It is hypothesised that threatening stimuli are detected better due to their salience or physical properties. However, these stimuli are typically embedded in a rich context, motivating the question whether threat detection is facilitated via learning of contexts in which threat stimuli appear. To address this question, we presented threatening face targets in new or old spatial configurations consisting of schematic faces and found that detection of threatening targets was faster in old configurations. This indicates that individuals are able to (...) learn regularities within visual contexts and use this contextual information to guide detection of threatening targets. Next, we presented threatening and non-threatening face targets embedded in new or old spatial configurations. Detection of threatening targets was facilitated in old configurations, and this effect was reversed for non-threatening targets. Present findings show that detection of threatening targets is driven not only by stimulus properties as theorised traditionally but also by learning of contexts in which threatening stimuli appear. Further, results show that context learning for threatening targets obstructs context learning for non-threatening targets. Overall, in addition to typically emphasised bottom-up factors, our findings highlight the importance of top-down factors such as context and learning in detection of salient, threatening stimuli. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn earlier work we showed that individuals learn the spatial regularities within contexts and use this knowledge to guide detection of threatening targets embedded in these contexts. While it is highly adaptive for humans to use contextual learning to detect threats, it is equally adaptive for individuals to flexibly readjust behaviour when contexts once associated with threatening stimuli begin to be associated with benign stimuli, and vice versa. Here, we presented face targets varying in salience in new or old spatial (...) configurations and changed the target salience halfway through the experiment to examine if contextual learning changes with the change in target salience. Detection of threatening targets was faster in old than new configurations and this learning persisted even after the target changed to non-threatening. However, the same pattern was not seen when the targets changed from non-threatening... (shrink)

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject–predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the legal implications which may be relevant to the ethical aspects of emerging technologies, to explore the existing situation in the area of legal regulation at EU level, and to formulate recommendations for the lawmakers.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis is based on the premise that the law is supposed to invoke moral principles. Speculative findings are formulated on the basis of analyzing specific emerging technologies; empirical findings are based on a research conducted (...) in the whole legal corpus of the EU.FindingsIn the area of network‐based technologies the already existing and elaborated legal frameworks can be used in an extended manner; artificial intelligence‐based technologies call for alterations in several branches of law; while interface technologies show the difficulty and complexity of regulating interdisciplinary fields. The legal implications of emerging technologies have attracted only a minimal legislative attention in the competent bodies of the EU.Originality/valueThe paper provides a systemic approach towards transmitting ethical norms to the application of emerging technologies through legal regulation, and formulates detailed recommendations in various areas of such technologies. (shrink)

The ontological turn in anthropological methodology, at least in its conceptualization-oriented formulation, aims to turn away from the concepts and objects found within one’s own social setting in order to turn to indigenous conceptualization processes and take a look at “the things themselves.” This article aims to unpack what such constant reconceptualization amounts to, arguing that when modified to meet certain objections, the ontological turn could provide important ingredients for an alternative version of interpretive social science—one that wishes to understand (...) social phenomena as human kinds in the vein of Ian Hacking, Sally Haslanger and Ron Mallon. (shrink)

During the winter of 1968–69, members of the so-called Budapest School formulated a scathing “review” of Georg Lukács’ late work, Ontology of Social Being. In the wake of the objections (but not in accordance with them), Lukács began to revise the text, but was unable to complete it: he died in June 1971. The disciples’ critique, published in English and German in 1976, played a major role in the reception history of Ontology—or rather in the fact that the 1500-page “philosophical (...) fiasco” still has no remarkable reception history. The main criticism of the disciples is that Lukács’ work mixes two incompatible ontologies and recalls the worst traditions of Soviet Marxism. In this paper, I will argue that the disciples’ “review” is misleading (nevertheless, the historical circumstances may provide a sufficient explanation for this) because there are no “two ontologies” in Lukács’ unfinished book. I will concentrate on the source of the misunderstanding, the Lukácsian thesis of the “post festum-rationality” of history, and in the light of this I will analyse how Lukács describes the open determination of individual and collective action in the process of the social reproduction of life. (shrink)

Dans la dernière partie des Aveux de la chair, Michel Foucault offre une analyse minutieuse de la théorie de la libido en tant que « stigmate de l’involontaire dans l’acte sexuel d’après la faute » selon saint Augustin ; le thème est intimement lié à l’exégèse patristique et augustinienne du livre de la Genèse 1:28 (« Croissez et multipliez »), plus spécialement à la question de l’existence possible des rapports sexuels au paradis. Le présent article se propose d’étudier à la (...) fois les textes concernés de saint Augustin, l’analyse qu’en offre Foucault et les interprétations philosophiques et théologiques ultérieures de la pensée de l’évêque d’Hippone et du philosophe français. Augustin (et Foucault lecteur de saint Augustin) a-t-il déclaré que nos aïeux faisaient l’amour au paradis? La théologie augustinienne du mariage et de la sexualité est-elle, comme le dit le dernier Foucault, le fondement de « la morale de l’Occident chrétien »? Au demeurant, peut-on parler de la théologie augustinienne ou encore du christianisme comme « fondement », tout en respectant la méthode « généalogique », telle que Foucault l’a développée? (shrink)

Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord have recently put forward a critical evaluation of the ontological turn in anthropological theory. According to this philosophically informed theory of ethnographic practice, certain insights of twentieth-century analytic philosophy should play a part in the methodological debates concerning anthropological fieldwork: most importantly, the denial of representationalism and the acceptance of the extended mind thesis. In this paper, I will attempt to evaluate the advantages and potential drawbacks of ontological anthropology—arguing that to become a true alternative (...) to current social scientific thinking about methodology, it has to meet certain philosophical objections. (shrink)

Can people efficiently navigate the modern communication environment, and if yes, how? We hypothesize that in addition to psychological capacities of epistemic vigilance, which evaluate the epistemic value of communicated information, some social institutions have evolved for the same function. Certain newspapers for instance, implement processes, distributed among several experts and tools, whose function is to curate information. We analyze how information curation is done at the institutional level and what challenges it meets. We also investigate what factors favor the (...) cultural evolution of institutions of epistemic vigilance: these include people’s preference for accurate and reliable information and their ability to assess communicated information in view of the source’s epistemic authority; but also contingent historical factors that make it worth—or not—to contribute to the maintenance of institutions of epistemic vigilance. We conclude the paper by considering the challenges and vulnerabilities of these institutions in the Digital Age. (shrink)

Recent theories have argued that emotions play a central role in moral decision-making and suggested that emotion regulation may be crucial in reducing emotion-linked biases. The present studies focused on the influence of emotional experience and individual differences in emotion regulation on moral choice in dilemmas that pit harming another person against social welfare. During these “harm to save” moral dilemmas, participants experienced mostly fear and sadness but also other emotions such as compassion, guilt, anger, disgust, regret and contempt (Study (...) 1). Fear and disgust were more frequently reported when participants made deontological choices, whereas regret was more frequently reported when participants made utilitarian choices. In addition, habitual reappraisal negatively predicted deontological choices, and this effect was significantly carried through emotional arousal (Study 2). Individual differences in the habitual use of other emotion regulation strategies (i.e., acceptance, rumination and catastrophising) did not influence moral choice. The results of the present studies indicate that negative emotions are commonly experienced during “harm to save” moral dilemmas, and they are associated with a deontological bias. By efficiently reducing emotional arousal, reappraisal can attenuate the emotion-linked deontological bias in moral choice. (shrink)

For simplicity, most of the literature introduces the concept of definitional equivalence only for disjoint languages. In a recent paper, Barrett and Halvorson introduce a straightforward generalization to non-disjoint languages and they show that their generalization is not equivalent to intertranslatability in general. In this paper, we show that their generalization is not transitive and hence it is not an equivalence relation. Then we introduce another formalization of definitional equivalence due to Andréka and Németi which is equivalent to the Barrett–Halvorson (...) generalization in the case of disjoint languages. We show that the Andréka–Németi generalization is the smallest equivalence relation containing the Barrett–Halvorson generalization and it is equivalent to intertranslatability, which is another definition for definitional equivalence, even for non-disjoint languages. Finally, we investigate which definitions for definitional equivalences remain equivalent when we generalize them for theories in non-disjoint languages. (shrink)

The purpose of our study was to measure the relationship between performance on various attentional tasks and hypnotic susceptibility. Healthy volunteers participated in a study, where they had to perform several tasks measuring various attention components in a waking state: sustained attention, selective or focused attention, divided attention and executive attention in task switching. Hypnotic susceptibility was measured in a separate setting by the Waterloo-Stanford Groups Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C .We found no significant correlation between any of the (...) attentional measures and hypnotic susceptibility. Highly hypnotizables did not prove to be superior to or worse than the other individuals in any of the tests.These results do not support the neuropsychophysiological model of hypnosis, as they show no consistent relationship between hypnotic susceptibility and waking attentional performance. (shrink)

The literary relations between the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement have, we believe, been sufficiently documented. It has been demonstrated that Senghor, Damas and Césaire avidly perused the pages of Crisis, Opportunity and Garvey's Negro World—Journals in which Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Countee Cullen and Jean Tommer—the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, first had their poems published. It is equally literary history now, that some of the poems of the Afro-American writers were reprinted in such Parisian Black-oriented journals and (...) little magazines as Les Continents, La Dépêche Africaine, Le Cri des Nègres, La Revue du Monde Noir and Légitime Défense. In this dissemination of ideas across the Atlantic, Paulette Nardal, Edward A. Jones, Louis T. Achille and Mercer Cook played the important role of literary intermediaries through their translations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present a new logic-based understanding of the connection between classical kinematics and relativistic kinematics. We show that the axioms of special relativity can be interpreted in the language of classical kinematics. This means that there is a logical translation function from the language of special relativity to the language of classical kinematics which translates the axioms of special relativity into consequences of classical kinematics. We will also show that if we distinguish a class (...) of observers in special relativity and exclude the non-slower-than light observers from classical kinematics by an extra axiom, then the two theories become definitionally equivalent. Furthermore, we show that classical kinematics is definitionally equivalent to classical kinematics with only slower-than-light inertial observers, and hence by transitivity of definitional equivalence that special relativity theory extended with “Ether” is definitionally equivalent to classical kinematics. So within an axiomatic framework of mathematical logic, wee xplicitly show that the transition from classical kinematics to relativistic kinematics is the knowledge acquisition that there is no “Ether”, accompanied by a redefinition of the concepts of time and space. (shrink)

Can the perception that one’s partner is investing effort generate a sense of commitment to a joint action? To test this, we developed a 2-player version of the classic snake game which became increasingly boring over the course of each round. This enabled us to operationalize commitment in terms of how long participants persisted before pressing a ‘finish’ button to conclude each round. Our results from three experiments reveal that participants persisted longer when they perceived what they believed to be (...) cues of their partner’s effortful contribution. Crucially, this effect was not observed when they knew their partner to be an algorithm, nor when it was their own effort that had been invested. These results support the hypothesis that the perception of a partner’s effort elicits a sense of commitment, leading to increased persistence in the face of a temptation to disengage. (shrink)

Regulations affect every aspect of our lives. Compliance with the regulations impacts citizens and businesses similarly: they have to find their rights and obligations in the complex legal environment. The situation is more complex when languages and time versions of regulations should be considered. To propose a solution to these demands, we present a semantic enrichment approach which aims at (1) decreasing the ambiguousness of legal texts, (2) increasing the probability of finding the relevant legal materials, and (3) utilizing the (...) application of legal reasoners. Our approach is also implemented both as a service for citizens and businesses and as a modeling environment for legal drafters. To evaluate the usefulness of the approach, a case study was carried out in a large organization and applied to corporate regulations and Hungarian laws. The results suggest this approach can support the previous aims. (shrink)

Can the perception that one’s partner is investing effort generate a sense of commitment to a joint action? To test this, we developed a 2-player version of the classic snake game which became increasingly boring over the course of each round. This enabled us to operationalize commitment in terms of how long participants persisted before pressing a ‘finish’ button to conclude each round. Our results from three experiments reveal that participants persisted longer when they perceived what they believed to be (...) cues of their partner’s effortful contribution. Crucially, this effect was not observed when they knew their partner to be an algorithm, nor when it was their own effort that had been invested. These results support the hypothesis that the perception of a partner’s effort elicits a sense of commitment, leading to increased persistence in the face of a temptation to disengage. (shrink)

In his highly influential book (The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, first published in 1958), Peter Winch introduces an alternative concept of interpretive social science, in which the focus is shifted from the actors’ subjective motives to the common elements found in every understandable action: language-games and rule-following. This Wittgensteinian, linguistic version of interpretive social science has had its vast array of critics throughout the years: according to some of them, it neglects the practical side (...) of sociology; while others claim that it fails properly to answer the questions raised by the translation from one language-game to another, or that it renders critical social theory impossible. In my article, I try to reflect critically upon these critiques themselves, showing that the Winchian theory does not overlook the practice in understanding the different forms of life; that with slight modifications it is able to cope with the problem of translation, and that it does not aspire to be the critical theory that many of its critics would like it to be. (shrink)

In recent years, developmental psychologists have increasingly been interested in various forms of prosocial behavior observed in infants and young children—in particular comforting, sharing, pointing to provide information, and spontaneous instrumental helping. We briefly review several models that have been proposed to explain the psychological mechanisms underpinning these behaviors. Focusing on spontaneous instrumental helping, we home in on models based upon what Paulus :77–81, 2014) has dubbed ‘goal-alignment’, i.e. the idea that the identification of an agent’s goal leads infants to (...) take up that goal as their own. We identify a problem with the most well-known model based upon this idea, namely the ‘goal contagion’ model. The problem arises from the way in which the model specifies the content of the goal which is identified and taken up. We then propose an alternative way of specifying the content of the goal, and use this as a starting point for articulating an alternative model based upon the idea of alignment, namely the ‘goal slippage’ model. By elucidating the difference between goal contagion and goal slippage, we contribute to the articulation of experimental criteria for assessing whether and when the mechanisms specified by these two models are at work. (shrink)

In the current paper, we articulate a theory to explain the phenomenology of mental effort. The theory provides a working definition of mental effort, explains in what sense mental effort is a limited resource, and specifies the factors that determine whether or not mental effort is experienced as aversive. The core of our theory is the conjecture that the sense of effort is the output of a cost-benefit analysis. This cost-benefit analysis employs heuristics to weigh the current and anticipated costs (...) of mental effort for a particular activity against the anticipated benefits. This provides a basis for spelling out testable predictions to structure future research on the phenomenology of mental effort. (shrink)

In ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, Levinas dismisses knowledge as a whole from art. This has deep implications for the ethical. The aesthetic event has nothing to do with the ethical event – art does not seem to hold a place for ethical knowledge. This situation is problematic with respect to the conflicting phenomenological evidence as well as with respect to Levinas himself, who occasionally relies on works of art in his ethical phenomenological analyses. My article aims to fill in the (...) blank spaces by finding a place for the ethical in Levinas’s model of ethical signification in art. To start with, I elaborate on the notion of ethical experience by way of László Tengelyi’s work on time-art and his conversation with Levinas. Next, I turn to Levinas’s portrayal of the insomnia of art, where the traces of such an experience can be located in the ebb and flow of consciousness, in the vicinity of the anonymous event, and on the way to the critical articulation of this event. In the second part of the article, I try to capitalize on this genetic model of ethical knowledge with reference to the faces of art. I attempt to show how in the in-depth experience provided by film faces come alive and signify. Rather than tying them in with the sublime, I argue for a limited yet undeniable presence of exteriority in the faces of the movie. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Transcendence of WordsAkos Krassoy (bio)Levinas’s central contribution to aesthetics and the philosophy of art is his well-known and provocative attempt to ethicize art. Yet, there is hardly any certainty regarding the nature of this ethicization. As far as the realization of Levinas’s program is concerned, readers usually remember its harmful effects.1 On the other hand, there are equally appreciative tones in his reading of art. It might be (...) more correct to say that the derogatory side is part of a fundamentally ambiguous attitude. It is almost as if Levinas’s radical ethical thinking, the job of which is to tackle totalizing Western thought, should speak in two voices when it comes to the aesthetic and the arts.Most of the commentaries run into, and then set out to resolve this weird situation marked by pejoration and ambiguity in one way or another. This is no easy task to accomplish; there is surely no single way out of this labyrinth. An element of irony is definitely required on the side of the interpreter. Arguably, my text may be no exception in the long line of attempts. In the following, I shall try my hand at these complexities and, similarly to other readers, deal with the contradictory remarks and implied but underdeveloped ideas by putting them into a meaningful framework. Like others before me, I shall do my best to provide a narrative as coherent as possible in which the letter [End Page 1] and the spirit of Levinas are followed and the relevant (phenomenological) aesthetic context is taken into account. In my case, this will mean siding with those interpreters who see a fixed set of problems dominating — that is, a single consistent path winding — in Levinas’s difficult itinerary. In more concrete terms, I shall join the camp of those who show sensitivity to the introduction of the critical act and argue that the shortcomings of the aesthetic are, to some extent, reversed in its recontextualization in human communication.2 Yet, unlike these authors who touch upon the issue of criticism to varying degrees, I shall concentrate fully on placing critical activity in the center of Levinas’s aesthetic thought and thus treating art as an important segment of ethical signification. My focus will be on the reintegration of the disengaged image into reality; I shall try to determine what this development in art implies in Levinas’s ethical phenomenological project. Concerning the particular course of my text, I shall concentrate mostly on the issue of ambiguity and, gradually working my way through it, deal with pejoration at the same time. I shall first analyze what is at stake in this ambiguousness, then attempt to establish its governing logic, only to prepare the ground on which criticism as a way out of the maze can be seen in its entirety.A Real Headache: AmbiguousnessAnyone interested in Levinas’s aesthetic thought arrives at a truly interesting but nebulous field. By nebulousness I primarily mean the overly ambiguous character of Levinas’s position. What Levinas has to say is indeed quite difficult to pin down or, at least, it is highly equivocal: the noise of critique is balanced by the sound of quiet but all the more patent affirmation. In every phase of his thinking there is a suspicion felt toward artistic expression, which may on occasion reach the level of derogation; all this is nevertheless accompanied by clear-cut support. This can be sensed in chance remarks, such as, in “Reality and Its Shadow” — the essay mostly responsible for the bad reputation of [End Page 2] Levinas in aesthetics — where Levinas discusses the plasticity of literary works and mentions a “particularly admirable page” in Proust’s The Captive (RS 10). In spite of the anti-aesthetic logic and philistine-like rhetoric of the essay, the art-loving character of the author — who is beyond a doubt an affectionate reader — is revealed for a second.Remarks like this are quite suggestive with respect to Levinas’s appraisal of the arts—as are many other details of Levinas’s work. Of all these, his apparent knowledge and use of artworks in his... (shrink)

Relations between literature and phenomenology vary greatly from proximity to distance depending on whether writers or philosophers give the definition. Writers in favour of the mission of phenomenology and phenomenologist relying on the visional power of literary examples can equally have a high regard for the other discipline thereby, nonetheless, preserving the demarcation. In the following, I will try to investigate these connections by debating the viewpoints of authors showing visible signs of appreciation on both sides. My examples are meant (...) to be emblematic in as much as they are to represent a general trend in their field and serve as spokespersons of important stances in relation to the other genre. (shrink)

For simplicity, most of the literature introduces the concept of definitional equivalence only to languages with disjoint signatures. In a recent paper, Barrett and Halvorson introduce a straightforward generalization to languages with non-disjoint signatures and they show that their generalization is not equivalent to intertranslatability in general. In this paper,we show that their generalization is not transitive and hence it is not an equivalence relation. Then we introduce the Andréka and Németi generalization as one of the many equivalent formulations for (...) languages with disjoint signatures. We show that the Andréka-Németi generalization is the smallest equivalence relation containing the Barrett–Halvorson generalization and it is equivalent to intertranslatability even for languages with non-disjoint signatures. Finally,we investigate which definitions for definitional equivalences remain equivalent when we generalize them for theories with non-disjoint signatures. (shrink)

Joint actions often require agents to track others’ actions while planning and executing physically incongruent actions of their own. Previous research has indicated that this can lead to visuomotor interference effects when it occurs outside of joint action. How is this avoided or overcome in joint actions? We hypothesized that when joint action partners represent their actions as interrelated components of a plan to bring about a joint action goal, each partner’s movements need not be represented in relation to distinct, (...) incongruent proximal goals. Instead they can be represented in relation to a single proximal goal – especially if the movements are, or appear to be, mechanically linked to a more distal joint action goal. To test this, we implemented a paradigm in which participants produced finger movements that were either congruent or incongruent with those of a virtual partner, and either with or without a joint action goal (the joint flipping of a switch, which turned on two light bulbs). Our findings provide partial support for the hypothesis that visuomotor interference effects can be reduced when two physically incongruent actions are represented as mechanically interdependent contributions to a joint action goal. (shrink)

Thought experiments are widely used in the informal explanation of Relativity Theories; however, they are not present explicitly in formalized versions of Relativity Theory. In this paper, we present an axiom system of Special Relativity which is able to grasp thought experiments formally and explicitly. Moreover, using these thought experiments, we can provide an explicit definition of relativistic mass based only on kinematical concepts and we can geometrically prove the Mass Increase Formula in a natural way, without postulates of conservation (...) of mass and momentum. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a logic-based conceptual analysis of the twin paradox (TwP) theorem within a first-order logic framework. A geometrical characterization of TwP and its variants is given. It is shown that TwP is not logically equivalent to the assumption of the slowing down of moving clocks, and the lack of TwP is not logically equivalent to the Newtonian assumption of absolute time. The logical connection between TwP and a symmetry axiom of special relativity is (...) also studied. (shrink)

We present three natural but distinct formalisations of Einstein’s special principle of relativity, and demonstrate the relationships between them. In particular, we prove that they are logically distinct, but that they can be made equivalent by introducing a small number of additional, intuitively acceptable axioms.