Among scientific realists and anti-realists, there is a well-known, perennial dispute about the reality and knowability of unobservable objects. This dispute is also present among structural realists, who all agree that science gives us genuine knowledge of structure at the unobservable level (however that structure may be understood). Ontic structural realists reduce or eliminate the ontological role of objects, while epistemic structural realists argue that objects do or might exist but are unknowable. In part because ontic structural realism has some (...) evidence from quantum mechanics and the consequent underdetermination of the metaphysics of objects in its favor, the majority of contemporary structural realists adopt that view. In contrast, I argue that epistemic structural realism is a highly compelling view, particularly in the form that remains agnostic about unobservable objects. This view can remain consistent with the empirical data from quantum mechanics, can give a satisfactory account of the metaphysics of structure, and can distinguish itself from other extant versions of realism. I provide two arguments in favor of agnosticism about objects, the first of which argues that suspending belief is consistent with the impetus of naturalized metaphysics, and the second of which argues that agnosticism about objects is a rational response to reflection on the limits and aims of science. Thus, I show that agnostic epistemic structural realism is a defensible and compelling view in the philosophy of science that demands more attention in the literature. (shrink)

Structural realists claim that structure is preserved across instances of radical theory change, and that this preservation provides an argument in favor of realism about structure. In this paper, I use the shift from Newtonian gravity to Einstein’s general relativity as a case study for structural preservation, and I demonstrate that two prominent views of structural preservation fail to provide a solid basis for realism about structure. The case study demonstrates that (i) structural realists must be epistemically precise about the (...) concrete structure that is being preserved, and (ii) they must provide a metaphysical account of how structure is preserved through re-interpretation in light of a new theory. Regarding (i), I describe a means of epistemic access to the unobservable that I call “thick detection” of structure, which isolates the structure that will be preserved. Regarding (ii), I argue that thickly detectable structure is preserved across theory change through a process of extracting the old structure from the new structure, much like what has been done with geometrized versions of Newtonian gravity. With these two responses in hand, the structural realist can adequately account for the preservation of structure and can provide a strong argument in favor of structural realism. (shrink)

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like (...) the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed. (shrink)

La noción de interpretación desarrollada en el racionalismo crítico de Karl R. Popper muestra atributos específicos que la distinguen de modo sustancial de la interpretación constitutiva de la experiencia que tanto N. R. Hanson como Th. Kuhn defienden en sus respectivas propuestas. Se muestra que la interpretación del modelo popperiano queda atrapada en una epistemología de corte empirista que la separa de modo radical de toda hermenéutica filosófica. The notion of interpretation developed in the critical rationalism of Karl R. (...) Popper displays specific attributes that substantially distinguish it from the constituent interpretation of experience defended in both N. R. Hanson and T. Kuhn proposals. The article shows that the interpretation of Popper's model is trapped in an empiricist epistemology that radically separates it from all hermeneutic philosophy. (shrink)

Generic language (e.g., “tigers have stripes”) leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these effects by testing how correcting generics might affect the development of these beliefs about novel social and animal kinds (Study 1) and about gender (Study 2). Correcting generics by narrowing their scope to (...) a single individual limited beliefs that the referenced categories could explain what their members would be like while broadening the scope to a superordinate category (Study 2) uniquely limited endorsement of gender norms. Across both studies, correcting generics did not alter beliefs about feature heritability and had mixed effects on inductive inferences, suggesting that additional mechanisms (e.g., causal reasoning about shared features) contribute to the development of full-blown essentialist beliefs. These results help illuminate the mechanisms by which generics lead children to view categories as having rich inductive and causal potential; in particular, they suggest that children interpret generics as signals that speakers in their community view the referenced categories as meaningful kinds that support generalization. The findings also point the way to concrete suggestions for how adults can effectively correct problematic generics (e.g., gender stereotypes) that children may hear in daily life. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 286—310. This mad play of writing —Stéphane Mallarmé Somewhere in between mathematics and theory, light and dark, physicality and projection, oscillates the poetry of Alessandro De Francesco. The texts hold no periods or commas, not even a capital letter for reference. Each piece stands as an individual construction, and yet the poetry flows in and out of the frame. Images resurface from one poem to the next, haunting the reader with reincarnations of an object lost in the (...) grass or a representation of a pear in a Dutch still life, embedded in cycles of cinematic close ups and multiple dimensions. As a whole, De Francesco’s oeuvre suggests, to use the title of one of his works, a redefinition —linguistic, epistemological, personal. The poem The End (un’agenda) (The End (an agenda)) opens with a quote by literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, which may be translated as follows: Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from this optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated out approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence.[1] In writing, De Francesco seeks to redefine our approach to things. His poems, like Blanchot’s writings, speak to both illuminate and to obscure. The reader hangs in an absence of reality within language that necessitates an attempt at interpretation, yet renders such a search ultimately futile. De Francesco draws the anonymous images that appear in this poem from the city of Paris, his current home. The fragmented narrative depicts an inner doubt of realness, calling for a confirmation of a physical existence beyond verbalization and cogitation. Cyclical references to film throw into question the reliability of the reality he creates. The light, sometimes red and safe, other times absent and murky, cannot necessarily be trusted as a guaranteed means of illumination. Blanchot’s distinction between language and visualization, and the relationship of each to reality, though linked specifically to The End (un’agenda) , can be a lens through which to read any of the three works that follow. assente obliqua (absent oblique) is composed of descriptions of six still life paintings, ranging from Dutch masterpieces of the seventeenth century to 1960s minimalism. The actual images of the paintings are absent, and the text is the sole source and object of a virtual reality created around the artwork. “Absent oblique” refers to the light source placed outside of the frame, which both informs and distracts viewing of the scene. Although mere description can be unreliable and unsatisfying in its necessary limitation, the representational act of description is shown as more than just a human want. It is a need, a means by which to grapple with an unsure reality. As the illustrations progress, they descend into abstraction and chaos. The precariously placed plate triggers the movement: the bottle bursts and the objects collapse into the movement of a tracking film camera. corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale (foreign body in ascending motion) is prose poetry in action. Its objective tone of description is skewed by the subjectivity of the narrative as horrific images are relayed in fragmented but matter-of-fact manner. A “foreign body” is both a mass of cancerous cells, and a corporeal description, and the poem takes the reader on a journey back and forth between the two, destination unclear. Beyond a questioning of the real, corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale is an examination of the possible. De Francesco’s poetry becomes a camera obscura through which to observe the constant flux of light and dark that blurs our reality. His work is colored by the idea of apo koinou , a Greek term meaning “from the common” that involves a construction of two clauses with a shared word or phrase. Through such melting of meaning, De Francesco creates a fluid ambiguity that is nonetheless grounded in bodily concepts. In assente obliqua , the reader is confronted with a description of a still life that rapidly transforms into a more chilling scene: the membrane of the mushroom in the basket emerges behind the white cloth a body could hide itself that asks for help In the realm of pure description, there is a mushroom that peeks out from behind a white cloth in a basket. Behind the white cloth, too, there could be a body, hiding, asking for help. Such an elision elicits disorienting mistrust in temporality, but also expands the planar possibilities of syntactical meaning. A white cloth is not merely a construct in still life painting, but veil that both shields and reveals potential mysteries. It is a proposed alternative to a traditional Western binary of subjectivity and objectivity. The apo koinou construction is rare in modern English, having slipped out of use after its resurgence in Old English poetry. De Francesco reintroduces this blur of object and subject relations into a modern light. He draws inspiration from a device used by Gruppo 63 founder and avant-garde poet Antonio Porta tended toward repetition of phrases in third person perspective. In Italian, it is perfectly grammatically correct to omit the subject, including only a verb conjugation. Gender, even humanity unknown, the subject dissolves into the action, thus giving to the poetry the power to change the reader’s perception of who or what is actually acting. To further push the relative boundaries of experience, De Francesco expands his written poetry into what he calls “reading environments.” In these sound experiments, De Francesco’s voice reading his poetry is manipulated by real time digital voice processing. The written is transformed to the spoken, and then injected with currents of electric sound. “At each activation of word in the darkness,” (from The End (un’agenda) ) language is permutated into a nonphysical yet all-encompassing being. In these projects, realized all over Europe, De Francesco continues his examination of the word’s potency beyond the page and into an “n-dimensional space,” where the lines between nature and affect are intertwined. To publish excerpts of De Francesco’s oeuvre is to show screen shots of full-length film, to read pull quotes from a philosophy treatise. In these poems, there are questions, not to be answered, but to be questioned again. The words will oscillate in and out of the square construction found in his poems, out of the borders of the page, out of the rectangle of the laptop screen. NOTES (1) Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation . Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 27. EDITORS' NOTE The .pdf above contains about twenty pages of translation and the original Italian poetry. Below we provide only a brief account. The End (an agenda) Parler, ce n’est pas voir. Parler libère la pensée de cette exigence optique qui, dans la tradition occidentale, soumet depuis des millénaires notre approche des choses et nous invite à penser sous la garantie de la lumière ou sous la menace de l’absence de lumière. —Maurice Blanchot in this n-dimensional space i could spy on myself from the cracks while going back and forth from the summer to the wardrobe from the night to the parking lot but something filters in through the half-closed shutters becomes an event enunciation we stay without explanation like parallel curves on the back of a solid growing older she enters the garden always repeats certain phrases the elevator to be redone the neighbor’s music the steps the pavement furls like the leaves of a fern when touched she is framed from behind while she moves rocking she covers distances slowly a bag overflows from the wardrobe something stirs inside but then the suitcase comes open not even by my hand it’s the objects that are starting to filter out the little red haired monster watches idling the appointments written on one of your agendas two years old still seem urgent each letter holds itself upright on the page with flourishes and arabesques each angle has its own geography i’m trying to describe the path the fingers trace on the carpet the zipper takes the opposite route we are suspended on the stairs above the water in the center is the summer seen from above the darkness of the city passes from one headlight to the next the surfaces of our arms cohere and are shiny underneath the blinking of a sign each pore is an open expanse the body dreams the hair gives form to the possible some daring swimmers were throwing themselves into the seine they swam upstream up to the first quay look there could exist behind the screen a room where even when the lamp is out and the curtains drawn even when the suitcase wasn’t closed everything seemed red everything calm construction of a four-dimensional tetrahedron by R. Courant – H. Robbins, What is Mathematics? Oxford University Press, 1941  . (shrink)

This article examines the implications of the transition to online or blended learning for first generation scholars (FGS) brought about by Covid-19. We present the findings of a mixed methods project that draws data from both in-depth qualitative interviews and a large quantitative survey of students at Durham University. We offer a comparative analysis of how FGS contrast to the general student body in relation to a range of key challenges that Covid-19 and the consequent ‘online pivot’ posed to university (...) life including technological, social and resource based issues. Our findings demonstrate that FGS were particularly affected by this shift to online or blended learning. The final substantive section discusses a range of potential mitigation strategies adopted by the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, with the assumption that some, at least, of these, and our data, will be of wider relevance in the sector. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecognising a facial expression is more difficult when the expresser's body conveys incongruent affect. Existing research has documented such interference for universally recognisable bodil...

That there is a heritable or familial component of susceptibility to chronic non‐communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease is well established, but there is increasing evidence that some elements of such heritability are transmitted non‐genomically and that the processes whereby environmental influences act during early development to shape disease risk in later life can have effects beyond a single generation. Such heritability may operate through epigenetic mechanisms involving regulation of either imprinted or non‐imprinted genes but (...) also through broader mechanisms related to parental physiology or behaviour. We review evidence and potential mechanisms for non‐genomic transgenerational inheritance of ‘lifestyle’ disease and propose that the ‘developmental origins of disease’ phenomenon is a maladaptive consequence of an ancestral mechanism of developmental plasticity that may have had adaptive value in the evolution of generalist species such as Homo sapiens. BioEssays 29: 145–154, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

We argue in favour of the general proposition that the nature of reasoning is best understood within a context of its origins and development. A major dimension of what develops in the years from childhood to adulthood, we propose, is increasing meta-level monitoring and management of cognition. Two domains are examined in presenting support for these claims—multivariable causal reasoning and argumentive reasoning.

The way many human rights advocates frame the international norm against child, early, and forced marriage (CEFM) has shifted in the past decade. While CEFM has historically been framed as driven by poverty and underdevelopment, advocates have more recently discussed the problem with a feminist sexuality frame. What leads advocates to change their framing about an international norm? We build an argument that stresses how (a) the nature of the frame, (b) the characteristics of the advocates, and (c) the characteristics (...) of the discursive environment interact to determine whether and to what extent advocates will adopt an alternative frame. We use a multi-methods approach (machine-learning text analysis, process tracing, and interviews) to examine the process of frame adoption around an international norm. Our theoretical understanding of international norms requires a better grasp on the role of framing, especially framing among the very norm entrepreneurs that are critical to international norm diffusion. (shrink)

Many office workers use computers and the Internet not only to get their daily jobs done but also to deal with their personal businesses. Therefore employers nowadays monitor their employees electronically to prevent the misuse of the company resources. The use of electronic monitoring in organizations causes issues of trust and privacy. This study is dedicated to developing a conceptual model on the two issues under electronic monitoring. Control, considered as the essence of the definition of privacy as well as (...) the foundation of the control model in the theory of procedural justice, plays an important role to people’s privacy concerns and trust. People’s perceived‐self, as essential in the group‐value model in the theory of procedural justice and in the cultural studies, also plays an important role to people’s privacy concerns and trust. This study presents research hypotheses on trust and privacy under electronic surveillance based on the two models of the theory of procedural justice, social identity theory, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Recently, Anglo-American philosophy has become something of a scandal. The disturbing lack of women and minorities in the field, combined with revelations of institutional discrimination and sexual harassment in several departments of Philosophy, have placed philosophy in the national and international spotlight. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, and other under-represented groups in the discipline have created blogs, conferences, task forces, guides, and other sites to give voice to, and address the concerns of, the philosophically marginalized. It is this background that (...) gave rise to the formation of our panel on diversity at the 59th annual meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association. Our remarks here participate in a much larger, continuing conversation that we are inviting the reader to join. A list of resources for those interested in addressing philosophy’s “diversity problem” is attached at the end of the panel. (shrink)

Part I of the present work outlined the rigorous application of information theory to a quantum mechanical system in a thermodynamic equilibrium state. The general formula developed there for the best-guess density operator $\hat \rho$ was indeterminate because it involved in an essential way an unspecified prior probability distribution over the continuumD H of strong equilibrium density operators. In Part II mathematical evaluation of $\hat \rho$ is completed after an epistemological analysis which leads first to the discretization ofD H and (...) then to the adoption of a suitable indifference axiom to delimit the set of admissible prior distributions. Finally, quantal formulas for information-theoretic and thermodynamic entropies are contrasted, and the entire work is summarized. (shrink)

Although there is a growing body of research on social media, only few studies have considered organic products. Therefore, this study mapped the diffusion path of the social media resources for organic products in Mexico and South Korea through Twitter and compared the contents of tweets about organic products in terms of their semantic and hyperlink networks using webometric methods. The results indicate that for organic products, Koreans sent tweets much more frequently than Mexicans. Mexican tweets focused on basic food (...) products in street markets, whereas Korean tweets highlighted promotions and firms, revealing the corporatist structure of its economy. In both cases, the findings support Twitter as a useful tool for Word-of-Mouth Communication on the online environment, among product consumers, and between consumers and enterprises. (shrink)

In order to solve the problems of poor physical fitness of college students and low efficiency of college sport venues' management, an intelligent sports management system based on deep learning technology is designed by using information technology and human-computer interaction under artificial intelligence. Based on the Browser/Server structure, the intelligent sports management system is constructed. The basic framework of Spring Cloud is used to integrate the framework and components of each part, and a distributed microservice system is built. The artificial (...) intelligence recommendation algorithm is used to analyze the user's age, body mass index, and physical health status, and recommend sports programs suitable for students, thus realizing the intelligent sports program recommendation function. At the same time, the recommendation algorithm is used to complete the course recommendation according to the students' preferences, teaching distance, opening time, course evaluation, and other indexes, and the course registration system is constructed; after the analysis of the entity and the relationship between the entities of the intelligent sports system, the database relational model of the system is designed with the entity relationship diagram. The results of the functional test show that the system can run well. In conclusion, the sports training environment instructional system based on artificial intelligence and deep learning technology can meet the teaching needs of colleges, improve the sports' quality for college students, and promote psychological education. (shrink)

Historians of philosophy will spill huge amounts of ink scrutinizing the reason why abduction was highlighted so much in the first two decades of the 21st century. Not to mention the numerous scholarly articles on abduction published in logic, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, semiotics, and philosophy of science, several monographs on abduction appeared during this period: Magnani, Walton, Gabbay and Woods, Aliseda, to name a few. It looks as if they were responding to Hintikka’s influential paper “What Is Abduction? The (...) Fundamental Problem of Contemporary Epistemology” published in this journal at the end of the last century.In order to appreciate... (shrink)

This paper proposes research propositions to study on MMOG and MUD addictions based on their causes – flow state and social interaction. Though previous studies relate MMOG addictions to Internet addictions based on social interactions, this study after examining the underlying theories of Use and Gratification The-ory and Flow Theory concludes that what cause MMOG addiction is flow experience not social interaction. On the other hand, the cause of MUD addiction is social interaction. After proposing the propositions of MUD and (...) MMOG addiction causes, this study provides possible impacts of such addictions based on the reasoning between the two theories and two online game addictions. (shrink)

The activities and consequences of workplace bullying and harassment have been widely explored in the literature but mainly studied within the scope of individuals or at the team level. Taking a holistic approach, we associate the concept of bullying with firm-level performance as well as stakeholders’ responses in the market. In this paper, we examine whether and how market investors react to the news of corporate harassment by top officials of publicly listed firms in Korea. Using a standard event study (...) methodology and multiple regression analysis with matched sample, we find significantly negative stock price reactions to news of corporate bullying. We also find that the impact is more salient if emotional bullying is involved and discuss both the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. (shrink)

The aim of this research work is to find out some results in fixed point theory for a pair of families of multivalued mappings fulfilling a new type of U -contractions in modular-like metric spaces. Some new results in graph theory for multigraph-dominated contractions in modular-like metric spaces are developed. An application has been presented to ensure the uniqueness and existence of a solution of families of nonlinear integral equations.