We review evidence that language is involved in the establishment and maintenance of adult categories of facial expressions of emotion. We argue that individual and group differences in facial expression interpretation are too great for a fully specified system of categories to be universal and hardwired. Variations in expression categorization, across individuals and groups, favor a model in which an initial “core” system recognizes only the grouping of positive versus negative emotional expressions. The subsequent development of a rich representational structure (...) may require the integration of a verbal categorization system with a perceptual processing system that is category-agnostic. Such a model may reconcile many strands of apparently conflicting behavioral, physiological, and neuroscience evidence concerning our understanding of facial expressions of emotion. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence has given us synthetic media that are increasingly easy to create and increasingly hard to distinguish from photographs and videos. Whereas an existing literature has been concerned with how these new media might make a difference for would-be knowers—the viewers of photographs and videos—I advance a thesis about how they will make a difference for would-be communicators—those who embed photos and videos in their speech acts. I claim that the presence of these media in our information environment (...) reduces our ability to show one another things, even as it may increase our resources for telling. And I argue that this has consequences beyond the disruption of knowledge acquisition; showing is a way that we preserve relational equality through superficial asymmetries in political communication, and thereby express respect for our audiences. If synthetic media reduce our options for showing, they then interfere in the way that we manage our relationships in the context of collective political action. (shrink)

This article reviews key philosophical and legal underpinnings of mental health professionals' obligation to obtain informed consent from consumers of their services. The basic components of informed consent are described, and strategies for clinically and ethically appropriate methods of obtaining informed consent are discussed. Emerging issues in informed consent involving duty to assess and protect against client dangerousness, obligations to third parties, and issues of deception are considered as well. The article proposes that part of the process of obtaining informed (...) consent is the cultivation of a treatment environment that emphasizes beneficence and client autonomy. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor — most especially, open-endedness, evocativeness, imagery and affective power. However, the qualities themselves are neither necessary nor sufficient for metaphor. I argue that many of the distinctively “poetic” qualities of metaphor are in fact qualities of aspectual thought, which can also be exemplified by parables, “telling details,” and “just so” stories. Thinking about these other uses of language to produce aspectual thought forces us to pinpoint what is distinctive about metaphor, and also (...) thereby reveals the weaknesses of three established views of metaphor. (shrink)

Pedagogy is a pillar of human culture and society. Telling each other information and showing each other how to do things comes naturally to us. A strong case has been made that declarative knowledge is the norm of assertion, which is our primary way of telling others information. This article presents an analogous case for the hypothesis that procedural knowledge is the norm of instructional demonstration, which is a primary way of showing others how to do things. Knowledge is the (...) norm of telling and showing. It is the prime pedagogical principle. (shrink)

Previous research demonstrates how activists who do not identify as feminist sometimes engage in “implicitly feminist practices.” In this paper, I extend this research by asking: Do self-identified feminists also employ such implicit strategies in the course of their activist efforts? If so, why would they “do” feminism implicitly? Based on participant observation and semistructured interviews at Girls Rock! Midwest—a week-long summer day camp program that aims to empower girls through rock music production—I develop the concept of implicit feminism. I (...) define implicit feminism as a strategy practiced by feminist activists within organizations that are operating in an anti- and postfeminist environment in which they conceal feminist identities and ideas while emphasizing the more socially acceptable angles of their efforts. My research demonstrates how feminist-identified activists employ implicitly feminist practices as a strategic response to feminist dilemmas stemming from competing organizational demands, how they envision the possibilities and drawbacks of such a strategy, and what this suggests for the shape and future of feminist politics. (shrink)

Coach education is a learner-centred process, which often fails to consider the preferences of the consumer. Historically, research into performers’ experiences of coaching have been influenced by the social constructivism of learning: in short, an expressed preference for what the performer has experienced as determined by their coach, rather than their own personal preferences. Therefore, this research used skateboarding as a natural laboratory in order to explore the current practices and preferences of performers in a coach-free environment. Ninety-one skateboarders from (...) parks in the United Kingdom and New Zealand offered information relating to their current learning practices, how they learnt about learning, and how the top-level performers in their environment were differentiated. Findings suggest that a number of learning tools are used by performers, which are closely aligned with a more traditional, cognitive view of coaching. Results also suggest that performers deployed a number of cognitive skills to enhance storage of a movement as an internal representation. Finally, in the absence of formal coaching, performers use their knowledge of learning to appoint informal leaders. Implications for practice are discussed. (shrink)

This paper substantiates a distinction, built out of Gricean resources, between two kinds of communicative act: showing and telling. Where telling that p proceeds by recruiting an addressee’s capacity to recognize trustworthy informants, showing does not. Instead, showing proceeds by presenting an addressee with a consideration that provides reason to believe that p (other than the reason provided by an informant’s credibility), and so recruits their capacity to respond to those reasons. With this account in place, the paper defends an (...) account of one way in which authors can show their readers that certain moral states of affairs obtain both inside, and outside of, their fictions. It is argued, moreover, that this kind of showing gives addressees access to more than just reasons for moral belief–it also gives them access to the sorts of reasons that enable agents to increase their moral understanding. In virtue of these latter capacities, the showing identified is a way of communicating about morality that is markedly different from the sort of moral testimony that many philosophers have been increasingly interested in of late. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

Can fictions make genuine assertions about the actual world? Proponents of the ‘Assertion View’ answer the question affirmatively: they hold that authors can assert, by means of explicit statements that are part of the work of fiction, that something is actually the case in the real world. The ‘Nonassertion’ View firmly denies this possibility. In this paper, I defend a nuanced version of the Nonassertion View. I argue that even if fictions cannot assert, they can indirectly communicate that what is (...) recounted as fictional is actually true. I show that this view is supported by independent linguistic data, and that it is able to defuse the objections that are typically raised against the Nonassertion View. I conclude by showing that this position has some interesting implications for testimonial cognitivism about fiction. (shrink)

Abstract“Show, don't tell” is a maxim basic to literary craft. It enjoins avoidance of abstract, cliché‐ridden summaries and use of rich, vividly rendered details. Anyone who has attended an introductory creative writing course will have encountered it. Practised literary writers know it is true. Why is showing so fundamental to good literature? Why is it more effective than telling? Showing constellates details, placing facets of a larger shape before the reader's mind, a shape that cannot be adequately encompassed (...) by a summary, whose power lies in the simultaneous integration of multiple, superficially discontinuous aspects. This sounds like the eureka effect, the “Aha!” of sudden discovery in mathematics and the sciences. I argue that grasping what is being shown in a literary context is indeed related to insight in theoretical fields. Telling the reader “what happened” makes the mind's eye glaze over in just the way that it glazes over when it is forced to memorize formulae that it does not understand. Showing is like offering an elegant proof; the mind reaches to understand what is going on. When it succeeds, it feels the satisfaction of having grasped meaning. (shrink)

Arguably, the existence of bald-faced (i.e. knowingly undisguised) lies entails that not all lies are intended to deceive. Two kinds of bald-faced lies exist in the literature: those based on some common knowledge that implies that you are lying and those that involve tell-tale signs (e.g. blushing) that show that you are lying. I designed the tell-tale sign bald-faced lies to avoid objections raised against the common knowledge bald-faced lies but I now see that they are more (...) problematic than what I initially thought. Therefore, I will discuss these lies in more detail, refine the existing cases, and resolve some anticipated objections. I conclude that tell-tale sign bald-faced lies are genuine lies not intended to deceive. (shrink)

Narrative ethics taps into an inherent human need to tell our own stories centred on our own moral values and to have those stories heard and acknowledged. However, not everyone’s words are afforded equal power. The use of narrative ethics in bioethical decision-making is problematized by a disparity in whose stories are told, whose stories are heard, and whose stories are believed. Here, I conduct an analysis of narrative ethics through a critical theory lens to show how entrenched (...) patterns of narrative neglect in medicine are harming not only our capacity to make use of narrative ethics but also our capacity to deliver effective healthcare. To illustrate this point, I use three examples where the patient’s gender affects how their stories unfold: autism, weight, and pain management. From these, I argue that the use of narrative ethics without the application of a critical theory lens risks the exacerbation of what Miranda Fricker refers to as “testimonial injustice,” the prima facie harm experienced by individuals whose credibility is undermined by others’ prejudices. Finally, I suggest that narrative ethics can be a powerful tool for mitigating oppressive practices in medicine if we couple it with critical analysis that enables us to understand the power dynamics at play in storytelling. (shrink)

Abstract:For many people, the media is the main source of their knowledge and understanding about policing and crime. As a result, a common thread running through content analysis of television police shows is the gap between the “reality” of police work, crime, criminals, and the justice system and the picture painted by media representations. I argue, however, that all representations of social reality are partial and that commercial imperatives, working processes, ideological frames of the makers, and format of individual shows (...) shape and constrain the stories told. Given that police shows can never be totally authentic, I argue that scholars should be exploring the symbolic value of these shows, the types of discourse produced, and whether such shows habituate viewers into ways of thinking about crime and punishment that may be excessively simplified. (shrink)

This essay argues that secrets and lies are not forms of withholding information but forms by which information is valorized. Lies are constructed: what is to be lied about, what a lie is to consist of, how it is to be told, and whom it is to be told to, all reveal a social imaginary about who thinks what and what constitutes credibility. Secrets are negotiated: continual decisions about whom to tell, how much to tell, and whom not (...) to tell describe social worlds, and the shape and weight of interactions therein. All of this makes lies and secrets extraordinarily rich historical sources. We might not see the truth distorted by a lie or the truth hidden by a secret, but we see the ideas and imaginings by which people disclose what should not be made public, and how they should carry out concealing one narrative with another. Such insights involve a step back from the project of social history, in which an inclusive social narrative is based on experience and individuals' ability to report it with some reliability, and suggests that historians need to look at social imaginings as ways to understand the ideas and concerns about which people lie and with which people construct new narratives that are not true. The study of secrets, however, links the study of social imaginings with the project of social history, as the valorization of information that results in the continual negotiation and renegotiation of secrets shows individuals and publics imagining the experiences labeled as secret because of the imagined power of a specific version of events. (shrink)

Health care providers are expected both to relieve pain and to provide anticipatory guidance regarding how much a procedure is going to hurt. Fulfilling those expectations is complicated by the cognitive modulation of pain perception. Warning people to expect pain or setting expectations for pain relief not only influences their subjective experience, but it also alters how nociceptive stimuli are processed throughout the sensory and discriminative pathways in the brain. In light of this, I reconsider the characterization of placebo analgesia (...) as pharmacologically inert and the use of it as deceptive. I show that placebo analgesia exploits the same physical mechanisms as proven analgesics and argue that it should be utilized to relieve pain. Additionally, I describe factors to help identify situations in which clinicians have the obligation to disclose the potential for pain coupled with ways of mitigating the risk of high-intensity pain by setting positive expectations. (shrink)

I begin by proposing a notion of mathematical understanding; then I take a brief look at four approaches to the task of teaching infinity to mathematical novices—four approaches, that is, to “popular” philosophy and mathematics—and assess whether they provide such an understanding. But I don’t mean this to be a recommendation for or against any author. Rather, I want to submit the idea that mathematical understanding is an important dimension of popularizing efforts, all of which can be valuable, to be (...) sure, along other dimensions. (shrink)

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the discovery by Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson of a distinction between the fittingness of an emotion and the propriety of the same. Meanwhile, Christian theology has long been attentive to the relevance of Christian theology to the emotions. Although it seems that never so far have the twain discussions met, they should meet. A fitting emotion accurately construes a situation. Christian theology tells us something about the importance—or the lack thereof—of emotional fit for (...) the emotions involved in love. It is a desideratum for the emotions that they are fitting. But other desiderata for the emotional life sometimes overrule the desideratum of fit. Moreover, emotions sometimes have an effect on their own fittingness. As Kierkegaard shows, love construes its object as better than he presently is, but it also makes the object better. We should cultivate a disposition to loving emotions that are occasionally unfitting yet help to bring about better fit. I explain these things and consider how someone might go about cultivating loving emotions which are sometimes unfitting yet also restorative of fit. (shrink)

This paper sheds light on the significance of gastronomy as an emblem of cultural identity in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child. It shows how Morrison imbues the narrative with instances of food and drinks which reflect certain racial stereotypes to which Lula Ann is prone during her struggle to reach self-definition. The colour, taste, diversity, quality and manners of food are all rigorously woven to portray Lula’s Journey. Onomastically, some characters and places are purposefully named after food such as (...) Sweetness, Whisky land, Raisin, and Mrs. Queen Olive; all of them represent an outstanding stage in Lula’s identity development. Finally, food takes a further dimension in the way it reflects the spiritual food that Lula receives throughout her journey. (shrink)

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) have become a widely used tool to reconcile societies in the aftermath of widespread injustice or social and political conflict in a state. This article focuses on TRCs that take place in non-transitional societies in which the political and social structures, institutions, and power relations have largely remained in place since the time of injustice. Furthermore, it will focus on one particular injustice that TRCs try to address through the practice of truth-telling, namely the eradication (...) of epistemic injustice. The article takes the Canadian and Norwegian TRCs as two examples to show that under conditions of enduring injustice, willful ignorance of the majority, and power inequality, TRCs might create a double bind for victims which makes them choose between epistemic exploitation and continued injustices based on the majority's ignorance. The article argues that the set-up and accompanying measures of TRCs are of the utmost importance if TRCs in non-transitional societies are to overcome epistemic injustice, instead of creating new relations of exploitation. (shrink)

Blatantly observable in the U.S. currently, the political chasm grows, representing a prototype of political polarization in most if not all western democratic political systems. Differential political psychology strives to trace back increasingly polarized political convictions to differences on the individual level. Recent evolutionary informed approaches suggest that interindividual differences in political orientation reflect differences in group-mindedness and cooperativeness. Contrarily, the existence of meaningful associations between political orientation, personality traits, and interpersonal behavior has been questioned critically. Here, we shortly review (...) evidence showing that these relationships do exist, which supports the assumption that political orientation is deeply rooted in the human condition. Potential reasons for the premature rejection of these relationships and directions for future research are outlined and implications for refinements and extensions of evolutionary informed approaches are derived. (shrink)

The effort to build a political economy of war without politics is finding its limits. The question now is what comes next. How to put politics back in? This article compares systematically two non-state armed groups that participate in the Colombian conflict, the main guerrilla and the paramilitary. It shows that despite their similar financial bases, they appear to exhibit systematic differences— regarding both their social composition and their internal/external behavior—and claims that the key to understanding them is the set (...) of organizational devices that each group crafts in its process of survival and growth. All this suggests that a main tenet of the early political economy of war, that all non-state armed groups can be understood as being strategically identical, is flawed. It also poses a classificatory challenge. (shrink)

Objects are reminiscent of actions often performed with them: knife and apple remind us on peeling the apple or cutting it. Mnemonic representations of object-related actions (action codes) evoked by the sight of an object may constrain and hence facilitate recognition of unrolling actions. The present fMRI study investigated if and how action codes influence brain activation during action observation. The average number of action codes (NAC) of 51 sets of objects was rated by a group of n = 24 (...) participants. In an fMRI study, different volunteers were asked to recognize actions performed with the same objects presented in short videos. To disentangle areas reflecting the storage of action codes from those exploiting them, we showed object-compatible and object-incompatible (pantomime) actions. Areas storing action codes were considered to positively co-vary with NAC in both object-compatible and object-incompatible action; due to its role in tool-related tasks, we here hypothesized left anterior inferior parietal cortex (aIPL). In contrast, areas exploiting action codes were expected to show this correlation only in object-compatible but not incompatible action, as only object-compatible actions match one of the active action codes. For this interaction, we hypothesized ventrolateral premotor cortex (PMv) to join aIPL due to its role in biasing competition in IPL. We found left anterior intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) to co-vary with NAC. In addition to these areas, action codes increased activity in object-compatible action in bilateral PMv, right IPS, and lateral occipital cortex (LO). Findings suggest that during action observation, the brain derives possible actions from perceived objects, and uses this information to shape action recognition. In particular, the number of expectable actions quantifies the activity level at PMv, IPL, and pMTG, but only PMv reflects their biased competition while observed action unfolds. (shrink)

The American Museum of Natural History is monumental not only in its architecture and design but also in its size, scope, and content. This monumental quality suggests in and of itself the primary meaning of the museum inherited from its history: comprehensive collecting as a form of domination.8 In this respect museums belong to an era of scientific and colonial ambition, from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, with its climactic moment in the second half of the nineteenth century. (...) It belongs in the category of nineteenth-century endeavors such as experimental medicine , evolutionary biology , and the naturalistic novel , all of which claimed to present a comprehensive social study. Such projects have been definitively compromised by postromantic critique, postcolonial protest, and postmodern disillusionment.9But in spite of its appearance, that prefix post- doesn’t make things any easier. Any museum of this size and ambition is today saddled with a double status; it is necessarily also a museum of the museum, a preserve not for endangered species but for an endangered self, a “metamuseum”: the museal preservation of a project ruthlessly dated and belonging to an age long gone whose ideological goals have been subjected to extensive critique.10 Willy-nilly, such a museum solicits reflections on and of its own ideological positions and history. It speaks to its own complicity with practices of domination while it continues to pursue an educational project that, having emerged out of those practices, has been adjusted to new conceptions and pedagogical needs. Indeed, the use of the museum in research and education is insisted on in its self-representations, including the Guide. 9. For an example of the postmodern critique, see Michael M. J. Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. Clifford and George E. Marcus , pp. 194-233.10. The metamuseal function of a museum like the American Museum is analyzed in Ames, Museums, the Public, and Anthropology. Mieke Bal is professor of the theory of literature at the University of Amsterdam and retains a visiting professorship in the comparative arts program at the University of Rochester. Her most recent book is Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. (shrink)

Deliberative scholars have suggested that citizens should be able to exchange arguments in public forums. A key element in this exchange is the rational mode of communication, which means speaking through objective argumentation. However, some feminists argue that this mode of communication may create or intensify epistemic injustices. Furthermore, we should not assume that everyone is equally equipped to take part in deliberation. Certain groups, such as Indigenous peoples, for instance, who may not be versed in rational forms of argumentation, (...) may not be listened to or involved sufficiently in the deliberative process. Therefore, it seems we need an alternative mode of communication, such as storytelling, which is a first-person or collective narrative. Given this, how should we pursue this goal? This article aims to answer this question by analysing a local conflict involving an Indigenous tribe and a neighbouring community in Brazil and exploring the underlying testimonial and hermeneutical injustices. I argue that storytelling has an important normative and institutional role in public deliberation and show that its applied version could overcome epistemic injustices and lead to better public policies. (shrink)

This paper employs Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuaity: Confessions of the Flesh to shed light on the perplexing phenomenon of vaccine (mandate) resistance. It argues that vaccine (mandate) resistance, while seemingly irresponsible and selfish, is entangled with the same modes of ‘truth-telling’ that have been part of the basic structure of modern Western governance for centuries. The paper begins by introducing the problem of vaccinate (mandate) resistance as a pedagogical problem for educators who want to teach social responsibility as informed (...) by sound scientific knowledge and research. It then outlines the triad of knowledge/science, power/governance, and subjectivity/being at the heart of Foucault’s research as a necessary frame for understanding the sociopolitical and historical entanglements of science in modern Western governance. Lastly, the paper traces Foucault’s study of early Christian writers such as St. Augustine in terms of how they help establish basic practices of truth-telling that still impact how subjects relate to power today. The ultimate goal of the paper is to show how exploration of the social, historical, and political realities of science related issues are vital for understanding issues of collective existence today. (shrink)

This paper challenges the common assumption that some phenotypic traits are quantitative while others are qualitative. The distinction between these two kinds of traits is widely influential in biological and biomedical research as well as in scientific education and communication. This is probably due to both historical and epistemological reasons. However, the quantitative/qualitative distinction involves a variety of simplifications on the genetic causes of phenotypic variability and on the development of complex traits. Here, I examine three cases from the life (...) sciences that show inconsistencies in the distinction: Mendelian traits, Mendelian diseases, and polygenic mental disorders. I show that these traits can be framed both quantitatively and qualitatively depending, for instance, on the methods through which they are investigated and on specific epistemic purposes. This suggests that the received view of quantitative and qualitative traits has a limited heuristic power—limited to some local contexts or to the specific methodologies adopted. Throughout the paper, I provide directions for framing phenotypes beyond the quantitative/qualitative distinction. I conclude by pointing at the necessity of developing a principled characterisation of what phenotypic traits, in general, are. (shrink)

This essay challenges dominant interpretations of Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia as affirming an ethical, non-political conception of truth-telling. I read the lectures instead as depicting truth-telling as an always political predicament: of having to appear distant from power, while also having to partake in some sense of political power. Read in this way, Foucault’s lectures help us to understand and address the disputed politicality of truth-telling – over who counts as a truth-teller, and what counts as the truth – that (...) his ethical interpreters tend to neglect. Yet the essay also shows that Foucault’s depiction of the predicament of truth-tellers is problematically gendered: focused on the masculine problem of moving in and out of the public sphere, rather than on the experience of the dispossessed, who are excluded from political power altogether. The essay mobilizes an alternative reading of one of Foucault’s key texts – Euripides’ Ion – to draw out an alternative, more democratic model of the predicament of truth-telling: of having to constitute power that can lend significant to truth-telling, while speaking from a position of powerlessness. (shrink)

Online vaccine-critical sentiments are often expressed in appealing personal narratives, whereas vaccine-supporting information is often presented in a non-narrative, expository mode describing scientific facts. In two experiments, we empirically test whether and how these different formats impact the way in which readers process and retrieve information about childhood vaccination, and how this may impact their perceptions regarding vaccination. We assess two psychological mechanisms that are hypothesized to underlie the persuasive nature of vaccination narratives: the availability heuristic and cognitive resistance. The (...) results of experiment 1 showed no empirical evidence for the availability heuristic, but exploratory analyses did indicate that an anti-vaccination narrative might reduce cognitive resistance, decrease vaccination attitudes and reduce attitude certainty in a generally pro-vaccination sample, especially for those who were more vaccine hesitant. Preregistered experiment 2 formally tested this and showed that not narrative format, but prior vaccine hesitancy predicts cognitive resistance and post-reading attitudes. Hesitant participants showed less resistance toward an anti-vaccine text than vaccine-supporting participants, as well as less positive post-reading attitudes and attitude certainty. These findings demonstrate belief consistency effects rather than narrative persuasion, which has implications for scientific research as well as public health policy. (shrink)

Epistemic dependence refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in practices of knowledge production. Epistemic oppression concerns persistent and unwarranted exclusions from those practices. This article examines the relationship between these two frameworks and demonstrates that attending to their relationship is a fruitful practice for applied epistemology. Paying attention to relations of epistemic dependence and how exclusive they are can help us track epistemically oppressive practices. In order to show this, I introduce a taxonomy of epistemic dependence. I argue (...) that this particular taxonomy is useful for tracking epistemically oppressive practices in institutional contexts. This is because, first, the forms of epistemic dependence in this taxonomy yield, what I call, diagnostic questions. These are questions that help us track how relations of epistemic dependence could become exclusive and that thus help reveal epistemic oppression in institutional contexts. Second, the forms of epistemic dependence in the taxonomy are interrelated. Paying attention not just to each of three forms of epistemic dependence but also to the way in which they are interrelated is useful for illuminating epistemically oppressive practices. I conclude by demonstrating how the diagnostic questions can be used in analyses of concrete institutional practices in asylum law and higher education. (shrink)

We discuss the structure of Buddhist theory, showing that it is a kind of moral phenomenology directed to the elimination of egoism through the elimination of a sense of self. We then ask whether being raised in a Buddhist culture in which the values of selflessness and the sense of non-self are so deeply embedded transforms one’s sense of who one is, one’s ethical attitudes and one’s attitude towards death, and in particular whether those transformations are consistent with the predictions (...) that Buddhist texts themselves make. We discover that the effects are often significant, but not always expected. (shrink)

This study investigates the performance of 21 monolingual and 56 bilingual children aged 5;6-9;0 on German-LITMUS-sentence-repetition (SRT; Hamann et al., 2013) and nonword-repetition-tasks (NWRT; Grimm et al., 2014), which were constructed according to the LITMUS-principles (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings; Armon-Lotem et al., 2015). Both tasks incorporate complex structures shown to be cross-linguistically challenging for children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and aim at minimizing bias against bilingual children while still being indicative of the presence of language impairment across (...) language combinations. Given the great variability in bilingual language exposure and the potential effect of language experience on language performance in bilingual children, we examined whether background variables related to bilingualism, particularly, the degree language dominance as measured by relative amount of use and exposure, could compromise the diagnostic accuracy of the German-LITMUS-SRT and NWRT. We further investigated whether a combination of the two tasks provides better diagnostic accurracy. To address this, we used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, the Partitioning-Around-Medoids (PAM), for deriving a clinical category for the children as ±language-impaired based on performance scores on SRT and/or NWRT while withholding information about their clinical status based on standardized assessment in L1/L2. Subsequently, we calculated diagnostic accuracy and investigated which background variables (age of onset, length of exposure, degree of language-dominance, socio-economic-status, and risk factors for SLI) best explained clinical-group-membership yielded from the PAM-analysis based on NWRT and/or SRT scores. Results show that although language-dominance influences the performance of bilingual typically-developing children, especially in the SRT, the diagnostic accuracy of the tools is not compromised by language dominance: while risk factors for SLI were significant predictors for clinical group membership in all models, language dominance did not contribute at all to explaining clinical cluster membership as typically-developing or SLI based on any of the combinations of the SRT and NWRT variables. Additionally, results confirm that a combination of SRT scored by correct target structure and the structurally more complex language-dependent part of the NWRT yields better diagnostic accuracy than single measures and is only sensitive for risk factors for SLI and not to dominance levels or SES. (shrink)

In the last decade, we have observed a continuous increase of interest in eye movement research. According to a recent investigation, eye movements are discussed in over one million publications. The number of publications with eye movement in the title or abstract has been steadily increasing over the years, with over 1,200 papers published alone in 2013. The last decade has also witnessed the emergence of many new sub-disciplines in the field of neuroscience and cognition - one of them is (...) neuroaesthetics, which refers to the [neuro-]science of aesthetic perception of art.The title and contents of our book have been inspired by a very influential research article. It is one of the most cited scientific papers of all time, published in 1959 by a team of neurophysiologists and engineers, Lettvin, McCulloch and Pitts who are considered to be the founders of modern cybernetics. Their article, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain," refers to the role of internal cortical models in the communication or interfacing of the information in the outside world with the practical contextual task of the viewer. It shows how eye movements are the modality of this communication. The same duality between eye movements and internal models plays a fundamental role in humans. When we look, for example, at art, it explains those neurological processes involved in neuroaesthetics. Our book undertakes this innovative approach to neuroaesthetics. It explains this duality and discusses the communication between the artist and the viewer's aesthetic perception. It is structured into five chapters.Chapter One discusses the neurology of aesthetics, the idea of art as a form of communication, and explains perception as an active matching between a "top" (the viewer's mind) and a "down" (the viewer's sensorial machinery). It goes deep into the philosophical quandary of what beauty is in terms of art. Chapter Two is about eye movements and the scanpath theory of vision perception. It discusses the role of visual attention for controlling active vision, the meaning of mental binding and the analysis of eye movements as the key to understanding aesthetic processes. Chapter Three introduces Claude Shannon's information theory using it as a matrix into which to embed the top down active vision scanpath theory. The authors explain the main concept of neuroaesthetics as a form of communication mediated by the sequence of eye fixations. Chapter Four discusses art critique: The role of the viewer's training and expectation, the dilemma of the aesthetics of art versus non-art and how all of this affects the viewing mode. Finally, Chapter Five treats the intimacy of the artistic process, showing the unique implementation of the communicative experience between the artist and the viewer - the relation between a pictorial representation defined by the artist and modes of AWE generated in the viewer during active looking. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, despite his exchanges with and reception by major figures in the field of political theory, is often thought of as a philosopher as opposed to a political theorist. For instance, the title of one of his essays, "On the Political Incompetence of Philosophy," is sometimes taken to indicate that Gadamer thought of his own philosophy as "politically incompetent" (Code 2003, 15). In this paper, I argue that Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy is deeply concerned with our relation to the political (...) world. To bring out these political concerns, I put Gadamer in conversation with Hannah Arendt, who overtly disavowed philosophy in favor of political theory. I show that Gadamer and Arendt share many of the same worries about the solitary model of much philosophy – particularly that of Heidegger – and that both try to promote a more involved, worldly mode of thinking. For Arendt, this mode of thinking attends in large part to the newness and distinctiveness of other people, whereas Gadamer emphasizes what other people say and how we must relate to them if we are to understand what they are telling us. I argue that although these are complementary ways of addressing political thinking, one important advantage of Gadamer's account is the way it brings into view the centrality of courage for understanding our shared political world. Because understanding frequently requires that we question our identities and renegotiate our existing relation to the world in often uncomfortable ways, political thinking involves what I call "hermeneutic courage.". (shrink)

Both Brandom and Wittgenstein base their concepts of experience on the game metaphor and the associated concept of rule. In fact, what Brandom seems to do is further refine Wittgenstein’s vocabulary by specifying the game as the game of giving and asking for reasons and rules as the rules of inference. By replacing the plurality of “games” with the one and only “game”, though, Brandom also lays the ground for a possible discord. This relates particularly to the cognitive significance of (...) different forms of human experience, such as music or art in general, which are treated by Wittgenstein as language games despite their being rather independent of claims and commitments and despite their utterly lacking the representational dimension. In my paper, I will show that with respect to these objections, one can argue that Brandom is in fact true to Wittgenstein’s instruction to always read his Investigations against his Tractatus. The general idea is to look at the game and picture metaphor as parts of a single concept that both philosophers work on together by going back to the very idealist concept of reflexivity or self-consciousness. (shrink)

Shortcomings in the target article preclude adequate tests of developmental/attachment and strategic pluralism theories. Methodological problems include comparing college student attitudes with societal level indicators that may not reflect life conditions of college students. We show, through two principal components analyses, that multiple tests of the theories reduce to only two findings that cannot be interpreted as solid support for evolutionary hypotheses.

This article turns to Jack London’s and Albert Camus’ novels about contagion to try to tease out some of the moral meanings of the pandemic we are currently living through. In many ways, these works are prescient, and can thus serve as commentary on the situation we find ourselves in. In others, their narratives differ from each other and from our experience; the differences signal what is at stake in some of our circumstances. Camus’ ideal of solidarity focuses my discussion. (...) I show how certain conditions associated with an outbreak provide occasions for solidarity, but also examine several obstacles to it. Many of those obstacles, I contend, have to do with the limitations on what we can know – about ourselves, one another, and the world. In the end, I argue that complete solidarity may require us to reconceive our relationship to our communal past and the natural world. (shrink)

If a conclusion was reached that creatures without a language capability exhibit some form of a capability for logic, this would shed a new light on the relationship between logic, language, and thought. Recent experimental attempts to test whether some animals, as well as pre-linguistic human infants, are capable of exclusionary reasoning are taken to support exactly that conclusion. The paper discusses the analyses and conclusions of two such studies: Call’s (2004) two cups task, and Mody and Carey’s (2016) four (...) cups task. My paper exposes hidden assumptions within these analyses, which enable the authors to settle on the explanation which assigns logical capabilities to the participants of the studies, as opposed to the explanations which do not. The paper then demonstrates that the competing explanations of the experimental results are theoretically underdeveloped, rendering them unclear in their predictions concerning the behavior of cognitive subjects, and thus difficult to distinguish by use of experiments. Additionally, it is questioned whether the explanations are rivals at all, i.e. whether they compete to explain the cognitive processes of the same level. The contribution of the paper is conceptual. Its aim is to clear up the concepts involved in these analyses, in order to avoid oversimplified or premature conclusions about the cognitive abilities of pre- and non-linguistic creatures. It is also meant to show that the theoretical space surrounding the issues involved might be much more diverse and unknown than many of these studies imply. (shrink)

The eighteenth century debate between moral rationalists and moral sentimentalists has seen a striking renaissance in the past decades, not least because of research into the nature of moral judgement conducted by empirical scientists such as social and developmental psychologists and neuroscientists. A claim that is often made in the current discussion is that the evidence made available by such empirical investigations refutes rationalist conceptions of moral judgement and vindicates the views of Hume or other moral sentimentalists. For example, Jesse (...) Prinz and Hanno Sauer have recently argued that the available data demonstrates that emotions are both necessary and sufficient for moral judgement and that the best or the only way to make sense of these findings is to conclude that moral judgements are constituted by emotions. The aim of this paper is to thoroughly examine this argument and the underlying empirical evidence and to show that there is currently no compelling evidence for the truth of either the necessity or the sufficiency thesis and that, even if both theses were true, they would fail to provide a sound basis for a plausible sentimentalist constitution claim. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the larger notion of cooperation in interaction and its underlying dimensions as defined in Conversation Analysis: alignment and affiliation. Focusing on three cases from three different languages we investigate a specific practice, that of anticipatory completions, in a particular context, that of storytelling, and show that the practice of completing another speaker’s turn in an anticipatory manner is not de facto definable as either an aligning or non-aligning action, nor can it be said to (...) be either affiliating or non-affiliating. Through our analyses, we aim to distinguish and illustrate the manifold layers of and perspectives to alignment and affiliation and argue for their relevance for studies of interactional phenomena. We conclude that the notion of cooperation and its implementation through affiliating and/or aligning actions is a multi-layered and complex issue, the intricacies of which are best understood and captured through detailed sequential analyses. (shrink)

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth. Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely (...) in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today. (shrink)