Durkheim's underdeveloped notion of fatalism is the keystone for a bridge between two conceptual categories central to Marxian and Durkheimian theory: alienation and anomie. Durkheim does not necessarily disagree with Marx that excessive regulation can be socially damaging but chooses to highlight the effects of under- regulation. A Durkheimian critique of overregulation becomes possible if we turn away from anomie and toward Durkheim's idea of fatalism-a concept that I will argue here is unexpectedly consistent with Marx's notion of alienation. We (...) can infer that Durkheim presents us with a notion of an "optimal" human condition that exists between anomie and fatalism. The structure of modern societies, it will be argued, is characterized not just by excessive control leading to alienation or by a lack of integrative restraint leading to anomie but also by active efforts to optimally regulate social life. (shrink)

Durkheim's underdeveloped notion of fatalism is the keystone for a bridge between two conceptual categories central to Marxian and Durkheimian theory: alienation and anomie. Durkheim does not necessarily disagree with Marx that excessive regulation can be socially damaging but chooses to highlight the effects of under-regulation. A Durkheimian critique of overregulation becomes possible if we turn away from anomie and toward Durkheim's idea of fatalism—a concept that I will argue here is unexpectedly consistent with Marx's notion of alienation. We can (...) infer that Durkheim presents us with a notion of an “optimal” human condition that exists between anomie and fatalism. The structure of modern societies, it will be argued, is characterized not just by excessive control leading to alienation or by a lack of integrative restraint leading to anomie but also by active efforts to optimally regulate social life. (shrink)

Much of our behavior is guided by our understanding of events. We perceive events when we observe the world unfolding around us, participate in events when we act on the world, simulate events that we hear or read about, and use our knowledge of events to solve problems. In this book, Gabriel A. Radvansky and Jeffrey M. Zacks provide the first integrated framework for event cognition and attempt to synthesize the available psychological and neuroscience data surrounding it. This synthesis (...) leads to new proposals about several traditional areas in psychology and neuroscience including perception, attention, language understanding, memory, and problem solving.Radvansky and Zacks have written this book with a diverse readership in mind. It is intended for a range of researchers working within cognitive science including psychology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, and education. Readers curious about events more generally such as those working in literature, film theory, and history will also find it of interest. (shrink)

Picture books are an important source of new language, concepts, and lessons for young children. A large body of research has documented the nature of parent-child interactions during shared book reading. A new body of research has begun to investigate the features of picture books that support children's learning and transfer of that information to the real world. In this paper, we discuss how children's symbolic development, analogical reasoning, and reasoning about fantasy may constrain their ability to take away content (...) information from picture books. We then review the nascent body of findings that has focused on the impact of picture book features on children's learning and transfer of words and letters, science concepts, problem solutions, and morals from picture books. In each domain of learning we discuss how children's development may interact with book features to impact their learning. We conclude that children's ability to learn and transfer content from picture books can be disrupted by some book features and research should directly examine the interaction between children's developing abilities and book characteristics on children's learning. (shrink)

This article aims to propose a critical and exploratory survey of utopian narratives published in Chile from 1829 to 1934 employing a qualitative and diachronic approach. The fundamental objective of this study is to make evident the thematic tendencies, formal recurrences, influences, and key differences in utopian works of fiction written over a century of Chilean history, connecting these with the overall development of Chilean society, in such a way as to express how the utopian narratives of this period reflect, (...) critique, or rebel against the hegemonic social projects present in the country. Last, this article also seeks to approach these works from the distinctive point of view of the field of utopian studies, thus establishing the relevance of its theoretical framework in the analysis of Chilean fiction. (shrink)

An argument is made that only through a detailed comparison of mutational mechanisms underlying the evolution of the genetic systems governing development, can the 'logic' of individual development be fully comprehended. To do this, it is essential to choose two or more genes (or their products) that interact in the establishment of a given function, and to compare the molecular basis of that interaction in closely related species. The rationale to this approach arises from observations of molecular co‐evolution between interacting (...) partners involved with given functions which have led to species specificity in the manner in which such functions are effected. Molecular coevolution reveals that divergence in sequence can be tolerated whilst biological functions are maintained, not because it is neutral and dispensable but because successful, compensatory changes can evolve in eukaryotic genomes that are in continuous states of flux. (shrink)

It is common to distinguish two great families of representation. Symbolic representations include logical and mathematical symbols, words, and complex linguistic expressions. Iconic representations include dials, diagrams, maps, pictures, 3-dimensional models, and depictive gestures. This essay describes and motivates a new way of distinguishing iconic from symbolic representation. It locates the difference not in the signs themselves, nor in the contents they express, but in the semantic rules by which signs are associated with contents. The two kinds of rule have (...) divergent forms, occupying opposite poles on a spectrum of naturalness. Symbolic rules are composed entirely of primitive juxtapositions of sign types with contents, while iconic rules determine contents entirely by uniform natural relations with sign types. This distinction is marked explicitly in the formal semantics of familiar sign systems, both for atomic first-order representations, like words, pixel colors, and dials, and for complex second-order representations, like sentences, diagrams, and pictures. (shrink)

This article aims to offer a fresh analysis of two passages in the extensive necromancy episode in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile: the ritual to reanimate the dead soldier's corpse (6.667–73), and the surgical procedure Erichtho then proceeds to undertake (6.750–7), resembling the practice of a vivisection. The study will focus mostly on the strong connection of magic to medical traditions in antiquity, with a commentary on, and analysis of, these verses through the lenses of medical vocabulary, themes and motifs. It ultimately (...) concludes that Lucan was familiar with the language and characteristics of the medical tradition, enriched his report with them, and was playing with his audience's knowledge of the same. (shrink)

A semantics of pictorial representation should provide an account of how pictorial signs are associated with the contents they express. Unlike the familiar semantics of spoken languages, this problem has a distinctively spatial cast for depiction. Pictures themselves are two-dimensional artifacts, and their contents take the form of pictorial spaces, perspectival arrangements of objects and properties in three dimensions. A basic challenge is to explain how pictures are associated with the particular pictorial spaces they express. Inspiration here comes from recent (...) proposals that analyze depiction in terms of geometrical projection. In this essay, I will argue that, for a central class of pictures, the projection-based theory of depiction provides the best explanation for how pictures express pictorial spaces, while rival perceptual and resemblance theories fall short. Since the composition of pictorial space is itself the basis for all other aspects of pictorial content, the proposal provides a natural foundation for further pictorial semantics. (shrink)

This article argues that Mona Hatoum's video Measures of Distance presents us with an example of Jean-Luc Marion's saturated phenomenon. Partial and deeply textured images of Hatoum's mother have p...

What is it for a picture to depict a scene? The most orthodox philosophical theory of pictorial representation holds that depiction is grounded in resemblance. A picture represents a scene in virtue of being similar to that scene in certain ways. This essay presents evidence against this claim: curvilinear perspective is one common style of depiction in which successful pictorial representation depends as much on a picture's systematic differences with the scene depicted as on the similarities; it cannot be analyzed (...) in terms of similarity alone. The same problem arises for many other kinds of depiction. The essay concludes that depiction in general is not grounded in resemblance but geometrical transformation. (shrink)

In response to the continued expansion of “red flag” laws allowing broader classes of people to petition a court for the removal of firearms from individuals who exhibit dangerous conduct, this paper argues that state laws should adopt a double-filter provision that balances individual rights and government public safety interests. The main component of such a provision is a special statutory category — “reporting party” — that enables a broader social network, such as co-workers or school administrators, to request that (...) a law enforcement officer file a petition for an Extreme Risk Protection Order. A double-filter provision would not give reporting parties a right to file a court petition directly. Instead, parties would file a request for petition with law enforcement officers, who must seek an ERPO from the court if they find the reporting party's information credible. That information is then transmitted to the court as a sworn affidavit of the reporting party. The goal is to facilitate a balanced policy model that widens the reporting circle in order to feed more potentially life-saving information into the system, mitigates the risk of erroneous deprivation of constitutionally protected due process and Second Amendment rights. (shrink)

The aim of this short note is to highlight a possible, hitherto unnoticed, telestich in Verg. Aen. 8.246–9, which presents the Greek word sēma (‘portent’, ‘wonder’, ‘prodigy’, ‘tomb’). To justify this identification, I will argue for its significance from its context in the poem (the battle between Hercules and Cacus), pointing out the insistence on the imagery of light and revelation, and the use of the phrase mirabile dictu, which appears in the same episode of the Aeneid, in the Latin (...) poetic tradition. (shrink)

This article explores the extent to which multiple-choice history/social studies exams measure student knowledge of social studies content. This article presents descriptive statistics that quantify the findings from a qualitative study. Data for this study were collected from 13 tenth-grade world history students in an urban classroom in New York State. Each participant answered 15 multiple-choice questions that had appeared on previous versions of the Global History and Geography Regents exam, the high-stakes exam they would have to take at the (...) end of the school year. As a small-scale exploratory study, the findings are not what quantitative researchers would call generalizable. Nevertheless, the findings raise questions about what tests measure, their effectiveness, and what constitutes social-studies knowledge. (shrink)

Gambling and Speculation takes the long, historic perspective of its controversial subject. The book offers not only a better understanding of the recent "gambling craze," but also a fundamental inquiry into human nature and the structure of societies. The Brenners argue that the negative image of gamblers and of speculators stems from prejudice, whose roots are in the distant, forgotten past. Legal scholars have frequently confused gambling with speculation and the anti-gambling laws were, at times, erroneously interpreted as implying the (...) prohibitions of contracts in futures and insurance markets. One consequence of all this confusion was that during this century both in the United States and England, the legislation and law on betting and gambling became ambiguous. The authors touch on this issue and make policy recommendations: to abolish restrictions on the industry, diminish the states' role in selling lotteries, and, at the same time, make legal distinctions capable of helping the tiny percentage of players who might be "addicted.". (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of face emoji (disc-shaped pictograms with stylized facial expressions) that accompany written text. We propose that there is a use of face emoji in which they comment on a target proposition expressed by the accompanying text, as opposed to making an independent contribution to discourse. Focusing on positively valenced and negatively valenced emoji (which we gloss as _happy_ and _unhappy_, respectively), we argue that the emoji comment on how the target proposition bears on a contextually (...) provided discourse value endorsed by the author. Discourse values embody what an author desires, aspires to, wishes for, or hopes for. Our analysis derives a range of non-trivial generalizations, including (i) ordering restrictions with regards to the placement of emoji and text, (ii) cases of apparent mixed emotions, and (iii) cases where the lexical content of the accompanying text influences the acceptability of a face emoji. (shrink)

This essay argues for a model of pictorial representation which aims to explain the relationship between pictorial content and pictorial accuracy. Focusing on cases where pictures are intended to convey accurate information, the model distinguishes between two fundamental representational relations: on one hand, a picture expresses a content; on the other, it aims at a target scene. Such a picture is accurate when the content it expresses fits the target scene it aims at. In addition, the model follows the traditional (...) division of content into two aspects: singular content specifies the particular individuals which a picture is of, and attributive content specifies the properties and relations which the picture ascribes to those individuals. For a picture to be accurate, both aspects must be matched in the target. I call this the Three-Part Model because it distinguishes between the triad of factors, singular content, attributive content, and target, which together determine pictorial accuracy. Though previous work on depiction has not recognized the distinctive role played by target, I will argue that it is essential in order to make sense of accuracy judgements across a range of central cases. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 32, Issue S1, Page 1-3, April 2023.

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois addressed the question "How does it feel to be a social problem?". In 2008, Moustafa Bayoumi answered the same question for Muslims in the United States. Both Du Bois and Bayoumi provide powerful critiques against any notion that racialized minorities are inherently problematic. Both men generally argue that one cannot blame racialized minorities for the ill treatment they endure under systematic oppression. Du Bois and Bayoumi are two of many voices fighting against the (...) popular stigmatization of racialized peoples that include public intellectuals, civil rights activists, politicians, community leaders, educators, and many others. One of the things that all these voices have in common... (shrink)

This essay calls attention to a set of linguistic interactions between counterfactual conditionals, on one hand, and possibility modals like could have and might have, on the other. These data present a challenge to the popular variably strict semantics for counterfactual conditionals. Instead, they support a version of the strict conditional semantics in which counterfactuals and possibility modals share a unified quantificational domain. I’ll argue that pragmatic explanations of this evidence are not available to the variable analysis. And putative counterexamples (...) to the unified strict analysis, on careful inspection, in fact support it. Ultimately, the semantics of conditionals and modals must be linked together more closely than has sometimes been recognized, and a unified strict semantics for conditionals and modals is the only way to fully achieve this. (shrink)

Dorfman et al.’s (2024) study on psychiatrists’ perceptions of treatment-refractory mental illness found that while most psychiatrists recognize there are cases where further treatment may no longe...

We analyze the transition of central banks from lenders to market makers of last resort. The adoption of unconventional monetary policies characterizes this transition. In their new role as market makers, central banks engage in the latter by extending and reinforcing interventions in other markets than the traditional bank reserves market. We then explain that the difference between the two roles is one of degree rather than kind. In both cases, the prevention of liquidity shortages is a primary concern. As (...) conventional policies become inadequate, central banks resort to unconventional policies to escape a general liquidity shortage at the zero lower bound. However, these unconventional policies do not solve the structural problems in financial and real markets. Both conventional and unconventional monetary policies cause price distortions, in particular on asset markets. The policies of the market maker of last resort prevent necessary readjustments of cyclical divergences between real and financial markets. (shrink)

Those who wish to claim that all facts about grounding are themselves grounded (“the meta-grounding thesis”) must defend against the charge that such a claim leads to infinite regress and violates the well-foundedness of ground. In this paper, we defend. First, we explore three distinct but related notions of “well-founded”, which are often conflated, and three corresponding notions of infinite regress. We explore the entailment relations between these notions. We conclude that the meta-grounding thesis need not lead to tension with (...) any of the three notions of “well-founded”. Finally, we explore the details of and motivations for further conditions on ground that one might add to generate a conflict between the meta-grounding thesis and a well-founded constraint. We explore these topics by developing and utilizing a formal framework based on the notion of a grounding structure. (shrink)

We look at recent accounts of the indefinite extensibility of the concept set and compare them with a certain linguistic model of indefinite extensibility. We suggest that the linguistic model has much to recommend over alternative accounts of indefinite extensibility, and we defend it against three prima facie objections.

In April 2015, an international team of researchers announced the measurement, for the first time, of the first ionization energy of lawrencium, a superheavy element of atomic number 103. The experimental result, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, led to the reopening of a long-standing debate that concerns the elements that should be part of group 3 of the periodic table. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new line of argumentation to elucidate this problem.