The use of algorithmic prediction in insurance is regarded as the beginning of a new era, because it promises to personalise insurance policies and premiums on the basis of individual behaviour and level of risk. The core idea is that the price of the policy would no longer refer to the calculated uncertainty of a pool of policyholders, with the consequence that everyone would have to pay only for her real exposure to risk. For insurance, however, uncertainty is not only (...) a problem – shared uncertainty is a resource. The availability of individual risk information could undermine the principle of risk-pooling and risk-spreading on which insurance is based. The article examines this disruptive change first by exploring the possible consequences of the use of predictive algorithms to set insurance premiums. Will it endanger the principle of mutualisation of risks, producing new forms of discrimination and exclusion from coverage? In a second step, we analyse how the relationship between the insurer and the policyholder changes when the customer knows that the company has voluminous, and continuously updated, data about her real behaviour. (shrink)

This paper proposes an extended idea of critique, bypassing the paradox of a critique of critique. It reconstructs the semantics of critique from ancient commentary to autonomous interpretation, identifying the blindness of critical theory in the claim to detect crises and to indicate how to overcome them. The critique of critique is achieved not by rejecting critique but by moving to second-order observation. In this understanding, critique does not refuse what is normal but observes it as improbable. Critical observation is (...) understood as reflection on normality, its opposite, and its alternatives. The debate on risk society is presented and commented on as an example. (shrink)

The relationship between smell and politics could appear obscure; and yet, when it comes to smell, questions about freedom and constriction, social and ontological mingling or distinctions, clearly arise. In this paper, I will especially focus on the domain of food as a clear example for describing some of the political ambivalences characterizing the sense of smell. The aim is to pave the way for a more detailed ‘sociopolitical aesthetics of smell’ to come. I will stress epistemological and social features (...) of odors in order to highlight their ambivalence in knowledge and community life. Perceivers and odors will emerge as mingled bodies, highlighting an ongoing process of material as well as emotional affection. Moreover, I will present some relevant examples of smell as social status symbols in relation to the aesthetic values linked to class hierarchy. Consumerism and scented goods will be lastly discussed in order to shade light on contemporary perceptual phenomena and their role in the socioeconomic dimension. (shrink)

The debate on the right to be forgotten on Google involves the relationship between human information processing and digital processing by algorithms. The specificity of digital memory is not so much its often discussed inability to forget. What distinguishes digital memory is, instead, its ability to process information without understanding. Algorithms only work with data without remembering or forgetting. Merely calculating, algorithms manage to produce significant results not because they operate in an intelligent way, but because they “parasitically” exploit the (...) intelligence, the memory, and the attribution of meaning by human actors. The specificity of algorithmic processing makes it possible to bypass the paradox of remembering to forget, which up to now blocked any human-based forgetting technique. If you decide to forget some memory, the most immediate effect is drawing attention to it, thereby activating remembering. Working differently from human intelligence, however, algorithms can implement, for the first time, the classical insight that it might be possible to reinforce forgetting not by erasing memories but by multiplying them. After discussing several projects on the web which implicitly adopt this approach, the article concludes by raising some deeper problems posed when algorithms use data and metadata to produce information that cannot be attributed to any human being. (shrink)

Most studies examining children's understanding of transitive sentences focus on the morphosyntactic properties of the construction and ignore prosody. But adults use prosody in many different ways to interpret ambiguous sentences. In two studies we investigated whether 5-year-old German children use prosody to determine participant roles in object-first (OVS) sentences with novel verbs (i.e., whether they use prosodic marking to overrule word order as a cue). Results showed that children identify participant roles better in this atypically ordered construction when sentences (...) are realized with the marked, OVS-typical intonational pattern, especially in combination with case marking (Study 1). In a second study, we embedded these sentences into an appropriate discourse context. The results show that, even in the absence of any case marking, children understand participant roles when they are realized with the appropriate intonational pattern. These findings demonstrate that young children can use intonation to help identify participant roles in transitive sentences, at least in marked constructions such as the German object-first (OVS) construction. (shrink)

More than a decade has passed since North American Indigenous scholars began a public dialogue on how we might “Indigenize the academy.” Discussions around how to “Indigenize” and whether it’s possible to “decolonize” the academy in Canada have proliferated as a result of the Truth and Reconciliation of Canada, which calls upon Canadians to learn the truth about colonial relations and reconcile the damage that is ongoing. Indigenous scholars are increasingly leading and writing about efforts in their institutions; efforts include (...) land- and Indigenous language-based pedagogies, transformative community-based research, Indigenous theorizing, and dual governance structures. Kim Anderson’s paper invites dialogue about how Indigenous feminist approaches can spark unique Indigenizing practices, with a focus on how we might activate Indigenous feminist spaces and places in the academy. In their responses, Elena Flores Ruíz uses Mexican feminist Indigenizing discourse to ask what can be done to promote plurifeminist indigenizing practices and North-South dialogues that acknowledge dynamic Indigenous pasts and diverse contexts for present interactions on Turtle Island. Georgina Tuari Stewart proceeds to describe Mana Wahine indigenous feminist theory from Aotearoa before proceeding to develop a “kitchen logic” of mana, which parallels Anderson’s understanding of tawow. Finally, Madina Tlostanova reflects on how several ways of advancing indigenous feminist academic activism described by Anderson intersect with examples from her own native Adyghe indigenous culture divided between the neocolonial situation and the post-Soviet trauma. (shrink)

Violence suffered by children is a violation of human rights and a global health problem. Children with disabilities are especially vulnerable to violence in the school environment, which has a negative impact on their well-being and health. Students with disabilities educated in special schools have, in addition, more reduced experiences of interaction that may reduce both their opportunities for learning and for building protective social networks of support. This study analyses the transference of evidence-based actions to prevent violence in schools (...) – the dialogic model of prevention and resolution of conflicts (DMPRC) – in the context of a special school, and its impact on the reduction of violence, the creation of egalitarian relationships, and the prevention of bullying. A case study with a communicative approach was conducted including in-depth interviews and communicative focus groups with the diverse participants to analyze the process of transformation carried out in the school and the main actions that give students a voice in the management and creation of egalitarian non-violent relationships. The results show that the inclusion of the students’ voices in the resolution and prevention of conflicts reduces violence, empowers special education students, strengthens friendship relationships, caring behavior, and active positioning among the community. The positive impact of the transference of the DMPRC to special schools contributes to students’ well-being and healthy development by offering safe and protective educational spaces and quality emotional education, also contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals related to the elimination of all forms of violence in childhood. (shrink)

Contrary to an understanding of the struggle against gender violence as placing men and women in opposition to one another, victims have always been supported by both women and men. To prevent violence is important to know not only which message should be transmitted but also how the dialogue should unfold, and the characteristics of the people engaging in that dialogue. Because of the existing association between attraction and violence in our society, the unity of the language of ethics and (...) the language of desire in such dialogue has become a key element in the struggle against gender violence. This study identifies the strong presence of communicative acts that unify these languages in the women and men who are successful in this struggle. The opposition to violence that they defend guide their own desires, which are transmitted through their communicative acts to the people around them. (shrink)

Our society is often understood and discussed as a society of non-contemporaneity —an issue that undoubtedly corresponds to a widespread and disturbing feeling in today's society. Both at personal level and in communicative contexts one often has the impression of an interlacement and a contrast among different rhythms, temporal horizons, durations and terms, and the result is usually a sort of pressure and a sense of inadequacy. It seems to me, however, that the difficulties we have to face don't depend (...) so much on the fact that we belong to a culture of not-contemporaneity: such cultures have existed, we can describe them and we can reconstruct their relationship with time, but they didn't have the problems of disorientation that seem to torment us today. On the contrary: we have them because our culture is rather a culture of contemporaneity, and this produces problems of synchronisation and a complexity of temporal relations we still cannot adequately deal with. German Unsere Gesellschaft wird oft als eine Gesellschaft der Ungleichzeitigkeit verstanden und diskutiert – eine Problematik, die zweifellos mit einer weitverbreiteten Verstörung in der heutigen Gesellschaft korrespondiert. Sowohl auf einer persönlichen Ebene als auch in kommunikativen Kontexten hat man oft den Eindruck eines Mit- und Gegeneinanders verschiedener Rhythmen, Zeithorizonte, Dauern und Enden, deren Ergebnis gewöhnlich eine Art Druck und ein Gefühl der Unzulänglichkeit sind. Es scheint mir aber, dass die Schwierigkeiten, denen wir uns zu stellen haben, nicht so sehr von unserer Verbundenheit mit einer Kultur der Ungleichzeitigkeit abhängen: Solche Kulturen haben bereits existiert, wir können sie beschreiben und ihre Zeitverhältnisse rekonstruieren, und doch haben sie nicht die Desorientierung erfahren, die uns heute quält. Im Gegenteil: Die heutigen Schwierigkeiten entspringen einer Kultur der Gleichzeitigkeit, die Probleme der Synchronisierung und komplexe Zeitverhältnisse mit sich bringt, mit denen wir immer noch nicht adäquat umgehen können. (shrink)

The paper deals with the changes in the sense of synchronicity and simultaneity connected with the transformations in the structure of society. It examines and criticizes the modern concept of absolute chronology, understood as an objective temporal reference common to all observers. This notion is compared with the relative and flexible (but neither objective nor generalizable) forms of synchronization of different societies. The paper discusses finally the hypothesis that contemporary society is realizing a more complex and recursive form of temporality, (...) that questions the modern ideal of synchronicity. This temporality is connected with recent developments in telematics. (shrink)

The richness and subtlety of the felt presence phenomenon introduced by “Felt Presence: the uncanny encounters with the numinous Other” (Solomonova et al., this issue) offers a challenge to the emerging field of new media. How to create a computer-mediated environment which can engender a spontaneous, creative, and individualized experience such as felt presence? The Other experiment described in this paper explores the possibility of unfolding phenomenological and poetic aura of felt presence experience in a media-rich environment with liminal stimulation, (...) dosed carefully, and open to interpretation. (shrink)

East Asia’s economy is leading the world into the new Asian century. While meritocratic practices in the educational and private sectors are often considered pivotal conditions for East Asia’s economic success, experts have pointed out that the path ahead requires new approaches to ensure social cohesion and stability, which depend on the quality of relations across social divides. These considerations raise multiple questions for philosophers: What forms of social meritocracy are necessary to sustain social cohesion? Moreover, how can the detrimental (...) effects of meritocratic practices be contained? Is it possible to utilise some of the intellectual resources indigenous to East Asia to generate innovative solutions? This paper argues that the answers to these questions lie in the indigenous Confucian conceptual resources. Confucian ideas can inspire a more desirable societal ideal for the future of East Asia. In particular, the Confucian emphasis on cultivating reciprocal harmonious human relationships and others’ morality can guide new approaches to fostering social cohesion. As Confucian personal cultivation through harmonious relations is a process of social cohesion, these ideas inspire a) a multiple approach to policymaking that is not only grounded in economic redistribution, b) a richer understanding of societal progress, and c) a democratic approach to fostering social cohesion. Unlike Confucian meritocrats and scholars who defend the Confucian roots of East Asian forms of political and social meritocracy, this paper proves that Confucian conceptual resources can help formulate a societal vision that strengthens cohesion and mitigates the adverse effects of meritocratic practices. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

: By introducing us into core concepts of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, Elena Esposito shows their relevance for contemporary social sciences and the study of unsettled times….

In recent years, a change in attitude in particle physics has led to our understanding current quantum field theories as effective field theories. The present paper is concerned with the significance of this EFT approach, especially from the viewpoint of the debate on reductionism in science. In particular, it is a purpose of this paper to clarify how EFTs may provide an interesting case-study in current philosophical discussion on reduction, emergence and inter-level relationships in general.

The idea for this issue of the Rivista di Estetica comes from a conference that was held at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, June 2011. The question that the speakers were asked to tackle was “What keeps society together?”. At least since John Searle’s 1995 book, The Construction of Social Reality, a popular answer to that question has been that collective intentionality lies at bottom of all manifestations of social reality – from interactions in informal groups (...) to... (shrink)

Research on the role of values in science and objectivity has typically approached trust through its epistemic aspects. Yet, recent work on public trust in science has emphasized the role of non-epistemic values in building and maintaining trust. This paper will use a concept of trust that adds concerns about justice to epistemic conditions to investigate this problem in relation to public health. I will argue that trust-conducive values, particularly justice, are relevant in deciding which value influences are legitimate in (...) scientific decision-making. Drawing on public health ethics, I will provide a consequentialist justification for employing trust-conducive values. While several concepts of justice have been explored in the context of public health, I will further draw on public health ethics, focusing on a view that brings together both distributive and procedural aspects. For illustration, I will use the case of cardiovascular disease prevention, particularly how concerns about justice apply when choosing between population-based and individual-based approaches. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

E. V. Il’enkov proceeded from the classical philosophical notion of Beauty considered in organic unity with Truth and Good. Following Marx, he regarded the sense of Beauty, the supreme mental feeling, as a product of history. Il’enkov insisted on the universal character of this feeling, for its basis is an activity of imagination which also lies at the root of any creative work. His criticism of modern art rested on analysis of the process of disintegration of personality, its capabilities within (...) industrial civilisation to break the natural tie between Truth, Good and Beauty. (shrink)

E. V. Il'enkov proceeded from the classical philosophical notion of Beauty considered in organic unity with Truth and Good. Following Marx, he regarded the sense of Beauty, the supreme mental feeling, as a product of history. Il'enkov insisted on the universal character of this feeling, for its basis is an activity of imagination which also lies at the root of any creative work. His criticism of modern art rested on analysis of the process of disintegration of personality, its capabilities within (...) industrial civilisation to break the natural tie between Truth, Good and Beauty. (shrink)

The current study investigates the influence of variety among online providers and customers' access to knowledge on consumer networks, consumer engagement, and sustainable purchasing. Emphasis is on the underlying relationships among these constructs in the digital economy, which has evolved into a complex structure of multifarious nodes and linkages unfolding in the online environment. The underlying theoretical approaches are knowledge-attitude-behavior (KAB) and customer sovereignty. Against this backdrop, a questionnaire-based survey was given to 200 Millennials (i.e., generation Y) and gen Z (...) Italians—approached as empowered stakeholders requiring accurate information and sustainable solutions from online providers—in January 2023. The data was processed via the structural equation modeling technique PLS-SEM, based on SmartPLS 4. The findings indicated that sustainable purchasing is influenced to some extent by access to knowledge, consumer engagement, and consumer networks. The study endeavors to fill a research gap, as the relationships between variety among online providers and sustainable purchasing, as well as consumer engagement from the empowerment perspective are underexplored. The study provides new evidence of the relationships between consumer networks, consumers' access to knowledge, sustainable purchasing, and consumer engagement in the framework of online retail by inquiring respondents. (shrink)

The collective monograph "Ontology of Stative Situations - Linguistic Modeling. A Contrastive Bulgarian-Russian Study" includes research carried out within the project of the same name "Ontology of stative situations – linguistic modeling. A contrastive Bulgarian-Russian study", supported by the "Scientific Research" Fund of the Ministry of Education and Science in Bulgaria (№ КП-06-РУСИЯ / 23) and from the Russian Fund for Fundamental Research (No. 20-512-18005).

Adam Ferguson’s imperial thought casts new light on the age-old republican dilemma of the tension between empire and liberty. Generations of republican writers had been haunted by this issue as the decline of Rome proved that imperial expansion would eventually ruin the liberty of a state. Many eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers regarded this as an insoluble conundrum and thus became critics of empire. Ferguson shared their basic views but, paradoxically, was still able to defend the British Empire in the debates over (...) the American Revolution. His argument effectively offered a viable solution to the republican dilemma, which distinguished him from his contemporaries. In light of this, I argue that political representation was the pivotal conception for Ferguson to make empire and liberty compatible. It was on this ground that he could advocate the union with Ireland, which he believed would lead to a lasting balance of power in Europe. -/- ; British Empire; liberty; balance of power; political representation; American Revolution; Anglo-Irish Union. (shrink)

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

"Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research (...) evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children's learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development"--. (shrink)

The justification of democracy, while widely debated, is hindered by a sub-optimal conceptual framework. For a start, there is confusion about the basic terms in the discussion. Many theorists claim to support either the ‘intrinsic’ or the ‘instrumental’ value of democracy, but it is unclear what this exactly means. Can democracy have other kinds of values? What does it mean to value democracy intrinsically? As a result, at certain points, scholars are talking past one another and their assessments of their (...) respective approaches to democracy are less clear than what they intended. This paper develops a conceptual framework of the values of democracy. I use this framework to classify theories of democracy under three main groups: theories that value democracy intrinsically, instrumentally, or contributorily (necessarily and non-necessarily). Through this analysis, the points of engagement among the different approaches will emerge and flawed arguments about democracy will be revealed. (shrink)

Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018, 404 p. Cette collection d’essais commence avec une question provocatrice : d’autres cours d’Europe offrent-elles une place « aussi éminente » aux femmes que la cour de France à l’époque moderne? Les études réunies ici montrent de façon évidente l’importance et la centralité des femmes à la cour de France, des reines et princesses au sommet du pouvoir jusqu’aux demoiselles de musique, nourrices, femmes d’officiels et autres. Cet...

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636; Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). In order to account for patterns, the traceback (...) method has been widely applied in research on first language acquisition to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances can be accounted for on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and partially schematic units (Lieven, Elena, Dorothé Salomo & Michael Tomasello. 2009. Two-year-old children’s production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3). 481–508). In the current study, we applied the method to code-mixed utterances (n = 1,506) of three German-English bilingual children between 2 and 4 years of age to investigate individual differences in each child’s own inventory of patterns in relation to their input settings. It was shown that units such as I see X as in I see a Kelle ‘I see a trowel’ could be traced back to the child’s own previous productions. More importantly, we see that each child’s inventory of constructions draws heavily on multiword chunks that are strongly dependent on the children’s language input situations. (shrink)

Emotional facial expression are an important communication channel between artificial characters and their users. Humans are trained to perceive emotions. Robots and virtual agents can use them to make their inner states transparent. Literature reported that some emotional types, such as anger, are perceived as being more intense than others. Other studies indicated that gender influences the perception. Our study shows that once the individual differences amongst participants are included in the statistical analysis, then the emotion type has no further (...) explanatory power. Artificial characters therefore should adapt to their specific users. (shrink)