In this article Zoltán Somhegyi investigates the aesthetic qualities of Northern landscape representations, with a special focus on how contemporary examples are connected to classical ones. First he examines the history of the aesthetic appreciation of these sites, starting from their early modern reception and from the differentiation of “Northern” and “Mediterranean” landscapes: while the Mediterranean ones were highly valued already from the 15th–16th centuries on, the “wilder” Northern landscapes were admired mainly from Romanticism onwards. This has, among others, an (...) aesthetichistorical reason, namely the birth of the category of the sublime; and in this case the harmonious Mediterranean landscapes and the irregular yet impressive Northern ones relate to each other as the category of beautiful does to the sublime. This is why from Romanticism on Northern landscapes became not only aesthetically valuable, but even more capable than the Southern ones to move the spectator. This is especially because, from a gnoseological point of view, the landscape might be a place – and the landscape representation a means – of self-interpretation. The historical overview is then used to better understand some of the most important characteristics of contemporary Northern landscape interpretations and representations from leading artists of the region, which are analysed in the second part of the article. (shrink)

How do we make sense of our experience? In order to understand how we construct meaning, the varied and complex relationships among language, mind, and culture need to be understood. While cognitive linguists typically study the cognitive aspects of language, and linguistic anthropologists typically study language and culture, Language, Mind, and Culture is the first book to combine all three and provide an account of meaning-making in language and culture by examining the many cognitive operations in this process. In addition (...) to providing a comprehensive theory of how we can account for meaning making, Language, Mind, and Culture is a textbook for anyone interested in the fascinating issues surrounding the relationship between language, mind, and culture. Further, the book is also a "practical" introduction: most of the chapters include exercises that help the student understand the theoretical issues. No prior knowledge of linguistics is assumed, and the material is accessible and useful to students in a variety of other disciplines, such as anthropology, English, sociology, philosophy, psychology, communication, rhetoric, and others. Language, Mind, and Culture helps us make sense of not only linguistic meaning but also of some of the important personal and social issues we encounter in our lives as members of particular cultures and as human beings. (shrink)

No scientific conclusion follows automatically from a statistically non-significant result, yet people routinely use non-significant results to guide conclusions about the status of theories (or the effectiveness of practices). To know whether a non-significant result counts against a theory, or if it just indicates data insensitivity, researchers must use one of: power, intervals (such as confidence or credibility intervals), or else an indicator of the relative evidence for one theory over another, such as a Bayes factor. I argue Bayes factors (...) allow theory to be linked to data in a way that overcomes the weaknesses of the other approaches. Specifically, Bayes factors use the data themselves to determine their sensitivity in distinguishing theories (unlike power), and they make use of those aspects of a theory’s predictions that are often easiest to specify (unlike power and intervals, which require specifying the minimal interesting value in order to address theory). Bayes factors provide a coherent approach to determining whether non-significant results support a null hypothesis over a theory, or whether the data are just insensitive. They allow accepting and rejecting the null hypothesis to be put on an equal footing. Concrete examples are provided to indicate the range of application of a simple online Bayes calculator, which reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of Bayes factors. (shrink)

We are material beings in a material world, but we are also beings who have experiences and feelings. How can these subjective states be just a matter of matter? Philosophical materialists have formulated what is sometimes called "the phenomenal concept strategy" to defend materialism. In Consciousness Revisited, philosopher Michael Tye, until now a proponent of the approach, argues that the phenomenal concept strategy is mistaken. A rejection of phenomenal concepts leaves the materialist with the task of finding some other strategy (...) for defending materialism. Tye points to four major puzzles of consciousness that arise: How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what does the explanatory gap consist and how can it be bridged? How can the hard problem of consciousness be solved? How are zombies possible? Tye presents solutions to these puzzles--solutions that relieve the pressure on the materialist created by the failure of the phenomenal concept strategy. In doing so, he discusses and makes new proposals on a wide range of issues, including the nature of perceptual content, the conditions necessary for consciousness of a given object, the proper understanding of change blindness, the nature of phenomenal character and our awareness of it, whether we have privileged access to our own experiences, and, if we do, in what such access consists. (shrink)

Combining up-to-date scholarship with clear and accessible language and helpful exercises, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction is an invaluable resource for all readers interested in metaphor. This second edition includes two new chapters--on 'metaphors in discourse' and 'metaphor and emotion' --along with new exercises, responses to criticism and recent developments in the field, and revised student exercises, tables, and figures.

The spillovers in knowledge among largely college-educated workers were among the key reasons for the impressive degree of economic growth and spread of entrepreneurship in the United States during the 1990s. Prior 'industrial policies' in the 1970s and 1980s did not advance growth because these were based on outmoded large manufacturing models. Zoltan Acs and Catherine Armington use a knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to explain new firm formation rates in regional economies during the 1990s period and beyond. The fastest-growing (...) regions are those that have the highest rates of new firm formation, and which are not dominated by large businesses. The authors of this text also find support for the thesis that knowledge spillovers move across industries and are not confined within a single industry. As a result, they suggest, regional policies to encourage and sustain growth should focus on entrepreneurship among other factors. (shrink)

The paper offers a realist account of political obligation. More precisely, it offers an account that belongs to the Williamsian liberal strain of contemporary realist theory (as opposed to a Geussian radical realist strain) and draws on and expands some ideas familiar from Bernard Williams’s oeuvre (thick/thin ethical concepts, political realism/moralism, a minimal normative threshold for distinctively political rule). Accordingly, the paper will claim that the fact of membership in a polity provides people with sufficient reason for complying with those (...) political authority claims whose source is that particular polity. The paper will explain that membership in a polity is constituted not by communitarian identification (Horton), nationhood (Tamir), joined commitment/plural subjectivity (Gilbert), but by the fact that people are stably exposed to political authority claims associated with a particular polity which they find making sense as passing the minimal normative threshold for a distinctively political form of rule (as opposed to the rule of terror or sheer coercion). This political-ethical phenomenon is widely known as political obligation but the paper will argue that the label is in fact a misnomer because it does not refer to a generic obligation. The implications of this account are manifold but two seem especially important: first, the notion of political obligation makes sense even beyond the realm of moralist political theory and, second, realist political theory should pay more attention to the problem of compliance than it used to do. (shrink)

Contrary to some well-known views in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, in general it is not the case that the felt character of sensory experiences is determined by the information that these experiences pick up, or represent, about the world. In this dissertation I shall focus on a particular sensory modality, namely color vision, to support this thesis. ;Recently there has arisen a strong and popular view of phenomenal consciousness according to which the two fundamental problems about the (...) mind: intentionality and phenomenal experience, can be traced back to just one: intentionality. On this view, the phenomenal aspect of experience is a special case of intentionality, or our mental states' carrying information about the external world. For instance, when we see the colors of objects, we see, in a direct and transparent way, exactly those kinds of properties that the external objects have. Not only are the colors of objects causally responsible for our experiences as of color, object colors crucially determine what is called the phenomenal character of color experience. ;In this dissertation I shall argue that this view of color experience---the view called representational externalism---cannot be correct. I shall argue that from the empirical facts about object color and color vision we need not conclude that object colors do not exist, hence color vision is a grand illusion, however, we do have to conclude from these facts that though object colors are the causes of our color experience, what it is like to see the colors is not, in any theoretically interesting sense, determined by the colors themselves. To the contrary, what it is like to see the colors is crucially determined by how our color vision systems are constructed. In this dissertation I offer two independent arguments to support this claim. (shrink)

0. Abstract In this paper, I argue that although the behavior of adjectives in context poses a serious challenge to the principle of compositionality of content, in the end such considerations do not defeat the principle. The first two sections are devoted to the precise statement of the challenge; the rest of the paper presents a semantic analysis of a large class of adjectives that provides a satisfactory answer to it. In section 1, I formulate the context thesis, according to (...) which the content of a complex expression depends on the context of its utterance only insofar as the contents of its constituents do. If the context thesis is false, the content of some complex expression is not compositionally determined. In section 2, using an example due to Charles Travis, I construct an objection to the context thesis based on the behavior of the adjective ‘green’. In section 3 and 4, I look at some of the difficulties surrounding the semantics of ‘good’, which provide the motivation for the thesis that most adjectives are contextually incomplete one-place predicates. In section 5, I discuss how ‘green’ and other color adjectives can be treated within such a semantic theory. Since this theory is compatible with the context thesis, the objection against the compositionality of content looses its force. (shrink)

This essay draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work to argue for a practice-oriented concept of expertise. We propose that conceptualizing types of expertise as having a family resemblance, relative to the problems such expertise addresses, escapes certain limitations of defining expertise as primarily epistemic. Recognizing the pragmatic purchase on actual problems a Wittgensteinian approach provides to discussions of expertise, we seek to understand the nature of expertise in situations where the people who need to make a difficult decision do not possess (...) or have access to the epistemic status that traditionally confers expertise. These are situations where people need to answer difficult questions that, while they may be informed by expertise in the epistemic register, are ultimately decided by expertise that weighs certified knowledge against the intractable characteristics of a particular situation. We suggest that there is not—even deep down on a conceptual level—only one kind of expertise, but multiple kinds of expertise that resonate with diverse kinds of problems. (shrink)

The implicit-explicit distinction is applied to knowledge representations. Knowledge is taken to be an attitude towards a proposition which is true. The proposition itself predicates a property to some entity. A number of ways in which knowledge can be implicit or explicit emerge. If a higher aspect is known explicitly then each lower one must also be known explicitly. This partial hierarchy reduces the number of ways in which knowledge can be explicit. In the most important type of implicit knowledge, (...) representations merely reflect the property of objects or events without predicating them of any particular entity The dearest cases of explicit knowledge of a fact are representations of one's own attitude of knowing that fact. These distinctions are discussed in their relationship to similar distinctions such as procedural-declarative, conscious unconscious, verbalizable-nonverbalizable, direct-indirect tests, and automatic voluntary control. This is followed by an outline of how these distinctions can be used to integrate and relate the often divergent uses of the implicit-explicit distinction in different research areas. We illustrate this for visual perception, memory, cognitive development, and artificial grammar learning. (shrink)

0. Abstract In this paper, I argue that although the behavior of adjectives in context poses a serious challenge to the principle of compositionality of content, in the end such considerations do not defeat the principle. The first two sections are devoted to the precise statement of the challenge; the rest of the paper presents a semantic analysis of a large class of adjectives that provides a satisfactory answer to it. In section 1, I formulate the context thesis, according to (...) which the content of a complex expression depends on the context of its utterance only insofar as the contents of its constituents do. If the context thesis is false, the content of some complex expression is not compositionally determined. In section 2, using an example due to Charles Travis, I construct an objection to the context thesis based on the behavior of the adjective ‘green’. In section 3 and 4, I look at some of the difficulties surrounding the semantics of ‘good’, which provide the motivation for the thesis that most adjectives are contextually incomplete one-place predicates. In section 5, I discuss how ‘green’ and other color adjectives can be treated within such a semantic theory. Since this theory is compatible with the context thesis, the objection against the compositionality of content looses its force. (shrink)

There is a striking similarity between the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Harry G. Frankfurt: they both argue that the temporal nature of human existence and agency is due to the fact that humans care about things. Even though Heidegger’s concept of care and Frankfurt’s concept of caring are very different, they are worth comparing because they play a similar role and have similar significance in their thinking. This comparison also offers an opportunity for a desired dialog between philosophers working (...) in those two different traditions. I argue that the two views can complement each other: Though Frankfurt provides a detailed psychological description of caring, his concept of caring is too mentalistic and leads to solipsism. Thus, his theory can be enriched with the help of Heidegger’s view based on the concept of Being-in-the-world. (shrink)

…entities? 2. How to be a nominalist 2.1. “Speak with the vulgar …” 2.2. “…think with the learned” 3. Arguments for nominalism 3.1. Intelligibility, physicalism, and economy 3.2. Causal..

This book presents an overview of these studies and attempts to clarify apparently disparate results by placing them in a coherent theoretical framework.

This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian “collective memory” of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but cannot be treated as epiphenomenal to their propagation. The diffusion of bodies tasked with establishing the “true” history of communism reflects, first and foremost, a shift in the region’s approach to its past, one driven by (...) the right’s frustration over an allegedly pervasive influence of former communist cliques. Memory institutes spread as the CEE right progressively perceives their emphasis on research and public education as a safer alternative to botched lustration processes. However, the field of anticommunism extends beyond diffusion by seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticommunist narratives. This results in an entirely different challenge, which requires reconciling of disparate ideological and national interests. In this article, I illustrate some of these nationally diverse, but internationally converging, trajectories of communist extrication from the vantage point of its main exponents: theanticommunist memory entrepreneurs, who are invariably found at the helm of memory institutes.Inhabiting the space around the political, historiographic, and Eurocratic fields, anticommunist entrepreneurs weave a complex web of alliances that ultimately help produce an autonomous field of anticommunism. (shrink)

I argue that sentences like ‘ John is building a house’ entail the existence of some thing John is building, althoguh they do not entail that this thing is a house. It is a house in progress. On the way, I argue against intensional analyses of the progressive. This is a follow-up of my earlier paper ‘On the Progressive and the Perfective.’.

A central puzzle of contemporary moral and political philosophy is that while most of us believe that all or almost all human beings enjoy the same moral status, human beings possess the capacities that supposedly ground moral status to very unequal levels. This paper aims to develop a novel strategy to vindicate the idea of moral equality against this challenge. Its central argument is that the puzzle emerges only if one accepts a usually unstated theoretical premise about value and the (...) proper response to value. The premise holds that if the presence of a valuable property warrants a certain kind of response towards its bearers, then every variation in the degree to which the property is present necessarily constitutes a reason for a corresponding variation in the response that is warranted towards its bearers. It argues that despite its intuitive appeal, the premise is not plausible as a general view about the proper way of responding to value, and as a view about responding to the value of rational beings in particular. It proposes an account of the proper manner of valuing rational beings that supports a distinctive version of the so-called threshold approach to justifying equal moral status. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relational critique of distributive conceptions of justice, according to which the proper focus of egalitarian justice is the egalitarian nature of social relations rather than the equal distribution of certain goods. It maintains that the relational critique constitutes a fundamental challenge to distributive egalitarianism only if it rejects the “core distributive thesis” that holds that the distribution of some nonrelational goods has relation-independent significance for justice. It argues that several relational proposals are compatible with that thesis, (...) and therefore constitute extensions or revisions of the distributive conception rather than alternatives to it, and that those relational views that reject the core distributive thesis are the least plausible ones. Finally, the chapter shows that relational views are often ambiguous regarding the nature of the significance of egalitarian relations, i.e. whether it consists in their contribution to well-being, or in being the fitting response to equal moral status. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

By the integrative value-like approach to the idea of God and to the function of religion, A. Adler’s individual psychology provides religious studies with considerable axiological and praxiological footings. Filling individual and societal needs within the contemporary world, religion is constituted as an essential factor in the growth and development of the sense of community as a foundation of democratic cohabitation. Adlerian psychology puts forward a holistic-integrative approach to the human being that can be applied to the area of religious (...) studies. The re-shaping of the table of values and of the socialization and education systems is necessary in the context of the crisis of values and discouraging influences specific to the globalized world. Feelings of inferiority are unavoidable realities of this world and, by avoiding becoming their victim and making use of a positive compensating effort, humas can convert them into facts of culture. We have a general responsibility to develop the innate potentiality of the community feeling, and to encourage it to manifest itself into desirable social behaviors. (shrink)

Grodzinsky's hypotheses need different theories of grammar for comprehension and for production. These predictions are undesirable. Hungarian data are incompatible with the Trace Deletion Hypothesis.

An accessible and illuminating exploration of the conceptual basisof scientific and statistical inference and the practical impact this has on conducting psychological research. The book encourages a critical discussion of the different approaches and looks at some of the most important thinkers and their influence.

We explore three methods for measuring the conscious status of knowledge using the artificial grammar learning paradigm. We show wagering is no more sensitive to conscious knowledge than simple verbal confidence reports but is affected by risk aversion. When people wager rather than give verbal confidence they are less ready to indicate high confidence. We introduce a “no-loss gambling” method which is insensitive to risk aversion. We show that when people are just as ready to bet on a genuine random (...) process as their own classification decisions, their classifications are still above baseline, indicating knowledge participants are not aware of having. Our results have methodological implications for any study investigating whether people are aware of knowing. (shrink)

A recent version of the mental file framework argues that the antirealist theory of fictional objects can be reconciled with the claim that fictional utterances involving character names express propositions that are true in the real world. This hybrid view rests on the following three claims: character names lack referents but express a mode of presentation, fictional utterances introduce oblique contexts where character names refer to their modes of presentation, and modes of presentation are mental files. In this critical paper, (...) I will argue that the proposed view runs into a number of theory-internal problems. These problems arise partly from the unclarities inherent in the notion of mental file, and partly from a mistaken semantics for character names. I will also argue that adherents of fictional realism can make use of the notion of mental file without encountering similar difficulties. (shrink)

An interdisciplinary examination of the evolutionary breakthroughs that rendered the brain accessible to itself.

In the following text I provide my response to the three reviewers of my book titled “Reviewing the Past. The Presence of Ruins”. First I list a few elements that all the reviewers highlighted. Then, I answer the insightful comments and detailed observations brought forward by them, organised in thematic structures. In this part I start with the three main criteria and the agency of Nature in ruination. Then I investigate the issues regarding the so-called “contemporary ruins”. Ruins’ environmental character, (...) context and sitedness are put into focus in the next section, to finally arrive to the equally inspiring questions of picturesque, sublime and to the issues of representation. (shrink)

The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the (...) Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. What we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the Anthropocene as our current predicament. (shrink)

Today’s technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity simultaneously evokes and defies historical understanding. On the one hand, it implies a historical claim of an epochal transformation concerning posthumanity as a new era. On the other, by postulating the birth of a novel, better-than-human subject for this new era, it eliminates the human subject of modern Western historical understanding. In this article, I attempt to understand posthumanity as measured against the story of humanity as the story of history itself. I examine the fate (...) of humanity as the central subject of history in three consecutive steps: first, by exploring how classical philosophies of history achieved the integrity of the greatest historical narrative of history itself through the very invention of humanity as its subject; second, by recounting how this central subject came under heavy criticism by postcolonial and gender studies in the last half-century, targeting the universalism of the story of humanity as the greatest historical narrative of history; and third, by conceptualizing the challenge of posthumanity against both the story of humanity and its criticism. Whereas criticism fragmented history but retained the possibility of smaller-scale narratives, posthumanity does not doubt the feasibility of the story of humanity. Instead, it necessarily invokes humanity, if only in order to be able to claim its supersession by a better-than-human subject. In that, it represents a fundamental challenge to the modern Western historical condition and the very possibility of historical narratives – small-scale or large-scale, fragmented or universal. (shrink)

I argue against the standard view that ontological debates can be fully described as disagreements about what we should believe to exist. The central thesis of the paper is that believing in Fs in the ontologically relevant sense requires more than merely believing that Fs exist. Believing in Fs is not even a propositional attitude; it is rather an attitude one bears to the term expressed by 'Fs'. The representational correctness of such a belief requires not only that there be (...) Fs, but also that the term expressed by 'Fs' should not misrepresent them. In certain cases we might believe that there are Fs without believing our conception of Fs applies to them. This may well be the situation we are in with regard to abstract entities of various sorts. (shrink)

First religion explained how the mind emerged, language developed, and overall consciousness came into being. Many of these explanations were challenged during the "age of reason," grand metaphysical theories gradually displaced many of the religious perceptions of the world, only to be displaced by scientific advances at the start of the century. Now, Zoltan Torey, an Australian psychologist, freelance science writer, and science journalist for ABC Radio National in Australia, offers a new science-based theory of the human mind. Torey spent (...) ten years using a process he calls reverse engineering, a process with a solid grounding in neuroscience, linguistics, and biological modelling to identify what we call the mind. He shows how it emerged, relates to language, generates consciousness, and yet remains hidden from insight. Sure to be controversial, The Crucible of Consciousness provides a unified description of the human mind, an antidote to the fragmented world and other simplistic belief-systems that occupy the cultural middleground. (shrink)

Is there anything political about politics? This question may well appear nonsensical, yet this is what has intrigued some of the best minds in political philosophy. The most straightforward answer was given by Carl Schmitt, for whom the distinction between friend and foe is definitive for politics. But it may be argued that some of the central concepts of other theories involve similar attempts to capture the intrinsically political aspect of politics. The harmonious working of Plato's Republic presupposes that every (...) citizen is satisfied with his role in it. This is possible only if each of them takes a part…. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that even some of the most fundamental concepts of Marxism have been used and abused to fit their advocates' purposes. More specifically, the interpretation of the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" has been subject to a dual development. First, the dictatorship of the proletariat has come to denote an increasingly violent regime. Second, the term has been used to refer to a rule exercised by an ever smaller segment of society. This paper (...) seeks to analyze and elucidate this much disputed and frequently misunderstood Marxist concept. In the first part Marx's use of the term is examined. The second section explores how the same concept was explicated in the writings of some of the most important first generation Marxist thinkers and "practitioners" like Engels, Lenin, Kautsky, Bukharin, and Stalin. Following the summary of my findings I attempt to formulate some meaningful generalizations about the usage of the concept by Marxist thinkers. (shrink)