Imagine that Ann, asked to name her favorite treat, answers: 1. Licorice is tasty Imagine that Ben, having hidden some licorice in the cupboard, whispers to Ann: 2. There might be licorice in the cupboard. What if any role is played by perspective—whom the licorice is tasty to, whose evidence allows for licorice in the cupboard—in the semantics of such sentences?

There is no consensus on how to define substance, but one popular view is that substances are entities that are independent in some sense or other. E. J. Lowe’s version of this approach stresses that substances are not dependent on other particulars for their identity. I develop the meaning of this proposal, defend it against some criticisms, and then show that others do require that the theory be modified.

This paper answers several open questions around structures with o‐minimal open core. We construct an expansion of an o‐minimal structure by a unary predicate such that its open core is a proper o‐minimal expansion of. We give an example of a structure that has an o‐minimal open core and the exchange property, yet defines a function whose graph is dense. Finally, we produce an example of a structure that has an o‐minimal open core and definable Skolem functions, but is not (...) o‐minimal. (shrink)

Subjectivism about normativity (SN) is the view that norms are never intrinsic to things but are instead always imposed from without. After clarifying what SN is, I argue against it on the basis of its implications concerning intentionality. Intentional states with the mind-to-world direction of fit are essentially norm-subservient, i.e., essentially subject to norms such as truth, coherence, and the like. SN implies that nothing is intrinsically an intentional state of the mind-to-world sort: its being such a state is only (...) a status relative to the imposition of a norm. If one rejects this view of mind-to-world states, then one has grounds for rejecting SN itself. If one accepts it, an infinite regress arises that makes it impossible for norms to be imposed, which means that SN has undermined itself. (shrink)

This paper aims to reframe disability through John Dewey’s transactional theory of culture to indicate how disability is not located in the biological organization of the individual nor in the organization of culture, but in the transactions between the two. This paper will apply Dewey’s theory of culture to disability studies and philosophy of disability and then to ADHD to make clear the benefits of a transactional model of disability.

This paper argues that the field of philosophy, and bioethics spe­cifically, engages in a series of speech acts that identify scholarship advocating for increased philosophical engagement with the experiences of disability as “activism.” In doing so, the field of philosophy treats these calls as not worthy of consideration, and therefore, to be ignored in “serious scholarship.” Further, this paper makes clear the ways that philosophy relies upon ableism through what Peter Railton calls the “culture of smartness,” which serves as a (...) form of ableist apologia as defined by Jay Dolmage. The paper concludes by using the example of ADHD to indicate how the prevalence of this “culture of smartness” serves to exclude disabled philosophers within the field. (shrink)

The phrase ‘trading zone’ is often used to denote any kind of interdisciplinary partnership in which two or more perspectives are combined and a new, shared language develops. In this paper we distinguish between different types of trading zone by asking whether the collaboration is co-operative or coerced and whether the end-state is a heterogeneous or homogeneous culture. In so doing, we find that the voluntary development of a new language community—what we call an inter-language trading zone—represents only one of (...) four possible configurations. In developing this argument we show how different modes of collaboration result in different kinds of trading zone, how different kinds of trading zone may be ‘nested’ inside each other and discuss how a single collaboration might move between different kinds of trading zone over time. One implication of our analysis is that interactional expertise is a central component of at least one class of trading zone.Keywords: Trading zones; Interactional expertise; Interdisciplinarity; Creole. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay applies lessons from John Dewey’s theory of democracy and democratic education to the modern development of information communications technologies and the assertion that the development of such technologies will lead to a more open, more democratic society. Given the continuity of the technology and its applications with structures of oppression within modern society, any attempt to resolve or democratize technology through skills-based training is bound to fail, as this does not resolve the cultural habits that enable oppression through (...) technology. To this end, what is necessary is democratic education that recognizes the unique contexts in which students become individuals and furnishes flexible habits of transaction. (shrink)

Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism argues that gender is best understood as a felt sense of the organization of the human body. Through Japanese aesthetics and American pragmatism, this book argues that re-understanding gender as an affect, or a feeling, can expand the ways that gender is understood, enacted, and theorized in experience.

Bloodbending is sometimes referred to as the “puppetmaster technique” because it is the only bending art whose focus is on the direct manipulation and control of a target. Incarcerated in a maximum‐security prison designed specifically to hold waterbenders, Hama was powerless to resist her captors due to their restriction of any liquid that could be used to bend. The bending styles in Avatar: The Last Airbender draw their inspiration from real‐world Chinese martial arts. Karl Friday describes satsujinken in a more (...) complicated way: “when a combatant uses force of will to overpower, immobilize, and strike down an opponent before he can react, this is called ‘setsunin‐to’”. It could be a perfect description of bloodbending as practiced by Hama: a use of already established and morally neutral techniques for the domination and overpowering of a person for egoistic aims. (shrink)

Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts by Barry Allen is the first English-language book to engage in a systematic investigation of the philosophical underpinnings of the Asian martial arts. In doing so, it aims to construct the Asian martial arts, specifically the Chinese martial traditions, as a field for comparative philosophy, wherein the investigation of Chinese philosophy through the martial traditions can provide illumination into Western questions of aesthetics, ethics, self-hood, and intentionality. Barry Allen's own devotion (...) to the study of the martial arts informs his philosophical investigations: rather than treat the Chinese martial and philosophical traditions as valuable only... (shrink)

If recent reports in the media are anything to go by, we now know why some people crave chocolate, why teenagers tend to be moody and – most impressively of all, perhaps – which parties voters will opt for in elections. Findings like these, we are assured, have the backing of science. We owe them to advances in brain-scanning technology that have enabled researchers to pinpoint the brain's ‘pleasure centre’ or ‘thinking area’, and so to achieve mind-reading powers that have (...) hitherto been the stuff of fantasy. There is even some site in the brain that might be called a ‘God spot’. (shrink)

Jean Ayres invented Sensory Integration for children experiencing learning and social difficulties because, according to Ayres, they could not adequately integrate information from multiple sensory modalities. She established a scientific basis for her identification of children with sensory integrative difficulties, using statistical techniques to identify symptoms and neuroscience to determine a cause. She was an unusually reflective practitioner who catalyzed a community of practice around SI without becoming a guru—indeed, she encouraged her students to come up with their own ideas (...) and test them empirically. She felt isolated from the growing field of Occupational Therapy yet is viewed as one of its greatest pioneers. After her death in 1988, the SI community gradually began to argue about fundamental issues like what should constitute an appropriate diagnosis and set of tests for SI. At present, the network is fragmented to the point where some of the opposing positions may be incommensurable with each other, which would require a trading zone. (shrink)

The notion of common ground is important for the production of referring expressions: In order for a referring expression to be felicitous, it has to be based on shared information. But determining what information is shared and what information is privileged may require gathering information from multiple sources, and constantly coordinating and updating them, which might be computationally too intensive to affect the earliest moments of production. Previous work has found that speakers produce overinformative referring expressions, which include privileged names, (...) violating Grice’s Maxims, and concluded that this is because they do not mark the distinction between shared and privileged information. We demonstrate that speakers are in fact quite effective in marking this distinction in the form of their utterances. Nonetheless, under certain circumstances, speakers choose to overspecify privileged names. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies:Human Nature in UtopiaGorman BeauchampIUtopists view man as a product of his social environment. Nothing innate in the psychic make-up of man—no inherent flaw in his nature, no inheritance of original sin—prevents his being perfected, or at least radically ameliorated, once the social structure that shapes character can be properly reordered. Utopists, in short, deny that there is such a thing as "human nature"—if, as (...) John Plamenatz suggests, to say that something is human nature is just another way of saying that it cannot be changed.1 To accept the psychic constitution of man as fixed, immutable, is anathema to utopists, who agree rather with Ortega y Gasset: "Man has no nature. What he has is history."2 The social conditions that have obtained historically, that is to say, have made man what he has been—anything but utopian; but if man's history could be changed, so could his "nature." The idea of Progress, so pervasive in the West from the seventeenth century on, lends some credence to this contention. W. D. Howells's Altrurians, their creator notes, "get some sad amusement out of the fact that the capitalist world believes human nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy have all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these things were once human nature, which is always changing...."3 Utopia is merely a means, then, of imaginatively expediting, directing, culminating the historically progressive creation of a morally exemplary race of men.The environmentalist psychology espoused by utopists springs from one of two anterior assumptions (although in the creation of many fictional idola the distinction between them is often blurred). The first [End Page 280] assumption is formulated most famously by Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality: that "man is naturally good, and only by his institutions is he made bad."4 The second assumption is formulated most famously by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding: that the mind—and by extension the character—is a tabula rasa that takes impression from the stimuli exerted by the external world and thus is neither innately good or bad, but plastic, malleable.5 An intriguing conflation of these two theories operates, for instance, in the psyche of the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In the long middle section of the book, where the monster's side of the story is presented sympathetically, his character develops in a text-book demonstration of Lockean psychology; yet, at the same time, this lumbering tabula rasa quivers with enough benevolence (the implausible provenance of which mystifies) to put most saints to shame. He becomes evil and destructive only after being persecuted unmercifully for his misshapen appearance.6 Indeed, the criminal career of Mary Shelley's monster rehearses the common utopian argument that society's injustice to man (or monster) is the source of his crimes. "With our present state of society," writes James Casey in A New Moral World (1885), "we manufacture criminals and then punish them for being so."7 H. G. Wells, in A Modern Utopia (1905), concurs: "Crime and bad lives are the measure of the State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community."8 And both are but restating the charge of Sir Thomas More's Raphael Hytholoday, leveled several centuries earlier in the original Utopia (1519): "If you allow people to be badly brought up and their habits to be corrupted little by little from childhood and if you then punish them for crimes to which their early training has disposed them, what else is this, I ask, but first making them thieves and then punishing them for it?"9 Evil deeds, then, to reiterate the utopist's point, result not from some vicious mole in human nature, but from the malfunctioning of society itself. Utopia, by contrast, is—or theoretically ought to be—a world without crime.Rousseau's concept of the innate goodness of man and the evil of his institutions most often informs primitivist models of utopia, exotic worlds inhabited by noble savages uncorrupted by civilization. The idealized Indians of Montaigne's essay... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guest Editors' NoteKevin Taylor (bio) and Johnathan Flowers (bio)Welcome to this special fall 2021 issue of Education & Culture. we are pleased to bring you the second installment of this special three-part issue on Deweyan approaches to contemporary issues at the intersection of data and technology.In his extensive writings on philosophy and technology, Luciano Floridi has argued that "the time has come to translate environmental ethics into terms (...) of infosphere and informational entities, for the land we now inhabit is not just the earth."1 This may be appropriate from a Deweyan perspective as Dewey's approach to aesthetic experience focuses on the living organism within its environment and we have become digital humans in digital environments. Our digital world feels unstable because it is in constant change, but Dewey reminds us that "all interactions that effect stability and order in the whirling flux of change are rhythms. There is ebb and flow, systole and diastole: ordered change."2 The rhythms of our digital world pervade all experience in what he termed "doing and undergoing." We are swimming in a sea of data and leaving behind what investigative reporter Julia Angwin terms data pollution.3 But in the data-driven world, that data pollution is collected, analyzed, and monetized by big data tech firms in a kind of societal harm that threatens digital democracy.Whereas part one saw contributions from five scholars throwing curriculum and technology into sharp relief, this issue asks questions such as "Where ought we to begin?", "What does feminist pragmatism have to tell us about the pandemic and online teaching and learning?", and "Do the aims and means of data and technology align with human experience?"John Machielsen's "Responsible Imagineering: John Dewey's Pluralistic Ethics and Technological Innovation" seems like a good place to begin. Machielsen argues for placing Dewey's ethics at the starting point from which technological innovation can flourish. Driven by Deweyan concepts of intelligence, education, and imagination, Machielsen explores, among other themes, socially disruptive technology from the perspective of pragmatists who constantly reconstruct concepts and values through the process of Deweyan inquiry. Human beings are imaginative and plastic with regard to problem solving, and what is needed here is to keep the barriers between technology and everyday life porous so that we do not risk compartmentalizing them as distinctly different realms.In the next two essays, we turn our attention to the growing concerns surrounding intelligent technology in online educational environments. Great strides have been made in the field of artificial intelligence, and intelligent technology has inserted itself into various aspects of data and technology, such as machine learning that creates personalized learning paths for students. Whether these technologies fall under the [End Page 1] category of algorithms, machine learning, or artificial intelligence, they raise questions about their potential impact on teaching and learning.Olivier Del Fabbro is also suspicious of the current state of intelligent technology in his article, "How to Teach Machines in Artificial Intelligence: Technical Education in John Dewey, Gilbert Simondon, and Machine Learning." Citing the Google machine learning model that classified African Americans as gorillas, Del Fabbro utilizes Dewey and Gilbert Simondon to argue that the human–machine relationship is still immature and at risk of creating an alienated situation out of undesirable bad habits. Intelligent technology requires constant care by engineers and programmers to form good habits and adapt to social life if their aims are to align with Deweyan pedagogy.As Del Fabbro focuses on intelligent technology, the human dimension of online learning comes under scrutiny in two articles that adopt feminist pragmatist methods. Krissah Marga B. Taganas's article, "Feminist-Pragmatist Perspectives on Online Education: Challenging and Changing Online Educational Conversation," rightfully acknowledges how the pandemic has magnified existing inequalities in society. The rapid migration to online learning was necessarily expedited in the face of uncertainties surrounding public health, but how do educators migrate classes that were not designed with online learning in mind to begin with? Dewey emphasized schools as sites and tools for change, but how does online education provide an optimal social environment for learning? Taganas utilizes feminist pragmatism as an important philosophical resource to... (shrink)

Carl J. Friedrich (1901?1984) defined constitutionalism as something more than can be expressed by the dominant behavioralist paradigm of modern political science and the typical academic focus on law and courts. A leading but now neglected post-WWII authority on constitutionalism, Friedrich argued that it should be understood as an institutionally-based, interactive system for deliberating the meaning and legal application of the norms of a political community. His approach shares much with the contemporary ?historical institutionalist? call to situate law and courts (...) within a broader, more normative, and more interactive conception of constitutionalism. Accordingly, a reconsideration of Friedrich's work may help current efforts to better articulate the full richness and complexity of constitutionalism as a distinctive way of ordering political life. (shrink)

This paper traces an expanded ethical perspective for youth and community work (YCW) practice in response to the climate and biodiversity crises. Discussing ecological ethics, we problematise the liberal humanist emphasis on utilitarianism and reject it as inappropriate for YCW in these times. Instead, we argue for an ecocentric practice ethic which intrinsically values the non-human world. To advance an ecocentric ethical perspective for YCW we draw on decolonial and posthuman theory. Inspired by a Freirean dialogical approach, we apply these (...) theoretical domains as lenses to problematise YCW practice, seeking a generative dialogue between perspectives. Through this, we identify three emergent tasks for ecocentric YCW: (a) thinking and acting beyond the individual; (b) cultivating reciprocal care and connection and (c) practicing critical pedagogies of place. This third element builds on YCW's social pedagogic tradition and provides a practical means to incorporate ecocentric ideas into practice. We conclude that, given the unprecedented implications of climate crises and biodiversity collapse, a YCW ethics that does not consider these implications for young people is insufficient for the context of practice today. Enacting an ecocentric YCW ethics requires ongoing collective praxis and dialogue between young people, practitioners, educators, managers and students. (shrink)

Cognition in work teams has been predominantly understood and explained in terms of shared cognition with a focus on the similarity of static knowledge structures across individual team members. Inspired by the current zeitgeist in cognitive science, as well as by empirical data and pragmatic concerns, we offer an alternative theory of team cognition. Interactive Team Cognition (ITC) theory posits that (1) team cognition is an activity, not a property or a product; (2) team cognition should be measured and studied (...) at the team level; and (3) team cognition is inextricably tied to context. There are implications of ITC for theory building, modeling, measurement, and applications that make teams more effective performers. (shrink)

This article reviews the public health and environmental regulations applicable to nanotechnology using a life cycle model from basic research through end-of-life for products. Given nanotechnology's immense promise and public investment, regulations are important, balancing risk with the public good. Trading zones and earth systems engineering management assist in explaining potential solutions to gaps in an otherwise complex, overlapping regulatory system.

Productive work on societal implications needs to be engaged with the research from the start. Ethicists need to go into the lab to understand what's possible. Scientists and engineers need to engage with humanists to start thinking about this aspect of their work. Only thus, working together in dialog, will we make genuine progress on the societal and ethical issues that nanotechnology poses.Davis Baird, in testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, May 1, 2003Federal funding of the (...) National Nanotechnology Initiative has averaged roughly $1 billion annually for the last three years, from 2004 to 2006. Society is poised to see more realistic nano-scale devices enter the marketplace, along with futuristic depictions of nanotechnology. For this reason, serious thought must be given to the societal impact of nanotechnology. (shrink)

A concise and readable account of Burke's political philosophy.

Historians of technology have provided important accounts of technological innovation, but they rarely employ concepts which permit a rigorous analysis ofinvention as a mental or cognitive process. This article seeks to address this theoretical lacuna by using concepts adapted from cognitive psychology to compare the mental processes of two telephone inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Specifically, we suggest that invention may be seen as a process in which inventors combine ideas with objects, or what we call mental models (...) and mechanical representations. The strategies by which inventors generate and manipulate these mental models and mechanical representations are what we refer to as heuristics. Using these concepts to narrate the development of the telephone, this article shows how invention can be interpreted as being much more than simply a mysterious act of individual genius. (shrink)

Ong and Derrida are concerned with presence—for Ong the presence of the other; for Derrida the presence of the signified. These seemingly disparate epistemological meanings of 'presence' actually share some striking similarities, but differ about how reason should be figured, that is, what metaphors should be used to conceptualize reason. This disagreement is fundamentally about what Ong called 'analogues for intellect.' After describing the history of Ong's and Derrida's concept of presence, we indicate how the ethical and religious implications Ong (...) and Derrida draw from 'presence' proceed logically from the analogues for intellect that each assumes. We will conclude, first, that these implications reveal a conflict of traditions—philosophy and rhetoric—but we also indicate how Ong's own rhetoric may permit dialogue between traditions. (shrink)

The societal and ethical impacts of emerging technological and business systems cannot entirely be foreseen; therefore, management of these innovations will require at least some ethicists to work closely with researchers. This is particularly critical in the development of new systems because the maximum degrees of freedom for changing technological direction occurs at or just after the point of breakthrough; that is also the point where the long-term implications are hardest to visualize. Recent work on shared expertise in Science & (...) Technology Studies (STS) can help create productive collaborations among scientists, engineers, ethicists and other stakeholders as these new systems are designed and implemented. But collaboration across these disciplines will be successful only if scientists, engineers, and ethicists can communicate meaningfully with each other. The establishment of a trading zone coupled with moral imagination present one method for such collaborative communication. (shrink)

Norms have a strong influence on human social interactions, but the emotions and actions associated with norm-breaking events have not been systematically studied. We asked subjects to imagine themselves in a conflict situation and then to report how they would feel, how they would act, and how they would imagine the feelings and actions of their opponent. By altering the fictional scenario that they were asked to imagine (weak vs. strong norm) and the perspective of the subject (norm-breaker vs. the (...) one whose norm has been violated), the emotions and actions associated with norm-breaking events could be examined. We tested the following hypotheses: (1) norms create emotional asymmetries that resolve conflicts in otherwise symmetrical contest situations; (2) sex differences exist in response to norm-breaking events, with males more prone to violence than females; (3) individual differences exist in response to norm-breaking events, along the lines predicted by theoretical models; and (4) emotions and actions attributed to one’s opponent are distorted in ways that can be interpreted as adaptive for the believer. In addition to these basic hypotheses, we address more subtle issues concerning the particular emotions provoked by norm-breaking events, the degree to which emotional response is fine-tuned to the situation, and the degree to which emotional response correlates with anticipated behavioral response. We discuss the relevance of our study to the general study of emotions and the use of fictional scenarios as a research method in addition to the study of norms from an evolutionary perspective. (shrink)