Along with pitch and loudness, timbre is commonly described as an audible property of sounds. This paper puts forward an alternative view—that timbres are properties of auditory media. This approach has many advantages. First, it accounts for the frequent attribution of timbres to objects that do not have characteristic sounds. Second, it explains why timbres are attributed not only to ordinary objects, like musical instruments, but also to surrounding spaces and architectural structures. And finally, it provides an original solution to (...) the timbre-constancy problem. (shrink)

Along with hallucinations and illusions, afterimages have shaped the philosophical debate about the nature of perception. Often referred to as optical or visual illusions, experiences of afterimages have been abundantly exploited by philosophers to argue against naïve realism. This paper offers an alternative account to this traditional view by providing a tentative account of the colors of the afterimages from an objectivist perspective. Contrary to the widespread approach to afterimages, this paper explores the possibility that the colors of afterimages are (...) not ontologically different from “ordinary” colors and that experiences of afterimages fail to provide a motivation for rejecting naïve realism. (shrink)

In November 2003, the University of Fribourg hosted a symposium on the ontology of colors. The invited participants included Justin Broackes, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Larry Hardin, Joe Levine and Barry Maund. The points of view presented by the participants in their thought-provoking papers were highly divergent. The presentation of each paper was followed by a long and intense discussion. Despite the divergence of the views proposed, the discussion during the symposium was highly focused. Several specific issues came up repeatedly (...) in the debate and illuminated the puzzle about the nature of colors in a thought provoking way from different angles. We include these papers in our brief description in the present introduction to present to the reader all the different viewpoints that have nourished the debate throughout the symposium. We are glad to be able to include one further invited paper by Jonathan Cohen in the present volume. In an attempt to transfer some of the atmosphere of the meeting to the reader and in order to make this collection still more stimulating we invited each participant to contribute comments on the other papers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough philosophers have often insisted that specular perception is illusory or erroneous in nature, few have stressed the reliability and indispensability of mirrors as optical instrumen...

Most philosophers consider olfactory experiences to be very poor in comparison to other sense modalities. And because olfactory experiences seem to lack the spatial content necessary to object perception, philosophers tend to maintain that smell is purely sensational or abstract. I argue in this paper that the apparent poverty and spatial indeterminateness of odor experiences does not reflect the “subjective” or “abstract” nature of smell, but only that smell is not directed to particular things. According to the view defended in (...) this paper, odors are properties of stuffs. This view, motivated by several arguments grounded in the phenomenology of olfactory experience, explains in particular why odors appear to be located both in the air around our nose and in the objects from which they emanate. It also explains the power of smell in the task of discriminating chemical compounds. (shrink)

Most objectivist and dispositionalist theories of color have tried to resolve the challenge raised by color variations by drawing a distinction between real and apparent colors. This paper considers such a strategy to be fundamentally erroneous. The high degree of variability of colors constitutes a crucial feature of colors and color perception; it cannot be avoided without leaving aside the real nature of color. The objectivist theory of color defended in this paper holds that objects have locally many different objective (...) colors. Most color variations are then real and result from the extreme richness of color properties. (shrink)

The idea that looking at a photograph is akin to face-to-face perception and that photographs provide genuine perceptual access to the objects they depict was notoriously defended by Kendall Walton in “Transparent Pictures.” Walton’s main thesis is that photographs are transparent in the sense that we can see objects through them. The main goal of this article is to support Walton’s view by providing a full account of photographic transparency. I will argue that the transparency that characterizes photography is not (...) metaphorical but in fact exhibits all the essential properties of transparent materials. To understand how a photograph can be transparent, one must understand the special type of causal connection between a photograph and what it shows. Building on Fritz Heider’s work, I will argue that photography is a visual medium, like air, water, glass, or mirrors, capable of transmitting the visual properties of distant objects to the perceiver. (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)

Most philosophical or scientific theories suppose that colour composition judgments refer to the way colours appear to us. The dominant view is therefore phenomenalist in the sense that colour composition is phenomenally given to perceivers. This paper argues that there is no evidence for a phenomenalist view of colour composition and that a conventionalist approach should be favoured.

In this paper I argue that all transparent objects are colorless. This thesis is important for at least three reasons. First, if transparent objects are colorless, there is no need to distinguish between colors which characterize three-dimensional bodies, like transparent colors, and colors which lie on the surface of objects. Second, traditional objections against color physicalism relying on transparent colors are rendered moot. Finally, an improved understanding of the relations between colors, light and transparency is provided.

As most philosophers recognize, the body’s central role in touch differs from the role it plays in the other sense modalities. Any account of touch must then explain the pivotal nature of the body’s involvement in touch. Unlike most accounts of touch, this paper argues that the body’s centrality in touch is not phenomenological or experiential: the body is not felt in any special way in tactile experiences. Building on Aristotle’s account in De Anima, I argue that the body is (...) central in touch because it is the medium of tactile perception. Touch depends on the body as vision and audition depend on air or any medium that can transmit light or sound waves. I show that it is precisely because the body must be transparent in order to transmit tangible properties that it cannot be perceived or experienced in tactile perception. Although this account conflicts with the widespread view that tactile perception is mediated by bodily sensations, I maintain that it explains how the structure and constitution of the human body contribute directly to what we feel in tactile experiences and that it provides a better understanding of the relation between the sense of touch and our bodily feelings. (shrink)

According to an ordinary view, we distinguish, classify, and appreciate food and beverages according to their taste. However, scientists seem to disagree with this naive view. They maintain that we don't really perceive the lemony taste of a cake or the delicate smoky taste of a single-malt whiskey, because what we ascribe to taste is in reality mostly perceived by smell. As opposed to this scientific consensus regarding taste, I will defend a naive view of taste and deny that olfaction (...) is involved in what we naively call taste. Like the uninformed layman, I will maintain that when I eat a strawberry, what I really perceive is its taste, not its smell or flavor. (shrink)

Along with hallucinations and illusions, afterimages have shaped the philosophical debate about the nature of perception. Often referred to as optical or visual illusions, experiences of afterimages have been abundantly exploited by philosophers to argue against naïve realism. This paper offers an alternative account to this traditional view by providing a tentative account of the colors of the afterimages from an objectivist perspective. Contrary to the widespread approach to afterimages, this paper explores the possibility that the colors of afterimages are (...) not ontologically different from “ordinary” colors and that experiences of afterimages fail to provide a motivation for rejecting naïve realism. (shrink)

The theory of mind (ToM) framework has been criticised by emerging alternative accounts. Each alternative begins with the accusation that ToM's validity as a research paradigm rests on the assumption of the ‘unobservability’ of other minds. We argue that the critics' discussion of the unobservability assumption (UA) targets a straw man. We discuss metaphysical, phenomenological, epistemological, and psychological readings of UA and demonstrate that it is not the case that ToM assumes the metaphysical, phenomenological, or epistemological claims. However, ToM supports (...) the psychological UA as a claim about cognitive processes responsible for mindreading. The latter can be interpreted as a claim that (a) neither the other's ‘mindedness’ in general nor the other's particular mental states are observable (i.e. apprehended perceptually); (b) particular mental states are unobservable, whereas some aspects indicative of ‘mindedness’ are observable; (c) some mental states are unobservable but some are also observable. Whereas the critics tend to attribute (a) to ToM, most ToM accounts actually take positions (b) or (c). We conclude that the allegations against ToM for positing UA are seriously misdirected. We further bring out an important stipulation of any account of observability of mental states: mental states are not observable in the same way as the sensory properties of physical objects. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to common opinion, a counterexample against a philosophical theory does not amount to conclusive evidence against that theory. Instead, the method of counterexamples allows for the derivation of a disjunction, i.e., ‘either the theory is false or an auxiliary assumption is false’, not a negation of the target theory. This is so because, whenever the method of counterexamples is used in an attempt to refute a philosophical theory, there is a crucial auxiliary assumption (...) that needs to be taken into account. The auxiliary assumption is that making intuitive judgments in response to hypothetical cases about the subject matter in question (e.g., knowledge or proper names) is a good method for finding out truths about that subject matter. Without good reasons to think that this assumption is warranted, the negation of a philosophical theory whose content is alleged to be in conflict with the content of an intuition cannot be justifiably derived using an argument that employs the method of counterexamples. (shrink)

Mindreading is often considered to be the most important human social cognitive skill, and over the past three decades, several theories of the cognitive mechanisms for mindreading have been proposed. But why do we read minds? According to the standard view, we attribute mental states to individuals to predict and explain their behavior. I argue that the standard view is too general to capture the distinctive function of mindreading, and that it does not explain what motivates people to read minds. (...) In order to understand why mindreading is evolutionarily adaptive, individually beneficial, and motivationally compelling, we need to include another level of explanation: the level of social relationships. I introduce a theory of the cognitive underpinnings of social relationships—the relational models theory of Alan Fiske. I outline the hypothesis that the function of mindreading is to shape social relations. I further hypothesize that mindreading is often motivated by social emotions. If mindreading serves r.. (shrink)

Traditional theory of mind (ToM) accounts for social cognition have been at the basis of most studies in the social cognitive neurosciences. However, in recent years, the need to go beyond traditional ToM accounts for understanding real life social interactions has become all the more pressing. At the same time it remains unclear whether alternative accounts, such as interactionism, can yield a sufficient description and explanation of social interactions. We argue that instead of considering ToM and interactionism as mutually exclusive (...) opponents, they should be integrated into a more comprehensive account of social cognition. We draw on dual process models of social cognition that contrast two different types of social cognitive processing. The first type (labeled Type 1) refers to process es that are fast, efficient, stimulus-driven, and relatively inflexible. The second type (labeled Type 2) refers to processes that are relatively slow, cognitively laborious, flexible, and may involve conscious control. We argue that while interactionism captures aspects of social cognition mostly related to Type 1 processes, ToM is more focused on those based on Type 2 processes. We suggest that real life social interactions are rarely based on either Type 1 or Type 2 processes alone. On the contrary, we propose that in most cases both types of processes are simultaneously involved and that social behavior may be sustained by the interplay between these two types of processes. Finally, we discuss how the new integrative framework can guide experimental research on social interaction. (shrink)

There are cases of emotion that we readily describe as 'sharing emotions with other people.' How should we understand such cases? Joel Krueger has proposed the Joint Ownership Thesis : the view that two or more people can literally share the same emotional episode. His view is partly inspired by his reading of Merleau-Ponty -- arguably Merleau-Ponty advocates a version of JOT in his "The child's relations with others." My critical analysis demonstrates that JOT is flawed in several respects: 1) (...) It involves a vague account of joint subjects; 2) It relies on a confusion between phenomenological and ontological levels of analysis. When these are clearly distinguished, Krueger's phenomenological analysis contradicts JOT understood as an ontological claim; 3) It relies on a highly problematic coupling-constitution inference; 4) It relies on a shift from the claim that the child and the caregiver jointly _realize_ an emotion, to the claim about joint _ownership_, which is a _non sequitur_. I argue that we can reach a better understanding of the phenomenon of shared emotions by bringing in another level of analysis: that of _social relationships_. I propose that shared emotions are a special case of _social-relational emotions_, typically arising within and/or giving rise to communal relationships. (shrink)

In this paper we defend structural representations, more specifically neural structural representation. We are not alone in this, many are currently engaged in this endeavor. The direction we take, however, diverges from the main road, a road paved by the mathematical theory of measure that, in the 1970s, established homomorphism as the way to map empirical domains of things in the world to the codomain of numbers. By adopting the mind as codomain, this mapping became a boon for all those (...) convinced that a representation system should bear similarities with what was being represented, but struggled to find a precise account of what such similarities mean. The euforia was brief, however, and soon homomorphism revealed itself to be affected by serious weaknesses, the primary one being that it included systems embarrassingly alien to representations. We find that the defense attempts that have followed, adopt strategies that share a common format: valid structural representations come as “homomorphism plus X”, with various “X”, provided in descriptive format only. Our alternative direction stems from the observation of the overlooked departure from homomorphism as used in the theory of measure and its later use in mental representations. In the former case, the codomain or the realm of numbers, is the most suited for developing theorems detailing the existence and uniqueness of homomorphism for a wide range of empirical domains. In the latter case, the codomain is the realm of the mind, possibly more vague and more ill-defined than the empirical domain itself. The time is ripe for articulating the mapping between represented domains and the mind in formal terms, by exploiting what is currently known about coding mechanisms in the brain. We provide a sketch of a possible development in this direction, one that adopts the theory of neural population coding as codomain. We will show that our framework is not only not in disagreement with the “plus X” proposals, but can lead to natural derivation of several of the “X”. (shrink)

The “received wisdom” in contemporary analytic philosophy is that intuition talk is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating back to the 1960s. In this paper, we set out to test two interpretations of this “received wisdom.” The first is that intuition talk is just talk, without any methodological significance. The second is that intuition talk is methodologically significant; it shows that analytic philosophers appeal to intuition. We present empirical and contextual evidence, systematically mined from the JSTOR corpus and HathiTrust’s Digital Library, (...) which provide some empirical support for the second rather than the first hypothesis. Our data also suggest that appealing to intuition is a much older philosophical methodology than the “received wisdom” alleges. We then discuss the implications of our findings for the contemporary debate over philosophical methodology. (shrink)

The current pandemic represents unprecedented times in medical education. In addition to the already strenuous demands of medical school, the SARS-CoVid-2 pandemic introduced a new source of ethical and moral pressure on students. Medical students navigated finishing their didactic years in isolation and initiated their clinical rotations in a pandemic environment. Many medical students found themselves in the frustrating position of being non-essential healthcare workers but still wanting to help. This paper follows the personal and shared experiences of a second-year (...) medical student transitioning to their third year. In particular, this paper examines the author’s personal ties to the disability community through their family, and how this impacted their approach in striving to aid in the pandemic. (shrink)

This commentary argues that Gallagher's account of direct social perception has remained underdeveloped in several respects. Gallagher has not provided convincing evidence to support his claim that mindreading is rare in social situations. He and other direct perception theorists have not offered a substantive critique of standard theories of mindreading because they have attacked a much stronger claim about the putative unobservability of mental states than most theories of mindreading imply. To provide a genuine alternative to standard theories of mindreading, (...) the direct perception theorist needs to provide more detailed answers to the following questions: What are the criteria for distinguishing perceptual processes from non-perceptual processes? How exactly does direct social perception function on the subpersonal level? What is the content of direct social perception? How does direct perception theory relate to more recent developments in the mindreading literature? (shrink)

Before 1933 commentaries on laws were exclusively juristic texts, written and read only by legal professionals. Beginning in 1934, scholars from different disciplines, especially medical scientists, began writing juristic commentaries. The essay examines the reasons for this development and explores how it changed the genre, using the example of the most important commentary on theBlutschutz-andEhegesundheitsgesetz, which resulted from the collaboration of two medical professionals and a legal professional. The article argues that the recruitment of non-juristic authors and the corresponding methodological (...) changes were caused by a debate on a possible “reform” of juristic commentaries which took place in law journals. From the perspective of the National Socialist regime, the genre in its traditional form was not compatible with the Third Reich’s philosophy of law.In this new genre, commentaries not only referred to legal problems, but also dealt with issues from other disciplines, such as medical questions. The essay modifies Mitchell G. Ash’s theoretical approach regarding the “entanglement” of jurisprudence and other disciplines. Law and other sciences became, according to Ash, “resources for one another”: Legal scholars could claim that legal decisions were based on scientific facts and therefore “unquestionable.” The affected disciplines also gained greater importance as a result of this process in which their findings becoming legally relevant. This transformation also enabled them to acquire resources for new research projects.Moreover, the essay examines the connection between this development and the change of audience within German courts. Not only did the authors of the commentaries change, but also the recipients: Many laws passed after 1933 introduced new courts using lay judges, professionals with a non-law background. These “experts” came from multiple fields connecting them to the new law, such as medical professionals. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungAb 1934 traten vermehrt Wissenschaftler unterschiedlicher Disziplinen, insbesondere Mediziner, als Autoren einer vormals rein rechtswissenschaftlichen Fachtextgattung auf, nämlich des juristischen Kommentars. Der folgende Text geht am Beispiel des maßgeblichen, von zwei Ärzten und einem Juristen verfassten Rechtskommentars zum Blutschutz- und Ehegesundheitsgesetz von 1935 der Frage nach, wie sich dadurch die Gesetzeserläuterung veränderte. Hintergrund ist eine ab 1934 in den juristischen Fachzeitschriften geführte Debatte um eine Reform des Genres Gesetzeskommentar, das in seiner herkömmlichen Anlage als inkompatibel mit dem nationalsozialistischen Rechtsdenken galt.Der (...) Aufsatz versucht diesen Prozess in Ausweitung des Theorieansatzes Mitchell G. Ashs als „Verflechtung“ des Rechts mit anderen Wissenschaften zu begreifen, die zu beiderseitigem „Vorteil“ war: Auf der einen Seite konnte sich die Jurisprudenz auf vorgeblich „wissenschaftlich-objektive“ Befunde berufen, die, anders als juristische Abwägungen – so die Suggestion –, als „nicht hinterfragbar“ angesehen wurden. Andererseits verlieh die unmittelbare Rechtsrelevanz bestimmter Befunde aus den betreffenden Wissenschaften diesen Disziplinen insgesamt einen höheren gesellschaftlichen Stellenwert, der wiederum die Erschließung neuer Forschungsfelder ermöglichte.Geprüft wird außerdem ein möglicher Zusammenhang mit einer partiellen Veränderung der Gerichtslandschaft: Mit der verstärkten Gesetzeskommentierung durch Nicht-Juristen erweiterte sich schließlich auch der Adressatenkreis der betreffenden Schriften. Auf Grundlage vieler ab 1933 geschaffener Gesetze wurden neue Gerichte ins Leben gerufen, an denen sogenannte sachkundige Laienrichter mitentschieden – „Fachleute“ aus den Disziplinen, auf die sich die Gesetzgebung nun berief. (shrink)

Neurosemantics is not yet a common term and in current neuroscience and philosophy it is used with two different sorts of objectives. One deals with the meaning of the electrical and the chemical activities going on in neural circuits. This way of using the term regards the project of explaining linguistic meaning in terms of the computations done by the brain. This book explores this second sense of neurosemantics, but in doing so, it will address much of the first as (...) well, for we believe that the capacity of neural circuits to support linguistic meaning, hinges on their peculiar role in coding entities and facts of the world. It is an enterprise at the edge of the available state-of-the-art knowledge in neuroscience and specifically, in the growing understanding of brain computational mechanisms. We conceive neurosemantics, however, as the natural evolution of a long standing project that began in the early days of Boole’s logic, the idea that semantics can be construed and explained in mathematical terms. Classical formal semantics, for a very long time, excluded from the analysis of language any account of mental processes, which on the contrary, became the central focus during the cognitive turn. Cognitive semantics, however, failed to provide a rigorous mathematical framework for semantic processes. Today, it is possible to begin explaining language by way of a new mathematical foundation, one that is empirically grounded in how the brain computes: neurosemantics. The way this book intends to contribute is twofold. One is to present a series of existing examples of neurosemantics in practice: early models addressing aspects of linguistic semantics purely in neurocomputational terms. The other is to try to identify the principles upon which models of this kind can be constructed, and their corresponding neural bases. (shrink)

Taking up Kimberlé Crenshaw's conclusion that black feminist theorists seem to continue to find themselves in many ways “speaking into the void” (Crenshaw 2011, 228), even as their works are widely celebrated, I examine intersectionality critiques as one site where power asymmetries and dominant imaginaries converge in the act of interpretation (or cooptation) of intersectionality. That is, despite its current “status,” intersectionality also faces epistemic intransigence in the ways in which it is read and applied. My aim is not to (...) suggest that intersectionality cannot (or should not) be critiqued, nor do I maintain that celebratory applications/interpretations are immune from epistemic distortion when it comes to interpreting intersectionality. Rather, my goal is to demonstrate that critiques of intersectionality are one important site to examine hermeneutic marginalization and interpretive violence; the politics of citation; and the impact of dominant expectations or established social imaginaries on meaning-making. In so doing, I aim to consider more fully how entrenched ways of thinking are frequently relied upon to interpret and critique intersectionality, even as these are often the very frameworks that intersectionality theorists have identified as highly problematic tools of misrepresentation, erasure, and violation. This slippage away from intersectionality's outlooks, whether in critical or laudatory contexts, is a pivotal site of epistemic negotiation we must examine more closely. (shrink)

Race/Class/Gender otherwise known as Intersectionality is one of the most important theoretical precepts developed in the past two decades in women's and gender studies and in the social sciences and humanities. Yet the concept remains elusive and poorly understood. This book seeks to solve these problems by answering the basic questions surrounding intersectionality in prose undergraduate students can understand and appreciate.

Resumo: Tendo por base o conceito marcuseano de linguagem unidimensional, o presente ensaio pretende problematizar esse tema com relação às suas implicações no campo da pesquisa educacional. A não utilização do conceito e do excesso de significado que a linguagem bidimensional traz em si, resulta na fragilidade teórica fortemente sentida no campo da pesquisa educacional, que resulta, em última instância, na dificuldade de validação do seu conhecimento. Nesse sentido, defendemos a importância da retomada dos estudos de caráter teórico, assim como (...) do trabalho adequado do conceito e dos universais, como instrumentos conceituais imprescindíveis na pesquisa que deseja considerar toda a complexidade do campo da educação. Palavras chave: linguagem unidimensional; pesquisa educacional; teoria; empiria; formação. The unidimensionalization of language and the theoretical fragilization of the educational investigative field: challenges for research in education: Based on the Marcusean concept of unidimensional language, the present essay intends to problematize this theme in relation to its implications in the field of educational research. The non-use of the concept and the excess of meaning that the two-dimensional language brings in itself results in the theoretical fragility strongly felt in the field of educational research, which results, in the last instance, the difficulty of validating its knowledge. In this sense, we defend the importance of resuming theoretical studies, as well as the adequate work of the concept and the universals, as essential conceptual instruments in the research that wishes to consider all the complexity of the field of education. Keywords: one-dimensional language; educational research; theory; empiria; formation. Unidimensionalización del lenguaje y fragilización teórica del campo de investigación educativa: desafíos para la investigación educativa Resumen: Basado en el concepto marcusiano de lenguaje unidimensional, el presente ensayo pretende problematizar este tema en relación con sus implicaciones en el campo de la investigación educativa. La falta de uso del concepto y el exceso de significado que el lenguaje bidimensional trae consigo resulta en la debilidad teórica que se siente fuertemente en el campo de la investigación educativa, lo que en última instancia resulta la dificultad de validar su conocimiento. En este sentido, defendemos la importancia de la reanudación de los estudios teóricos, así como el trabajo adecuado del concepto y los universales, como instrumentos conceptuales indispensables en la investigación que desea considerar toda la complejidad del campo de la educación. Palabras clave: lenguaje unidimensional; investigación educativa; teoría empirismo formación. Apoio/Financiamento: PROSUC/CAPES Data de registro: 31/07/2019 Data de aceite: 30/10/2019. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Regarding an already consolidated tradition in discourse studies in Latin America, with featured importance in graduate programs in the field of Linguistics and a busy calendar of annual events in the field, it is possible to say that there is considerable amount of imported knowledge being applied and very little creativity in local theoretical or methodological production. Discourse studies are generally divided into two main schools of thought: French discourse analysis and English discourse analysis. The denomination that represents these (...) lines of discourse sheds light on the colonized nature of the field. This colonization of discourse knowledge, in more immediate terms, indicates considerable effort applied to theories viewed as universally valid and scarcely modified for the situated context, but it also shows the implications of being a discourse analyst in a subordinate space within the academic field – a place where we, Latin American discourse researchers, occupy compared to our colleagues in the global North – and about contemplating theoretical alternatives. The decolonizing effort of this field should thus be directed to three converging paths: decolonizing knowledge, in the sense of criticizing theories and methods while understanding that there is no universal knowledge; decolonizing the power of the creative act of overcoming this universalizing knowledge, which means accepting the force of local methodological and theoretical production, especially by constantly questioning disciplinary separation and its impositions; and decolonizing the being, making strategic use of this paradoxical space, which contains the possibilities of knowledge communion, also including common knowledge. All this should have an impact on graduate-level education in discursive studies, in a virtuous cycle between consciousness, criticism and creativity. (shrink)

We describe a recent approach for distinguishing between stochastic and deterministic sources of variability, focusing on the mammalian cell cycle. Variability between cells is often attributed to stochastic noise, although it may be generated by deterministic components. Interestingly, lineage information can be used to distinguish between variability and determinism. Analysis of correlations within a lineage of the mammalian cell cycle duration revealed its deterministic nature. Here, we discuss the sources of such variability and the possibility that the underlying deterministic process (...) is due to the circadian clock. Finally, we discuss the “kicked cell cycle” model and its implication on the study of the cell cycle in healthy and cancerous tissues. (shrink)

This article combines the idea of the active interview with insights from science studies and suggests that some concepts from science studies, like boundary objects and trading zones, should be utilized to understand and facilitate the production and analysis of data in a transcultural interview. This is illustrated by examples from interviews that the author conducted with women computer science students and faculty in a university in Malaysia. The article argues that the understanding of, as well as the performance of (...) the transcultural interview might benefit from the highly pragmatic character of scientific investigations, focusing on using locally available resources to produce knowledge; and that this in turn may enhance our capacity to do feminist research. (shrink)

Background. Drawing on social identity theory and positive psychology, this study investigated women’s responses to the social environment of physics classrooms. It also investigated STEM identity and gender disparities on academic achievement and flourishing in an undergraduate introductory physics course for STEM majors. 160 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory physics course were administered a baseline survey with self-report measures on course belonging, physics identification, flourishing, and demographics at the beginning of the course and a post-survey at the end of (...) the academic term. Students also completed force concept inventories and physics course grades were obtained from the registrar. Results. Women reported less course belonging and less physics identification than men. Physics identification and grades evidenced a longitudinal bidirectional relationship for all students (regardless of gender) such that when controlling for baseline physics knowledge: (a) students with higher physics identification were more likely to earn higher grades; and (b) students with higher grades evidenced more physics identification at the end of the term. Men scored higher on the force concept inventory than women, although no gender disparities emerged for course grades. For women, higher physics (versus lower) identification was associated with more positive changes in flourishing over the course of the term. High-identifying men showed the opposite pattern: negative change in flourishing was more strongly associated with high identifiers than low identifiers. Conclusions. Overall, this study underlines gender disparities in physics both in terms of belonging and physics knowledge. It suggests that strong STEM identity may be associated with academic performance and flourishing in undergraduate physics courses at the end of the term, particularly for women. A number of avenues for future research are discussed. (shrink)

The low and shrinking numbers of women in higher computer science education is a well-known problem in most Western countries. The dominant Western perception of the relationship between gender and computer science codes the latter as “masculine,” and the low number of women is seen at least partly as an effect of that coding. Malaysia represents a different case. There are large numbers of women in computer science, and computer science is not perceived as “masculine.” Rather, it is deemed as (...) providing suitable jobs and good careers for women. This reflects an understanding of gender where femininities are constructed by association to office work, commonly recognized as a woman-friendly space because it is seen as more safe and protected than, for example, construction sites and factories. The findings suggest that gender and computer science may be more diversely coproduced than commonly believed in Western research. (shrink)

Despite the bombardment of AI ethics frameworks (AIEFs) published in the last decade, it is unclear which of the many have been adopted in the industry. What is more, the sheer volume of AIEFs without a clear demonstration of their effectiveness makes it difficult for businesses to select which framework they should adopt. As a first step toward addressing this problem, we employed four different existing frameworks to assess AI ethics concerns of a real-world AI system. We compared the experience (...) of applying the AIEFs from the perspective of (a) a third-party auditor conducting an AI ethics risk assessment for the company, and (b) the company receiving the audit outcomes. Our results suggest that the feel-good factor of doing an assessment is common across the AIEFs that can take anywhere between 1.5 and 20 h to complete. However, each framework provides different benefits (e.g., issue discovery vs. issue monitoring) and is likely best used in conjunction with one another at different stages of an AI development process. As such, we call on the AI ethics community to better specify the suitability and expected benefits of existing frameworks to enable better adoption of AI ethics practice in the industry. (shrink)