The conference where this article was originally presented solicited recommendations for the “right questions” to ask regarding education and technology. The author of this article suggests that we already know what the right questions are for illuminating technology and its social meaning. What the author wants to know is why those questions in fact are not being asked more widely—why is widespread disinclination to enter explicit deliberation on the proper place of technology so resilient? Langdon Winner uses the term “technological (...) somnambulism” to describe the predominant stance toward technology in our culture, that “we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” via the adoption of new technologies. The basic institutional and ideological forces shaping the development and use of technology are not mysterious. But, scrutiny of those forces remains limited to a relative handful of academics and activists. How can technological somnambulism be countered? (shrink)

Introduction -- The road to imperfection -- Cataloguing irrationality -- Some real life examples -- Science to the rescue -- A deeper look at what's wrong -- Assigning the blame -- Can it be fixed.

In Hanks I defend a theory of propositions that locates the source of propositional unity in acts of predication that people perform in thought and speech. On my account, these acts of predication are judgmental or assertoric in character, and they commit the speaker to things being the way they are represented to be in the act of predication. This leads to a problem about negations, disjunctions, conditionals, and other kinds of embeddings. When you assert that a is F or (...) b is G you do not assert that a is F, nor do you commit yourself to a’s being F. According to my theory, however, in uttering the disjunction you predicate F of a. What is going on? I account for these cases using the concept of cancellation. In uttering the disjunction, the act of predicating F of a is cancelled, and when an act of predication is cancelled it does not count as an assertion and does not commit the speaker to anything. But what is it for an act of predication to be cancelled? One immediate concern is that cancelled predication won’t provide a unified proposition to be the input to disjunction. In this paper I answer this and related objections by explaining and defending my concept of cancellation. (shrink)

Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content, according to which the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. He explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

This book is a lively and provoking introduction to film theory.

This book bridges media, technocultural, urban and journalism studies to examine the role of journalism in relation to a smart city project on Toronto’s waterfront. From the announcement of the public-private partnership called Sidewalk Toronto to the project’s termination, a mediatized controversy unfolded. Through an assemblage approach and a comprehensive case study of the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, it follows the actors and chronicles the Quayside project story as a conversation about the promise and perils of a (...) future “smart” neighbourhood. In the news of Waterfront Toronto, Sidewalk Labs, other actors, events and developments, there were multiple voices and views, interpretations and arguments, that manifested conflicting interests and values. As a situated actor, journalism produced a porous discourse where the prognostic value of the project to come could be expressed. The Quayside story not only described the project and the process with an active propose-and-public pushback movement but articulated relations of transparency and trust, governance and accountability. Journalist’s work of mediation conditioned the project’s emergence and dissolution within asymmetrical relations of power. Sidewalk Lab’s bid for legitimacy would face an oppositional dimension that indented the project’s enactment. Moreover, a time lag between project time and governmental policymaking made the mediatized controversy intractable. With their residual symbolic power, quality journalism contributed to dialogical urban learning. (shrink)

This article provides an Anselmian interpretation of the theme of the congress, Pleasures of Knowledge. First, it shows the practical character of Anselm’s epistemology, according to his dialogue De veritate: cognition is conceived as a process characterised by an internal normative claim – called rectitudo – on the one hand, and practical acts supposed to meet this claim on the other hand. Secondly, the same structure is analysed in Anselm’s ethics especially in his soteriological work Cur deus homo, which serves (...) as a link to connect the emotional mood of the Orationes sive Meditationes with the former considerations on epistemology. Thus, it is shown that emotions play a significant systematic role in Anselmian thought. (shrink)

'Globalization' provides an ambiguous cliché for psychology as the North American and European version of the discipline is being exported widely. After providing a brief history of globalization and the failure of its intended effects I discuss three episodes of psychology's place in a globalized marketplace of ideas; the pre-1900 development of psychology in Germany and North America, the failure of phenomenological psychology in Europe after World War II and the current state of the professionalization of psychology. Psychology has, thus (...) far, largely followed the enthusiasms of the globalizers. While it is far too late to create 'indigenous psychologies,' theory remains a vehicle of questioning, coaxing, and resistance through which to engage the multiplicity of subjectivities that confront us. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

There is a noticeable gap between results of cognitive neuroscientific research into basic mathematical abilities and philosophical and empirical investigations of mathematics as a distinct intellectual activity. The paper explores the relevance of a Wittgensteinian framework for dealing with this discrepancy.

Geary suggests that implicit mathematical principles exist across human cultures and transcend sex differences. Is such knowledge present in animals as well, and is it sufficient to account for performance in all species, including our own? I attempt to trace the implications of Gearys target article for comparative psychology, questioning the exclusion of “subitizing” in describing human mathematical performance, and asking whether human researchers function as cultural agents with animals, elevating their implicit knowledge to secondary domains of numerical performance.

The article deals with the analysis of one medieval solution of semantic paradoxes, namely with the position of the so-called “cassantes” (i.e. “those who nullify”). The solution is based upon designating problematical sentences to be agrammatical and thus “saying nothing”: paradoxes are solved by means of deyning apparent truth-apts. Theoretically fundamental supposition of this step is drawing the distinction between grammatical and logical structure of a sentence, or (from a speech-act theoretical point of view) the distinction between a sentence and (...) a statement. Remarkable analogies can also be shown between this distinction and the distinction between two conceptions of congruence in the twelfth-century grammar. Nowadays the cassationist approach is the solution of paradoxes proposed in the theoretical framework of the illocutionary logic. (shrink)

Instead of drawing out exact paths for overcoming barriers, the authors of the book Enhancing Science Impact refer back to the necessity of reflecting on all aspects of research. There is no one-fits-all solution of approaching sustainability. Instead a comprehensive understanding of problem-structuring is necessary for addressing current challenges. Even though the work provides a practical foci-guideline, a critical reflection on how nature is represented within research programmes and projects is missing.

The present paper is concerned with an exposé of the basic general-semantic theses presented in the tract called “De insolubilibus” written by the 14th century British logician Roger Swyneshed. Swyneshed‘s semantics is analysed as a highly specific theory of truth, correspondence and facts . Swyneshed’s theory revises the correspondence theory of truth and rejects the principle of bivalence, while offering the solution to two different types of paradoxes . As it is usual for theories of this kind, Swyneshed’s semantics has (...) to face the specific forms of revenge-arguments, which lead to a specific conception of truthmaking. (shrink)

Moet de strafrechter ook de scheidsrechter zijn van het publieke debat? De scheiding der machten in het licht van de vrijheid van meningsuiting voor volksvertegenwoordigers This article contains a critical review of the provisions in the Dutch penal code regarding group defamation and hate speech. It is argued that not only these provisions themselves but also their application by the Dutch supreme court, constitutes a problem for the legitimacy and functioning of representative democracy. This is due to the tendency of (...) the supreme court to employ special constraints for offensive, hateful or discriminatory speech by politicians. Because such a special constraint is not provided or even implied by the legislator, the jurisprudence of the supreme court is likely to end up in judicial overreach and therefore constitutes a potential – if not actual – breach in the separation of powers. In order to forestall these consequences, the protection of particularly political speech should be improved, primarily by a revision of the articles 137c and 137d of the Dutch penal code or the extension of parliamentary immunity. (shrink)

This article provides somephilosophical ``groundwork'' for contemporary debatesabout the status of the idea(l) of critical thinking.The major part of the article consists of a discussionof three conceptions of ``criticality,'' viz., criticaldogmatism, transcendental critique (Karl-Otto Apel),and deconstruction (Jacques Derrida). It is shown thatthese conceptions not only differ in their answer tothe question what it is ``to be critical.'' They alsoprovide different justifications for critique andhence different answers to the question what giveseach of them the ``right'' to be critical. It is arguedthat (...) while transcendental critique is able to solvesome of the problems of the dogmatic approach tocriticality, deconstruction provides the most coherentand self-reflexive conception of critique. A crucialcharacteristic of the deconstructive style of critiqueis that this style is not motivated by the truth ofthe criterion (as in critical dogmatism) or by acertain conception of rationality (as intranscendental critique), but rather by a concern forjustice. It is suggested that this concern should becentral to any redescription of the idea(l) ofcritical thinking. (shrink)

In the 1330s Roger Swyneshed formulated a solution to semantic paradoxes based on the distinction between correspondence with reality and self-falsification as truth-making factors. Since Swyneshed states that some valid inferences are not truth-preserving, his view implies the question of the general definition of validity which he does not address explicitly. Logical works attributed to Paul of Venice contain developments of Swyneshed's contextualist semantics substantially modified by the assumption that sentential meanings are objective propositional entities. The main goals of this (...) paper are to show the correlations between the ontological and logical developments of Swyneshed's semantics in the works of Paul of Venice and to outline a context-sensitive formal semantics that could serve as a model of this family of semantic theories. (shrink)

The problem of logical omniscience breaks down to the problems of the closure of knowledge under implication and of the distribution of knowledge over implication. In late medieval scholasticism these two related issues were engaged in various genres, in particular in general analysis of validity, games of obligationes, solution to self-referential antinomies and semantics of terms. The present study analyses the corpus of fourteenth-century texts with some overreaches to the subsequent two centuries, attempting to cover representatives of both the “British” (...) and the “Continental” tradition. With some degree of simplification, this results in a range of four basic positions: 1. knowledge is closed under “analytic entailment” (Buridan), 2. knowledge distributes over implication (Heytesbury), 3. knowledge distributes over implication provided that its consequent’s truth is being taken into consideration (Peter of Mantua), 4. knowledge does not distribute overimplication (Wyclif). (shrink)

One of the prominent debates of post-Tridentine scholasticism addressed probability, often expressed by the term “moral” (or adverbially, “morally”), originally motivated by the epistemology of decision-making and the debates on predestination and “middle knowledge”. Puente (or Pedro) Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), an Iberian Jesuit and the author of one of the earliest Jesuit philosophy courses, entered this debate in the early-seventeenth century. This paper presents his 1610s and 1620s analyses of different forms or degrees of evidence, certainty, and necessity or (...) impossibility, addressing the commonly-used trichotomy of the “metaphysical”, “physical”, and “moral”, in which “moral” is the weakest form of a modality, together with the paradigmatic examples and interesting applications of the framework. (shrink)

Patient advocacy is an important aspect of nursing care, yet there are few instruments to measure this essential function. This study was conducted to develop, determine the psychometric properties, and support validity of the Protective Nursing Advocacy Scale (PNAS), which measures nursing advocacy beliefs and actions from a protective perspective. The study used a descriptive correlational design with a systematically selected sample of 419 medical-surgical registered nurses. Analysis of the 43-item instrument was conducted using principal components analysis with promax rotation, (...) which resulted in the items loading onto four components. The four subscales have sufficient internal consistency, as did the overall PNAS. Satisfactory evidence of construct, content, and convergent validity were determined. Implications for nursing practice include using the PNAS in conjunction with an educational program to enhance advocacy skills, which may help to improve patient outcomes. (shrink)

Among the important conceptual innovations introduced in the second scholasticism era and motivated by theological debates following the Council of Trent were the theories of moral necessity and moral implication. As they were centred upon a view of moral necessity as a form of necessity weaker than physical necessity, and moral implication as weaker than physical implication, some interpretations of moral necessity encouraged the logic of statistical hypotheses and probability. Three branches of this debate are studied in this paper: the (...) explanation of moral necessity in terms of suppositio, the confrontation over the interpretation of moral necessity, and the theory of statistical quantification. (shrink)

Craig Hanks and Aili Bresnahan are contributing editors only -- not main editors.