Both children and adults predict the content of upcoming language, suggesting that prediction is useful for learning as well as processing. We present an alternative model which can explain prediction behaviour as a by-product of language learning. We suggest that a consideration of language acquisition places important constraints on Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) theory.

Borrowing some of Aby Warburg’s methods from his Mnemosyne Atlas, this paper experiments with an anti-linear, non-teleological method of writing fashion history. It investigates fashion movement, gesture and pose, and their afterlife in images and objects. It thus looks at the intersection of time and the gesture, particularly in relation to the idea of the ‘now’, a central organising principle of fashion. To this end, it juxtaposes images of the body in motion from a wide range of sources, including scientific (...) photography, etiquette manuals and fashion magazines. Spanning three centuries, though not chronologically, the images show a range of activities: not only fashion posing, but also tennis-playing, duelling, dancing, military marching, social gestures, and going to the races. The paper proposes that each image is charged with some quality or attribute that is also immanent in one or more of the others, even though they have no causal or temporal relationship. (shrink)

Borrowing some of Aby Warburg’s methods from his Mnemosyne Atlas, this paper experiments with an anti-linear, non-teleological method of writing fashion history. It investigates fashion movement, gesture and pose, and their afterlife in images and objects. It thus looks at the intersection of time and the gesture, particularly in relation to the idea of the ‘now’, a central organising principle of fashion. To this end, it juxtaposes images of the body in motion from a wide range of sources, including scientific (...) photography, etiquette manuals and fashion magazines. Spanning three centuries, though not chronologically, the images show a range of activities: not only fashion posing, but also tennis-playing, duelling, dancing, military marching, social gestures, and going to the races. The paper proposes that each image is charged with some quality or attribute that is also immanent in one or more of the others, even though they have no causal or temporal relationship. (shrink)

Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies of syntactic priming of the English dative alternation. Study 1 was a cross-sectional study (N = 140) of children aged 3−9 years, in which we found strong evidence of abstract priming and the lexical boost, but (...) little evidence that either effect was moderated by age. We found weak evidence for a prime surprisal effect; however, exploratory analyses revealed a protracted developmental trajectory for verb-structure biases, providing an explanation as for why prime surprisal effects are more elusive in developmental populations. In a longitudinal study (N = 102) of children in tightly controlled age bands at 42, 48, and 54 months, we found priming effects emerged on trials with verb overlap early but did not observe clear evidence of priming on trials without verb overlap until 54 months. There was no evidence of a prime surprisal effect at any time point and none of the effects were moderated by age. The results relating to the emergence of the abstract priming and lexical boost effects are consistent with prediction-based models, while the absence of age-related effects appears to reflect the structure-specific challenges the dative presents to English-acquiring children. Overall, our complex pattern of findings demonstrates the value of developmental data sets in testing psycholinguistic theory. (shrink)

‘Virtue signaling’ is the practice of using moral talk in order to enhance one’s moral reputation. Many find this kind of behavior irritating. However, some philosophers have gone further, arguing that virtue signaling actively undermines the proper functioning of public moral discourse and impedes moral progress. Against this view, I argue that widespread virtue signaling is not a social ill, and that it can actually serve as an invaluable instrument for moral change, especially in cases where moral argument alone does (...) not suffice. Specifically, virtue signaling can change the broader public’s social expectations, which can in turn motivate the adoption of new, positive social norms. I also argue that the reputation-seeking motives underlying virtue signaling impose important constraints on virtue signalers’ behavior, which serve to keep the worst excesses of virtue signaling in check. (shrink)

Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of empirical research on trait attribution suggest that the cognitive processes that generate these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This gives rise to a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has deeply disturbing and alienating consequences. In this paper, I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character-trait judgments are in (...) fact quite trustworthy. I then propose a mindreading-based model of the socio-cognitive processes underlying trait attribution that explains both why these judgments are initially unreliable, and how they eventually become more accurate. (shrink)

Background At the beginning of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, many non-Covid healthcare services were suspended. In April 2020, the Department of Health in England mandated that non-Covid services should resume, alongside the continuing pandemic response. This ‘resetting’ of healthcare services created a unique context in which it became critical to consider how ethical considerations did (and should) underpin decisions about integrating infection control measures into routine healthcare practices. We draw on data collected as part of the ‘NHS Reset Ethics’ project, (...) which explored the everyday ethical challenges of resetting England’s NHS maternity and paediatrics services during the pandemic. Methods Healthcare professionals and members of the public participated in interviews and focus group discussions. The qualitative methods are reported in detail elsewhere. The focus of this article is our use of Frith’s symbiotic empirical ethics methodology to work from our empirical findings towards the normative suggestion that clinical ethics should explicitly attend to the importance of relationships in clinical practice. This methodology uses a five-step approach to refine and develop ethical theory based on a naturalist account of ethics that sees practice and theory as symbiotically related. Results The Reset project data showed that changed working practices caused ethical challenges for healthcare professionals, and that infection prevention and control measures represented harmful barriers to the experience of receiving and offering care. For healthcare professionals, offering care as part of a relational interaction was an ethically important dimension of healthcare delivery. Conclusions Our findings suggest that foregrounding the importance of relationships across a hospital community will better promote the ethically important multi-directional expression of caring between healthcare professionals, patients, and their families. We offer two suggestions for making progress towards such a relational approach. First, that there is a change of emphasis in clinical ethics practice to explicitly acknowledge the importance of the relationships (including with their healthcare team) within which the patient is held. Second, that organisational decision-making should take into account the moral significance afforded to caring relationships by healthcare professionals, and the role such relationships can play in the negotiation of ethical challenges. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate (...) controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct. (shrink)

Phillips and colleagues convincingly argue that knowledge attribution is a faster, more automatic form of mindreading than belief attribution. However, they do not explain what it is about knowledge attribution that lends it this cognitive advantage. I suggest an explanation of the knowledge-attribution advantage that would also help to distinguish it from belief-based and minimalist alternatives.

Inspired by Voltaire's advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française (...) d'étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

In this four part exchange, Evan Selinger starts by stating that Collins’s empirical evidence in respect of linguistic socialization and its bearing on artificial intelligence and expertise is valuable; it advances philosophical and sociological understanding of the relationship between knowledge and language. Nevertheless, he argues that Collins mischaracterizes the data under review and thereby misrepresents how knowledge is acquired and understates the extent to which expert knowers are embodied. Selinger reconstructs the case for the importance of the body in the (...) initial acquisition of language and challenges Collins to show how a disembodied entity could become fluent in any language at all.Collins responds by accepting that his approach does not demonstrate quite as much about the irrelevance of the body as he thought it did but that even though he accepts all of Selinger’s claims, ‘the body’ as needed by the philosophical approach set out by Selinger is still a vestigial thing. Collins’s main point, however, is that the philosophical view of the body—the world is divided into embodied agents and unembodied entities—distracts attention from the more interesting empirically researchable question of how the ability to become socialized diminishes, if it does, as the body become more and more minimal. The right research question is not about whether a person can extrapolate from minimal sensory input but how much extrapolation is possible under different circumstances and how it is done.Dreyfus, having seen the whole of the exchange so far, agrees that both have a point but argues that Collins’s approach still misses the well established importance of bodily engagement for full understanding.Collins responds to this by trying to set out more clearly the position associated with the idea of interactional expertise.Keywords: Interactional expertise; Phenomenology; Turing test; Embodiment; Tacit knowledge; Socialization. (shrink)

Engineers encounter difficult ethical problems in their practice and in research. In many ways, these problems are like design problems: they are complex, often ill-defined; resolving them involves an iterative process of analysis and synthesis; and there can be more than one acceptable solution. This book offers a real-world, problem-centered approach to engineering ethics, using a rich collection of open-ended scenarios and case studies to develop skill in recognizing and addressing ethical issues.

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called (...) Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up. (shrink)

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

The experience of a reward appears to enhance memory for recent prior events, adaptively making that information more available to guide future decision-making. Here, we tested whether reward enhances memory for associative item-location information and also whether the effect of reward spreads to other categorically-related but unrewarded items. Participants earned either points (Experiment 1) or money (Experiment 2) through a time-estimation reward task, during which stimuli-location pairings around a 2D-ring were shown followed by either high-value or low-value rewards. All stimuli (...) were then tested for location memory or recognition (yes/no), immediately and after a 24-hour delay. Across both experiments (combined analysis), there was a robust improvement in location memory following high-value rewards, even though evidence supporting this effect was reliable in Experiment 2 but not in Experiment 1. The memory-enhancing effect of reward was observed on both the immediate and delayed location-memory tests. Reward-enhanced memory for both directly rewarded stimuli and categorically related stimuli that were not directly rewarded. No reliable effect of reward value on yes/no recognition-memory performance was observed in either experiment. We hypothesise that reward enhances the consolidation of recent experience and conceptually related memories to make these more available for future decisions. (shrink)

A central area of current philosophical debate in the foundations of mathematics concerns whether or not there is a single, maximal, universe of set theory. Universists maintain that there is such a universe, while Multiversists argue that there are many universes, no one of which is ontologically privileged. Often model-theoretic constructions that add sets to models are cited as evidence in favour of the latter. This paper informs this debate by developing a way for a Universist to interpret talk that (...) seems to necessitate the addition of sets to V. We argue that, despite the prima facie incoherence of such talk for the Universist, she nonetheless has reason to try and provide interpretation of this discourse. We present a method of interpreting extension-talk (V-logic), and show how it captures satisfaction in `ideal' outer models and relates to impredicative class theories. We provide some reasons to regard the technique as philosophically virtuous, and argue that it opens new doors to philosophical and mathematical discussions for the Universist. (shrink)

These are central to the accounts of lexical representation and meaning construction developed, giving rise to the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive ...

Both mindreading and stereotyping are forms of social cognition that play a pervasive role in our everyday lives, yet too little attention has been paid to the question of how these two processes are related. This paper offers a theory of the influence of stereotyping on mental-state attribution that draws on hierarchical predictive coding accounts of action prediction. It is argued that the key to understanding the relation between stereotyping and mindreading lies in the fact that stereotypes centrally involve character-trait (...) attributions, which play a systematic role in the action–prediction hierarchy. On this view, when we apply a stereotype to an individual, we rapidly attribute to her a cluster of generic character traits on the basis of her perceived social group membership. These traits are then used to make inferences about that individual’s likely beliefs and desires, which in turn inform inferences about her behavior. (shrink)

Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well as (...) longstanding debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential. (shrink)

It is often assumed that concepts from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, have to be treated differently from concepts from non-formal sciences. This is especially relevant in cases of concept defectiveness, as in the empirical sciences defectiveness is an essential component of lager disruptive or transformative processes such as concept change or concept fragmentation. However, it is still unclear what role defectiveness plays for concepts in the formal sciences. On the one hand, a common view sees formal (...) concepts to be protected against defects because of their precise and stable nature. On the other, studies going back as far as Lakatos (1963) showcase the changeability of such concepts. -/- In this paper, I will investigate if and how defectiveness based on the occurrence of inconsistencies can appear with formal concepts. To make the case as strong as possible, I employ a strict notion of formal concept that assumes the concept to have a fixed and definite extension. I will show that there are indeed certain types of defectiveness that cannot occur with such concepts; but that there are other types of defectiveness that do occur. This means that while formal concepts have to be treated differently than non-formal concepts, questions about defectiveness---as raised in the conceptual engineering debate and philosophy of science---can still be applied to them. I will highlight this point by showing how formal sciences have special strategies available to them that allow them to resolve defectiveness of their concepts in a flexible and informative manner. (shrink)

Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well as (...) longstanding debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential. (shrink)

Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering is a superlative collection of essays that does what too few scholarly works have dared: it takes seriously the philosophical significance of women’s lived experience. Every woman, regardless of her own reproductive story, is touched by the often restrictive beliefs and norms governing discourses about pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Thus the concerns of this anthology are relevant to all women and central to any philosophical project that takes women’s lives seriously. In (...) this volume 16 authors- including both established feminists and some of today’s most innovative new scholars- engage in sustained reflection on the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which those experiences are informed. Many of the topics in this collection, though familiar, are here taken up in a new way: contributors think beyond the traditional pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, speak to the manifold nature of mothering by considering the experiences of adoptive mothers and birthmothers, and upend the belief that childrearing practices must be uniform despite psycho-sexual differences in children. Many chapters reveal the radical shortcomings of conventional philosophical wisdom by placing trenchant assumptions about subjectivity, gender, power and virtue in dialogue with women’s experience. The volume is diverse both in its content and in its scholarly approach; certain of the essays are informed by their authors’ own experiences, others draw from extant narratives; many engage such canonical thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger, while others draw from the works of contemporary feminists including Sara Ruddick, Iris Marion Young, Virginia Held, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All readers, regardless of their philosophical training and commitments, will find much to appreciate in this volume. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used in disaster risk management applications to predict the effect of upcoming disasters, plan for mitigation strategies, and determine who needs how much aid after a disaster strikes. The media is filled with unintended ethical concerns of AI algorithms, such as image recognition algorithms not recognizing persons of color or racist algorithmic predictions of whether offenders will recidivate. We know such unintended ethical consequences must play a role in DRM as well, yet there is (...) surprisingly little research on exactly what the unintended consequences are and what we can do to mitigate them. The aim of this perspective is to call researchers working on fairness, accountability, and transparency to work with DRM and local experts—so we can ensure that disaster mitigation and relief is accountable, considers local values, and is not unintentionally biased. (shrink)

In Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation, Iris Marion Young describes the lived bodily experience of women who have “chosen” their pregnancies. In this essay, Lundquist underscores the need for a more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy. Drawing on sources in literature, psychology, and phenomenology, she offers descriptions of the cryptic phenomena of rejected and denied pregnancy, indicating the vast range of pregnancy experience and illustrating substantial phenomenological differences between “chosen” and unwanted pregnancies.

Climate change and decarbonization raise complex justice questions that researchers and policymakers must address. The distributions of greenhouse gas emissions rights and mitigation efforts have dominated justice discourses within scenario research, an integrative element of the IPCC. However, the space of justice considerations is much larger. At present, there is no consistent approach to comprehensively incorporate and examine justice considerations. Here we propose a conceptual framework grounded in philosophical theory for this purpose. We apply this framework to climate mitigation scenarios (...) literature as proof of concept, enabling a more holistic and multidimensional investigation of justice. We identify areas of future research, including new metrics of service provisioning essential for human well-being. [Can be freely read by clicking the ReadCube link below.]. (shrink)

In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, I argue (...) for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of ‘country’ being a dual character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists’ and audiences’ practical identities. Part of country music’s aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre’s practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity. (shrink)

Sophists were active participants in ancient discussions about being or what-is at the most general level. This chapter discusses the contributions of Gorgias, Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron in the context of the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. All of these figures share a serious commitment to ontological inquiry as well as a concern with the problems that arise when discussing being or what-is. They also share an approach to these problems that is at times paradoxical and self-undermining. -/- The (...) chapter begins with a brief discussion of Parmenides’ poem, a work that serves as an important backdrop for later ontology. It then covers Gorgias’ On Not-Being, a response to the Eleatics and a unique contribution in its own right. Gorgias’ work is then compared with that of Zeno and Melissus. Finally, the more limited evidence we have of Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron’s ontological theorizing is discussed. (shrink)

Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In (...) this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms. (shrink)

How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...) from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards “factive” forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation. (shrink)

• An adequate conceptual framework is still needed to account for phenomena that (i) have a first-person, subjective-experiential or phenomenal character; (ii) are (usually) reportable and describable (in humans); and (iii) are neurobiologically realized.2 • The conscious subject plays an unavoidable epistemological role in characterizing the explanadum of consciousness through first-person descriptive reports. The experimentalist is then able to link first-person data and third-person data. Yet the generation of first-person data raises difficult epistemological issues about the relation of second-order awareness (...) or meta-awareness to first-order experience (e.g. (shrink)

Keeping track of what others believe is a central part of human social cognition. However, the social relevance of those beliefs can vary a great deal. Some belief attributions mostly tell us about what a person is likely to do next. Other belief attributions tell us more about a person's social identity. In this paper, I argue that we cope with this challenge by employing two distinct concepts of belief in our everyday social interactions. The epistemic concept of belief is (...) primarily used to keep track of what other people take to be true, and this informs how we predict and interpret their behaviors. The symbolic concept of belief, in contrast, is primarily used as a means of signaling one's social identity to other members of one's community. In turn, community members closely monitor each other's symbolic beliefs as a means of enforcing social norms. (shrink)

Critics of clinical equipoise have long argued that it represents an overly permissive, and therefore morally unacceptable, mechanism for resolving the tensions inherent in clinical research. In particular, the equipoise requirement is often attacked on the grounds that it is not sufficiently responsive to the interests of individual patients. In this paper, we outline a view of equipoise that not only withstands a stronger version of this objection, which was recently articulated by Deborah Hellman, but also plays important roles in (...) clarifying the discussion. (shrink)

Colour fascinates all of us, and scientists and philosophers have sought to understand the true nature of colour vision for many years. In recent times, investigations into colour vision have been one of the main success stories of cognitive science, for each discipline within the field - neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence, and philosophy - has contributed significantly to our understanding of colour. Evan Thompson's book is a major contribution to this interdisciplinary project. Colour Vision provides an (...) accessible review of the current scientific and philosophical discussions of colour vision. Thompson steers a course between the subjective and objective positions on colour, arguing for a relational account. This account develops a novel `ecological' approach to colour vision in cognitive science and the philosophy of perception. It is vital reading for all cognitive scientists and philosophers whose interests touch upon this central area. (shrink)

Almost a quarter-century after the Carnegie report, Scholarship Reconsidered, the scholarship of teaching remains a contested idea, celebrated by some and critiqued by others. This new book is particularly relevant now however as it explores the notion of the scholarship of teaching through the lens of authenticity, a complex, intriguing and particularly striking and distinctively helpful notion which has caught the attention of several authors in adult and higher education. However, those writing about authenticity do not always make explicit what (...) it is that they mean by this notion, nor are they clear about the philosophical foundations underpinning it. In developing the notion of the scholarship of teaching as an 'authentic practice', the author draws on several complementary philosophical ideas to explore the nature of this practice, why it is imperative for universities to engage in it, what meaningful engagement wold look like and the conditions under which it might qualify as 'authentic'. Core constructs employed include practice virtue communicative action 'being', 'power', critical reflection and transformationThe scholarship of teaching is described as a practice sustained through critical reflection and critical self-reflection. Being a scholar of teaching is viewed as an ongoing transformative learning process, a process of becoming authentic, the latter ultimately aimed at both helping students to become authentic and creating a better world in which to teach, learn and live. Although explored as a practice in its own right, the scholarship of teaching is seen to be strengthened by being situated within a wider integrated notion of academic practice. The book combines the author's previous research on authenticity with earlier work on the meaning of the scholarship of teaching, offering a provocative, fresh and timely perspective on the scholarship of teaching and professional learning in our times but also providing guidance on how to create a better world in which to learn, teach and live. (shrink)

Up Against Foucault offers both a feminist critique of Foucauldian theories as well as an attempt to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable perspectives. Feminists are often "up against Foucault" because he questions key conclusions in feminism regarding the nature of gender relations, and men's possession of power. This book, however, fills the gap in literature about Foucault by showing how his theories of sexuality and power relations are often applicable to the everyday realities of women's lives. Drawing upon their diverse backgrounds (...) in social theory and philosophy, the contributors discuss the ways in which Foucault provokes feminists into questioning their grasp of power relations, and examines the implications of his decision to overlook categories of gender in his discussion of sexuality and power relations. They also show that in spite of his lack of interest in gender, Foucault's ways of understanding the control of women and female sexuality ultimately have much to offer feminism. (shrink)

We survey recent developments in the theory of class forcing for- malized in the second-order set-theoretic setting.

The aims of this study were to measure the readability of Australian based informed consent documents and determine whether informed consent readability guidelines have been established by Australian human research ethics committees (HRECs). A total of 20 informed consent documents, 10 HIV/AIDS and 10 type 2 diabetes, were measured for readability using the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) and Gunning Fog Index (Fog). Published guidelines and policy statements of the two local HREC who approved the 20 clinical trials under study (...) where examined to identify whether they had any formal policies/guidelines on the readability of informed consent documents. The two HRECs were contacted via e-mail to also determine whether they utilised any informal readability standards or “rules of thumb” that may not have been mentioned in the published documents. The HIV/AIDS and type 2 diabetes informed consent documents were, on average, written at a grade 13 reading level. Formal readability standards had not been established by the two local HRECs, however, they did verify the use of informal rules for assessing readability of informed consent documents. Based on Australian literacy data, the majority of informed consent documents were written well beyond the reading ability of many Australians. Unreadable informed consent documents may result in patients rejecting trial participation altogether or conversely may result in their participating in a trial with inadequate consent. Therefore, a step toward reducing the complexity of informed consent documents may be to implement objective readability assessments into the human research ethics application and review process. (shrink)

This clearly presented study examines the nature of religious experiences, and asks whether they can be used as evidence for religious beliefs. The author discusses important philosophical issues raised by religious experience, such as the role of models and metaphors in their description, and the way experiences in general are used as evidence for claims about the world. Using contemporary and classic sources from the world's religions, the author gives an account of different types of religious experience. She also draws (...) extensively on psychological, sociological, and philosophical literature to meet sceptical challenges, and concludes that, like most experiences, they are most effective as evidence within an argument which combines evidence from a wide range of sources. (shrink)

It is widely held that free speech is a distinctive and privileged social kind. But what is free speech? In particular, is there any unified phenomenon that is both free speech and which is worthy of the special value traditionally attached to free speech? We argue that a descendent of the classic Millian justification of free speech is in fact a justification of a more general social condition; and, via an argument that 'free speech' names whatever natural social kind is (...) justified by the best arguments, that free speech is therefore this more general condition. This condition involves not merely the orthodox freedom (in some sense) of speakers to distribute words, but also two less frequently acknowledged dimensions of free speech: audience understanding and consideration. We conclude with some discussion of the policy implications of this conception of free speech. (shrink)