Although prima facie no more than a successful private detective, Sherlock Holmes is a classic exponent of scientific method and has laid down several fundamental rules of scientific discovery and truth?detection. While he rediscovered and modified well?known principles of induction, analysis and synthesis, and decision theory, he also made significant contributions to patterns of explanation, and with his ?principle of exclusion? was an ingenious innovator. This latter cornerstone of Holmes's methodology led him to an interesting modal theory of the ?improbable (...) possible? as a competitor to the famous doctrine of the ?impossible probable? put forward by Aristotle in de Arte Poetica. Holmes's scientific discipline was seasoned by warmth, understanding, and boldness. (shrink)

Das provokative und vielgelobte Buch Rorty's, des inzwischen international bekannten Ordinarius aus Princeton, stellt das gesamte Unternehmen der abendländischen Philosophie in Frage. Zentrales Thema von Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature sind Krise und Niedergang der analytischen Philosophy, wie wir sie seit Descartes, Locke und Kant kennen. Während Descartes und Locke die Seele als Auge modellierten, das die äußere Welt als inneres Bild wahrnimmt und vermittelt, verfeinerte Kant diese okulare Metapher durch Einführung des transzendentalen Subjekts. Gleichzeitig gab Kant der professionalen (...) Philosophie die Aufgabe, über die Legitimität intellektueller Anstrengungen zu richten. Legitimität aber kann nur gegründet sein in objektiven Kriterien und Regeln darüber, welche Repräsentationen der Welt als die wahren anzuerkennen sind. Nach Rorty führt dieser Ansatz die Philosophie unabdingbar auf den verhängnisvollen Weg der Reduktion auf Epistemologie. Die damit auftretenden erkenntnistheoretischen Probleme gilt es jedoch nicht zu lösen, sondern aufzulösen, zum Verschwinden zu bringen. Eine Besserung für die Sache der Philosophie sei zu erhoffen nur von einer historischen Kehrtwende zur Geschichte als Therapie. An dieser Stelle werden Wittgenstein, Heidegger und Dewey als Neuerer einer hermeneutisch orientierten philosophischen Pragmatik vorgestellt. Das Buch endet mit einer Skizze, wie das Unternehmen Philosophie in Zukunft menschlicher, dilettantischer, sozialer und damit insgesamt relevanter gestaltet werden kann. - Nicht so sehr Rorty's Verdikt über die Fruchtlosigkeit der analytischen Tradition - daß weite Teile der analytischen Philosophy in Sophisterei und Langeweile ausgeartet sind, ist bekannt - als vielmehr Rorty's Methode soll hier untersucht werden, sein Stil, seine professionellen Argumente als Beispiel einer ebenso zeitlosen wie vielgesichtigen Vorgehensweise in der abendländischen Philosophie, die Rorty neu orientieren will: Philosophie, der der Atem ausgeht über der Arbeit am Begriff, hat die Tendenz, eine Atempause in der Historie zu suchen oder das Philosophieren durch metaphilosophische Prolegomena zu einer zukünftigen neuen Metaphysik zu ersetzen. Rorty liefert beides: Kritik der Tradition und Versprechen einer besseren Zukunft. Allerdings sind seine de-konstruktiven Partien der professionellen Auseinandersetzung mit der analytischen Nachfolge Kants ungleich brillanter als sein Plädoyer für eine Symbiose von Gedanken des humanistischen neunzehnten Jahrhunderts mit Sokratischer Polypragmatik und Wittgensteinschen Therapien. (shrink)

Das provokative und vielgelobte Buch Rorty's, des inzwischen international bekannten Ordinarius aus Princeton, stellt das gesamte Unternehmen der abendländischen Philosophie in Frage. Zentrales Thema von Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature sind Krise und Niedergang der analytischen Philosophy, wie wir sie seit Descartes, Locke und Kant kennen. Während Descartes und Locke die Seele als Auge modellierten, das die äußere Welt als inneres Bild wahrnimmt und vermittelt, verfeinerte Kant diese okulare Metapher durch Einführung des transzendentalen Subjekts. Gleichzeitig gab Kant der professionalen (...) Philosophie die Aufgabe, über die Legitimität intellektueller Anstrengungen zu richten. Legitimität aber kann nur gegründet sein in objektiven Kriterien und Regeln darüber, welche Repräsentationen der Welt als die wahren anzuerkennen sind. Nach Rorty führt dieser Ansatz die Philosophie unabdingbar auf den verhängnisvollen Weg der Reduktion auf Epistemologie. Die damit auftretenden erkenntnistheoretischen Probleme gilt es jedoch nicht zu lösen, sondern aufzulösen, zum Verschwinden zu bringen. Eine Besserung für die Sache der Philosophie sei zu erhoffen nur von einer historischen Kehrtwende zur Geschichte als Therapie. An dieser Stelle werden Wittgenstein, Heidegger und Dewey als Neuerer einer hermeneutisch orientierten philosophischen Pragmatik vorgestellt. Das Buch endet mit einer Skizze, wie das Unternehmen Philosophie in Zukunft menschlicher, dilettantischer, sozialer und damit insgesamt relevanter gestaltet werden kann. - Nicht so sehr Rorty's Verdikt über die Fruchtlosigkeit der analytischen Tradition - daß weite Teile der analytischen Philosophy in Sophisterei und Langeweile ausgeartet sind, ist bekannt - als vielmehr Rorty's Methode soll hier untersucht werden, sein Stil, seine professionellen Argumente als Beispiel einer ebenso zeitlosen wie vielgesichtigen Vorgehensweise in der abendländischen Philosophie, die Rorty neu orientieren will: Philosophie, der der Atem ausgeht über der Arbeit am Begriff, hat die Tendenz, eine Atempause in der Historie zu suchen oder das Philosophieren durch metaphilosophische Prolegomena zu einer zukünftigen neuen Metaphysik zu ersetzen. Rorty liefert beides: Kritik der Tradition und Versprechen einer besseren Zukunft. Allerdings sind seine de-konstruktiven Partien der professionellen Auseinandersetzung mit der analytischen Nachfolge Kants ungleich brillanter als sein Plädoyer für eine Symbiose von Gedanken des humanistischen neunzehnten Jahrhunderts mit Sokratischer Polypragmatik und Wittgensteinschen Therapien. (shrink)

I will explore the paradoxical nature of epistemic access. By critiquing the traditional conception of mental states that are labelled as ’knowledge’, I demonstrate the susceptibility of these states to an infinite regress, thus, challenging their existence and validity. I scrutinise the assumption that an epistemic agent can have complete epistemic access to all facts about a given object while simultaneously being ignorant of certain truths that impact the very knowledge claims about the object. I further analyse the implications of (...) this paradox when attempting to fine-grain the parameters of epistemic access, which happens to reveal the vacuity of such definitions and the inevitability of the regress. (shrink)

In this article Cristoph Wulf examines the basic concepts of pedagogy and educational science in the German-speaking world, looking at education and socialization from the perspective of educational anthropology. He makes evident that the complex German concept of Bildung, in particular, can only be fully understood by means of a historical and philosophical analysis.

I defend J. L. Austin's direct realism against the colour delusion argument by employing epistemic logic to demonstrate that perceiving colours does not necessitate an intermediary such as sense-data, thus preserving the directness of perception.

The object of the book is to meet and combat false conceptions, to co-ordinate true notions, and so to furnish the reader with some general information on the old and the new scholasticism. The advantage of the book is its two-sided perspective that contains historical investigations about the ancient sources of the scholastic philosophy and the decline from it. But it contains also a systematic perspective by which the doctrines of the scholastic philosophizing are collected systematically. Therefore this book is (...) an scholarly introduction into the scholastic philosophy dedicated for undergraduate’s. (shrink)

We introduce a new theorem in social choice theory built on a path integral approach which will show that, under some reasonable conditions, there is a unique way to aggregate individual preferences based on fuzzy sets into a social preference based on probabilities, and that this way is invariant under any permutation of alternatives. We then apply this theorem to the case of democratic decision making with data of the behaviour and voting preferences of voting agents and show that there (...) is a tradeoff between fairness and efficiency and that no voting system can achieve both simultaneously. (shrink)

This introductory text explores the theory of social choice. Written as a primer suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduates, this text will act as an important starting point for students grappling with the complexities of social choice theory. Rigorous yet accessible, this primer avoids the use of technical language and provides an up-to-date discussion of this rapidly developing field. This is the first in a series of texts published in association with the LSE.

Kuhn claimed that several algorithms can be defended to select the best theory based on epistemic values such as simplicity, accuracy, and fruitfulness. In a recent paper, Okasha :83–115, 2011) argued that no theory choice algorithm exists which satisfies a set of intuitively compelling conditions that Arrow had proposed for a consistent aggregation of individual preference orderings. In this paper, we put forward a solution to avoid this impossibility result. Based on previous work by Gaertner and Xu, we suggest to (...) view the theory choice problem in a cardinal context and to use a general scoring function defined over a set of qualitative verdicts for every epistemic value. This aggregation method yields a complete and transitive ranking and the rule satisfies all Arrovian conditions appropriately reformulated within a cardinal setting. We also propose methods that capture the aggregation across different scientists. (shrink)

Two experiments examined the impact of causal relations between features on categorization in 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children and adults. Participants learned artificial categories containing instances with causally related features and noncausal features. They then selected the most likely category member from a series of novel test pairs. Classification patterns and logistic regression were used to diagnose the presence of independent effects of causal coherence, causal status, and relational centrality. Adult classification was driven primarily by coherence when causal links were deterministic (...) (Experiment 1) but showed additional influences of causal status when links were probabilistic (Experiment 2). Children’s classification was based primarily on causal coherence in both cases. There was no effect of relational centrality in either age group. These results suggest that the generative model (Rehder, 2003a) provides a good account of causal categorization in children as well as adults. (shrink)

Wulf Gaertner provides a comprehensive account of an important and complex issue within social choice theory: how to establish a social welfare function while restricting the spectrum of individual preferences in a sensible way. Gaertner's starting point is K. J. Arrow's famous 'Impossibility Theorem', which showed that no welfare function could exist if an unrestricted domain of preferences is to be satisfied together with some other appealing conditions. A number of leading economists have tried to provide avenues out of (...) this 'impossibility' by restricting the variety of preferences: here, Gaertner provides a clear and detailed account, using standardized mathematical notation, of well over forty theorems associated with domain conditions. Domain Conditions in Social Choice Theory will be an essential addition to the library of social choice theory for scholars and their advanced graduate students. (shrink)

(2013). Cognitive shortcuts in causal inference. Argument & Computation: Vol. 4, Formal Models of Reasoning in Cognitive Psychology, pp. 64-88. doi: 10.1080/19462166.2012.682655.

This introductory text explores the theory of social choice. This text is an important starting point for students grappling with the complexities of social choice theory. Rigorous yet accessible, with new chapter exercises, it avoids the use of technical language and provides an up-to-date discussion of this rapidly developing field.

The memory wave in the humanities has contributed to the impressive revival of cultural history, but the success of memory studies has not been accompanied by significant conceptual and methodological advances in the research of collective memory processes. Most studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question. As a result, the wealth of new insights into past and present historical cultures cannot (...) be linked conclusively to specific social collectives and their historical consciousness. This methodological problem is even enhanced by the metaphorical use of psychological and neurological terminology, which misrepresents the social dynamics of collective memory as an effect and extension of individual, autobiographical memory. Some of these shortcomings can be addressed through the extensive contextualization of specific strategies of representation, which links facts of representation with facts of reception. As a result, the history of collective memory would be recast as a complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers. The negotiations among these three different historical agents create the rules of engagement in the competitive arena of memory politics, and the reconstruction of these negotiations helps us distinguish among the abundance of failed collective memory initiatives on the one hand and the few cases of successful collective memory construction on the other. For this purpose, collective memory studies should adopt the methods of communication and media studies, especially with regard to media reception, and continue to use a wide range of interpretive tools from traditional historiography to poststructural approaches. From the perspective of collective memory studies, these two traditions are closely related and mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive, ways of analyzing historical cultures. (shrink)

This paper discusses the ethical implications of perverse incentives with regard to autonomous driving. We define perverse incentives as a feature of an action, technology, or social policy that invites behavior which negates the primary goal of the actors initiating the action, introducing a certain technology, or implementing a social policy. As a special form of means-end-irrationality, perverse incentives are to be avoided from a prudential standpoint, as they prove to be directly self-defeating: They are not just a form of (...) unintended side effect that must be balanced against the main goal or value to be realized by an action, technology, or policy. Instead, they directly cause the primary goals of the actors—i.e., the goals that they ultimately pursue with the action, technology, or policy—to be “worse achieved”. In this paper, we elaborate on this definition and distinguish three ideal-typical phases of adverse incentives, where only in the last one the threshold for a perverse incentive is crossed. In addition, we discuss different possible relevant actors and their goals in implementing autonomous vehicles. We conclude that even if some actors do not pursue traffic safety as their primary goal, as part of a responsibility network they incur the responsibility to act on the common primary goal of the network, which we argue to be traffic safety. (shrink)

This book develops an “idiomatic” foundational theory of the self and its moral obligations. It then employs this theory to answer a variety of questions about legal obligation, political authority, community, and international justice. It argues that we ought to obey a particular community’s laws and government commands, so long as our government restricts itself to protecting classical liberty and individual property rights under the rule of law. It further argues that people today should ideally live in confederated, legally sovereign (...) nation-states or nation-unions. Finally, it suggests that we have greater obligations to our compatriots than we do to foreign citizens, although we will often have pressing moral reasons to obey foreign laws while abroad, grant citizenship to outsiders who wish to join us, and help relieve foreign people’s misery. (shrink)

This paper addresses the silence about the Haitian revolution in the oeuvre of Karl Marx. He, who regarded revolutions as “locomotives of world history,” ignored the history of the revolution in Haiti and remained silent about its protagonists. In a brief approach to this paradox, I argue that the main reason for this blank space was Marx’s deficient analysis of contemporary racism. This is made clear in relation to 1) his acceptance of the biological meaning of race, 2) his involvement (...) in two main racisms of the time, antisemitism and colonial racism, and 3) his differentiation and gradation of historical subjects. The consequences were dramatic not because of Marx’s involvement in the racist zeitgeist but insofar as his learning process with regard to the relevance of anti-colonial movements and his awareness of negative societalization as well as its significance were not reflected in a theory of racism. This was to prove a debacle for subsequent attempts at a Marxist analysis of racism and has had effects that are still evident today. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between two main questions regarding the notion of privacy: “What is privacy?” and “Why do/should we value privacy?”. In developing a social-ontological recognitional model of privacy, it gives an answer to the first question. According to the SORM, Privacy is a second order quality of roles within social practices. It is a function of who is or should be recognized as a “standard authority”. Enjoying standard authority means to have the right to interpret and contest role behavior (...) and role obligations within a specific practice, as well as evaluate the normative structure, the fundamental practice norms as well as the roles and their status. The SORM utilizes the concept of standard authority to explicate privacy with regard to two categories that capture the relevant phenomena of privacy: decisional and informational privacy. Within a practice, an actor is said to have decisional privacy if she as a BCR does not recognize bearers of accidental roles as standard authorities. Vice versa, an actor is said to enjoy informational privacy if all other BCRs recognize her as a standard authority. Additionally, the requirement of mutual recognition by the practice participants as standard authorities introduces a “weak normativity” into the theory, which can be used to identify deficient privacy arrangements within practices. (shrink)

The ArgumentPain has important biomedical socioanthropological, semiotic, and other facets. In this contribution pain and the experssion of pain are looked at from the perspective of evolutionary biology, utilizing, among others, cross-cultural data from field work in Melanesia.No other being cares for sick and suffering conspecifics in the way humans do. Notwithstanding aggression and neglect, common in all cultures, human societies can be characterized as empathic, comforting, and promoting the health and well-being of their members. One important stimulus triggering this (...) caring response in others is the expression of pain. The nonverbal channel of communication, particularly certain universal — i.e., culture-independent facial expressions, gestures, and body postures, convey much of the message from the painstricken person to the group.These behaviors signal the person's physical and psychical pain, sadness, grief, and despair in ways very similar to the signs given by infants and small children: the body loses tonus and sinks or drops to the ground, the gestures are those of helplessness. Pain and grief may be so strong that control is lost not only over the body's posture but also over the mind's awareness. In such cases the afflicted person may carry out actions endangering himself or others. In general, these behavior patterns resemble those of infants in situations of distress and danger, and it is not surprising that the response of the members of the group is basically parental: taking care, assisting and consoling.Perceptive and behavioral patterns which developed in the course of avian and mammalian phylogeny to serve the well-being of the young have proven, as was shown by Eibl-Eibesfeldt, to be powerful building blocks for actions in other spheres of human interaction. Love is one such field, the reactions to a conspecific suffering pain is another. (shrink)

A theory of categorization is presented in which knowledge of causal relationships between category features is represented in terms of asymmetric and probabilistic causal mechanisms. According to causal‐model theory, objects are classified as category members to the extent they are likely to have been generated or produced by those mechanisms. The empirical results confirmed that participants rated exemplars good category members to the extent their features manifested the expectations that causal knowledge induces, such as correlations between feature pairs that are (...) directly connected by causal relationships. These expectations also included sensitivity to higher‐order feature interactions that emerge from the asymmetries inherent in causal relationships. Quantitative fits of causal‐model theory were superior to those obtained with extensions to traditional similarity‐based models that represent causal knowledge either as higher‐order relational features or “prior exemplars” stored in memory. (shrink)

This paper discusses the ethical implications of perverse incentives with regard to autonomous driving. We define perverse incentives as a feature of an action, technology, or social policy that invites behavior which negates the primary goal of the actors initiating the action, introducing a certain technology, or implementing a social policy. As a special form of means-end-irrationality, perverse incentives are to be avoided from a prudential standpoint, as they prove to be directly self-defeating: They are not just a form of (...) unintended side effect that must be balanced against the main goal or value to be realized by an action, technology, or policy. Instead, they directly cause the primary goals of the actors—i.e., the goals that they ultimately pursue with the action, technology, or policy—to be “worse achieved”. In this paper, we elaborate on this definition and distinguish three ideal-typical phases of adverse incentives, where only in the last one the threshold for a perverse incentive is crossed. In addition, we discuss different possible relevant actors and their goals in implementing autonomous vehicles. We conclude that even if some actors do not pursue traffic safety as their primary goal, as part of a responsibility network they incur the responsibility to act on the common primary goal of the network, which we argue to be traffic safety. (shrink)

This paper studies a ranking rule of the following type axiomatically: each voter places k candidates into n categories with ranks from n to 1 attached to these categories, the candidate(s) with the highest aggregate score is (are) the winner(s). We show that it is characterized by a monotonicity condition and a multi-stage cancellation property.

This essay analyzes the development of Hayden White's work from Metahistory to the present. It compares his approach to Roland Barthes's study of narrative and historical discourse in order to illustrate the differences between White's structuralist methods and poststructuralist forms of textual analysis. The author puts particular emphasis on the interdependence between the development of White's work and the criticism it has received during the last twenty years. Whereas historians have dismissed White's relativism, literary theorists and intellectual historians have criticized (...) his formalist methods. White's attempts to counter these critiques have gone mostly unnoticed and have been unsuccessful in that they destabilized his original position without proposing a coherent alternative. The question about adequate representations of Nazism, which White has recently addressed, highlights the theoretical problems which have not received enough attention by White or his critics. (shrink)

A central question in cognitive research concerns how new properties are generalized to categories. This article introduces a model of how generalizations involve a process of causal inference in which people estimate the likely presence of the new property in individual category exemplars and then the prevalence of the property among all category members. Evidence in favor of this causal‐based generalization (CBG) view included effects of an existing feature’s base rate (Experiment 1), the direction of the causal relations (Experiments 2 (...) and 4), the number of those relations (Experiment 3), and the distribution of features among category members (Experiments 4 and 5). The results provided no support for an alternative view that generalizations are promoted by the centrality of the to‐be‐generalized feature. However, there was evidence that a minority of participants based their judgments on simpler associative reasoning processes. (shrink)

Following the recent practice turn in privacy research, informational privacy is increasingly analyzed with regard to the “appropriate flow of information” within a given practice, which preserves the “contextual integrity” of that practice (Nissenbaum, 2010, p. 149; 2015). Such a practice-theoretical take on privacy emphasizes the normative structure of practices as well as its structural injustices and power asymmetries, rather than focusing on the intentions and moral considerations of individual or institutional actors. Since privacy norms are seen to be institutionalized (...) via the role obligations of the practice's participants, this approach can analyze structural and systematic privacy infringements in terms of “defective role performances and defective social relations” (Roessler & Mokrosinska, 2013, p. 780). -/- Unfortunately, it is still often somewhat unclear what this exactly means within the context of informational privacy, why these performances and relations are defective and for whom. This raises the common objection of a so-called “practice positivism” (Applbaum, 1999, p. 51), that is, the difficulty of practice–theoretical accounts to take a practice-independent standpoint, from which to normatively evaluate the existing practice norms themselves. For example, Nissenbaum herself initially argues for a “presumption in favor of the status quo” with respect to the appropriateness and flow of privacy norms within a practice (Nissenbaum, 2004, p. 127). Such a “practice conservatism” (Nissenbaum, 2010, p. 169) comes dangerously close to committing a naturalistic fallacy, if not undergirded by practice-external criteria (which is ultimately what she does). -/- Merely resorting to existing practice norms to assess what defective role performances amount to, only shifts the question from how to recognize an appropriate flow of information to the question of how to recognize those defective role performances and social relations. Against this backdrop, the central aim of this article is to shed light on this question without resorting to practice-independent first principles or far-reaching universalistic anthropological assumptions. For this, I will analyze the notion of “defective role performances and social relations” in terms of social pathologies.1 Doing so has two advantages: First of all, it can draw on already existing concepts and distinctions, which help to categorize the different levels of analysis that exist in informational privacy research and situate the notion of “defective role performances” within them (Section 1). Second, those concepts and distinctions can serve as a basis for establishing a typology of phenomena with regard to deficient practices of informational privacy (Section 4). (shrink)

The construction of complex simulation models and the application of new computer hardware to ecological problems has resulted in the need for many ecologists to rely on computer programmers to develop their modelling software. However, this can lead to a lack of flexibility and understanding in model implementation and in resource problems for researchers. This paper presents a new programming language, Viola, based on a simple organisational concept which can be used by most researchers to develop complex simulations much more (...) easily than could be achieved with standard programming languages such as C++. The language is object oriented and implemented through a visual interface. It is specifically designed to cope with complicated individual based behavioural simulations and comes with embedded concurrency handling abilities. (shrink)

Making use of the liberal concept of civil disobedience, this paper assesses, under which circumstances instances of illegal digital protest—called “hacktivism”—can be justified vis-à-vis the pro tanto political obligation to obey the law. For this, the paper draws on the three main criteria for liberal civil disobedience—publicity, nonviolence, and fidelity to law—and examines how these can be transferred to the realm of the digital. One of the main disanalogies between street and cyberspace protests is the tendency of hacktivists to remain (...) anonymous, which in turn calls into question their fidelity to law (the third criterion). The paper argues that there are functionally equivalent alternatives to what can be called the “acceptance-of-legal-consequences-condition” (ALCC) associated with the fidelity to law. As a result, the ALCC is not a necessary condition for hacktivists to showcase their fidelity to law, thereby resolving the apparent disanalogy. (shrink)

How do we make causal judgments? Many studies have demonstrated that people are capable causal reasoners, achieving success on tasks from reasoning to categorization to interventions. However, less is known about the mental processes used to achieve such sophisticated judgments. We propose a new process model—the mutation sampler—that models causal judgments as based on a sample of possible states of the causal system generated using the Metropolis–Hastings sampling algorithm. Across a diverse array of tasks and conditions encompassing over 1,700 participants, (...) we found that our model provided a consistently closer fit to participant judgments than standard causal graphical models. In particular, we found that the biases introduced by mutation sampling accounted for people's consistent, predictable errors that the normative model by definition could not. Moreover, using a novel experimental methodology, we found that those biases appeared in the samples that participants explicitly judged to be representative of a causal system. We conclude by advocating sampling methods as plausible process‐level accounts of the computations specified by the causal graphical model framework and highlight opportunities for future research to identify not just what reasoners compute when drawing causal inferences, but also how they compute it. (shrink)

Two experiments examined the impact of causal relations between features on categorization in 5- to 6-year-old children and adults. Participants learned artificial categories containing instances with causally related features and noncausal features. They then selected the most likely category member from a series of novel test pairs. Classification patterns and logistic regression were used to diagnose the presence of independent effects of causal coherence, causal status, and relational centrality. Adult classification was driven primarily by coherence when causal links were deterministic (...) (Experiment 1) but showed additional influences of causal status when links were probabilistic (Experiment 2). Children’s classification was based primarily on causal coherence in both cases. There was no effect of relational centrality in either age group. These results suggest that the generative model (Rehder, 2003a) provides a good account of causal categorization in children as well as adults. (shrink)

Paradigms of anthropology -- Evolution-hominization-anthropology -- Philosophical anthropology -- Anthropology in the historical sciences: historical anthropology -- Cultural anthropology -- Historical cultural anthropology -- Core issues of anthropology -- The body as a challenge -- The mimetic basis of cultural learning -- Theories and practices of the performative -- The rediscovery of rituals -- Language-the antinomy between the universal and the particular -- Images and imagination -- Death and recollection of birth -- Future prospects.

This volume develops a unique framework to understand India through indigenous and European perspectives, and examines how it copes with the larger challenges of a globalized world. Through a discussion of religious and philosophical traditions, cultural developments as well as contemporary theatre, films and media, it explores the manner in which India negotiates the trials of globalization. It also focuses upon India’s school and education system, its limitations and successes, and how it prepares to achieve social inclusion. The work further (...) shows how contemporary societies in both India and Europe deal with cultural diversity and engage with the tensions between tendencies towards homogenization and diversity. This eclectic collection on what it is to be a part of global network will be of interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, philosophy, sociology, culture studies, and religion. (shrink)

Davon ausgehend, dass Natur und Kultur das gemeinsame Erbe des Menschen bilden, wird dargestellt, was wir unter dem Anthropozän verstehen. Es werden die ungewollten Wirkungen der Industrialisierung und Modernisierung untersucht. Dazu gehören der Klimawandel, die Zerstörung der Biodiversität, die gestörten biogeochemischen Kreisläufe, die Versauerung der Ozeane und die Verschmutzung des Planeten mit der Gefahr der Zerstörung der Lebensgrundlagen der Menschen, Tiere und Pflanzen. Welche Rolle spielen in diesem Prozess die Maschinen? Ohne ihre Erfindung wäre es nicht zu diesem Prozess mit (...) seinen zahlreichen Nebenwirkungen gekommen. Ihre Entwicklung reicht von der Dampfmaschine über die Prothetik bis zur Robotik. Ein wichtiger Motor der Entwicklung sind heute die digitale Kultur und die Künstlichen Intelligenz. Lassen sich diese auch für die nachhaltige Entwicklung nutzen? Ohne die Digitalisierung wäre es nicht zu den Entwicklungen der Gentechnologie gekommen. Mit der Erfindung und Nutzung der CRISPR-Technologie werden Eingriffe in die Evolution möglich, die sich als eine Zuspitzung der Dynamik des Anthropozäns begreifen lassen. Gibt es Möglichkeiten, die Gefährdungen und die negativen Auswirkungen dieser Entwicklungen zu vermeiden oder sie sogar zu kompensieren? Hier entstehen viele nicht einfach beantwortbare anthropologische Fragen, die für ein historisch und kulturell reflexives (Selbst-)Verständnis des Menschen von zentraler Bedeutung sind. (shrink)