From the time of its birth, Popper 's theory of falsifiability has been fiercely criticized from various viewpoints. In the author's view, however, those various criticisms all have the same root in their assumption that a falsification must be certain and conclusive. As the theory of falsifiability has never had such an assumption, it is the source of misunderstanding. By discarding it, we can reply to every criticism and thereby clarify the role of falsifiability in our search for better knowledge; (...) that is, it makes our attitude open to a yet unknown world. (shrink)

This special issue explores the significance of collectivism in modern and contemporary Japanese art. Japanese artists banded together throughout the twentieth century to work in collectives, reflecting and influencing each evolution of their culture. Illuminating the interplay between individual and community throughout Japan’s tumultuous century, the contributors to this issue examine both the practical internal operations of the collectives and the art that they produced. One contributor studies the art societies of prewar imperial Japan, whose juried art salons defined a (...) new _nihonga_ painting tradition. While recent scholarly work on art produced during World War II has tended to neglect the collectivist tradition, this issue covers wartime groups like the Art Unit for Promoting the Munitions Industry and the important questions they pose about the relationship between artists and the state. Art collectives in post-occupation Japan gained prominence working in the experimental vanguard of the global art scene in painting, sculpture, design, and intermedia projects. Adding a crucial dimension to the study of Japanese art and modernism, this issue explores how these groups attempted to accommodate the creative paradox of individualism within collectivism. _Contributors: Maki Kaneko, Kuroda Raiji, John Szostak, Miwako Tezuka, Ming Tiampo, Reiko Tomii, Alicia Volk, Midori Yoshimoto Reiko Tomii_ is an independent art historian and curator in New York. She is coauthor of _Xu Bing_. _Midori Yoshimoto_ is Associate Professor of Art History and curator of two galleries at New Jersey City University. She is the author of _Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York_. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to probe the connection between Spinoza's philosophy and his excommunication from the Synagogue in 1656. It seeks, first, to show the decisive influence of the 1656 excommunication on Spinoza's life and thought, and to demonstrate that this event is the single most important key to understanding his entire philosophy. With this key, the paper seeks, secondly, to illustrate the development and transformation of Spinoza's thought through specific reference to his three major works, Korte Verhandeling, De (...) Emendatione, and Ethica. Underlying these two points is a third, namely, that the inherently dynamic and positive elements of ?experience?, which have not been fully appreciated thus far, should be given greater attention in the evaluation of Spinoza's philosophy. (shrink)

We report the results of an experiment in which human subjects were trained to perform a perceptual matching task. Subjects were asked to manipulate comparison objects until they matched target objects using the fewest manipulations possible. An unusual feature of the experimental task is that efficient performance requires an understanding of the hidden or latent causal structure governing the relationships between actions and perceptual outcomes. We use two benchmarks to evaluate the quality of subjects’ learning. One benchmark is based on (...) optimal performance as calculated by a dynamic programming procedure. The other is based on an adaptive computational agent that uses a reinforcement-learning method known as Q-learning to learn to perform the task. Our analyses suggest that subjects were successful learners. In particular, they learned to perform the perceptual matching task in a near-optimal manner (i.e., using a small number of manipulations) at the end of training. Subjects were able to achieve near-optimal performance because they learned, at least partially, the causal structure underlying the task. In addition, subjects’ performances were broadly consistent with those of model-based reinforcement-learning agents that built and used internal models of how their actions influenced the external environment. We hypothesize that people will achieve near-optimal performances on tasks requiring sequences of action—especially sensorimotor tasks with underlying latent causal structures—when they can detect the effects of their actions on the environment, and when they can represent and reason about these effects using an internal mental model. (shrink)

Walter Ong points out that no one can write naturally, because writing is a completely artificial technique we need to acquire through education. The technology of literacy as writing letters begets a dividing line between “literates” and “illiterates,” since literacy cannot be acquired otherwise. When we review the early history of literacy, we notice that letter-writing was a specialized technology, and that in its center resided a small number of elites who could write. Thereafter, in the Modern Era, the center (...) of discussion on literacy turned to the issue of the illiterate masses, mainly on how to bring them to literacy through school education. As the interest in popularizing literacy increased, though, another kind of increased interest arose: the interest in literacy education for blind people. On purpose or not, blind people had been excluded or alienated from literature and/or letter-based culture. However, the stronger the power exerted to exclude blind people, the more blind people aspired to write/read letters. Such aspiration and attempts to write/read letters in their own way may establish a distinct touch-centered world of letters and literacy and, importantly, may relativize its sight-centered world counterpart. If so, how will such a practice revise sight-centered literacy and open new horizons? I would like to consider this topic by reviewing its historical background and examining a case of writing practice by Kuzuhara Kôtô, a blind musician, in 19th century Japan. (shrink)

Without making any reference to traditional linguistic disciplines such as presupposition, implicature and indirect speech acts, this article analyzes how and what implicit meanings were constructed, structured and negotiated through an ambulance request call to the119 call center in Yamagata, Japan in 2011, while enhancing the cogency of the empirical approach independent from analytical theories. Through the occasioned taxonomic analysis of the occasioned semantics of the caller and the call-taker regarding the dispatch, the analysis captured definitive evidence on how a (...) negative response was created from the call-taker’s categorization process. It reveals the process in which the rejection was determined from the talk by the call-taker that was oriented toward and constructed by the conceptual knowledge of motion, which was formulated as ‘walk’. A three-part-list structure was created, which formulated ‘emesis’ into the category of a symptom, but not into that of an illness. The analysis reports that the call-taker’s method of occasioned semantics was operative and systematically patterned. Based on the results of the analysis, with linguistic evidence, the article critically argues that the rejection of an ambulance request was due in large part to the call-taker’s method of categorization when asking questions, which provides an alternative account to that of a previously reported analysis. (shrink)

Brides of the Buddha: Nuns’ Stories from the Avad?na?ataka, by Karen Muldoon-Hules. Lexington Books, 2017. 240pp. Hb. $100, ISBN-13: 9881498511452. E-book. $95. ISBN-13: 9781498511469.

The rest of the book addresses a variety of theoretical and empirical issues that relate to this conception, concluding with a response from Sen to his critics.

The purpose of this paper is phe-nomenological interpretation of the various faces of divinity in the later Heidegger and elucidation of the human comportment corresponding to this divinity. In the first chapter, I will make clear the relation between ontological difference in the sense of the later Heidegger and the primordial dimension of divinity which is called the last god and the sacred. Further, the relation between such divinity and entity as a whole will be clarified. In the second chapter, (...) I will elucidate the place of the divinities in the manifestation of entity as a whole by considering the role of the godlikes in the fourfold. When the primordial alterity of the last god should be experienced in entity as whole, which leads to the notion of the godlikes, it must confront human subject in totally asymmetrical manner. Such asymmetrical communication can be structurally made explicit by taking the concept of “discourse” in Being and Time into account. Finally, I will consider the character of human comportment called preservation with focusing on its relation to the later Heidegger’s conceptions of divinity. This will shed light on how human beings could properly appreciate the experience of what is beyond our understanding and nevertheless supporting our existence.El objetivo de la ponencia es llevar a cabo una interpretación fenomenológica de las diversas facetas de la divinidad en el Hei-degger tardío y elucidar el comportamiento humano respecto de esta divinidad. En el primer capítulo, se esclarece la relación entre la diferencia ontológica en el sentido que le da el segundo Heidegger y la dimensión primordial de la divinidad, llamada el último dios y lo sagrado. A conti-nuación, se esclarecerá la relación entre la divinidad así concebida y lo ente en totalidad. En el segundo apar-tado, se elucidará el lugar de las divinidades en la manifestación de lo ente en totalidad considerando el papel de los divinos la Cuaternidad. Cuando la alteridad primordial del último dios se experimente en lo ente en totaliadd, lo cual conduce a la noción de los divinos, tiene que enfrentarse al sujeto humano de una forma totalmente asimétrica. Esta comunicación asimétrica puede explicitarse estructuralmente mediante la consideración del concepto del discurso en Ser y tiempo. Final-mente, consideraré el carácter del comportamiento humano denominado la preservación, con especial atención a su relación con la noción de lo divino en Heidegger tardío. Esto arrojará luz sobre cómo los seres humanos podrían apreciar de manera adecuada lo que está más allá de nuestra comprensión y sin embargo, sostiene nuestra existencia. (shrink)

From the time of its birth, Popper’s theory of falsifiability has been fiercely criticized from various viewpoints. In the author’s view, however, those various criticisms all have the same root in their assumption that a falsification must be certain and conclusive. As the theory of falsifiability has never had such an assumption, it is the source of misunderstanding. By discarding it, we can reply to every criticism and thereby clarify the role of falsifiability in our search for better knowledge; that (...) is, it makes our attitude open to a yet unknown world. Key Words: Popper • falsifiability • openness • inconclusive falsification • second Popper legend. (shrink)

A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant‐directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult‐directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learning: hyperarticulation, which makes the categories more separable, and variability, which makes the generalization more robust. Here, we test the separability and robustness of vowel category learning on acoustic representations of speech uttered by Japanese adults in ADS, IDS (addressed to 18‐ to 24‐month olds), or (...) read speech (RS). Separability is determined by means of a distance measure computed between the five short vowel categories of Japanese, while robustness is assessed by testing the ability of six different machine learning algorithms trained to classify vowels to generalize on stimuli spoken by a novel speaker in ADS. Using two different speech representations, we find that hyperarticulated speech, in the case of RS, can yield better separability, and that increased between‐speaker variability in ADS can yield, for some algorithms, more robust categories. However, these conclusions do not apply to IDS, which turned out to yield neither more separable nor more robust categories compared to ADS inputs. We discuss the usefulness of machine learning algorithms run on real data to test hypotheses about the functional role of IDS. (shrink)

Central to discussions of multiculturalism and minority rights in modern liberal societies is the idea that the particular demands of minority groups contradict the requirements of equality, anonymity, and universality for citizenship and belonging. The contributors to this volume question the significance of this dichotomy between the universal and the particular, arguing that it reflects how the modern state has instituted the basic rights and obligations of its members and that these institutions are undergoing fundamental transformations under the pressure of (...) globalization. They show that the social bonds uniting groups constitute the means of our freedom, rather than obstacles to achieving the universal. (shrink)

This paper surveys the historiography of the global response to HIV/AIDS. Since 1981, when the disease was first identified, there have been great strides in the medical and biological sciences in understanding the impact of the new virus on the human immune system. Although there is still no successful vaccine, antiretroviral (ART) treatment continues to improve the likelihood of HIV-positive people living long and healthy lives. We have also seen a few exciting cases of full recovery, which will allow scientists (...) to explore new avenues towards a cure. Yet the AIDS pandemic is by no means over: 40 million have died and over 35 million individuals still live with HIV. More importantly, as historians and scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been pointing out since the early 1980s, HIV brought to light how non-medical factors play a critical role in a successful disease response. As the global community faces the aftermath of a new pandemic, it is timely to examine how broader social, economic, political, and cultural factors influence individual experiences of disease at local, national, international, and global scales. This essay examines how scholars have written historically about the HIV pandemic, using a variety of methods and approaches: from traditional histories of medicine to anthropologies of development. While HIV has sparked a massive corpus of historical reflection from a variety of disciplines, its contemporaneity means that “global AIDS historiography” cannot yet be described as a cohesive academic conversation. Yet what unites the scholarship, this essay argues, is its use of HIV to examine how and why post-war social and economic systems have achieved health objectives for some populations and not others. (shrink)

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context (Imai & Gentner, 1997) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the presence of (...) labels per se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity?On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context. (shrink)

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that followImai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context (Imai & Gentner, 1997) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the presence of labelsper (...) se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity?On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context. (shrink)

A relatively unknown woman named Maria Theresa Short opened a popular observatory in 1835 in Ed inburgh - a time and place where men of science and property had long failed to make a viable space for astronomy. She exhibited scientific instruments to a general public, along with a great telescope and a walk-in camera obscura that projected live views of the city and continues to delight audiences to this day. To better understand Short's accomplishments, achieved as scientific and public (...) life became increasingly closed to women, this study explores her largely untold story, and maps some of the places of science around it. Finding local contingencies, multiple sites and practices by diverse groups, it proposes that tensions within the connections between science and spectacle and the use of popularization to promote its professionalization produced gaps that even a marginal figure like Maria Short could inhabit and exploit. (shrink)

トリアージ、ワクチンの分配、ゲノム編集、さらに倫理、思想、文学、政治社会まで、様々な領域の喫緊の問題として「尊厳」を論じる。.