of art instead of seeing them only in books, slides, or on Web sites. Already in 1936, Walter Benjamin called attention to the drawbacks of reproductions; his words resonate all the more in our age of digital image overload. Easy access to images is, of course, desirable, and the advanced technologies we now have can even aid our understanding of a work of art. Nonetheless, the physical experience of standing in front of a work of art can never be replicated by seeing it on a flat screen or a piece of paper. In this article I will examine the advantages, disadvantages, differences, and similarities between looking at a Web-based image of a Rembrandt painting, a photograph of a Rembrandt painting, and actually standing in front of one of his original works. I will also discuss the more advanced technologies for examining paintings and how they can help us “see” further into a work of art and increase our understanding of it. [End Page 51]When standing in front of a painting, you are seeing a three-dimensional object with a history of its own. Its nicks, the dings in its frame, its true colors and texture, its exact size, the quality of the brushstrokes, and the amount of paint are all visible to the careful observer, who stands in a long line of viewers over the centuries who have appreciated the artist’s achievement. When approached from different angles, a painting in real space can even seem to vary in the mood it conveys or the impression it gives. A striking demonstration of this phenomenon occurred during a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when Rika Burnham, a museum educator, divided our Rembrandt Project group in half and asked us to look at Rembrandt’s 1660 Self-Portrait from different angles and describe the sitter’s mood. When we compared notes, our impressions of the painting were so different that an outside listener would have thought we were looking at two completely different paintings. We then switched angles, and our respective impressions changed dramatically. Effects of light (shadows, highlights, color) and interpretations of elements in the painting, such as the hand or the hat, had been affected by the angle from which we had approached the work, and these minor adjustments had significantly altered the way we “read” the painting.This kind of experience is of course not possible when looking at a photograph of a work of art. A photograph can be very useful and can usually tell you much about a painting, but, unfortunately, the photograph itself is an object that was taken at a specific time and place, under specific circumstances that might or might not be ideal for capturing the essence of what it is trying to reproduce. Because the angle from which a photograph is taken remains static, it only allows us to experience the painting from one direction, under the given set of lighting conditions. Other problems abound. Two color reproductions of a given painting will more than likely offer wildly different color tonalities because photographs and reproductions in many publications imperfectly correct for color. Lighting of the painting may... (shrink)

Von Hippel & Trivers reason that the potential benefits of successfully deceiving others provide a basis for the evolution of self-deception. However, as self-deceptive processes themselves provide considerable adaptive value to an individual, self-deception may have evolved as an end in itself, rather than as the means to an end of improving other-deception.

Review of Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio. 2015. Biological autonomy: a philosophical and theoretical enquiry.

The important text of the inscription found at Vetren, in effect the oldest document from the chancellery of the Odrysian kingdom, represents a revision - adapted to the political realities of the middle of the 4th century BC - of the royal charter, which laid down, probably from its first foundation in around the middle of the 5th century BC, the legal status and the conditions of symbiosis of a Greek emporion in the sovereign territory of the Odrysian kingdom. It (...) was a convention guaranteeing the asylum of the emporion and the emporites established in Pistiros, confirming their financial transactions with the indigenous population and according extraordinary privileges to transient merchants originating from important commercial centres on the northern coast of the Aegean sea and the Black Sea. It also attests the existence of a system of conventions regulating the rights and privileges of the Greeks on Odrysian soil, similar, we imagine, to that which according to Herodotus' account of Naucratis, regulated the presence and trade of Greeks in Pharaonic Egypt. (shrink)

Given instances of widespread citizen cooperation with political regimes widely perceived as illegitimate, why are some individuals subsequently branded as collaborators who had engaged in “treasonous cooperation” with the enemy whereas others who had been involved in similar or identical forms of cooperation were not? Using the branding and punishment of Nazi collaborators in the postwar Polish criminal court system as a case study, this article excavates how the perceived betrayals undergirding the social construction of collaboration are shaped by the (...) interaction of macro- and micro-level bonds associated with membership in national and local communities. This analysis highlights how highly localized perceptions of betrayal, manifested as individual grievances, became intertwined with larger understandings of loyalty to the nation, thereby selecting who was eligible for membership in the postwar political and social order. In addition to laying the groundwork for a sociological theory of collaboration, this study also contributes to a growing body of scholarship dedicated to “everyday nationhood.”. (shrink)

From a theoretical perspective, most discussions of statistical learning have focused on the possible “statistical” properties that are the object of learning. Much less attention has been given to defining what “learning” is in the context of “statistical learning.” One major difficulty is that SL research has been monitoring participants’ performance in laboratory settings with a strikingly narrow set of tasks, where learning is typically assessed offline, through a set of two-alternative-forced-choice questions, which follow a brief visual or auditory familiarization (...) stream. Is that all there is to characterizing SL abilities? Here we adopt a novel perspective for investigating the processing of regularities in the visual modality. By tracking online performance in a self-paced SL paradigm, we focus on the trajectory of learning. In a set of three experiments we show that this paradigm provides a reliable and valid signature of SL performance, and it offers important insights for understanding how statistical regularities are perceived and assimilated in the visual modality. This demonstrates the promise of integrating different operational measures to our theory of SL. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

Hesitations about accepting whole-heartedly Norris et al.'s suggestion to abandon feedback in speech processing models concern (1) whether accounting for all available data justifies additional layers of complexity in the model and (2) whether characterizing Merge as non- interactive is valid. Spoken word recognition studies support the nature of Merge's lexical level and suggest that phonemes should comprise the prelexical level.

ObjectiveMisophonia is an unusually strong aversion to a specific class of sounds – most often human bodily sounds such as chewing, crunching, or breathing. A number of studies have emerged in the last 10 years examining misophonia in adults, but little is known about the impact of the condition in children. Here we set out to investigate the well-being profile of children with misophonia, while also presenting the first validated misophonia questionnaire for children.Materials and MethodsWe screened 142 children using our (...) novel diagnostic [the Sussex Misophonia Scale for Adolescents ]. This allowed us to identify a group of children already manifesting misophonia at that age – the first population-sampled cohort of child misophonics examined to date. Children and their parents also completed measures of well-being and creative self-construct.ResultsData show that children with misophonia have significantly elevated levels of anxiety and obsessive compulsive traits. Additionally children with misophonia have significantly poorer life-satisfaction, and health-related quality of life. As predicted, they show no differences in creative self-construct.ConclusionTogether our data suggest the first evidence in population sampling of poorer life outcomes for children with misophonia, and provide preliminary convergent and discriminant validation for our novel misophonia instrument. Our data suggest a need for greater recognition and therapeutic outlets for adolescents with misophonia. (shrink)

Throughout history, both philosophers and non-philosophers have doubted that philosophical positions qua philosophical positions are justified and that philosophy is a rational enterprise. Today, such doubts are grouped under the term “Metaphilosophical Skepticism”. Nicholas Rescher, in his book Strife of Systems, includes Kant among the proponents of this kind of skepticism. I want to argue that while Rescher is wrong, Kant has con­tributed to a new version of such skepticism. In the first step, I characterize the basic idea of metaphilosophical (...) skepticism in more detail and identify a version of this idea, which I call “Second-Stage-Skepticism” and on which I will focus. In the following part, I reconstruct Rescher’s reading of Second-Stage-Skepticism as well as his reasons for considering Kant to represent this version. My main claim in this part will be that there is no reading of the mentioned basic idea that makes Rescher’s view reasonable. In the third step, I introduce a newer form of metaphilosophical skepticism — “Third-Stage Skepticism” — and conjecture that this form can be seen as inspired by Kant’s thought on philosophical diversity. Finally, I point out a way to reject this newer form. (shrink)

The text presents the current philosophical debate on conspiracy theories and discusses the positions of this debate. The focus is on the questions "What are conspiracy theories?" and "Is it justified to believe in conspiracy theories or how can we distinguish – if at all – warranted from unwarranted conspiracy theories?" The positions discussed will be explained and evaluated in recourse to current examples, e.g.regarding the Corona crisis. Finally, an assessment of the role of philosophy within media coverage and interdisciplinary (...) research on conspiracy theories is given. (shrink)

Kritik: Michael Butter, »Nichts ist, wie es scheint«. Über Verschwörungstheorien, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2018.

Objective To compare the perspectives of medical students in the preclinical and clinical phases of medical training on the issue of rationing scarce medical resources in times of crisis. Methods Questionnaire-based cross-sectional study. Results A total of 201 participants took part in the study, with 100 participants in the preclinical phase group, and 101 in the clinical phase group. A multivariable analysis found that just 14.9% (n = 34) of the clinical phase students were willing to give a short-supplied blood (...) unit to the first-arrived patient to the emergency department when more patients are expected compared to 63.9% in the preclinical group (n = 62) ( p < 0.001, OR = 0.75 95% CI: 0.029−0.192). Seventy-four percent (n = 74) of the clinical phase students were found to be willing to remove a patient from a respirator to allocate it to an ill child compared to 35.7% (n = 35) in the preclinical phase group ( p < 0.001, OR = 4.168 95% CI: 1.931−8.998). Of the clinical phase group, 46.6% (n = 41) were willing to allocate a short supplied flu medicine to a patient with poor prognosis compared to 57.7% (n = 56) in the preclinical phase group ( p = 0.04, OR = 0.457 95% CI: 0.216−0.966). Conclusion Clinical exposure during training may affect the way medical students make ethical decisions, independent of age, sex, as well as marital and parental status. (shrink)

We begin by presenting William of Ockham's various formulations of his principle of parsimony, Ockham's Razor. We then define a reaction mechanism and tell a personal story of how Ockham's Razor entered the study of one such mechanism. A small history of methodologies related to Ockham's Razor, least action and least motion, follows. This is all done in the context of the chemical (and scientific) community's almost unthinking acceptance of the principle as heuristically valuable. Which is not matched, to put (...) it mildly, by current philosophical attitudes toward Ockham's Razor. What ensues is a dialogue, pro and con. We first present a context for questioning, within chemistry, the fundamental assumption that underlies Ockham's Razor, namely that the world is simple. Then we argue that in more than one pragmatic way the Razor proves useful, without at all assuming a simple world. Ockham's Razor is an instruction in an operating manual, not a world view. Continuing the argument, we look at the multiplicity and continuity of concerted reaction mechanisms, and at principal component and Bayesian analysis (two ways in which Ockham's Razor is embedded into modern statistics). The dangers to the chemical imagination from a rigid adherence to an Ockham's Razor perspective, and the benefits of the use of this venerable and practical principle are given, we hope, their due. (shrink)