The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science is an outstanding guide to the major themes, movements, debates, and topics in the philosophy of social science. It includes thirty-seven newly written chapters, by many of the leading scholars in the field, as well as a comprehensive introduction by the editors. Insofar as possible, the material in this volume is presented in accessible language, with an eye toward undergraduate and graduate students who may be coming to some of this material for (...) the first time. Scholars too will appreciate this clarity, along with the chance to read about the latest advances in the discipline. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science is broken up into four parts. Historical and Philosophical Context Concepts Debates Individual Sciences Edited by two of the leading scholars in the discipline, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of social science, and its many areas of connection and overlap with key debates in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

We concur with Cohen Kadosh & Walsh (CK&W) that representation of numbers in the parietal cortex is format dependent. In addition, we suggest that all formats do not automatically, and equally, access analog magnitude representation in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Understanding how development, learning, and context lead to differential access of analog magnitude representation is a key question for future research.

The persistent educational challenges that fractions pose call for developing novel instructional methods to better prepare students for fraction learning. Here, we examined the effects of a 24-session, Cuisenaire rod intervention on a building block for symbolic fraction knowledge, continuous and discrete non-symbolic proportional reasoning, in children who have yet to receive fraction instruction. Participants were 34 second-graders who attended the intervention (intervention group) and 15 children who did not participate in any sessions (control group). As attendance at the intervention (...) sessions was irregular (median = 15.6 sessions, range = 1–24), we specifically examined the effect of the number of sessions completed on their non-symbolic proportional reasoning. Our results showed that children who attended a larger number of sessions increased their ability to compare non-symbolic continuous proportions. However, contrary to our expectations, they also decreased their ability to compare misleading discretized proportions. In contrast, children in the Control group did not show any change in their performance. These results provide further evidence on the malleability of non-symbolic continuous proportional reasoning and highlight the rigidity of counting knowledge interference on discrete proportional reasoning. (shrink)

This article investigates the potential of fMRI to test assumptions about different components in models of complex cognitive tasks. If the components of a model can be associated with specific brain regions, one can make predictions for the temporal course of the BOLD response in these regions. An event‐locked procedure is described for dealing with temporal variability and bringing model runs and individual data trials into alignment. Statistical methods for testing the model are described that deal with the scan‐to‐scan correlations (...) in the errors of measurement of the BOLD signal. This approach is illustrated using a “sacrificial” ACT‐R model that involves mapping 6 modules onto 6 brain regions in an experiment from Ravizza, Anderson, and Carter (in press) concerned with equation solving. The model's visual encoding predicted the BOLD response in the fusiform gyrus, its controlled retrieval predicted the BOLD response in the lateral inferior prefrontal cortex, and its subgoal setting predicted the BOLD response in the anterior cingulate cortex. On the other hand, its motor programming failed to predict anticipatory activation in the motor cortex, its representational changes failed to predicted the pattern of activity in the posterior parietal cortex, and its procedural component failed to predict an initial spike in caudate. The results illustrate the power of such data to direct the development of a theory of complex problem solving, both at the level of a specific task model as well as at the level of the cognitive architecture. (shrink)

Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods, and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg's and Lee McIntyre's updated and substantially revised Fourth Edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving lucid explanations with clear analyses, the volume is as a much-used, thematically-oriented introduction to the field.

What happens when an entire group of human beings is excluded from the definition of humanity? How is the power of language used to distort reality? What happens when a comprehensive economic plan is based on theft, brainwashing, slave labor, and murder? These and other philosophical questions about the Holocaust are contemplated in Contemporary Portraits of Auschwitz. In 1988, a group of philosophers who had survived the Holocaust, or had known people at the Auschwitz death camp, decided to found an (...) organization that would examine the philosophical implications of Shoah: the Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust. Noting that the history and the personal horror stories had been told and retold, SPSGH's founders Sander Lee, Berel Lang, and Alan Rosenberg argued that too little study had been so far devoted to the philosophy of Hitler's final solution and other genocides. Auschwitz problematized the Enlightenment concept of humanity, and other concepts. The perfection of state-sponsored and -administered mass death issued in new forms of language, moral indifference, and forgetting. Philosophy often even fails to mention the Holocaust in discussions of National Socialism. And the disaster of Auschwitz has been largely neutralized by the normalization of a "ruined" language. This volume includes essays in several areas: Witnesses and Testimonies; Morality and Ethics; Art and Poetry; History and Memory; and The Crisis of Representation. Contributors are Karyn Ball, Eve Bannet, Debra Bergoffen, James Bernauer, Klaus Dorner, Jennifer N. Fink, Roger Fjellstrom, Ruth Liberman, Burkhard Liebsch, Alan Milchman, Raj Sampath, Paul Sars, Hans Seigfried, Thomas W. Simon, Dan Stone, Peter Strasser, Frans van Peperstratten, Erik M. Vogt, Andrew Weinstein, and others. (shrink)

I sketch here an intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types, which are individuated in part by historical paths (re)production. Although attractive, this view has been rejected by a number of authors on the basis of general claims about abstract objects. On consideration, however, these general claims are overgeneralizations, which whilst true of some abstracta, are not true of all abstract objects, and in particular, are not true of created types. The intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types (...) is, then, left in place. (shrink)

Jay Rosenberg offers a systematic philosophical theory of knowledge which is specifically responsive to the fact that we always engage the world from a particular perspective within it. It consequently calls into question in a fundamental way many received understandings regarding the relationships among the concepts of knowledge, belief, justification, and truth.

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. As new blood filled our young patient's veins, her breathing became regular and her pulse full. She was so far gone I would not have expected her to recover consciousness for a day, if at all, but within an hour, she began to wake up. We removed the breathing tube a couple of hours later— no ventilator ever needed.As life-sustaining technology becomes more widely available in fortunate parts of the developing world, benefits (...) come with complications. The temptation is to focus on the thing—the ventilator itself—as the crucial element and press to buy more, mistaking the problem for one of resource scarcity only. But we need a culturally relevant ethical framework to guide the use and withdrawal of ventilators and similar life-sustaining tools. Resource scarcity is only part of the problem. Buying additional ventilators only defers allocation decisions and entirely fails to address end-of-life suffering. It is unsustainable in Rwanda; it is a dubious solution anywhere. The intangible need for an ethical framework hides beneath apparent scarcity and, when this need is not addressed and luck runs out, one salvageable patient can die for want of a ventilator that serves only to prolong the suffering of another. (shrink)

The simplistic assumption that replacing humans by intelligent artifacts or introducing such artifacts, or robots, into all aspects of human society will necessarily benefit society at large must be continually re-evaluated. Clearly, contributing factors will involve concerns of efficiency, the role of work as a component in human self-worth, the distribution of wealth generated by advanced technologies, the potential for growing divisions in society resulting from gross inequities in income and from the loss of work as a central fact of (...) life, and of course, the unpredictability of regular and widespread interactions between humans and artificially intelligent programs and devices. The focus of this paper is an exploration of the future relationship between people and their robots and the anticipated role of ethics. (shrink)

Some monothematic types of delusions may arise because subjects have unusual experiences. The role of this experiential component in the pathogenesis of delusion is still not understood. Focussing on delusions of alien control, we outline a model for reality testing competence on unusual experiences. We propose that nascent delusions arise when there are local failures of reality testing performance, and that monothematic delusions arise as normal responses to these. In the course of this we address questions concerning the tenacity with (...) which delusions are maintained, their often bizarre content, the patients' inability to dismiss them, and their often circumscribed character. (shrink)

Epistemologists can be divided into two camps: those who think that nothing short of certainty or (subjective) probability 1 can warrant assertion and those who disagree with this claim. This paper addressed this issue by inquiring into the problem of setting the probability threshold required for assertion in such a way that that the social epistemic good is maximized, where the latter is taken to be the veritistic value in the sense of Goldman (Knowledge in a social world, 1999). We (...) provide a Bayesian model of a test case involving a community of inquirers in a social network engaged in group deliberation regarding the truth or falsity of a proposition $p.$ p . Results obtained by means of computer simulation indicate that the certainty rule is optimal in the limit of inquiry and communication but that a lower threshold is preferable in less idealized cases. (shrink)

Some monothematic types of delusions may arise because subjects have unusual experiences. The role of this experiential component in the pathogenesis of delusion is still not understood. Focussing on delusions of alien control, we outline a model for reality testing competence on unusual experiences. We propose that nascent delusions arise when there are local failures of reality testing performance, and that monothematic delusions arise as normal responses to these. In the course of this we address questions concerning the tenacity with (...) which delusions are maintained, their often bizarre content, the patients’ inability to dismiss them, and their often circumscribed character. (shrink)

The low rates of regular exercise and overall physical activity (PA) in the general population represent a significant public health challenge. Previous research suggests that, for many people, exercise leads to a negative affective response and, in turn, reduced likelihood of future exercise. The purpose of this paper is to examine this exercise–affect–adherence relationship from an evolutionary perspective. Specifically, we argue that low rates of physical exercise in the general population are a function of the evolved human tendency to avoid (...) unnecessary physical exertion. This innate tendency evolved because it allowed our evolutionary ancestors to conserve energy for physical activities that had immediate adaptive utility such as pursuing prey, escaping predators, and engaging in social and reproductive behaviors. The commonly observed negative affective response to exercise is an evolved proximate psychological mechanism through which humans avoid unnecessary energy expenditure. The fact that the human tendencies toward negative affective response to and avoidance of unnecessary physical activities are innate does not mean that they are unchangeable. Indeed, it is only because of human-engineered changes in our environmental conditions (i.e., it is no longer necessary for us to work for our food) that our predisposition to avoid unnecessary physical exertion has become a liability. Thus, it is well within our capabilities to reengineer our environments to once again make PA necessary or, at least, to serve an immediate functional purpose. We propose a two-pronged approach to PA promotion based on this evolutionary functional perspective: first, to promote exercise and other physical activities that are perceived to have an immediate purpose, and second, to instill greater perceived purpose for a wider range of physical activities. We posit that these strategies are more likely to result in more positive (or less negative) affective responses to exercise, better adherence to exercise programs, and higher rates of overall PA. (shrink)

The institutional guarantees of modern labour law, that provide the keystone of progressive liberalism, are often only reactionary to the entrenched concepts of socialist law. Adoption of institutions of “workers rights”, and employment protection based upon contract, inevitably nullify the ideological promise of the inalienable “right to work”. China, among the last bastions of theoretical Marxist socialism, and among the first socialist countries ready to accept that it has been in desperate need of reforming uneconomical state enterprises, seems willing to (...) sacrifice ideological purity for economic development. Yet, if economic turnaround requires enterprise rationalisation in a market economy, it is understandable that Chinese labour requires the same kinds of protection against unbridled capitalism as progressive labour movements elsewhere. Doubtless, for those who have enjoyed no such institutional guarantees in the past, official commitment to improvement of labour conditions is better than no acknowledgment of need for reform of social policy whatever. Yet, the real question for students of social change is “Are these legislated reforms effective policy guides for local administration and the courts?”“|Or are they merely regulations for licensing compliance – primarily for foreign invested enterprises?”. In brief, “... to what extent are the new ‘workers’ rights’ realistically attainable sources of judicial remedies for individual workers?”. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to examine in detail the arguments which Spinoza uses in a very brief section of the Ethics, the lemmas following Proposition 13 of Part II. My aim in this analysis will be twofold: to attempt a preliminary sketch of the nature of a physical system in Spinoza’s view, and to clarify what Spinoza means by speaking of certain items as “individuals.” At least a partial fulfillment of the first aim is a necessary condition for the (...) second, since most of what Spinoza has to say about individuation in the Ethics and elsewhere is expressed in terms of individual bodies. His own solution of the mind-body problem entails that there will be correlative statements true at the ideational level; but, unfortunately, he usually leaves such correlations to his reader. I use the term “ideational” herein in preference to “mental” to avoid any dualistic connotation. Ideational and extensional levels for Spinoza refer to a dualism of denoting complexes, but not to a dualism of objects denoted by these. (shrink)

This article explores the Polanyi brothers’ publicly-stated views--and private debates--concerning the nature and origin of fascism and communism. In that connection, it examines their rival estimates of the Soviet regime.

This article explores the Polanyi brothers’ publicly-stated views--and private debates--concerning the nature and origin of fascism and communism. In that connection, it examines their rival estimates of the Soviet regime.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 213 Seiten: 197-211.

It is widely believed that some wars are just, and that the paradigm case of a just war is a defensive war. A familiar strategy used to justify defensive war is to infer its permissibility from the case of self-defensive killing. I show, however, that the permission to defend oneself does not justify killing, but instead calls for nonviolent resistance. I conclude that on the account of self-defense I develop, the appropriate way to respond to a war of aggression is (...) not by prosecuting a defensive war, but by engaging in a form of nonviolence I call pacific resistance. (shrink)

Russell had two theories of names and one theory of description. Logically proper names are Millian names, which have only denotation but no connotation. Ordinary names are not genuine names but disguised definite descriptions subject to quantificational analyses. Only by asserting that ordinary names are definite descriptions could Russell motivate his theory of description to solve three problems for Millian names, namely, Frege’s puzzle, empty reference and negative existentials. Critics usually discuss Russell’s theories of names and his theory of description (...) separately. This paper takes a new perspective and presents a dilemma for the overall project, arguing that it is hard to be a Russellian about names coherently. The central issue is whether contextualisation is semantic or pragmatic in nature, an issue very much alive in contemporary debates. This paper traces Russell’s ambiguity on this matter back to his conception of the roles of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description in naming. (shrink)

This paper presents a conceptual framework for the study of social intelligence in a real-life environment. It is focussed on the dialogue organisation in argumentation, in particular how our understanding of dialogue phenomena in mediated communication may help us to support natural interaction in classroom debates. Dialogue organisation is explored in terms of the cohesive structure of dialogue that emerges as the result of information maintenance and change, specified locally by the adjacency pair and turn-taking, and globally by topic threads. (...) We give a descriptive analysis of their interplay in real chat debates, based on lexical chains of repeated words in an attempt to clarify what feedback participants in the debate require in order to reflect on their contributions to the debate. We then show how this analysis can be used as a basis for conceptual design of a feedback adviser tool to automatically search for topics in student chat debates. Much of the data used in our analysis has been generated as part of the SCALE project SCALE (Internet-based intelligent tool to support collaborative argumentation-based learning in secondary schools) – EU Framework V project. focussed on specifying tools for computer supported argumentation in the classroom. (shrink)