Faces are complex stimuli that can be described via intuitive facial features like the eyes, nose, and mouth, “configural” features like the distances between facial landmarks, and features that correspond to computations performed in the early visual system (e.g. oriented edges). With regard to this latter category of descriptors, adult face recognition relies disproportionately on information in specific spatial frequency and orientation bands: Many recognition tasks are performed more accurately when adults have access to mid-range spatial frequencies (8-16 cycles/face) and (...) horizontal orientations (Dakin & Watt, 2009). In the current study, we examined how this information bias develops in middle childhood. We recruited children between the ages of 5-10 years old to participate in a simple categorization task that required them to label images according to whether they depicted a face or a house. Critically, children were presented with face and house images comprised either of primarily horizontal orientation energy, primarily vertical orientation energy, or both horizontal and vertical orientation energy. We predicted that any bias favoring horizontal information over vertical should be more evident in faces than in houses, and also that older children would be more likely to show such a bias than younger children. We designed our categorization task to be sufficiently easy that children would perform at near-ceiling accuracy levels, but with variation in response times that would reflect how they rely on different orientations as a function of age and object category. We found that horizontal bias for face detection (but not house detection) correlated significantly with age, suggesting an emergent category-specific bias for horizontal orientation energy that develops during middle childhood. These results thus suggest that the tuning of high-level recognition to specific low-level visual features takes take place over several years of visual development. (shrink)

History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and Praxis explores one of the most significant paradigm shifts in public discourse. A post-truth environment that primarily appeals to emotion, elevates personal belief and devalues expert opinion has important implications far beyond Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, and has a profound impact on how history is produced and consumed. Post-truth history is not merely a synonym for lies. This book argues that indifference to historicity by both the purveyor and recipient, contempt (...) for expert opinion that contradicts it, and ideological motivation are its key characteristics. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this work explores some of the following questions. What exactly is post-truth history? Does it represent a new phenomenon? Does the historian have a special role to play in preserving public memory from 'alternative facts'? Do academics more generally have an obligation to combat fake news and fake history both in universities and on social media? How has a 'post-truth culture' impacted professional and popular historical discourse? Looking at theoretical dimensions and case studies from around the world, this book explores the violent potential of post-truth history and calls on readers to resist. (shrink)

Written memoranda of conversations, or memcons, provide a near‐contemporaneous record of what was said in conversation, and offer important insights into the activities of high‐profile individuals. We assess the impact of writing a memcon on memory for conversation. Pairs of participants engaged in conversation and were asked to recall the contents of that conversation 1 week later. One participant in each pair memorialized the content of the interaction in a memcon shortly after the conversation. Participants who generated memcons recalled more (...) details of the conversations than participants who did not, but the content of recall was equally and largely accurate for both participants. Remarkably, only 4.7% of the details of the conversation were recalled by both of the partners after a week delay. Contemporaneous note‐taking appears to enhance memory for conversation by increasing the amount of information remembered but not the accuracy of that information. These findings have implications for evaluating the testimony of participants on conversations with major political or legal ramifications. (shrink)

The fruits of knowledge—such as books, data, and ideas—tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history (...) of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period’s monumental shifts in culture and learning. (shrink)

The way we refer to things in the world is shaped by the immediate physical context as well as the discourse history. But what part of the discourse history is relevant to language use in the present? In four experiments, we combine the study of task‐based conversation with measures of recognition memory to examine the role of physical contextual cues that shape what speakers perceive to be a part of the relevant discourse history. Our studies leverage the differentiation effect, a (...) phenomenon in which speakers are more likely to use a modified expression to refer to an object (e.g., dotted sock) if they had previously described a similar object (e.g., striped sock) than when they had not described a similar object. Two physical cues—the background that framed the to‐be‐described pictures and the position of the pictures in the display—were manipulated to alter perceptions about the relevant discourse context. We measured the rate with which speakers modify referring expressions to differentiate current from past referents. Recognition memory measures following the conversation probed what was and was not remembered about past discourse referents and contexts. Analysis of modification rates indicated that these contextual grouping cues shaped perceptions about the relevant discourse context. The contextual cues did not affect memory for the referents, but the memory for past referents was better for speakers than for listeners. Our findings show that perceptions about the relevant discourse history are a key determinant of how language is used in the moment but also that conversational partners form asymmetric representations of the discourse history. (shrink)

Gesellschaftliche Veränderungen in grossem Massstab, von der Pluralisierung der Gesellschaft, der Digitalisierung, die als Vierte Kulturtechnik bezeichnet wird, bis hin zur Widerfahrnis von Kontingenzen wie Armut und Flüchtlingsströmen oder Umweltkatastrophen, stellen die Verantwortungsfähigkeit des Menschen vor neue Herausforderungen. Es wird dabei deutlich: Humanität und Vernunft, Würde und Freiheit verdanken ihren Gehalt und ihre Gestalt einem die Vernunft selbst übersteigenden Transzendenten, in dem die Vernunft je und je ihres eigenen Grundes ansichtig werden kann. Dass dieses Verhältnis zwischen Vernunft und ihrem transzendenten (...) Grund alle Wissens- und Lebensbereiche durchdringt, zeigen die interdisziplinären Beiträge dieses Bandes, die Fragen der Weltentstehung und Anthropologie, der Logik und Mystik, des Glaubens und des Gottesbildes, des Sinns und der Religion, der Gottesdienstpraxis und der Architektur behandeln. (shrink)

The belief in free will has been frequently challenged since Benjamin Libet published his famous experiment in 1983. Although Libet’s experiment is highly dependent upon subjective reports, no study has been conducted that focused on a first-person or introspective perspective of the task. We took a neurophenomenological approach in an N = 1 study providing reliable and valid measures of the first-person perspective in conjunction with brain dynamics. We found that a larger readiness potential is attributable to more frequent (...) occurrences of self-initiated movements during negative deflections of the slow cortical potentials . These negative deflections occur in parallel with an inner impulse reported by an expert meditator which may in turn lead to a voluntary act. We demonstrate in this proof-of-principle approach that the first-person perspective obtained by an expert meditator in conjunction with neural signal analysis can contribute to our understanding of the neural underpinnings of voluntary acts. (shrink)

Through the discussion of the two texts: "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" by Walter Benjamin and "Birth of the Clinic" by Michel Foucault, the aim of this thesis consists in trying to point out a kind of history of ambivalence and to understand its rapport with possible knowledge. The thesis contained in this work can be formulated as follows: Benjamin and Foucault grant an important position to writing in its aspect to knowledge. In fact the direct question (...) arises as follows : how is it possible for these two philosophers to think the ambivalence? How and why has it an interest to philosophical knowledge? We act on the assumption that ambivalence contains a postulation for truth and that it is not only a relativization of the latter. The motivation of this thesis resides in the intuition that the concept of writing employed by Benjamin and Foucault is characterized by ambivalence. Thus the writing can be understood not only like a mobile limitation of thought for these philosophers, but as an experience of the world. Ambivalence thus expresses a fundamental experience of modernity. Ambivalent writing makes the effort to find significations which cannot be fixed in a system. The writing challenges the established discourse. It can be understood as a political and critical turning point. It appeared to us, that the text Intuition of the moment by Gaston Bachelard, and its analysis about ‘time and writing’ can serve as a link between the conception of Benjamin’s allegory and the Clinic of Foucault. It seemed to us that in a similar manner the two implicitly question the relationship between writing and time. (shrink)

Craig Callender, Jonathan Cohen and Markus Schrenk have recently argued for an amended version of the best system account of laws – the better best system account (BBSA). This account of lawhood is supposed to account for laws in the special sciences, among other desiderata. Unlike David Lewis's original best system account of laws, the BBSA does not rely on a privileged class of natural predicates, in terms of which the best system is formulated. According to the BBSA, a contingently (...) true generalization is a law of a special science S iff the generalization is an axiom (or a theorem) of the best system relative to the set of predicates used by special science S. We argue that the BBSA is, at best, an incomplete theory of special science laws, as it does not account for typical features of special science laws, such as attached ceteris paribus conditions and the idealized character of law statements in these disciplines. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article offers a re-contextualization of the Positivism Dispute between the Frankfurt School and advocates of empirical sociology in the German sociological profession between 1954 and 1970. Investigating the reasons why the German Sociological Association convened in Tübingen in October 1961, it assigns a more peripheral role to Karl Popper and this now famous seminar. Focusing instead on the debate among German sociologists from the mid-1950s which prompted the convention of the seminar and the invitation for Popper to speak, the (...) article maintains that philosophy of history was the central concern of the Positivism Dispute. In this debate, members of the Frankfurt School emphasized contingency in history and society, while sociologists such as René König, Helmut Schelsky, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Arnold Gehlen advocated sociology as the empirical study of ‘given’ social facts. By doing so the article questions the narrative of the Positivism Dispute advanced by Karl Popper and some of his followers, as well as interpretations which have focused on debates during the aftermath of the Tübingen seminar in the 1960s. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I will investigate the compatibility of different metaphysics of time with the powers view. At first sight, it seems natural to combine some sort of powers ontology with a dy...

abstractThe paper explores a new interpretation of the consequentializing project. Three prominent interpretations are criticized for neglecting the explanatory dimension of moral theories. Instead...

This book develops a new Wittgenstein interpretation called Wittgenstein’s Metametaphysics. The basic idea is that one major strand in Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophy can be described as undermining the dichotomy between realism and idealism. The aim of this book is to contribute to a better understanding of the relation between language and reality and to open up avenues of dialogue to overcome deep divides in the research literature. In the course of developing a comprehensive and in-depth interpretation, the author (...) provides fresh and original analyses of the latest issues in Wittgenstein scholarship and gives new answers to both major exegetical and philosophical problems. This makes the book an illuminating study for scholars and advanced students alike. (shrink)

Introduction : reinterpreting landscapes in an evolving world -- The pastoral tradition as inherited motives -- From classical pastorals to pastoral landscapes : rebirth of the landscape idea through analytical narration -- Instances of pastoral motivation in contemporary landscape analytical practice -- Articulating analytical narratives of contemporary pastoral landscapes -- The landscape analyst's pastoral action.

3 LIBERTARIANISM Now that we have discussed determinism and laws of nature, let us finally turn to libertarianism. Traditionally, libertarianism has been viewed as an incompatibilist theory of free will, as it requires the existence of real ...

The standardised randomised clinical trial (RCT) has been exceedingly popular in medical research, economics, and practical policy making. Recently, RCTs have faced criticism. First, it has been argued by John Worrall that we cannot be certain that our sample is not atypical with regard to possible confounding factors. I will argue that at least in the case of medical research, we know enough about the relevant causal mechanisms to be justified to ignore a number of factors we have good reason (...) not to expect to be disruptive. I will also argue against an argument provided by Nancy Cartwright and Eileen Munro that RCTs should not be taken to deductively infer probabilistic causal claims, but ampliatively. The paper will end on a discussion of evidence hierarchies and a defence of the stance of evidence-based medicine that RCTs are the best available method to assess a treatment’s efficacy. (shrink)

In climate science, observational gridded climate datasets that are based on in situ measurements serve as evidence for scientific claims and they are used to both calibrate and evaluate models. However, datasets only represent selected aspects of the real world, so when they are used for a specific purpose they can be a source of uncertainty. Here, we present a framework for understanding this uncertainty of observational datasets which distinguishes three general sources of uncertainty: (1) uncertainty that arises during the (...) generation of the dataset; (2) uncertainty due to biased samples; and (3) uncertainty that arises due to the choice of abstract properties, such as resolution and metric. Based on this framework, we identify four different types of dataset ensembles — parametric, structural, resampling, and property ensembles—as tools to understand and assess uncertainties arising from the use of datasets for a specific purpose. We advocate for a more systematic generation of dataset ensembles by using these sorts of tools. Finally, we discuss the use of dataset ensembles in climate model evaluation. We argue that a more systematic understanding and assessment of dataset uncertainty is needed to allow for a more reliable uncertainty assessment in the context of model evaluation. The more systematic use of such a framework would be beneficial for both scientific reasoning and scientific policy advice based on climate datasets. (shrink)