This material originally appeared as part of a larger publication developed by ERIC, unden a contract with the National Institute of Edu cation, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as a practical resource for teaching about science-related social issues. It was pub lished jointly by ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Studies/social Science Education and the Sociat Science Education Consortium.

What insight is there to gain when Adorno is put “beside himself”? The humoristic tendency of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famous essay on the culture industry highlights the non-categorical modalities borrowed from the avant-gardes and psychoanalysis that disorganize Kant’s supposedly invariant concepts a priori: partialities of the driven montage, allegorisation. This tendency opens on the decentering consequences for the thinking of another subject, beyond the logic of suspicion and the melancolic jouissance that block it.

Author Max Black argues that language should conform to the discovered regularities of experience it is radically mistaken to assume that the conception of language is a mirror of reality.

Perceptual experience and visual imagination both offer a first-person perspective on visible objects. But these perspectives are strikingly different. For it is distinctive of ordinary perceptual intentionality that objects seem to be present to the perceiver. I term this phenomenal property of experience ‘presence’. This paper introduces a positive definition of presence. Dokic and Martin (2017) argue that presence is not a genuine property of perceptual experience, appealing to empirical research on derealisation disorders, Parkinson’s disease, virtual reality and hallucination. I (...) demonstrate that their arguments fall short of establishing that presence is not perceptual. (shrink)

In his article ‘Divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism’ (Religious Studies, 42 (2006), 177-191) Stephen Maitzen develops a novel version of the atheistic argument from divine hiddenness according to which the lopsided distribution of theistic belief throughout the world’s populations is much more to be expected given naturalism than given theism. I try to meet Maitzen’s challenge by developing a theistic explanation for this lopsidedness. The explanation I offer appeals to various goods that are intimately connected with the human (...) cognitive constitution, and in particular, with the way in which we depend upon social belief forming practices for our acquisition of much of our knowledge about the world – features about us that God would value but that also make probable a lopsided distribution of theistic belief, or so I argue. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a novel defense of moderate pessimism about moral deference, i.e., the view that we have pro tanto reason to avoid moral deference. I argue that moral deference fails to give us the epistemic credentials to satisfy plausible norms of moral assertion. I then argue that moral assertions made solely on the basis of deferential moral beliefs violate a plausible epistemic and moral norm against withholding information that one knows, has evidence, or ought to believe will (...) importantly affect another person’s deliberation. Finally, I argue that not only does moral deference fail to put the audience in a good epistemic position it also puts the audience in a bad epistemic and moral position. First, there is a tight connection between outright believing something and being disposed to assert it and so deferential moral beliefs often motivate people to assert something that they don’t have the epistemic credentials to properly assertion. Second, there will often be moral reasons to make assertions—even based on deferential moral beliefs. These assertions, while all-things-considered permissible, will be epistemic impermissible and involve violating a moral norm. (shrink)

We study model theory of actions of finite groups on substructures of a stable structure. We give an abstract description of existentially closed actions as above in terms of invariants and PAC structures. We show that if the corresponding PAC property is first order, then the theory of such actions has a model companion. Then, we analyze some particular theories of interest (mostly various theories of fields of positive characteristic) and show that in all the cases considered the PAC property (...) is first order. (shrink)

We achieve several results. First, we develop a variant of the theory of absolute Galois groups in the context of many sorted structures. Second, we provide a method for coding absolute Galois groups of structures, so they can be interpreted in some monster model with an additional predicate. Third, we prove the “Weak Independence Theorem” for pseudo-algebraically closed (PAC) substructures of an ambient structure with no finite cover property (nfcp) and the property [Formula: see text]. Fourth, we describe Kim-dividing in (...) these PAC substructures and show several results related to the SOPnhierarchy. Fifth, we characterize the algebraic closure in PAC structures. (shrink)

The formal part of this chapter is concerned with measures of need-based justice. According to the measures we propose, a distribution is unjust (i) the more it deviates from absolute need satisfaction and equal degrees of need satisfaction, (ii) the more the given undersupply could have been mitigated by transfers, or (iii) the more resources are used for oversupply instead of need satisfaction. These measures are compared, i.e., as to the satisfaction of need-oriented relatives of axioms prominent in poverty measurement; (...) and we have a critical eye on the proposals of Jasso and Miller. The empirical part reports on three vignette studies conducted to find out how people evaluate the justice of given distributions and how they distribute goods when aiming at justice. The main goal was to measure the significance ascribed to need. This significance was compared with the significance ascribed to effort or equality; and it was shown that a need’s influence decreases when the corresponding person is accountable for having a higher amount of it. In the third study, we found out that needs that are not directed at bare survival, such as the need for participation in social life, are attributed lower degrees of importance. The chapter concludes with some implications of our research for a theory of need-based justice. (shrink)

On a standard understanding of externalist metasemantic theories, such theories require a speaker to defer to other speakers in order to share content with them. We argue that this standard understanding is mistaken, and that, on a proper understanding of externalism, sharing content does not depend in any way on deference, either to experts, or one’s linguistic community. We defend a version of externalism that we call ‘pure externalism’, and we argue that the idea that shared content requires deference is (...) a residue of internalism/descriptivisism to which externalists ought to be opposed. We also argue that, despite common belief to the contrary, several of the originators of externalism, including Tyler Burge, do not think that deference is in any way relevant, let alone required, for shared externalist content. (shrink)

Collection of essays previously published by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, a Bolivian-German writer, curator and philosopher. From 2019 to 2020 he was the director of Bolivia's National Museum of Art (Museo Nacional de Arte, MNA) in La Paz. "The texts that make up this publication appeared in the newspaper La Razón, of La Paz, between October 13, 2019 and August 24, 2021, the first five in the supplement "Tendencias" and the remaining three in the section "Voces". At the end of (...) each one the respective date is recorded. The general revision that was made for this edition does not alter the spirit of the texts, written in difficult times for our country." --Editorial note. (shrink)

The identity of a natural kind can be construed in terms of its causal profile. This conception is more appropriate to science than two alternatives. The identity of a natural kind is not determined by one causal role because one natural kind can have many causal roles and several functions and because some functions are shared by different kinds. Furthermore, the microstructuralist thesis is wrong: The identity of certain natural kinds is not determined by their microstructure. It is true that (...) if A and B have the same microstructural composition then a sample of a c. hemical substance A is of the same chemical substance as a sample of B. However, the reverse does not hold. It is not the case that if a sample of a chemical substance A is of the same chemical substance as a sample of B then A and B have the same microstructural composition. This is because a macroscopic NK can be “multiconstituted” by different microstructures. (shrink)

For the past 40 years, philosophers have generally assumed that a key to understanding mental representation is to develop a naturalistic theory of representational content. This has led to an outlook where the importance of content has been heavily inflated, while the significance of the representational vehicles has been somewhat downplayed. However, the success of this enterprise has been thwarted by a number of mysterious and allegedly non-naturalizable, irreducible dimensions of representational content. The challenge of addressing these difficulties has come (...) to be known as the “hard problem of content” (Hutto & Myin, 2012), and many think it makes an account of representation in the brain impossible. In this essay, I argue that much of this is misguided and based upon the wrong set of priorities. If we focus on the functionality of representational vehicles (as recommended by teleosemanticists) and remind ourselves of the quirks associated with many functional entities, we can see that the allegedly mysterious and intractable aspects of content are really just mundane features associated with many everyday functional kinds. We can also see they have little to do with content and more to do with representation function. Moreover, we can begin to see that our explanatory priorities are backwards: instead of expecting a theory of content to be the key to understanding how a brain state can function as a representation, we should instead expect a theory of neural representation function to serve as the key to understanding how content occurs naturally. (shrink)

Written primarily in Latin, 1918/1982 edition.

This chapter highlights the common practice of appealing to lay intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories of free will. These arguments often seem to assume that the purported intuitions in question are not results of error, and the purported intuitions are generalizable to some interesting extent. Some empirical investigations of these two assumptions, including some studies that revealed intra‐personal variation in compatibilist intuitions are reviewed. The chapter examines two popular error theories, the affect Hypothesis and the Bypassing Hypothesis, which take (...) these findings to challenges. With new empirical results, it argues instead that both compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions genuinely reflect how people think about free will and moral responsibility. A pluralistic approach of theorizing about free will that allows one to embrace either compatibilism or incompatibilism in different contexts is proposed. (shrink)

Dieses Buch setzt sich auf philosophische Weise mit dem Begriff des Gottes auseinander und untersucht die möglichen Wege, um den Gottesbegriff praktisch zu begründen. Es liefert wichtige Erkenntnisse und Analysemethoden für alle, die sich mit dem Thema auseinandersetzen wollen. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within (...) the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Mohan Matthen holds that visual perceptual content is divided into descriptive and referential elements. Descriptive content is our awareness of sensory features belonging to objects located in the visual field. Matthen conceives of this in terms of an image. The referential element is a demonstrative form of content, by which we pick out those objects as particulars and assert their physical presence. Matthen terms this ‘the feeling of presence’. Together, they make up the ‘assembled message’ that visual states present to (...) the perceiver in perceptual experience. I argue that the two elements cannot play together as Matthen envisages. Beginning with the referential element, I show that the feeling of presence is unable to both provide demonstrative reference and assert that the visual state reflects how things are. Turning to the descriptive element, I argue that Matthen is committed to a view on which descriptive (or image) content is a mental entity, a reified image. This is a common element across perceptual experience, episodic memory and visual imagination. The mental entity proves a defective ingredient in assembling perceptual content that purports to present reality. There are problems integrating the depicted viewpoint with the subject’s actual viewpoint, and problems maintaining a coherent notion of assertion. I argue that the project of assembling perceptual experience from descriptive and referential elements is unworkable. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

What role do linguistic cues on a surface and contextual level have in identifying the intention behind an utterance? Drawing on the wealth of studies and corpora from the computational task of dialog act classification, we studied this question from a cognitive science perspective. We first reviewed the role of linguistic cues in dialog act classification studies that evaluated model performance on three of the most commonly used English dialog act corpora. Findings show that frequency‐based, machine learning, and deep learning (...) methods all yield similar performance. Classification accuracies, moreover, generally do not explain which specific cues yield high performance. Using a cognitive science approach, in two analyses, we systematically investigated the role of cues in the surface structure of the utterance and cues of the surrounding context individually and combined. By comparing the explained variance, rather than the prediction accuracy of these cues in a logistic regression model, we found that (1) while surface and contextual linguistic cues can complement each other, surface linguistic cues form the backbone in human dialog act identification, (2) with word frequency statistics being particularly important for the dialog act, and (3) the similar trends across corpora, despite differences in the type of dialog, corpus setup, and dialog act tagset. The importance of surface linguistic cues in dialog act classification sheds light on how both computers and humans take advantage of these cues in speech act recognition. (shrink)

Verschwörungserzählungen sind ein fortdauernd prominentes Thema in der nachrichtlichen Berichterstattung und treten immer wieder in Zusammenhang mit Bewegungen auf, die demokratische Strukturen zu untergraben versuchen. In der aktuellen Diskussion um Verschwörungserzählungen dominieren psychologische, politische, kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Philosophische Zugänge hingegen scheinen dabei unterrepräsentiert zu sein. Der hier vorliegende Schwerpunkt „Verschwörungserzählungen“ soll einen Beitrag dazu leisten, diesem Mangel abzuhelfen, und das Phänomen der Verschwörungserzählungen aus verschiedenen Perspektiven insbesondere der Praktischen Philosophie zu beleuchten.

Abstract:This essay follows the recent discourse on two phenomena: the tendency of hegemony to incorporate subversive cultures, and the digital reanimation of prominent dead people. At the intersection of these phenomena lies what we call “cultural necromancy,” a special case of hegemonic incorporation that aesthetically manipulates the physical presence of a deceased figure in the service of power. This essay explores historical analogues to cultural necromancy and how the digital age has accelerated the process through examples ranging from medieval saints (...) to Lenin’s mausoleum to the Tupac hologram. It then examines cultural necromancy’s implications for counterculture and resistance. (shrink)

In this short epilogue, Barragán and Ryynänen discuss the possibility of using kitsch and kitsch theories horizons for interpreting contemporaneity in various ways. The main spearhead of the critical notes is aimed at academic culture, which Barragán and Ryynänen claim to have become “kitschified” in a sense.

1. Bd. Allgemeine Grundlegung.--2. Bd. Die statischen und dynamischen Grundbegriffe. 1. T. Die statischen Grundbegriffe.

l. Grundlegung der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung.--2. Natur und Gesellschaft.--3. Die solidarische Gesellschaft.

This paper considers critical rationalism under an institutional perspective. It argues that a methodology must be incentive compatible in order to prevail in scientific competition. As shown by a formal game-theoretic model of scientific competition, incentive compatibility requires quality standards that are hereditary: using high-quality research as an input must increase a researcher’s chances to produce high-quality output. Critical rationalism is incentive compatible because of the way it deals with the Duhem-Quine problem. An example from experimental economics illustrates the relevance (...) of the arguments. (shrink)

The way that the questions of our symposium are framed causes me some concern. At a general level this is for three reasons. First there is a principle of statutory interpretation – Expressio unius...

It is a book all LIS educators and administrators need to read now. The editors and author contributors show us by direct action what critical librarianship is. At the heart of the book is an ethics of care and self-care, an ethics born out of critical stances positioned in examining our rich intersectionalities and inter-being as people of color and allies. Librarians With Spines is a call to action that asks us to reflect on our intentionality as information professionals. It (...) challenges librarians to proudly uphold and carry forward our duty to serve our communities in our daily work. (shrink)