The recorded musical text -- Recording, repetition, and meaning in absolute music -- Schnabel's rationalism, Gould's pragmatism -- Digital mythologies -- Beethoven and the iPod Nation -- Photo/phono/pornography -- Mahler as imagist.

[V]isibility is central to the shaping of political, medical, and socioeconomic decisions. Who will be treated—how and where—are the central questions whose answers are often entwined with issues of visibility … [and] the effects that media visibility has on the perception of particular bodies .In a documentary entitled Paris: The Luminous Years , writer Janet Flanner describes the intense friendship of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Both were inspired by Paul Cézanne and his retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne—which, according (...) to Paris: The Luminous Years, marked in Janus-like fashion the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries in art. Flanner tells of the frequent visits between the two painters, where they “talked and talked … two or three months that they just spent gabbling, gabbling.” And from their camaraderie and gabble emerged someth .. (shrink)

This commentary discusses a strategy by which investigators can examine whether observers perceive properties of the global array independently of properties in individual sensory arrays. Research showing that perception of complex relationships appears to be independent of the perception of individual components is considered. Ashby and Townsend's (1986) methods for identifying perceptual independence are important tools for studying the global array.

Everett’s Relative State Interpretation has gained increasing interest due to the progress of understanding the role of decoherence. In order to fulfill its promise as a realistic description of the physical world, two postulates are formulated. In short they are for a system with continuous coordinates \, discrete variable j, and state \\), the density \=|\psi _j|^2\) gives the distribution of the location of the system with the respect to the variables \ and j; an equation of motion for the (...) state \. The first postulate connects the mathematical description to the physical reality, which has been missing in previous versions. The contents of the standard postulates are derived, including the appearance of Hilbert space and the Born rule. The approach to probabilities earlier proposed by Greaves replaces the classical probability concept in the Born rule. The new quantum probability concept, earlier advocated by Deutsch and Wallace, is void of the requirement of uncertainty. (shrink)

What makes some human rights campaigns for the physical integrity rights of prisoners more effective than others? Despite various normative arguments condemning these practices, only limited systematic analysis documents the relative effectiveness of different arguments on individuals. This is surprising, because the success of human rights campaigns depends on getting individuals to care about and support policy positions that protect human rights. We constructed an experiment to compare the effects of six different arguments against prisoner abuse and torture. We found (...) that an argument which emphasized the suffering of the prisoner had a consistently positive and significant effect on opposition to torture and prisoner abuse. However, this effect was largely contingent on subjects’ political ideology. Political conservatives actually became less opposed to torture, on average, after reading the same argument emphasizing the prisoners’ suffering or the sacredness of human beings. (shrink)

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

2015 Reprint of 1956 Printing. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Cybernetics is here defined as "the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine"-in a word, as the art of steersmanship; and this book will interest all who are interested in cybernetics, communication theory and methods for regulation and control. W. Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. His two (...) books, "Design for a Brain" and "An Introduction to Cybernetics," were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking into the nascent discipline and were highly influential. Contents include: What is new -- Change -- The Determinate Machine -- The Machine with Input -- Stability -- The Black Box -- Quantity of Variety -- Transmission of Variety -- Incessant Transmission -- Regulation in Biological Systems -- Requisite Variety -- The Error-controlled Regulator -- Regulating the Very Large System -- Amplifying Regulation. (shrink)

We must, therefore, make a study of mechanism; but some introduction is advisable, for cybernetics treats the subject from a new, and therefore unusual, ...

The enactivist paradigm of embodied cognition represents a powerful alternative to Cartesian and cognitivist approaches in the philosophy of mind. On this view, the body plays a constitutive role in the integrated functioning of perception, affect and other cognitive processes. Enactivism shares many of the central themes of feminist theory, and is extended to apply to social and political concerns. Following a discussion of the key components of the enactive approach, we apply it to explain more complex social manifestations, specifically (...) gender performance and its reproduction through time. By employing Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, we demonstrate how gender, as one marker of social identity and difference, emerges through processes of embodied and embedded sense-making as articulated by enactive theory. We argue that more attention to embodied and embedded values allows for the interruption and transformation of histories of oppressive practices and opens the door to more liberatory possibilities. (shrink)

This paper offers a new way to make sense of disagreement expansion from a polylogical perspective by incorporating various places in addition to players and positions into the analysis. The concepts build on prior implicit ideas about disagreement space by suggesting how to more fully account for argumentative context, and its construction, in large-scale complex controversies. As a basis for our polylogical analysis, we use a New York Times news story reporting on an oil train explosion—a significant point in the (...) broader controversy over producing oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing. (shrink)

"Ashby includes the great thinkers and periods that have shaped Western ethics: the Greeks, the Hebrew prophets, the Roman Stoics, St. Augustine, the medieval ethicists, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Romantics, and the radical revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the period from 1850 to 1920, Ashby notes, the transformations wrought by the four great modern thinkers - Darwim, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - both extended and significantly challenged the traditional core beliefs (...) of the West and, as a result, bestowed upon us a profound moral crisis, one that we have not yet successfully met. Consequently, as we stand at the brink of the twenty-first century, with its further technological breakthroughs and social upheavals, how will we deal with the moral uncertainties that await us? In his final chapter Ashby contends that while remaining alive to our Western ethical heritage, we will have no choice but to confront its basic presuppositions as we move into a more pluralistic society, for he asserts that the ideology of the future cannot be exclusively Western; future history cannot be purely Western history. So, while this history of ethics cannot tell us how to live, it can offer to the reader what is prerequisite to a more satisfying life: an insightful and inclusive history of where our own ethical beliefs have come from and a sense of the challenges that await us all.". (shrink)

We argue that lateralities are not merely a result of phylogenetic processes but reflect probability functions that are influenced by task characteristics and extended practice. We support our argument by empirical findings on lateral biases in early infancy in general, and footedness in particular, and on hand preferences in nonhuman primates.

A specific issue for argumentation theory is whether information and communication technologies play any role in governing argument — that is, as parties engage in practical activities across space and time via ICTs, does technology matter for the interplay of argumentative content and process in managing disagreement? The case made here is that technologies do matter because they are not merely conduits of communication but have a role in the pragmatics of communication and argumentation. In particular, ICTs should be recognized (...) as communication-information services that are delegated degrees of responsibility for managing disagreements arising from practical activities. These services are organized around practical theories for designing disagreement space. However, recognizing this relationship between argument and technology requires accounting for procedures, techniques, or rules and speech acts that are not argumentative propositions in any strict sense but that are consequential for what becomes argumentation in any setting. An account about designing disagreement space, grounded in Jackson and Jacobs’s theory of Disagreement Management, is put forward to address these issues while more generally contributing to understanding argument in context. (shrink)

Background: We previously showed, by means of an online-based survey, that the belief of being infected by coronavirus disease 2019 acted as a nocebo and predicted higher perception of symptoms similar to COVID-19 symptoms. However, there is little known about the psychological mechanisms that give rise to beliefs such as certainty of being infected by COVID-19, and this was investigated in the present study.Objective: Using the same data from the previous online survey with the same research team, we further investigated (...) whether certainty of being infected by COVID-19 is associated with age, sex, health anxiety, and/or personality traits.Methods: Respondents filled out an online survey with 57 questions about symptoms similar to COVID-19, certainty of being infected by COVID-19, anxiety, stress, health anxiety, and personality dimensions.Results: Higher levels of conscientiousness and health anxiety were independently associated with certainty of being infected by COVID-19. The model predicted 29% of the variance in certainty of being infected by COVID-19.Conclusion: Being conscientious and worried about health issues were associated with the belief of being infected by COVID-19. Such finding may have implications for health care personnel who provide COVID-19 testing or consulting services to general population, as individuals high in these traits may over-report COVID-like symptoms. Theoretically, these findings point to psychological factors that may increase nocebo and possibly placebo effects. Clinically, the findings suggest that individuals high in conscientiousness and health anxiety may be more likely to over-report their bodily experiences. (shrink)

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

It is argued here that large-scale organization and networked computing enable new divisions of communicative work aimed at shaping the content, direction, and outcomes of societal conversations. The challenge for argumentation theory and practice lies in attending to these new divisions of communicative work in constituting contemporary argumentative realities. Goffman’s conceptualization of participation frameworks and production formats are applied to articulate the communicative work of organizations afforded by networked computing that invents and innovates argument in all of its senses—as product, (...) process, and procedure. Communicative work, however, may be scaffolding argumentative contexts and practices that are quite different than what has constituted past argumentative realities. The computerization of argument happens as organizations invent and innovate argument practice relative to the demands and opportunities of interorganizational communication. The cases and examples examined here suggest that argument practice is evolving around the logic of conversation and the principle of personalization. The analysis challenges argumentation theory to seriously engage with the construction of communicative contexts and the realization of ideas about disagreement management in organizational practice and information infrastructures. Directions for integrating insights from a design perspective on argument with insights from organizational and information systems theory are proposed for coming to terms with an era of large-scale organization and computerization, in particular the evolution of argument practice, the inscription of argument in the built environment, and the absorption of socio-cultural argument practices by organizations and computation. (shrink)