A recently reconstructed text written by Rousseau is obviously the first part of a broader work he had intended to write on the Principles of War. Although the opus remained incomplete, Rousseau integrated most of the insights he had gained from this early analysis on war into his later political thought. The two main premisses of Rousseau′s analysis are that war does not exist between human beings in the state of nature, but only between artificial bodies, i. e. societies consolidated (...) into states, and that therefore war must be regarded as being solely the consequence of the social state. On the international level, the competition between the already constituted wills of the states, who strive to weaken and eventually annihilate each of the other state′s general will, leads to the sheer impossibility of construing a permanent international order based either on force or on law. However, as war has this aporetic nature, for it threatens and at the same time consolidates the constituted civil order, Rousseau will henceforth concentrate on how to strenghten the general will against private interests while, by the same token, enabling it to curb the ambitions of the sovereign. (shrink)

Benjamin's fragment 'Capitalism as Religion', written in 1921, was only published several decades after his death. Its aim is to show that capitalism is a cultic religion, without mercy or truce, leading humanity to the 'house of despair'. It is an astonishing document, directly based on Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but – in ways akin to Ernst Bloch or Erich Fromm – transforming Weber's 'value-free' analysis into a ferocious anticapitalist argument, probably inspired by Gustav (...) Landauer's romantic and libertarian socialism. This article analyses Benjamin's fragment and explores its relationship to Weber's thesis, as well as to the tradition of romantic anticapitalism. (shrink)

Introduction -- Prelude: a paradox of the ineffable. Schopenhauer's deep copy ; The Platonic solutions ; Four dialectical responses (after Nietzsche) -- Bloch's tone. The tone ; The natural klang ; The expressive tone ; Bloch's magic rattle ; The tone's inner ineffability ; The event-forms ; A dialectical account of music history ; Utopian musical speech -- Adorno's musical fracture. Adorno's tone ; Adorno's conception of history ; The tendenz des materials ; Music's language-like ineffability ; The (...) immanent critique ; The paradox of Mahler's vernacular ; The curve of inconsistency -- Interlude: Wittgenstein's silence -- Jankelevitch's inconsistency. Bergson and the inconsistency of time ; The aporetic source of fidelity ; Charm ; Cosmic silence ; Unwoven dialectics -- Deleuze and Guattari's rhythm. Deleuze's rhythm ; The rhythm of sense ; A structuralist quadrivium ; The rhythm of life ; Sonorous co-extensions -- Conclusion: a paradox of the vernacular. (shrink)

The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed an account of modernity that combined rigorous critique, a rejection of nostalgia, left pessimism or transcendental appeals, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden recesses of the everyday. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his ‘critique of everyday life’ but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Although often dismissed as trivial, boredom can be understood as a touchstone through (...) which we can grasp much wider anxieties, socio-cultural changes and subjective crises that are intrinsic to our experience of modernity. Curiously, although Lefebvre was very interested in boredom, he did not analyse it systematically, and he used terms like ‘boring’ or ‘boredom’ in loose, elliptical and seemingly contradictory ways. Such a lack of clarity reveals his ambivalence about this phenomenon, but also highlights a subtle pattern of differentiation he makes between particular modalities of boredom that can be highly illuminating. Through a careful reading of the full range of Lefebvre’s writings, we can begin to understand how he discriminates between different experiences and expressions of boredom, some of which are unambiguously negative, whereas others are judged more positively. With respect to the latter, as he says in Introduction to Modernity, under certain conditions boredom can be full of desires, frustrations and possibilities. Through such an investigation, we start to glimpse latent connections between boredom and utopian propensities that caught the attention not only of Lefebvre but also such thinkers as Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. (shrink)

On oppose volontiers Max Weber à Karl Marx. Certes, le grand sociologue allemand était un libéral, hostile au communisme. Mais c'était aussi, nous rappelle Michael Löwy, textes à l'appui, un analyste très critique du capitalisme et de sa course effrénée au profit qui enferme l'humanité moderne dans un système implacable. Relisant la célèbre étude sur les « affinités électives » entre l'éthique protestante et l'esprit du capitalisme, Michael Löwy prolonge l'analyse. Il explore ainsi les « affinités négatives » (...) entre l'éthique catholique et l'esprit du capitalisme et en retrouve la trace dans divers courants catholiques de gauche en Europe comme dans la théologie de la liberté en Amérique latine aujourd'hui. Il suit également les autres filiations anticapitalistes du sociologue de Heidelberg. D'une part celle du marxisme wébérien qui va de Georg Lukàcs à Maurice Merleau-Ponty, en passant par les premiers théoriciens de l'École de Francfort. D'autre part, celle d'un courant socialiste/romantique, essentiellement promu par des auteurs juifs allemands de la République de Weimar, tels Ernst Bloch ou Walter Benjamin. Cette postérité, Michaël Löwy, qui est à la fois un wébérien érudit et un marxiste engagé, l'incarne à sa manière. Et il entend montrer combien le courant critique du marxisme wébérien reste d'actualité alors que la toute puissance des marchés emprisonne, plus que jamais, les peuples dans la cage d'acier du calcul égoïste. (shrink)

La ampulosidad que caracteriza los nombres de los trabajos filosóficos de nuestra época está ausente en el libro Esperanza y Utopía. Ernst Bloch desde América Latina; acertado título que recoge seis artículos de estudiosos de la obra del filósofo de Ludwigshafen. Título además programático que nos introduce convenientemente a lo que pretenden sus páginas: una visita al pensamiento del autor del Principio Esperanza desde la óptica latinoamericana. Se abre el libro con un prólogo de Michael Löwy, gran conocedor (...) de la filosofía del último judaísmo alemán, a la que ha dedicado varios libros. El profesor francés, además de narrar la forma en que conoció al viejo Bloch en Tubinga, ve en la obra de este pensador un intento de explorar filosóficamente el territorio ignoto del futuro. Sin embargo, contra una futurología ilustrada que intentaba predecir el curso de los acontecimientos históricos como un progreso constante hacia el bien y la felicidad, de un lado, y contra la ciencia ficción que se imagina estados ora ideales ora catastróficos por venir, por otro, Bloch viaja al pasado para descubrir, en la historia de la humanidad, los signos de las nobles esperanzas de una vida mejor. Descubrir el futuro en el pasado a través de las “promesas no cumplidas”2, es el gran mérito de su obra, según Löwy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel by Caroline EdwardsMark SchmittCaroline Edwards. Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 277 pp. Paperback, ISBN 9781108712392.The development of the novel as a literary form is closely linked to the representational mode of realism and how it can convey the human experience of time. That the novel distinguishes itself substantially from earlier forms of literature in how it (...) attempts to capture temporality through means of literary realism has been acknowledged ever since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957). As such, the novel form underwent dramatic changes throughout the periods of modernity and postmodernity, with modernist and postmodernist techniques of representation mirroring shifts in the temporal experience. But how can the contemporary novel—a category itself loaded with implication and definitional problems—of the twenty-first century confront the particular representational challenges of its time? This is the question that Caroline Edwards addresses in her study Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Edwards is concerned with the wider repercussions of the post-postmodernist notion of the Fukuyaman thesis of the “end of history” and the profound challenges to this thesis in the face of the post-9/11 unfolding of the twenty-first century. The temporal experience of this century is marked by what Edwards calls “non-contemporaneity,” that is, a “political, and even ontological uncertainty” (9). In the context of contemporary literature, the resulting “temporal disjointedness that marks our experience in the twenty-first century” has “given rise to different expressions of the unevenness of the contemporary, at the level of novelistic structure, prose style, generic sampling and non-mimetic interventions into otherwise realist narratives and juxtaposed timescales” (9). The notion of non-contemporaneity is drawn from Ernst Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit, which Edwards considers to be “productive to thinking about the complexity of [End Page 595] utopian times and the different kinds of pasts and futures that circulate within our own present moment of contemporaneity, which is inescapably non-contemporaneous with itself ” (30). Edwards considers this noncontemporaneity as a prevalent temporal register in contemporary British fiction that speak to the crises of temporality associated with a range of political, social, and economic events and processes that have marked the first decades of the twenty-first century. The seemingly natural unfolding of the “the linear progressive time of neoliberalism” (8), what Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism,” has increasingly been put into question, not least due to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (158). Similarly, Edwards identifies the 2016 Brexit referendum as symptomatic of a nationalism that must, following Michael Gardiner, always appear to be “out of time” (8). Such crises are thus indicative of anachronistic unevenness and conflicting temporalities. Consequently, a literary fiction that wants to adequately represent these struggles with temporality cannot confine itself to the pitfalls of literary realism, but it would be equally ill-suited by resorting to postmodernist metafiction and irony. Rather, as Edwards contends, the twenty-first-century fictions that she discusses attempt to complicate realist modes by using disruptive and experimental narrative techniques that amount to “non-mimetic experiments with narrative voice and structure” and “delinearised” temporalities (4). With this approach, Edwards argues, these texts interrogate the present as unstable.The four main chapters of Edwards’s book proceed by first establishing the dominant philosophical and theoretical concepts underlying her hypothesis. Chapter 2 (“Reading Fictions of the Not Yet”) is a theoretical and methodological chapter and offers an in-depth engagement with theories of temporality and narratology. Edwards’s aim here is to advocate for an updating of conventional narratology to account for the multilayered narrative experiments with time since modernism and especially in contemporary fiction. Her approach to theorization and analysis is inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) in the decision to focus on close readings of a small number of primary texts and read them as texts or aesthetic artifacts that develop “theories of their own” (29). The chapter offers an in-depth engagement with Bloch’s philosophy of utopianism and his concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit.Another cornerstone for Edwards’s theory and method is the work of... (shrink)

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...) to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

Ramscar, Yarlett, Dye, Denny, and Thorpe (2010) showed how, consistent with the predictions of error‐driven learning models, the order in which stimuli are presented in training can affect category learning. Specifically, learners exposed to artificial language input where objects preceded their labels learned the discriminating features of categories better than learners exposed to input where labels preceded objects. We sought to replicate this finding in two online experiments employing the same tests used originally: A four pictures test (match a label (...) to one of four pictures) and a four labels test (match a picture to one of four labels). In our study, only findings from the four pictures test were consistent with the original result. Additionally, the effect sizes observed were smaller, and participants over‐generalized high‐frequency category labels more than in the original study. We suggest that although Ramscar, Yarlett, Dye, Denny, and Thorpe (2010) feature‐label order predictions were derived from error‐driven learning, they failed to consider that this mechanism also predicts that performance in any training paradigm must inevitably be influenced by participant prior experience. We consider our findings in light of these factors, and discuss implications for the generalizability and replication of training studies. (shrink)

The Chomskian revolution in linguistics gave rise to a new orthodoxy about mind and language. Michael Devitt throws down a provocative challenge to that orthodoxy. What is linguistics about? What role should linguistic intuitions play in constructing grammars? What is innate about language? Is there a 'language faculty'? These questions are crucial to our developing understanding of ourselves; Michael Devitt offers refreshingly original answers. He argues that linguistics is about linguistic reality and is not part of psychology; that (...) linguistic rules are not represented in the mind; that speakers are largely ignorant of their language; that speakers' intuitions do not reflect information supplied by the language faculty and are not the main evidence for grammars; that the rules of 'Universal Grammar' are largely, if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought; indeed, that there is little or nothing to the language faculty. Devitt's controversial theses will prove highly stimulating to anyone working on language and the mind. (shrink)

The idea of a virtue has traditionally been important in ethics, but only recently has gained attention as an idea that can explain how we ought to form beliefs as well as how we ought to act. Moral philosophers and epistemologists have different approaches to the idea of intellectual virtue; here, Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski bring work from both fields together for the first time to address all of the important issues. It will be required reading for anyone (...) working on either side of the debate. (shrink)

Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences—and the relations between the elements they comprise—are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the learning of sequences are rarely investigated. We present three experiments that seek to examine these mechanisms during a typing task. Experiments 1 and 2 tested learning during typing single letters on each trial. (...) Experiment 3 tested for “chunking” of these letters into “words.” The results of these experiments were used to examine the mechanisms that could best account for them, with a focus on two particular proposals: statistical transitional probability learning and discriminative error-driven learning. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that error-driven learning was a better predictor of response latencies than either n-gram frequencies or transitional probabilities. No evidence for chunking was found in Experiment 3, probably due to interspersing visual cues with the motor response. In addition, learning occurred across a greater distance in Experiment 1 than Experiment 2, suggesting that the greater predictability that comes with increased structure leads to greater learnability. These results shed new light on the mechanism responsible for sequence learning. Despite the widely held assumption that transitional probability learning is essential to this process, the present results suggest instead that the sequences are learned through a process of discriminative learning, involving prediction and feedback from prediction error. (shrink)

In popular usage both ideology and utopia have negative, and somewhat similar, connotations. Utopia is thought to imply something naively idealistic and, as a result, impossible to achieve due to the constraints of the ‘real world’ or because ‘human nature’ will get in the way. Ideology is also thought to imply being out of touch with the ‘real world’ by being blinkered by a set of beliefs that distorts one’s understanding of that ‘real world’. This chapter examines the recent history (...) of the relationship between the two concepts by examining the way they are treated by their best known theorists, Ernst Bloch, Michael Freeden, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Karl Mannheim, and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter argues that while they are closely related and one can become the other, they can also be separated because they reflect different ways of understanding the world. (shrink)

In circulation, T cells are spherical with selectin enriched dynamic microvilli protruding from the surface. Following extravasation, these microvilli serve another role, continuously surveying their environment for antigen in the form of peptide‐MHC (pMHC) expressed on the surface of antigen presenting cells (APCs). Upon recognition of their cognate pMHC, the microvilli are initially stabilized and then flatten into F‐actin dependent microclusters as the T cell spreads over the APC. Within 1–5 min, clathrin is recruited by the ESCRT‐0 component Hrs to (...) mediate release of T cell receptor (TCR) loaded vesicles directly from the plasma membrane by clathrin and ESCRT‐mediated ectocytosis (CEME). After 5‐10 min, Hrs is displaced by the endocytic clathrin adaptor epsin‐1 to induce clathrin‐mediated trans‐endocytosis (CMTE) of TCR‐pMHC conjugates. Here we discuss some of the functional properties of the clathrin machinery which enables it to control these topologically opposite modes of membrane transfer at the immunological synapse, and how this might be regulated during T cell activation. (shrink)

Psychiatric diagnosis and prognosis is fraught with important philosophical and conceptual problems. This chapter focuses on some epistemological issues and moral issues that arise in contemporary psychiatric practice. It examines various clinical and actuarial techniques for psychiatric diagnosis, ordered very loosely in terms of how "structured" or "automated" they are. The chapter makes the case for assessing psychiatric treatments with controlled experiments, raises several epistemological dangers that arise from relying on uncontrolled investigations, and considers some of the unique methodological and (...) ethical issues that arise when trying to assess talk therapy. (shrink)

Visitenkarte -- Liebesgrüsse aus Hamburg: Der Spion den ich liebte -- Abgerechnet wird zum Schluss! -- Situationen sind Prinzipienschredder -- Kennen lernen heisst unbekannt lassen -- Wer döst, nimmt wahr -- Staunen kann man nur durch Fenster -- Gnadenlos wertschätzen -- Bin ich ein Typ? -- Takt oder Wahrheit: Jemanden beraten -- Hirntot durch Deutschland -- Ich will mich selbst bestimmen - wie mache ich das bloss? -- Der Handelnde trägt immer Schuld -- Wer guckt mich denn da im Spiegel (...) an? -- Der andere stört - Differenzfähigkeit -- Das ist eine Frage der Selbstachtung -- Erschrockene Gleichgültigkeit -- Müssen wir uns um den Teufel Sorgen machen? -- Es lebe die Grenze - nieder mit allen Grenzen! -- Ich werde gestorben sein -- An etwas glauben oder glauben -- Gott, Grund eines Geheimnisses -- Über den Versuch, sein Leben in Situationen zu reflektieren -- Philosophie anhand von Themen, Problemen und Situationen -- Nachwort. (shrink)

It is shown (i) that causation exists, since we couldn't even ask whether causation existed unless it did; (ii) that any given case of causation is a case of persistence; and (iii) that spatiotemporal relations supervene on causal relations. (ii) is subject to the qualification that we tend not to become aware of instances of causation as such except when two different causal lines---i.e. two different cases of persistence---intersect, resulting in a breakdown of some other case of persistence, this being (...) why we tend to regard instances of causation as fundamentally disruptive, as opposed to preservative in nature. The meaning of (iii) is that spatiotemporal relations are causal relations considered in abstraction of the various specific differences holding between different kinds of causation. (shrink)

Abstract:A brief response to papers presented by Herman Saatkamp, Krzysztof Skowroński, Eric Weber, and John Stuhr on the occasion of John Lachs' retirement from Vanderbilt University.

The Many-Interacting-Worlds (MIW) approach to a quantum theory without wave functions proposed in [8] leads naturally to numerical integrators of the Schrödinger equation on comoving grids. As yet, little is known about concrete MIW models for more than one spatial dimension and/or more than one particle. In honour of Detlef Dürr, we report on a further development of the MIW approach to treat arbitrary degrees of freedom and provide a numerical proof of concept for ground states in 2d. The latter (...) is part of a systematic numerical study [22] that includes also 1d ground and excited states. With this step towards the treatment of higher degrees of freedom we hope to stimulate their further study. (shrink)

This paper examines the interplay between conceptual structure and the evolution of scientific concepts, arguing that concepts are fundamentally ‘forward-looking’ constructs. Drawing on empirical studies of similarity and categorization, I explicate the way in which the conceptual taxonomy highlights the ‘relevant respects’ for similarity judgments involved in categorization. I then propose that this taxonomy provides some of the cognitive underpinnings of the ongoing development of scientific concepts. I use the concept synapse to illustrate my proposal, showing how conceptual taxonomy both (...) facilitates and constrains the accommodation of newly discovered phenomena. I end by briefly considering the implications of the proposed approach for a normative evaluation of scientific concepts. (shrink)

This article develops a constructivist, non-metaphysical, non-essentialist conception of human dignity using Jeremy Waldron, Michael Rosen, Ernst Bloch, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. This constructivist conception of dignity is then related to the communicative or reflexive conception of freedom developed by discourse ethics. Then, these two conceptions are demonstrated to be foundational for the development and implementation of human rights.

Similarity‐based theories of concepts have a broad intuitive appeal and have been successful in accounting for various phenomena related to the formation and application of concepts. Their adequacy as theories of concepts has been questioned, however, as similarity is often taken as too flexible, too unconstrained, to be explanatory of categorization. In this article, I propose an account of similarity that takes the “foil” against which the target items are measured as integral to the process of comparison, making the similarity (...) relation a fundamentally triadic one. I argue that this account delivers more internal constraints on the process of comparison than the traditional, dyadic account of similarity does. Finally, I propose that this account is advantageous for a similarity‐based theory of concepts, as it easily integrates with the notion of conceptual taxonomy and uses it to deliver additional constraints on categorization. On such a theory of concepts, the foil, whose variability is in large part responsible for the flexible nature of similarity judgements, is turned within the framework of conceptual taxonomy to the very element that constrains similarity judgements in categorization. Therefore, this notion of similarity mitigates the worry that similarity is too flexible to be explanatory of categorization. (shrink)

This book represents a unique attempt to reconcile the traditional oppositions of the natural law and social utopian traditions, providing basic insights into the meaning of human rights in a socialist society.

Ethical issues are pivotal to the practice of psychiatry. Anyone involved in psychiatric practice and mental healthcare has to be aware of the range of ethical issues relevant to their profession. An increased professional commitment to accountability, in parallel with a growing "consumer" movement has paved the way for a creative engagement with the ethical movement. The bestselling 'Psychiatric Ethics' has carved out a niche for itself as the major comprehensive text and core reference in the field, covering a range (...) of complex ethical dilemmas which face clinicians and researchers in their everyday practice. This new edition takes a fresh look at recent trends and developments at the interface between ethics and psychiatric practice. Coming ten years after the third edition, the editors have observed several emerging aspects of psychiatric practice requiring coverage, as a result, 5 new chapters have been added, including cutting edge topics - such as neuroethics. All other chapters have been fully revised and updated. The book will continue to be essential reading for psychiatrists, psychologists, other mental health professionals, and bioethicists, as well as of interest to policy makers, managers and lawyers. (shrink)

Interpreting a seemingly simple function word like “or,” “behind,” or “more” can require logical, numerical, and relational reasoning. How are such words learned by children? Prior acquisition theories have often relied on positing a foundation of innate knowledge. Yet recent neural‐network‐based visual question answering models apparently can learn to use function words as part of answering questions about complex visual scenes. In this paper, we study what these models learn about function words, in the hope of better understanding how the (...) meanings of these words can be learned by both models and children. We show that recurrent models trained on visually grounded language learn gradient semantics for function words requiring spatial and numerical reasoning. Furthermore, we find that these models can learn the meanings of logical connectives and and or without any prior knowledge of logical reasoning as well as early evidence that they are sensitive to alternative expressions when interpreting language. Finally, we show that word learning difficulty is dependent on the frequency of models' input. Our findings offer proof‐of‐concept evidence that it is possible to learn the nuanced interpretations of function words in a visually grounded context by using non‐symbolic general statistical learning algorithms, without any prior knowledge of linguistic meaning. (shrink)

Several tasks in artificial intelligence require the ability to find models about knowledge dynamics. They include belief revision, fusion and belief merging, and abduction. In this paper, we exploit the algebraic framework of mathematical morphology in the context of propositional logic and define operations such as dilation or erosion of a set of formulas. We derive concrete operators, based on a semantic approach, that have an intuitive interpretation and that are formally well behaved, to perform revision, fusion and abduction. Computation (...) and tractability are addressed, and simple examples illustrate the main results. (shrink)

Children and adults from a remote Zafimaniry village in eastern Madagascar were probed for their intuitive understanding of the biological inheritance of bodily features. They were told a story about a baby adopted at birth, and were asked whether, when grown, he would be more likely to resemble his birth parents or his adoptive parents in bodily traits, beliefs, preferences, temperaments, and skills. In spite of the fact that the Zafimaniry, like other Southeast Asian and Malagasy peoples, profess explicit beliefs (...) concerning the fixation of individuals' properties that are at variance with Western folkbiology, Zafimaniry adults responded as do American adults on the task. Zafimaniry children, however, did not repond as did the adults, nor did they respond as did the majority of American children. Rather, they responded in the manner most consistent with what would be predicted, for children as well as for adults, from the ethnographic literature. That is, they tended to judge that an adopted boy would resemble his adoptive rather than his birth parents on virtually all traits, including bodily traits. The implications of these findings for current debates within cognitive science and anthropology are discussed. (shrink)

Michael Dummett; Discussions: Chairman's Address: Basic Law V*, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 243–252, https:/.

This original collection investigates how Mary Shelley's 200-year-old novel is the product of creolization--the intentional conglomeration of scientific, mythological, political, and social discourses. The book traces how the story has creolized itself into life and culture as a new mythology and political statement for each generation.