I submit that philosophy makes progress, but it does so in a way that is distinct from the sense in which the word applies to science, and is more akin to what happens in allied fields such as mathematics and logic. I develop a model of philosophy as “evoking” (to use L. Smolin's term) a series of peaks in conceptually defined but empirically constrained, landscapes, or what N. Rescher calls “aporetic clusters.” I also discuss empirical evidence for the existence of (...) such clusters, following a statistical survey of philosophers’ views about their own field, carried out by D. Bourget and D.J. Chalmers. (shrink)

In the last decades ontology has been successfully developed in many directions and has fostered various approaches for depicting the contemporary ontological landscapes. An important task is to outline recent thought on the conceptual interfaces between science and philosophy. The present volume opens up a view onto the plurality of different ontological schemes. The papers collected here discuss the interfaces between ontology and empirical research that are created by the notions of a whole, a thought, a number, a quality, (...) an ability, a kind, notions of causation, dynamicity, and social objects, the application of relevant logical tools for the reconsideration of ontological paradigms, as well as the investigation of the consequences in cognitive sciences on the development of ontology. (shrink)

Biological conservation practices and approaches take many forms. Conservation projects do not only differ in their aims and methods, but also concerning their conceptual and normative background assumptions and their underlying motivations and objectives. We draw on philosophical distinctions from the ethics of conservation to explain variances of different positions on conservation projects along six dimensions: (1) conservation ideals, (2) intervention intuitions, (3) the moral considerability of nonhuman beings, (4) environmental values, (5) views on nature and (6) human roles (...) in nature. The result is a map of the moral landscape of biological conservation, on which these six dimensions are layered. This map functions as a heuristic tool to understand conceptual and normative foundations of specific conservation projects, which we will illustrate with four paradigmatic examples: the Pisavaara Strict Nature Reserve, Predator Free New Zealand, the Oostvaardersplassen Nature Reserve and the Great Green Wall Project. With this map as a heuristic tool, we aim to conceptually illuminate disagreement and clarify misunderstandings between representatives of different environmental protection strategies and to show that the same project can be supported (or criticised) on different grounds. (shrink)

This volume explores questions about conceptual change from both scientific and philosophical viewpoints by analyzing the recent history of evolutionary developmental biology. It features revised papers that originated from the workshop "Conceptual Change in Biological Science: Evolutionary Developmental Biology, 1981-2011" held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in July 2010. The Preface has been written by Ron Amundson. In these papers, philosophers and biologists compare and contrast key concepts in evolutionary developmental biology (...) and their development since the original, seminal Dahlem conference on evolution and development held in Berlin in 1981. Many of the original scientific participants from the 1981 conference are also contributors to this new volume and, in conjunction with other expert biologists and philosophers specializing on these topics, provide an authoritative, comprehensive view on the subject. Taken together, the papers supply novel perspectives on how and why the conceptual landscape has shifted and stabilized in particular ways, yielding insights into the dynamic epistemic changes that have occurred over the past three decades. This volume will appeal to philosophers of biology studying conceptual change, evolutionary developmental biologists focused on comprehending the genesis of their field and evaluating its future directions, and historians of biology examining this period when the intersection of evolution and development rose again to prominence in biological science. (shrink)

What makes us conscious? Many theories that attempt to answer this question have appeared recently in the context of widespread interest about consciousness in the cognitive neurosciences. Most of these proposals are formulated in terms of the information processing conducted by the brain. In this overview, we survey and contrast these models. We first delineate several notions of consciousness, addressing what it is that the various models are attempting to explain. Next, we describe a conceptual landscape that addresses (...) how the theories attempt to explain consciousness. We then situate each of several representative models in this landscape and indicate which aspect of consciousness they try to explain. We conclude that the search for the neural correlates of consciousness should be usefully complemented by a search for the computational correlates of consciousness. (shrink)

The conceptual landscape connected with such notions as mental disease, mental disorder, or, considerably broader, madness is not only complex and internally heterogeneous, but also somewhat obscure. Even the very nature of complexity and heterogeneity at place, what is more, seems to be unclear, which is reflected in the numerous (and heated) debates philosophers of psychiatry engage in and, respectively, in the variety of fundamentally incompatible, if not incommensurable, high-level models of psychopathology they develop (Fulford & Colombo, 2004).The (...) paper by Justin Garson (2023) can be understood as a successful attempt at helping us to find our bearings in such a troublesome conceptual domain. As such, it can... Read More. (shrink)

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion involves extraordinary use of ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all (...) of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or “agency detector,” whose proper domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims. (shrink)

One of the most characteristic features of Comparative Literature in terms of methodological practice is that of operating in “in between” spaces. Not only does this feature suggest the comparative approach as something which originates through movement, thus making it imperative for the researcher to deal with the notion of mobility, it also characterizes many of the concepts with which it operates. Considering the possibility, as well as the fertility, of practicing this methodology in the analysis and critique of contemporary (...) visual art, we understand that it fits the analysis of any enterprise regarding the in-betweens of visual and verbal texts. These fundamental aspects were elected for a comparative analysis of two visuals artists whose œuvres operate in in-between spaces between the visual and the verbal as much as between the self and the Other. José Leonilson (Brazil 1957-1993) and Louise Bourgeois (France/EUA 1911-2010) reveal, through a comparative analysis, creative and constitutive actions which elaborate a space we could best understand through the image of a seaside landscape where the line we try to draw to divide the saltwater from the sand never stands. But, in what manners could the constituted poetic space created by them be of significance for a broader spectrum than the literary interest? In our understanding, Leonilson’s and Bourgeois’s poetics operate through a silent hearing of the Other, might that be their loved ones, the stone or cloths. This conceptual notion, required for the creative action, thus establishes a particular notion of balance between them and the Other. It is this precise aspect that also operates the mobility of the notion of love through their œuvre, and through the election of personal emotional narratives as the thriving force for creation. And what could be more needed nowadays, here as elsewhere, than considering together with Leonilson’s and Bourgeois’ images that love shall be the perpetual moving space that at times nears, and later distances us from each other? (shrink)

Drawing conceptually and directly on music notation, this book investigates landscape architecture's inherent temporality. It argues that the rich history of notating time in music provides a critical model for this under-researched and under-theorised aspect of landscape architecture, while also ennobling sound in the sensory appreciation of landscape. It makes available to a wider landscape architecture and urban design audience the works of three influential composers - Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti and Michael Finnissy - presenting a (...) critical evaluation of their work within music, as well as a means in which it might be used in design research. Each of the musical scores is juxtaposed with design representations by Kevin Appleyard, Bernard Tschumi and William Kent, before the author examines four landscape spaces through the development of new landscape architectural notations. In doing so, this work offers valuable insights into the methods used by landscape architects for the benefit of musicians, and by bringing together musical composition and landscape architecture through notation, it affords a focused and sensitive exploration of temporality and sound in both fields. (shrink)

The aim of the book is to explore common concerns regarding methodological individualism in different fields of the life sciences broadly construed. It will address conceptual problems regarding individuals and their relation and dependence on the collectivities they are part of and consider innovative new viewpoints, grounded in specific scientific projects that question the present descriptions and understanding and raise challenges. A wide variety of recent, influential contributions in the life sciences utilize notions of collectivity, sociality, rich interactions and (...) emergent phenomena, as essential explanatory tools to handle numerous persistent scientific questions in the life sciences. -/- Examples range from gene expression and regulation, the dynamics of bacterial populations, the ecological developmental biology of symbiosis, levels of selection, to communication, motion and patterns of behavior in diverse life forms, the role of social institutions and cultural dynamics in human evolution, and the psychological basis for social norms. The book is being structured so that fruitful and rewarding disciplinary interactions take place among researchers and scholars who have been concerned with overcoming methodological individualism. -/- The books includes a section of four papers on holobionts and the hologenome theory and a special memorial article on the work of the late Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob authored by Herbert Levine. (shrink)

For more than 35 years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. Diary/Landscape - the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist - set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England. In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. A beautiful and moving meditation on family, (...) history, memory, and place, the work reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation. (shrink)

Communication strategies to shape public opinion can be applied to the philosophical program of conceptual engineering. I propose to look for answers to the implementation challenge for conceptual engineering on similar challenges that arise in other contexts, such as that of social movements. I claim that conceptual engineering is successfully practiced in other areas with direct consequences on the political landscape, and that we can apply to philosophy what we might learn from those successful practices. With (...) that end in mind, I explain the psychological approach to conceptual engineering. I present what has been called “the implementation challenge”, which is the problem that emerges from the possibility of control over the content of our concepts. The challenge consists in that if there is not such a control, conceptual engineering is not implementable. Then, I review some of the reactions that have been given to that challenge, and I defend the feasibility of conceptual engineering appealing to the collective action frames that social movements endorse as an instance of a successful kind of conceptual engineering and derive some strategies that might be of use for conceptual engineering in philosophy. Finally, I reply to some anticipated objections to my proposal. (shrink)

Avrum Stroll accepts the ancient tradition that one of the tasks of philosophy is to give an accurate account of the world's features, both animate and inanimate. But, he contends, because these features are inexhaustibly complex, no single theory or conceptual model can provide a complete account. Stroll's approach is piecemeal and example-oriented. In stressing the importance of examples, his work runs counter to one of the most powerful and seductive ways of thinking about the world--the Platonic tradition, which (...) denigrates examples in the search for qualities or essences. Stroll favors pluralism, on the ground that this is how the world is.The "landscapes" of the title refers to various conceptual landscapes. Using the methodological approach he calls philosophy by example, the author discusses seven major problems of epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language: skepticism, direct reference theories and natural kinds, the relationship between the microscopic and macroscopic, the logic of examples, direct reference and fiction, holistic theories of meaning, and direct versus indirect realism in perception. It is the author's method that binds together the different topics, but the method is not the message. What matters are the substantive results. His unique analyses reveal new understandings of some difficult problems. (shrink)

The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured for the animal. Koffka made a sharp distinction between the “behavioural environment” and the “geographical (...) environment”. We show how this distinction picks out the difference between the environment as perceived by an individual organism, and the shared publicly available environment. The ecological psychologist James Gibson was later critical of Koffka for inserting a private phenomenal reality in between animals and the shared environment. Gibson tried to make do with just the concept of affordances in his explanation of molar behaviour. We argue however that psychology as a science of molar behaviour will need to make appeal both to the concepts of shared publicly available affordances, and of the multiplicity of relevant affordances that invite an individual to act. A version of Koffka’s distinction between the two environments remains alive today in a distinction we have made between the field and landscape of affordances. Having distinguished the two environments, we go on to provide an account of how the two environments are related. Koffka suggested that the behavioural environment forms out of the causal interaction of the individual with a pre-existing, ready-made geographical environment. We argue that such an account of the relation between the two environments fails to do justice to the complex entanglement of the social with the material aspects of the geographical environment. To better account for this sociomaterial reality of the geographical environment, we propose a process-perspective on our distinction between the landscape and field of affordances. While the two environments can be conceptually distinguished, we argue they should also be viewed as standing in a relation of reciprocal and mutual dependence. (shrink)

The World Anti-Doping Agency sets out a detailed description of what its own conception of the “spirit of sport” as employed in the World Anti-Doping Code entails. However, controversies as to the significance and meaning to be ascribed to the term abound in the literature. In order to unravel the core of the debates and to move discussions forward, the authors aimed at reviewing understandings of the spirit of sport in the conceptual literature. The main databases were searched using (...) relevant keywords. After the inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied, eighteen publications were included in the review. The most striking result to emerge from the data is the multivalence of the concept of spirit of sport. Our thematic analysis generated the contestability of the spirit of sport as the predominant theme in the conceptual literature. There is a need for empirical research to generate data about perspectives on the spirit of sport from other stakeholders especially those of the athletes themselves. (shrink)

Features of gait are determined at multiple levels, from the selection of the gait itself (e.g. walk or run) through the specific parameters utilized (stride length, frequency, etc.) to the pattern of muscular excitation. The ultimate choices are neurally determined, but what is involved with that decision process? Human locomotion appears stereotyped not so much because the pattern is predetermined, but because these movement patterns are good solutions for providing movement utilizing the machinery available to the individual (the legs and (...) their requisite components). Under different circumstances the appropriate solution may differ broadly (different gait) or subtly (different parameters). Interpretation of the neural decision making process would benefit from understanding the influences that determine the selection of the appropriate solution in any set of circumstances, including that of normal conditions. In this review we survey an array of studies that point to energetic cost as a key input to the gait coordination system, and not just an outcome of the gait pattern implemented. We then use that information to rigorously define the construct proposed by Sparrow and Newell (1998) where the effects of environment, organism and task act as constraints determining the solution set available, and the coordination pattern is then implemented under a pressure for energetic economy. Environment is defined in terms of affordances based on the ecological psychology definition of the concept and organism is defined as classic morphology and physiology based capabilities. We rely on a novel conceptualization of task that recognizes that the task goal needs to be separated from the mechanisms that achieve the goal if the motivation behind the selection of the mechanism strategy is to be exposed and understood. This reformulation of the Sparrow and Newell construct is then linked to the proposed pressure for economy by considering it as an optimization problem, where the most readily selected gait strategy will be that which achieves the task goal at (or near) the energetic minimum. (shrink)

Th is article examines the extent to which spaces are structuring influences on, or targets of, action. Two factors and their interactions are presented: the extent to which a space is 1) maintained and 2) used. As these factors increase in strength, the structural influences of a space increase while agential opportunities are diminished. Conversely, as spaces become dilapidated and abandoned, structural forces are weakened and the potential for creative action heightens. These spaces can be conceptualized as elements of the (...) ‘residual landscape’: spaces left behind by socio-historical processes and practices. Special cases are considered where the factors are inversely related and issues of structure and agency are complicated. A brief case study serves to illustrate each type of spaceand the factors which operate therein. (shrink)

Grounded in the use of the visual, Chinese thought and language operate within a wide spectrum that includes calligraphy, poetry, literature, painting, and garden-landscapes. In languages of phonetic signifiers, the spectrum is deliberately controlled to be narrower, excluding the visual from language and delegating it to iconology. These linguistic-cultural strategies have an ancient past and produce far-reaching consequences in thought and artefacts, with garden-landscapes being one of the most substantial outcomes. Garden-landscapes are China’s equivalent to Greek architecture, leading us to (...) both a repositioning of Chinese thought and a new framework of architecture. In this sense, the city, serving the function of thought in the expanded medium of conceptual and material units of meanings (figures), incorporates things into intellectual orders. This is perhaps the most important feature of Chinese thought and one that is the first to be obscured when it is rendered in scholarship in Indo-European languages. (shrink)

The North American landscape has changed considerably since European settlement, and ecological restorationists are responding to these changes by attempting to restore “natural” areas to their presettlement conditions. Through participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, this work details the physical and conceptual reconstruction of the oak savanna ecosystem. The construction of the “oak savanna” is shown to be more than the creation of a new classification of nature; it is the remaking of a natural community in situ. The (...) “creation story” of the oak savanna is told through the examination of the contested creations of the scientific claim, the expertise to make such a claim, and of nature itself. Finally, the implications of this research for environmental science and the place of the constructivist sociologist are discussed. (shrink)

The manifestation of the significance of geographic specificity in the formation and development of society is the most crucial research vector in the study of socio-philosophical doctrines. The tradition of conceptualizing the meaning of geography in the history of Russia was significantly contributed by Sergey Solovyov and Vasily Klyuchevsky. Fyodor Stepun also correlated geographic conditions and social practices within the philosophy of landscape, which he successfully integrated into his socio-philosophical doctrine. This research paper is undertaken to reveal the essential (...) principles of Stepun's social philosophy and to determine the features of his argumentation, which he used to interpret the mechanism of the socio-cultural process. Comparing the landscapes of Europe and Russia is Stepun's favorite method to focus on entirely different systems of social practices formed in different natural conditions. The limited/unlimited opposition is the foundation of Stepun's landscape philosophy. Stepun emphasizes that religion plays a significant role in forming the existence of social beings. Religion creates and maintains the unity of society, without which it is impossible to include geographic space in social practices. Religion forms a collective social subject from a multitude of individuals and collective formations and from their various activities - a unity tradition: a culture that has its strategy for the social development of the landscape. Stepun believed that the loss of religion's functionality as an instrument of social cohesion leads, in the long term, to the death of culture. Orthodox politics will help in the conditions of Russia's infinite space to ensure social cohesion and thus incorporate the landscape into social area. This policy knows the unique role of religion in socio-cultural development. Thanks to the Orthodox policy, it is possible to integrate the Russian landscape into the economic system effectively. (shrink)

Dance anthropologists and ethnomusicologists are trained to treat the labels ‘dance’ and ‘music’ with caution, because the terms carry preconceptions that may mask significant aspects of the structured movement/sound systems they study. Yet many talk about ‘the body’ – the medium through which these systems come into being – as something given and ‘true’, without investigating its emic conceptualizations or looking into the implications these may have in terms of how music and dance are experienced. The article investigates the dancing (...) bodies of western ballet dancers and of Tiwi dancers of northern Australia. The latter have an extensive vocabulary for body parts, but no word for ‘body’ as a bounded entity, comparable to the ‘body’ conceptualized by ballet dancers. The article argues that for the Tiwi landscape and human bodies are unavoidably tied together and that the dancers incarnate both land and cosmology. While specific parts have a concrete practical existence, the whole body expands into the landscape so that the landscape becomes flesh. Through the aesthetic transformation of dancing, dancers and land become one, and life is sustained and the land revitalized. (shrink)

The problem raised in the article is actualized not by the artificial attachment of the topic of ecology to the existential problems of humankind, but by the urgent need to conceptualize the dangers of a growing gap between the further development of civilization and ignoring the primary nature of its existence, the analysis of modern specific dangers of wildlife, flora and fauna, catastrophic climatic phenomena, desertification, and chemical pollution of the land. The posed problem of the conceptualization of wild nature (...) logically continues the intention of the authors to turn to the human-dimensional characteristics of the entire natural environment. At the level of socio-philosophical analysis, the meaning of a new model of relations between society and nature is revealed, and alternative concepts of nature protection to modern practices are comprehended. The importance of wildlife in its narrowed (terrestrial) space for social development on the established ideological principles of the most careful attitudes to wildlife, taking into account the reverse dangerous impact of the destructible habitat on humanity, has been proved. (shrink)

Humans think and communicate in very flexible and schematic ways, and a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for the Amazon and associated information system ontologies should reflect this flexibility and the adaptive nature of human cognition in order to achieve semantic interoperability. In this paper I offer a conceptual investigation of SDI and explore the nature of cultural schemas as expressions of indigenous ontologies and the challenges of semantic interoperability across cultures. Cultural schemas are, in essence, our ontologies, but they (...) are markedly different than classical formal ontologies. They shape our ontological commitments to what exists in the world as well as the ways in which we approach and engage the world. And while they help structure our understanding of the world in which we are embedded, they are associative and flexible. They help to focus our attention to particular details of our experiences and give them salience, yet they cannot be simply reduced to a series of extracted features. They allow us to make meaning of the contextualized, cultural experience in which we are always immersed. An SDI is a shared social-technological-informational structure that, if it is to be useful and successful for sustainability in the Amazon, must incorporate and use indigenous cultural schemas. Indigenous communities must have the ability to contribute to the collection of geospatial data and their contributions recognized as legitimate forms of knowledge. In order for the SDI to work, it must recognize the larger cultural landscape to which cultural schemas can connect to the ready-to-hand elements of salient cultural experiences. (shrink)

In _ Plato's Camera_, eminent philosopher Paul Churchland offers a novel account of how the brain constructs a representation -- or "takes a picture" -- of the universe's timeless categorical and dynamical structure. This construction process, which begins at birth, yields the enduring background conceptual framework with which we will interpret our sensory experience for the rest of our lives. But, as even Plato knew, to make singular perceptual judgments requires that we possess an antecedent framework of abstract categories (...) to which any perceived particular can be relevantly assimilated. How that background framework is assembled in the first place is the motivating mystery, and the primary target, of Churchland's book. Unexpectedly, this neurobiologically grounded account of human cognition also provides a systematic story of how such low-level epistemological activities are integrated within an enveloping framework of linguistic structures and regulatory mechanisms at the social level. As Churchland illustrates, this integration of cognitive mechanisms at several levels has launched the human race on an epistemological adventure denied to all other terrestrial creatures. (shrink)

El patrimonio cultural ha adquirido un sentido cada vez más complejo, amplio y dinámico. De una parte, se ha trascendido el antiguo paradigma monumental; de otra, el patrimonio se ha extendido a innumerables ámbitos epistemológicos y prácticos que lo interpretan y aplican según sus intereses.Desde una perspectiva teórica, este trabajo pretende una aproximación conceptual al patrimonio cultural a través de algunas claves que deberían estar presentes en toda reflexión patrimonial. Esta investigación se extenderá también a la noción de Paisaje (...) Urbano Histórico y al ámbito de la arquitectura vernácula a fin de mostrar esa complejidad y su problemática real. (shrink)

In _ Plato's Camera_, eminent philosopher Paul Churchland offers a novel account of how the brain constructs a representation -- or "takes a picture" -- of the universe's timeless categorical and dynamical structure. This construction process, which begins at birth, yields the enduring background conceptual framework with which we will interpret our sensory experience for the rest of our lives. But, as even Plato knew, to make singular perceptual judgments requires that we possess an antecedent framework of abstract categories (...) to which any perceived particular can be relevantly assimilated. How that background framework is assembled in the first place is the motivating mystery, and the primary target, of Churchland's book. Unexpectedly, this neurobiologically grounded account of human cognition also provides a systematic story of how such low-level epistemological activities are integrated within an enveloping framework of linguistic structures and regulatory mechanisms at the social level. As Churchland illustrates, this integration of cognitive mechanisms at several levels has launched the human race on an epistemological adventure denied to all other terrestrial creatures. (shrink)

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead (...) of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory. (shrink)

The paper aims at analyzing Wittgenstein's arguments on voluntary action as they are developed in Part II of PI in Z and eventually in RPPI-II. Special attention is paid to the scrutiny of arguments which could be characterized as the pars destruens and the pars construens of Wittgenstein's grammar of action. The first one consists in the usage of the distinction between dispositions and states to get rid of the "misleading parallels" which undermine the explicative claims of scientific psychology; the (...) second lies in the elaboration of a "conceptual" analysis of the phenomena of mental life which would constitute an adequate instrument to locate voluntary actions, and "creative acts" in general, in Wittgenstein's plan for a treatment of psychological concepts. (shrink)

The central claim of the volume in which this chapter appears (*Fermented Landscapes*, ed. Colleen C. Myles, Univ. of Nebraska Press 2020) is that the chemical process of fermentation supplies an apt metaphor for understanding certain kinds of landscape change. The kinds of landscape change in question are, fortuitously, those often occasioned by commercial processes centered around fermentation itself: the commercial production of beer, wine, spirits, cider, cheese, and related fermented products. But what makes this metaphor apt? Which (...) kinds of landscape change are most fruitfully conceptualized as exhibiting “fermentation,” and how do they differ from other sorts of landscape change? What is it about fermentation-centered industries that effects fermentation-modeled landscape change, and when (if ever) do these industries contribute to other, different forms of landscape change? Is there any essential reason why fermentation-centered industries should create in their environs processes of transformation usefully characterized in terms of ferment? Or is this little more than a happy linguistic coincidence? In short: how much mileage do we get from this metaphor? This chapter offers a number of considerations germane to an evaluation of the “fermented landscapes” research paradigm—considerations to which readers may wish to remain alert as they study the contributions in this volume. (shrink)

London-based company ScanLab Projects is a multi-disciplinary commercial collaboration between architect, artist, coders and designers who utilize technologies surrounding 3D laser scanning in their practice. Inherent in the manner their projects are pitched is through reference to the photographic as technological process. Central to their engagement with the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scanning apparatus is a consideration of the relationality between virtual or digital object and what could be determined as extrinsic or ‘real’ terrain. In Post-lenticular Landscapes, 2017, ScanLab (...) created a series of LiDAR scans of Yosemite National Park. The landscape, presented as a stereoscopic film work where the spectator flies through an ephemeral black and white point cloud, is contextualized relationally to a certain photo-historical context and lineage: As Yosemite is synonymous with the advent of photographic process through the work of Muybridge, Watkins, Woods and Adams, the work revisits an archetypal image of the American sublime. In this text, I unpack ScanLab’s usage and conceptualization of LiDAR scans referentially to an understanding of the photographic. By considering how ScanLab frames our understanding of the project through the technological apparatus, the text attempts to problematize the scans by reading them through a particular art historic heritage. In this context, I posit alternate ways of reading the work, specifically through reference to the image of Yosemite that has proliferated across the desktops of Apple computers since 2014. Furthermore, through a reading of metonymy in the writing of Eelco Runia, the eerie as understood by Mark Fisher and in relation to Lev Manovich’s description of photorealism, I propose that the future of the mediation and understandings of machinic vision are to be thought with a reconsidered notion of the photographic. (shrink)

An innovative contribution to the literature of cultural geography, this book explores the evolution of landscape--both material and symbolic--from the standpoint of the populations, cultures, and human decision-making processes that shape and give it meaning. Focusing on evolution, behavior, symbolism, and ecology, Norton offers a critique of the literature of cultural and social geography and articulates a framework of central issues that connect a wide range of theoretical approaches. In the first four chapters, Norton gives detailed consideration to both (...) traditional and contemporary literature and methodologies and to the links between cultural geography and other social science concepts and analytical methods. The remaining chapters are concerned with the causes and consequences of cultural landscape evolution and the variables affecting it, including language, religion, politics, society, economy, and the physical environment. In addressing these areas of cultural geography, Norton promotes an approach that integrates the contributions of geography with those of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history. His analysis provides a useful synthesis of the conceptual and empirical content of cultural geography and suggests promising new directions for research in the field. Norton's work will prove a valuable classroom and library resource for students and scholars in cultural and social geography and related areas of sociology and anthropology. (shrink)

The concepts of adaptive/fitness landscapes and adaptive peaks are a central part of much of contemporary evolutionary biology; the concepts are introduced in introductory texts, developed in more detail in graduate-level treatments, and are used extensively in papers published in the major journals in the field. The appeal of visualizing the process of evolution in terms of the movement of populations on such landscapes is very strong; as one becomes familiar with the metaphor, one often develops the feeling that it (...) is possible to gain deep insights into evolution by thinking about the movement of populations on landscapes consisting of adaptive valleys and peaks. But, since Wright first introduced the metaphor in 1932, the metaphor has been the subject of persistent confusion, from equivocation over just what the features of the landscape are meant to represent to how we ought to expect the landscapes to look. Recent advances—conceptual, empirical, and computational—have pointed towards the inadequacy and indeed incoherence of the landscapes as usually pictured. I argue that attempts to reform the metaphor are misguided; it is time to give up the pictorial metaphor of the landscape entirely and rely instead on the results of formal modeling, however difficult such results are to understand in ‘intuitive’ terms. (shrink)

: The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report issued in April 2005 shows how severely our civilisation is degrading and overstressing the natural systems that support human life and all other lives on earth. An important critical challenge, especially for the eco-humanities, is to help us understand the conceptual frameworks and systems that disappear the crucial support provided by natural systems and prevent us from seeing nature as a field of agency. This paper considers the currently popular concept of a cultural (...) landscape as an example of a concept that downplays natural agency, and discusses the epistemology of nature scepticism and nature cynicism that often accompanies its vogue in the humanities. Can some philosophical disentangling of senses of nature (often considered the most complex term in the language) allow sceptics their main points without placing them on such a strong collision course with the requirements of commonsense and survival? (shrink)

Landscape is a cultural construct, a way of conceptualizing and experiencing place. If it is true that our shaping perception [] makes the difference between raw matter and landscape (Scharma 1995: 10), how do designers and the technologies they use shape that perception? How do the various technologies and techniques that are used to represent landscape in the twenty-first century frame how we perceive nature in our minds and how we sense it through our bodies? This article (...) explores the way so-called natural landscapes are conceived, represented and designed by professionals within contemporary culture. By interrogating how experiences of place are constructed through three mediums webcams, large-format cinema and landscape architectural design an intertextual picture of contemporary landscape emerges that is simultaneously virtual, hybridized and real. (shrink)

In recent years, a growing discussion about how we should design our cities has emerged, particularly for the more controversial modes of design such as “defensive,” “hostile,” or “disciplinary” architecture (i.e., benches on which one cannot sleep, or metal studs on which one cannot skate). Although this debate is relatively mature, many studies have argued that these design notions are undertheorized and are, thus, challenging to study from an empirical and normative perspective. In this paper, I will defne the most (...) common terms used in the literature and show how they are interconnected by utilizing a set of “conditions of adequacy” from philosophy to facilitate a more transparent and well-grounded discussion of them. Terms such as “hostile” and “defensive” design are underlined by several diferent phenomena, not just one as is sometimes commonly assumed. I will also show that these phenomena and their conceptualizations require—and sometimes force us to use—diferent moral reasons when justifying the utilization of diferent designs. (shrink)

Current conceptual frameworks differ deeply on the meanings of human-natural environment relations. One is a monist social constructionist frame: meaning is only in human definitions, and natural events are meaningless. The other offers dualist perspectives that locate meaning both in definitions and in realist indications of environmental events such as global environmental change. After discussing ‘landscape’ as a bridging concept, I suggest an ordering of the two perspectives through a metatheoretical distinction between definitional and responsive meanings with primacy (...) in the response. Finally, I apply a metatheoretical schema based on the work of George H. Mead to meanings of natural environment implicated in a discussion of an official pronouncement, ‘The drought is over’. (shrink)

If, as Lefebvre argues, every society produces its own social space, then modernity might be characterized by that (anti-)social and instrumental space epitomized and idealized in Le Corbusier's writings. This repetitively patterned space consumes and regulates the differences between places and people; it encapsulates a normalizing morality that seeks to reduce all differences to an economic order of the Same. Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of 'difference' can both help explain the operation of this (im)moral landscape and offer the possibility of (...) alternative post-modern social spaces that might produce and respect Otherness. In this sense Lefebvre's work is an incipient 'difference ethics'. (shrink)

Given that an analysis of disposition ascription cannot be made in terms of a simple subjunctive conditional, we present a multiply qualified conditional analysis that places disposition ascription within an implicit fundamental causal conceptual typography within which a disposition ascription is embedded, framed, and understood. By placing the multiply qualified analysis within an implicit causal matrix involving a focal cause, pathway of influence, mechanism of action, contributing/partial cause, mediator, extrinsic moderator,, intrinsic moderator, and manifestation, we show how this analysis (...) evades counterexamples and arguments raised against the simple conditional analysis. We then indicate how the causal conceptual landscape provides a roadmap for unpacking and explicating parameters of the ceteris paribus qualifier to acquit the analysis of charges of being vacuous or irredeemably vague. (shrink)

Open access to information is now a universal phenomenon thanks to rapid technological developments across the globe. This open and universal access to information is a key value of democratic societies because, in principle, it supports well-informed decision-making on individual, local, and global matters. In practice, however, without appropriate readiness for navigation in a dynamic information landscape, such access to information can become a threat to public health, safety, and economy, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. In the past, (...) this readiness was often conceptualized in terms of adequate literacy levels, but the contemporarily observed highest-ever literacy levels have not immunized our societies against the risks of misinformation. Therefore, in this Perspective, we argue that democratization of access to information endows citizens with new responsibilities, and second, these responsibilities demand readiness that cannot be reduced to mere literacy levels. In fact, this readiness builds on individual adequate literacy skills, but also requires rational thinking and awareness of own information processing. We gather evidence from developmental, educational, and cognitive psychology to show how these aspects of readiness could be improved through education interventions, and how they may be related to healthy work-home balance and self-efficacy. All these components of education are critical to responsible global citizenship and will determine the future direction of our societies. (shrink)

When legal theorists ask questions about legal interpretation—such as what it fundamentally is, what it aims at, or how it should work—they often do so in ways closely tethered to existing legal practice. For example: they try to understand how an activity legal actors (purportedly) already engage in should be done better, such as how judges can better learn about the content of the law. In this paper, I discuss a certain kind of “conceptual ethics” approach to thinking about (...) legal interpretation, which is less tethered to existing legal practice (or the existing meaning of core pieces of legal terminology). The approach I explore asks questions about legal interpretation in a way that is tethered to what legal (or “legal-ish”) concepts people should deploy, as part of arguments on behalf of engaging in legal (or “legal-ish”) practices different from our current ones. In exploring this approach, I aim to help us better understand the landscape of philosophical issues about legal interpretation, including parts of it that I think have been underexplored. (shrink)

In recent years, consumers in the United States have been confronted by no fewer than four competing fair-trade labels, each grounded in a separate certification system and widely differing standards. This fracturing is partly a response to the recent split by the U.S. certifier Fair Trade USA from the international fair trade system, but also illustrates longstanding divisions within the fair trade movement. This article explores the dynamics of competition among nonstate standards through content analyses of fair trade standards documents (...) from the four U.S. fair-trade certifications for agrifood products. It analyzes the differences among them, asking what kinds of social and labor relations are facilitated by each, and identifies how closely they correspond with key fair trade principles. We make two primary arguments. First, we contend that the case of fair trade challenges the dominant conceptual model used to analyze competition among multiple private standards in a single arena, in which newer challengers lower the rigor of standards. Second, we argue that the current fractured U.S. certification landscape illuminates divisions among different interest groups over which principles—and which labor and production forms—should be privileged under the banner of fair trade. (shrink)

This essay reviews the place and role of Public Service Media (PSM) in promoting social justice in the changing digital media landscape through the ethos of diversity. Media diversity – the value and practice of including varied viewpoints, social groups, voices, and channels or outlets in media – has long been a declared pillar of PSM organizations worldwide. However, current changes in the digital media landscape and the growing extension of PSM organizations to digital platforms require re-reading the (...) premise of promoting media diversity as a tool for social justice. This essay identifies a paradox. On one hand, online media appear to accommodate a greater range of diverse voices and players, particularly in the PSM ecosystem. At the same time, these very same online spaces jeopardize diversity, as the increasing practices of personalization, algorithmic curation, and platformization often reduce diversity of representations, voices, and exposure to content, thereby hindering opportunities for social justice and equality. This essay shines a spotlight on this nexus of conflicting mechanisms. The essay begins with in-depth definitions of the two somewhat convoluted terms diversity and social justice. This section includes a review of global perspectives on PSM organizations, and the long-standing value of diversity promoted through them for decades. We then review the impact and changes identified in PSM platforms worldwide in light of the digital turn in the media field. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of the inherent tension between mechanisms that promote and hinder diversity online. Throughout this discussion, we raise questions about the practical dimensions of using online media to promote social justice through diversity. It provides a useful starting point for considering the intersection of Public Service Media, online platforms, diversity, and social justice. Thus, the essay will serve academic scholars studying social justice on a conceptual level as well as practitioners and stakeholders in the media industry at large, and PSM in particular, seeking to practically promote social justice. (shrink)

Notions of space and place are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, but they are distinguished both conceptually and historically. When put in relation to space and place, beauty reveals all its vitality and ties to socio-political issues, like: why do we consider a place beautiful and another place ugly? How do taste judgments about places influence planning, tourism, heritage policies, urban, and landscape architecture? I will develop my argument in four points. First, I will shortly pin down the (...) main tenets of a concept of beauty that is inherently spatial, by rephrasing Roger Scruton’s insights on the beautiful and Ed Casey’s notion of ‘implacement’. Second, I will address the interconnection between the modern emergence of a quantitative and objectivist concept of space and a non-relational idea of beauty. Third, I will expose the relationship between the concept of place, idiographic and qualitative, and the emergence of a site-specific, phenomenologically based concept of beauty. In conclusion, I will show how non-relational conceptions of beauty risk to colonize aesthetic experience and I will take a stand for a relational conception of beauty against the risk of standardization of both landscape appreciation and planning. (shrink)

Empirically successful scientific theories are intellectual hurricanes. They flood lowlands set aside for worries about definitions. They carry away philosophical reflections that are less dense than the accumulated scientific findings that give these storms their strength, and they fundamentally reshape the conceptual landscape. The history of scholarship reveals that once an empirically corroborated scientific theory explains and predicts phenomena in some domain noticeably better than the available alternatives (whether those alternatives are scientific theories or not), among experts at (...) least, the process of conceptualizing those phenomena, thereafter, mostly floats along on the surface of debates about the comparative scientific merits of that theory and its competitors. Earlier debates about definitions lose most of their interest until new theories arise that generate new, less easily managed empirical findings in the pertinent domains. Across the centuries, the fates of such concepts as ‘inertia’ and ‘planet’ are fitting illustrations of these patterns, as are, more recently, the fates of such concepts as ‘gene’ and ‘deciding’ (aka “decision making”). (shrink)

In a series of formal studies and less formal applications, Hong and Page offer a ‘diversity trumps ability’ result on the basis of a computational experiment accompanied by a mathematical theorem as explanatory background (Hong & Page 2004, 2009; Page 2007, 2011). “[W]e find that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set” (2004, p. 16386). The result has been extremely influential as (...) an epistemic justification for diversity policy initiatives. Here we show that the ‘diversity trumps ability’ result is tied to the particular random landscape used in Hong and Page’s simulation. We argue against interpreting results on that random landscape in terms of ‘ability’ or ‘expertise.’ These concepts are better modeled on smother and more realistic landscapes, but keeping other parameters the same those are landscapes on which it is groups of the best performing that do better. Smoother landscapes seem to vindicate both the concept and the value of expertise. Change in other parameters, however, also vindicates diversity. With an increase in the pool of available heuristics, diverse groups again do better. Group dynamics makes a difference as well; simultaneous ‘tournament’ deliberation in a group in place of the ‘relay’ deliberation in Hong and Page’s original model further emphasizes an advantage for diversity. ‘Tournament’ 2 dynamics particularly shows the advantage of mixed groups that include both experts and non-experts. As a whole, our modeling results suggest that relative to problem characteristics and conceptual resources, the wisdom of crowds and the wisdom of the few each have a place. We regard ours as a step toward attempting to calibrate their relative virtues in different modelled contexts of intellectual exploration. (shrink)