Although it might be argued that the social drama is a story in [Hayden] White's sense, in that it has discernible inaugural, transitional, and terminal motifs, that is, a beginning, a middle, and an end, my observations convince me that it is, indeed, a spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of everyone's experience in every human society. My hypothesis, based on repeated observations of such processual units in a range of sociocultural systems and in my reading in ethnography (...) and history, is that social dramas, "dramas of living," as Kenneth Burke calls them, can be aptly studied as having four phases. These I label breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or recognition of schism. Social dramas occur within groups of persons who share values and interests and who have a real or alleged common history. The main actors are persons for whom the group has a high value priority. Most of us have what I call our "star" group or groups to which we owe our deepest loyalty and whose fate is for us of the greatest personal concern. It is the one with which a person identifies most deeply and in which he finds fulfillment of his major social and personal desires. We are all members of many groups, formal or informal, from the family to the nation or some international religion or political institution. Each person makes his/her own subjective evaluation of the group's respective worth: some are "dear" to one, others it is one's "duty to defend," and so on. Some tragic situations arise from conflicts of loyalty to different star groups. Victor Turner is professor of anthropology and a member of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. His many publications include Schism and Continuity in an African Society, The Forest of Symbols, The Ritual Process, and, with Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. (shrink)

Recent work in cerebral neurology should be used to fashion a new synthesis with anthropological studies. Beginning with Paul D. Madean's model of the triune brain, we explore Ralph Wendell Burhoe's question whether creative processes result from a coadaptation, perhaps in ritual itself, of genetic and cultural information. Then we examine the division of labor between right and left cerebral hemispheres and its implications for the notions of play and “ludic recombination.” Intimately related to ritual, play may function in the (...) social construction of reality analogous to mutation and variation in organic evolution. Finally, we consider how our picture of brain functioning accords with some distinctive features of the religious systems dominant in human cultures. (shrink)

Jean-Francois Lyotard is often considered to be the father of postmodernism. Here leading experts in the field of cultural and philosophical studies, including Barry Smart, John O' Neill and Victor J. Seidler, tackle many of the questions still being asked about this controversial figure.

In this paper we propose a new approach to address the ramification problem in common-sense reasoning about action and change. We contrast the methods of McCain and Turner, Thielscher and Sandewall and, based on some of the limitations they encounter, we introduce a trajectory-based approach which keeps a history of the states through which a system evolves to characterise its dynamical state. We furnish an underlying state-transition semantics and a logic that admits an expressive, dynamical account of some typical (...) scenarios which encounter modelling difficulties in the other approaches mentioned. (shrink)

This edited collection of essays brings together the leading experts in the field of cultural and philosophical studies to tackle many of the questions still being asked about Jean Francois Lyotard. Contributors include Barry Smart, John O'Neill and Victor J. Seidler with subjects ranging from Lyotard's writings on justice and politics of difference, on feminism, youth, judaism as well as a chapter devoted to his early writings.

This book discusses the role of the trickster figure in contemporary film against the cultural imperatives and social issues of modernity and postmodernity, and argues that cinematic tricksters always reflect psychological, economic and social change in society. It covers a range of films, from Charlie Chaplin’s classics such as _Modern Times_ and _The Great Dictator_ to contemporary comedies and dramas with ‘trickster actors’ such as Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron-Cohen, Andy Kaufman and Jack Nicholson. _The Trickster in Contemporary Film_ offers a (...) fresh perspective on the trickster figure not only in cinema but in Western culture in general. Alongside original film analyses, it touches upon a number of psychosocial issues including sovereignty of the individual, tricksterish qualities of the media, and human relationships in the mercurial digital age. Further topics of discussion include: common motifs in trickster narratives the trickster and personal relationships gonzo-trickster and the art of comic insurrection. Employing a number of complementary approaches such as Jungian psychology, film semiotics, narrative structure theories, Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of film, as well as anyone with an interest in analytical psychology and wider critical issues in contemporary culture. (shrink)

The article shows some moving occasions during the first fieldwork of Victor Turner and myself in Africa during the 1950s. For instance, the Ndembu people would always give great welcomes to their returning kin after long absences. The scenes are etched on my mind as a blueprint for all welcomes. On their friends return, the villagers would immediately gather and sing the simple song, “You're back, you're back!” Why did the people so much value each other? In this (...) village I was learning about communitas. The scenes were etched on my mind as a blueprint for all sociality. They were like the Hallelujah Chorus, Beethoven's Song of Joy, the Marseillaise, “When the Saints Come Marching In”—many anthems of praise. They were unconditionally directed, the song of what we came to know as communitas. We were intensely interested and enjoyed the rituals just as they did; only they were unfamiliar to us. For the people, they were everything. (shrink)

Like Clifford Geertz and Mary Douglas, Victor Turner considers religion the key to culture and ritual the key to religion. Like them as well, he interprets religion the way believers purportedly do: as beliefs, as beliefs about the cosmos, yet as cosmic beliefs compatible with modern science. Ritual serves to express those cosmic beliefs–not for the scientific purpose of explaining or controlling the cosmos but for the existential purpose of giving human beings a place in it. Ritual serves (...) simultaneously to express beliefs about society–not only for the functionalist purpose of keeping human beings in their social place but also for the existential purpose of giving them a social place. (shrink)

The extraordinary parallel between the psychological theory of reversals (Apter, 1982) and the anthropological theory of anti-structure (Turner, 1982)-- both derived independently and almost simultaneously from entirely different kinds of evidence and research-- would seem to point to something profound and universal in human experience which has been curiously neglected in the behavioural sciences and entirely ignored in consciousness studies. What I will do here is to introduce reversal theory, show how it applies to ritual, and then compare it (...) with Victor Turner's well-known approach to the very same topic. Reversal theory has in fact been used to elucidate many diverse social phenomena, for example criminal violence, military combat, sexual behaviour, family relationships, soccer hooliganism, organizational culture, leadership, team sports, social advocacy and classroom management (see review in Apter, 2001a). The present paper extends these ideas to ritual for the first time, and makes reference especially to the work of Turner and his idea of cultural inversions (Turner, 1969). Reversal theory is also about inversions, but the inversions in this case (i.e. reversals) occur at the level of individual psychology and are identified initially as experiential rather than behavioural or social. This paper will explore the relationship between these two kinds of reversal, psychological and anthropological. (shrink)

English manuscript version of Afterword to German translation of Victor Turner's The Ritual Process. The Ritual Process is a pivotal book in the body of Victor Turner's works. The first three chapters, drawn from Turner's Henry Morgan lectures at the University of Rochester, reveal the richness and subtlety of his analysis of tribal ritual and social life. In the third chapter, he concentrates on the aspects of liminality and communitas found in Ndembu ritual and expands (...) these in the remainder of the book to universal categories of human experience. His masterful ethnography opens up to reveal the fundamental reality of the subjunctive mood in human affairs: the ritual process. In Turner's analyses of the Isoma and Wubwang'a rituals of the Ndembu of Northwestern Zambia, one sees the fantastic interplay between human affliction and symbolic renewal, between human communities and a natural environment teeming with signification. The Ndembu are revealed to be a people with a deep appreciation of the complexity of existence, and endowed with a sophisticated technics of meaning, a vast architectonic of felt, expressive forms through which to journey to those borderlands beyond human comprehensibility: death, the dead, the call of the mother-line, fecundity, transformation, the interstices of social structure. Turner reveals himself to be an initiate, not only to the rites revealed to him by the Ndembu, but to the centrality of ritual itself in tribal society and human affairs. Trained in the British structural-functionalist approach to social anthropology, Turner notes how the incessant call of the drums made him feel that he "was always on the outside looking in." Soon, however, Turner and his wife and collaborator Edith discarded their theoretical ear-plugs and answered the invitation of the drums. As observers and co-participants in Ndembu ritual the Turners' began to blaze a trail toward a new anthropology. (shrink)

Contributors to this collection examine the Turners’ most important theoretical contributions to anthropology, from their work on pilgrimages, liminality, and communitas to insights from their fieldwork. They illustrate the Turners’ enduring theoretical contributions and their profound effects on the anthropological perspective.

This paper uses Victor Turner's recent discussion of liminal and liminoid forms of communitas to criticize psychoanalytic praxis, both theory and therapy. In so doing it argues that Turner's distinction can be sharpened by assimilating it to the Marxist concept of commoditization. Heinz Kohut's analysis of narcissism can be supplemented by considering how self‐esteem, like other forms of behavior, is ritualized, particularly in the mother‐child matrix. We can account for the recent increase in narcissistic disorders, in part, (...) by noting how liminal forms of communitas have given way to liminoid forms. Liminoid forms of communitas, like that established in the analytic relationship, secure self‐esteem less adequately than do liminal forms. (shrink)

Metaphorical analogies have been popular in different forms of reasoning, theatre and drama analogy among them. From the semiotic perspective, theatre is arepresentation of reality. Characteristic to theatrical representation is the fact that for creating representations of reality it uses, to a great extent, the materiality andcultural codes that also constitute our everyday life; sometimes the means of representation are even iconically identical to the latter. This likeness has inspirednumerous writers, philosophers and, later, social scientists to look for particular similarities (...) between social life, drama and theatre. In this paper I chose twoparticular approaches from the social sciences that make use of the metaphorical analogy of theatre in quite different, yet, to certain extent, also overlapping ways — Victor Turner’s concept of “social dramas” from anthropology and Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgy” of social interactions from sociology. The former bases hisanalogy more on the structure of the dramatic text and on a key resemblance in the (dramatic) conflict, whereas the latter builds his analogy on the principles ofperforming used in theatre, and regards characters and roles as major resemblances between action on stage and in social space. This paper examines these key resemblances and sheds light on what kind of interpretations of culture and society emerge when theatre analogies are put into action. In the concluding section some general problems, related to extended metaphors and analogical explanations the researcher needs to face with, are discussed. (shrink)

Metaphorical analogies have been popular in different forms of reasoning, theatre and drama analogy among them. From the semiotic perspective, theatre is arepresentation of reality. Characteristic to theatrical representation is the fact that for creating representations of reality it uses, to a great extent, the materiality andcultural codes that also constitute our everyday life; sometimes the means of representation are even iconically identical to the latter. This likeness has inspirednumerous writers, philosophers and, later, social scientists to look for particular similarities (...) between social life, drama and theatre. In this paper I chose twoparticular approaches from the social sciences that make use of the metaphorical analogy of theatre in quite different, yet, to certain extent, also overlapping ways — Victor Turner’s concept of “social dramas” from anthropology and Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgy” of social interactions from sociology. The former bases hisanalogy more on the structure of the dramatic text and on a key resemblance in the (dramatic) conflict, whereas the latter builds his analogy on the principles ofperforming used in theatre, and regards characters and roles as major resemblances between action on stage and in social space. This paper examines these key resemblances and sheds light on what kind of interpretations of culture and society emerge when theatre analogies are put into action. In the concluding section some general problems, related to extended metaphors and analogical explanations the researcher needs to face with, are discussed. (shrink)

Metaphorical analogies have been popular in different forms of reasoning, theatre and drama analogy among them. From the semiotic perspective, theatre is arepresentation of reality. Characteristic to theatrical representation is the fact that for creating representations of reality it uses, to a great extent, the materiality andcultural codes that also constitute our everyday life; sometimes the means of representation are even iconically identical to the latter. This likeness has inspirednumerous writers, philosophers and, later, social scientists to look for particular similarities (...) between social life, drama and theatre. In this paper I chose twoparticular approaches from the social sciences that make use of the metaphorical analogy of theatre in quite different, yet, to certain extent, also overlapping ways — Victor Turner’s concept of “social dramas” from anthropology and Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgy” of social interactions from sociology. The former bases hisanalogy more on the structure of the dramatic text and on a key resemblance in the (dramatic) conflict, whereas the latter builds his analogy on the principles ofperforming used in theatre, and regards characters and roles as major resemblances between action on stage and in social space. This paper examines these key resemblances and sheds light on what kind of interpretations of culture and society emerge when theatre analogies are put into action. In the concluding section some general problems, related to extended metaphors and analogical explanations the researcher needs to face with, are discussed. (shrink)

Victor Turner's view of pilgrimage is reexamined and questioned using data collected at the shrine to Saint Francis of Assisi in Canindi, a small town in northeast Brazil. Turner's view of pilgrimage as a liminal state in which the pilgrim is out of structure is summarized in terms of his major theoretical assumptions and objectives. The shrine in Canindé and the pilgrimage there are described. Pilgrimage is examined in terms of the symbolic assumptions of Brazilian "Popular" Catholicism (...) and culture. The author shows it to be a product of a relationship between the pilgrim and the saint in which the pilgrimage is made in fulfillment of a promise made. The pilgrim to Canindi, and other shrines in Brazil, is shown to be fulfilling the obligations of a patron‐client type of exchange with the saint and consequently not out of structure. The author concludes that the patron‐client exchange imagery is better suited to the analysis of pilgrimage in Brazil and Latin America than Turner's view of liminality. (shrink)

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...) put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach. (shrink)

The concept of "practices"--whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture--is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by which (...) a "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea. Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory. (shrink)

Humans are moral creatures. Among all life on Earth, we alone experience rich moral emotions, follow complex rules governing how we treat one another, and engage in moral dialogue. But how did human morality evolve? And can humans become morally evolved? -/- In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell draw on the latest research in the biological and social sciences to explain the key role that morality has played in human evolution. They explore the moral traits that (...) humans share with chimpanzees; how a more complex moral mind enabled Homo sapiens to arise and out-compete other human species; and the place of morality alongside historic revolutions in technology and social organization. Throughout the book, Kumar and Campbell argue that morality co-evolved with intelligence and complex sociality. Morality prevents societal collapse and enables complex knowledge. -/- After unearthing the ancient origins of human morality, Kumar and Campbell use evolutionary theory to deliver profound insights about how to advance moral progress and resist moral regress, such as reducing animal suffering on industrial farms; capitalizing on the recent revolution in gay rights to foster a nascent revolution in transgender rights; opposing intersectional inequality that impacts women and people of color in lower socioeconomic classes; and addressing major problems of global inequality, especially impending crises of injustice caused by anthropogenic climate change. Understanding how we evolved--and how we continue to evolve--can help us become a better ape. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one logic. Logical normativism is the view that logic is normative. These positions have often been assumed to go hand-in-hand, but we show that one can be a logical pluralist without being a logical normativist. We begin by arguing directly against logical normativism. Then we reformulate one popular version of pluralism—due to Beall and Restall—to avoid a normativist commitment. We give three non-normativist pluralist views, the most promising of which depends (...) not on logic’s normativity but on epistemic goals. (shrink)

An influential way of distinguishing inferential from non-inferential processes appeals to representational states: an agent infers a conclusion from some premises only if she represents those premises as supporting that conclusion. By contrast, when some premises merely cause an agent to believe the conclusion, there is no relevant representational state. While promising, the appeal to representational states invites a regress problem, first famously articulated by Lewis Carroll. This paper develops a novel account of inference that invokes representational states without succumbing (...) to regress. The key move is to reject the tempting idea that the relevant representational states are causally prior to inferences. I argue, instead, that an inference constitutes the relevant representational state. To infer is thus—in the very drawing of the conclusion—to represent the premises as supporting the conclusion, and thereby to commit to that support relation. (shrink)

The human spark -- Catch a fire -- The idea of you -- The idea of I -- Forbidden ideas -- Artful ideas -- Vast ideas -- Tight ideas -- Recurring ideas -- Future ideas.

Scientists often make surprising claims about things that no one can observe. In physics, chemistry, and molecular biology, scientists can at least experiment on those unobservable entities, but what about researchers in fields such as paleobiology and geology who study prehistory, where no such experimentation is possible? Do scientists discover facts about the distant past or do they, in some sense, make prehistory? In this book Derek Turner argues that this problem has surprising and important consequences for the scientific (...) realism debate. His discussion covers some of the main positions in philosophy of science - realism, social constructivism, empiricism, and the natural ontological attitude - and shows how they relate to issues in paleobiology and geology. His original and thought-provoking book will be of wide interest to philosophers and scientists alike. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. A key objection to logical pluralism is that it collapses into monism. The core of the Collapse Objection is that only the pluralist’s strongest logic does any genuine normative work; since a logic must do genuine normative work, this means that the pluralist is really a monist, who is committed to her strongest logic being the one true logic. This paper considers a neglected question in the collapse (...) debate: what is it for a logic to do genuine normative work? As well as having wider upshot for the connection between logic and normativity, grappling with this question provides a new response to the Collapse Objection on behalf of the pluralist. I suggest that we should allow logics to generate pro tanto reasons in a way that bears not just on combinations of attitudes but on how an agent’s attitudes are based on one another. This motivates adopting normative principles that allow the pluralist’s weaker logics to earn their normative keep. Rather than being ad hoc, these principles capture a sense in which good reasoning goes beyond the consistency of an agent’s attitudes. Good reasoning is also concerned with how an agent’s attitudes are based on one another. (shrink)

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday (...) thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention. (shrink)

Metaphorical analogies have been popular in different forms of reasoning, theatre and drama analogy among them. From the semiotic perspective, theatre is a representation of reality. Characteristic to theatrical representation is the fact that for creating representations of reality it uses, to a great extent, the materiality and cultural codes that also constitute our everyday life; sometimes the means of representation are even iconically identical to the latter. This likeness has inspired numerous writers, philosophers and, later, social scientists to look (...) for particular similarities between social life, drama and theatre. In this paper I chose two particular approaches from the social sciences that make use of the metaphorical analogy of theatre in quite different, yet, to certain extent, also overlapping ways — Victor Turner’s concept of “social dramas” from anthropology and Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgy” of social interactions from sociology. The former bases his analogy more on the structure of the dramatic text and on a key resemblance in the conflict, whereas the latter builds his analogy on the principles of performing used in theatre, and regards characters and roles as major resemblances between action on stage and in social space. This paper examines these key resemblances and sheds light on what kind of interpretations of culture and society emerge when theatre analogies are put into action. In the concluding section some general problems, related to extended metaphors and analogical explanations the researcher needs to face with, are discussed. (shrink)

In reference to the philosophical theology of medieval Islamic theologian Ibn Taymiyya, this paper outlines a parallel between Taymiyyan thought and Alvin Plantinga’s thesis of ‘Reformed Epistemology’. In critiquing a previous attempt to build an account of ‘Islamic externalism’, the Taymiyyan model offers an account that can be seen as wholly ‘Plantingan’.

Practice Then and Now "Practice theory" has a long history in philosophy, under various names, but current practice theory is a response to failures of projects of modernity or enlightenment which attempt to reduce science or politics to formulae. Heidegger, Oakeshott, and MacIntyre are each examples of philosophers who turned to practice conceptions. Foucault and Bourdieu made similar turns. Practice accounts come in different forms: some emphasize skill-like individual accomplishments, others emphasize the social character or presupposition-like character of the tacit (...) conditions of activities. The Social Theory of Practices problematized the idea of sameness, the idea that participants in an activity had the same tacit possessions, which undermined the idea that practices were collective objects in which individuals participated. Later critics, such as Schatzki and Rouse, emphasized the normative coherence and character of practice, which has a collective aspect. Pickering and others suggested a notion of practices that was de-mentalized and focused on the objects that were part of the practical activity, which provided for the continuity and sociality of practice without collectivizing its mental content. The discovery of mirror neurons suggested a non-collective mode of transmission of practices. The implications of these developments can be seen in connection with ethics, where the conflict between the ethical and the practical can be understood in terms of the intrinsic conflict between the need to behave successfully and our learned ethical intuitions. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the growing literature in social epistemology of diagnosing the epistemically problematic features of fake news. I identify two novel problems: the problem of relevant alternatives; and the problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment. The former arises among individual epistemic transactions. By making salient, and thereby relevant, alternatives to knowledge claims, fake news stories threaten knowledge. The problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment arises at the level of entire epistemic communities. I introduce the (...) notion of an epistemic environment, roughly the totality of resources and circumstances relevant to assessing the epistemically interesting statuses, such as knowledge. Fake news degrades our epistemic environment by undermining confidence in epistemic institutions and altering epistemic habits, thereby making the environment less conducive to achieving positive epistemic statuses. This is problematic even if the decrease in confidence and the altering of habits are rational. I end by considering solutions to these problems, stressing the importance of reproaching each other for proliferating fake news. I argue that we should reproach even faultless purveyors of fake news. This is because fake news typically arises in abnormal epistemic contexts, where there is widespread ignorance of, and noncompliance with, correct epistemic norms. (shrink)

In this article, I consider how the epistemic problem of religious disagreement has been viewed within the Islamic tradition. Specifically, I consider two religious epistemological trends within the tradition: Islamic Rationalism and Islamic Traditionalism. In examining the approaches of both trends toward addressing the epistemic problem, I suggest that neither is wholly adequate. Nonetheless, I argue that both approaches offer insights that might be relevant to building a more adequate response. So, I attempt to combine insights from both by drawing (...) a distinction between inferential and noninferential reflective responsibility. Given this distinction, I argue that it may be possible for a theist to remain steadfast in upholding their tradition-specific theistic belief, without having to hold that belief by way of inference; but nevertheless, having to be sufficiently reflectively responsible in forming their theistic belief noninferentially. (shrink)

The expressive theory of paternalism holds that an action is paternalistic when and because it expresses the insulting idea that the actor knows better than the person acted upon. I argue that the expressive theory has implausible implications. First, it entails that a government’s interventions in people’s lives count as paternalistic only if their motivations are sufficiently consistent and well-publicised that the circumstances allow its policies to express the relevant insult. In other words, secret paternalism is impossible. Second, the theory (...) implies that governments can remove any objection to a policy qua paternalistic by means of a manipulative exercise in public relations. Nor, I argue, does the expressive theory offer any explanatory advantage over autonomy-based theories. (shrink)

Relativism is central to the social sciences for the simple reason that customs and morals are diverse, and explaining this diversity is one of its major tasks. The explanations have relativistic implications, but they vary according to the type of explanation. In the nineteenth century evolutionary explanations dominated: differences were relative to stages. The social determination of ideas followed from these accounts, but could be logically separated from them. In the twentieth century, accounts based on the culture concept, understood loosely (...) in neo-Kantian terms as a matter of different shared presuppositions, dominated. This conception informed a relativistic methodological approach to history and disciplinary differences, exemplified in the methodological writings of Max Weber, where they were related to values. This was more radical, in the sense that there was no further explanation of the presuppositions. They simply differed. As this conception was expanded into the epistemic realm, it became even more radical, by being applied to science itself. The “Strong Programme in the sociology of science” observed a principle of symmetry, which held that true and false scientific beliefs needed to be explained using the same explanatory tools. In each of these cases problems of reflexivity and self-undermining played a role. (shrink)

How does the integration of mixed reality devices into our cognitive practices impact the mind from a metaphysical and epistemological perspective? In his innovative and interdisciplinary article, “Minds in the Metaverse: Extended Cognition Meets Mixed Reality” (2022), Paul Smart addresses this underexplored question, arguing that the use of a hypothetical application of the Microsoft HoloLens called “the HoloFoldit” represents a technologically high-grade form of extended cognizing from the perspective of neo-mechanical philosophy. This short commentary aims to (1) carve up the (...) conceptual landscape of possible objections to Smart’s argument and (2) elaborate on the possibility of hologrammatically extended cognition, which is supposed to be one of the features of the HoloFoldit case that distinguishes it from more primitive forms of cognitive extension. In tackling (1), I do not mean to suggest that Smart does not consider or have sufficient answers to these objections. In addressing (2), the goal is not to argue for or against the possibility of hologrammatically extended cognition but to reveal some issues in the metaphysics of virtual reality upon which this possibility hinges. I construct an argument in favor of hologrammatically extended cognition based on the veracity of virtual realism (Chalmers, 2017) and an argument against it based on the veracity of virtual fctionalism (McDonnell and Wildman, 2019). (shrink)

David Lewis defends the thesis of the asymmetry of overdetermination: later affairs are seldom overdetermined by earlier affairs, but earlier affairs are usually overdetermined by later affairs. Recently, Carol Cleland has argued that since the distinctive methodologies of historical science and experimental science exploit different aspects of this asymmetry, the methodology of historical science is just as good, epistemically speaking, as that of experimental science. This paper shows, first, that Cleland's epistemological conclusion does not follow from the thesis of the (...) asymmetry of overdetermination, because overdetermination is compatible with epistemic underdetermination. The paper also shows, contra Cleland, that there is at least one interesting sense in which historical science is epistemically inferior to experimental science, after all, because local underdetermination problems are more widespread in historical than in experimental science. (shrink)