The contributions gathered here demonstrate how categorical ontology can provide a basis for linking three important basic sciences: mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Category theory is a new formal ontology that shifts the main focus from objects to processes. The book approaches formal ontology in the original sense put forward by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, namely as a science that deals with entities that can be exemplified in all spheres and domains of reality. It is a dynamic, processual, and non-substantial (...) ontology in which all entities can be treated as transformations, and in which objects are merely the sources and aims of these transformations. Thus, in a rather surprising way, when employed as a formal ontology, category theory can unite seemingly disparate disciplines in contemporary science and the humanities, such as physics, mathematics and philosophy, but also computer and complex systems science. (shrink)

Using Catford’s shifts (1965), this study is an attempt to investigate four English translations by Clarke (1879), Davie (1882), Edwards (1911) and Wickens (1984) of selected poems from the Bustan of Saadi, the eminent Persian poet and writer. Five poems were randomly selected from the Bustan. Every line of the selected poems was investigated by the raters and placed in the related shift type specified by Catford (1965), namely level shift and category shift which in turn (...) includes class shift, unit shift, structural shift, and intrasystem shift. Some lines were placed under more than one shift type as more than one change could be identified in them. The results revealed that the structural shift was the most frequently used shift by the four translators of the poems in the Bustan. Level shift followed by unit shift were the next most frequently used shifts. It was found that the four translators had a somewhat similar trend in terms of using shifts towards translating the selected poems of the Bustan of Saadi. Also, it can be concluded that structural and level shifts were inevitable in some places during the translation process. (shrink)

A system of categories is a complete list of highest kinds or genera. Traditionally, following Aristotle, these have been thought of as highest genera of entities (in the widest sense of the term), so that a system of categories undertaken in this realist spirit would ideally provide an inventory of everything there is, thus answering the most basic of metaphysical questions: “What is there?”. Skepticism about the possibilities for discerning the different categories of ‘reality itself’ has led others to approach (...) category systems not with the aim of cataloging the highest kinds in the world itself, but rather with the aim of elucidating the categories of our conceptual system. Thus Kant makes the shift to a conceptualist approach by drawing out the categories that are.. (shrink)

The distinction between perception and cognition has always had a firm footing in both cognitive science and folk psychology. However, there is little agreement as to how the distinction should be drawn. In fact, a number of theorists have recently argued that, given the ubiquity of top-down influences, we should jettison the distinction altogether. I reject this approach, and defend a pluralist account of the distinction. At the heart of my account is the claim that each legitimate way of marking (...) a border between perception and cognition deploys a notion I call ‘stimulus-control.’ Thus, rather than being a grab bag of unrelated kinds, the various categories of the perceptual are unified into a superordinate natural kind. (shrink)

We investigated the understanding of causal systems categories—categories defined by common causal structure rather than by common domain content—among college students. We asked students who were either novices or experts in the physical sciences to sort descriptions of real-world phenomena that varied in their causal structure (e.g., negative feedback vs. causal chain) and in their content domain (e.g., economics vs. biology). Our hypothesis was that there would be a shift from domain-based sorting to causal sorting with increasing expertise in (...) the relevant domains. This prediction was borne out: The novice groups sorted primarily by domain and the expert group sorted by causal category. These results suggest that science training facilitates insight about causal structures. (shrink)

Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, we aim to tease out how narrators talk into being the social group constellations in their storyworlds and how these – potentially shifting – constellations can be related to the narrator’s identity constructions. We investigate two World War II-testimonies narrated by Belgian concentration camp survivors and scrutinize whether the expected Standardized Relational Pair of victim-perpetrator – viz. the camp prisoners versus the Nazis – is in operation, how these two categories are talked into being, whether (...) other social groups are mentioned and how all these processes affect the narrators’ identity work. It proved to be the case that, even though the victim-perpetrator Standardized Relational Pair is indeed present in both testimonies, it functions very differently in both stories, resulting in almost opposing identity work by the two narrators. (shrink)

I distinguish, and discuss the relations between, five types of context-shift involving indexicals. For 'intentional' indexicals - indexicals whose value depends upon the speaker's intention - we can shift the context more or less 'at will', by manifesting one's intention to do so. For other indexicals we can shift the context through pretense. Following a number of authors, I distinguish two types of context-shifting pretense, corresponding to two sets of linguistic phenomena. The fourth type of case is (...) that of expressions which are not really indexical, but perspectival, and for which we do not need to appeal to the notion of context-shift in order to account for their shifty behaviour. The fifth category I introduce and discuss is that of 'shiftable indexicals'. Do we need it, given that we already have the other four categories? My answer is a qualified 'yes'. (shrink)

HARDIN PK. Nursing Inquiry 2003; 10: 209–217 Shape-shifting discourses of anorexia nervosa: reconstituting psychopathologyThis article explores how the circuitous relationship between individuals, the media, and discursive systems replicate and reinforce the act of self-starvation in young women. Using a feminist poststructuralist methodology, the focus of this article is on how discourses and institutional practices operate to position young women who take up the subject position of wanting to be diagnosed as anorexic. Utilizing data from online accounts and individual interviews, I (...) attend to the ways in which young women are institutionally positioned as ‘anorexics’ and the effects that those positions have on their behaviors, in addition to reinforcing institutional practices that construct anorexia nervosa. Questions addressed through this inquiry are: How do institutional practices create and continue to constitute ‘anorexia nervosa’? How do discourses operate to position young women such that they are either included and/or excluded into the category of ‘anorexia nervosa’? What are the effects and consequences that emanate from these positionings? (shrink)

In two eye-tracking studies we investigated the influence of Mandarin numeral classifiers – a grammatical category in the language – on online overt attention. Mandarin speakers were presented with simple sentences through headphones while their eye-movements to objects presented on a computer screen were monitored. The crucial question is what participants look at while listening to a pre-specified target noun. If classifier categories influence Mandarin speakers' general conceptual processing, then on hearing the target noun they should look at objects (...) that are members of the same classifier category – even when the classifier is not explicitly present. The data show that when participants heard a classifier they shifted overt attention significantly more to classifiermatch objects than to distractor objects, but when the classifier was not explicitly presented in speech, overt attention to classifier-match objects and distractor objects did not differ. This suggests that although classifier distinctions do influence eye-gaze behavior, they do so only during linguistic processing of that distinction and not in moment-to-moment general conceptual processing. (shrink)

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection, following Holton :625–628, 1997). PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse, the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual (...) content, sensations, feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt’s approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. (shrink)

This essay participates in a feminist postcohnial critical historiographyfepistemol’ ogy by providing a critique of The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. The essay considers Spivak's success in interrogating her own position as a leading postcohnial critic as she engages in dialogues with various people. Spivak's commitment to cross-cultural exchanges is undeniable. However, at times the resurgence of her authoritative subject position deflects productive tensions generated by careful scrutiny of the category postcohnial.

Within veterinary medical education, tracking systems exist that differentiate between “large” and “small” animal medicine. In a tracking system, students can focus primarily on their choice of animal medicine once they have completed the core curriculum. This article argues that these socially created categories are ever shifting; therefore, some species do not always “fit.” This generates new discourses surrounding emerging “border tracks”; these “tracks” focus on species whose social definitions change so that their placement in the tracking system of veterinary (...) medical education is a site of contestation. Thus, animal medicine operates not solely on the basis of biology, but on the basis of social meaning as well. This analysis will use the equine concentration to demonstrate the ambiguity of borders, as well as their potential to serve as communicative sites for social change. (shrink)

Since their introduction by Partee and Rooth (1983) into linguistic theory, type shifting principles have been extensively employed in various linguistic domains, including nominal predicates (Partee 1987), kind denoting NPs (Chierchia 1998), interrogatives (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1989), scrambled definites (De Hoop and Van der Does 1998) and plurals (Winter 2001,2002). Most of the accounts that use type shifting principles employ them as ``last resort'' mechanisms, which apply only when other compositional mechanisms fail. This failure is often sloppily referred to as (...) type mismatch . The motivation for introducing type mismatch into the compositional mechanism is twofold: on the one hand it allows lexical items to be assigned the minimal types that are needed for describing their denotation; on the other hand, it has been argued that the ``last resort'' strategy of type shifting prevents derivation of undesired meanings. The first goal of this paper is to define a simple notion of type mismatch, which will rather closely follow Partee and Rooth's original proposal but will be expressed within more familiar terms of categorial semantics. After introducing this implementation of traditional type mismatch, it will be argued that in fact, it covers only one possible kind of trigger for type shifting principles. Partee and Rooth's notion of mismatch is ``external'' in that the type of an expression is changed only when it combines with another type to which it cannot compose using the ``normal'' compositional mechanism. It will be argued that, within an appropriate type system, another notion of mismatch is also useful. This is the kind of mismatch in which the semantic type of an expression does not match its syntactic category. Two such cases will be explored: mismatch between morpho-syntactic number (singular or plural) and semantic number (a denotation ranging over atoms or sets), and mismatch between syntactic category (noun, DP, adjective etc.) and semantic role (predicate, quantifier, predicate modifier etc.).. (shrink)

Vaesen and van Amerongen (Philosophical Psychology 21:779-797, 2008) criticize Dennett’s design stance, arguing that as a cognitive thesis about artifact categorization, it is falsified by empirical findings. I assess their criticism in light of both further results and alternate findings the authors acknowledge (but did not discuss in detail). I argue that the design stance still stands in virtue of the conflicting character of these findings, and suggest shifting the domain of empirical scrutiny.

Psychopathy fascinates. Modernist writers construct out of it an image of alienated individualism pursuing the moment, killing they know not why, exploiting in passing, troubled, if troubled at all, not by guilt, but by perplexity (Camus 1989; Gide 1995; Mailer 1957; Musil 1996). Psychiatrists and psychologists—even those who should know better—are drawn by it to take off into philosophical speculation about morality, evil, and the beast in man (Mullen 1992; Simon 1996). Philosophers succumb to the temptation of attempting to ground (...) speculation in the supposed facticity of psychopathy. -/- Psychopathy is a cultural construct with roots going back to the eighteenth century, but which only came to full flower over the last fifty years (Hare 1998; Lewis 1974). The currently fashionable constructions of psychopathy find wide acceptance among clinicians and academics. The problem is, however, whether the concept has connections that have been established to the behavior, psychopathology, or the structure and function of brain worthy of according even a modest level of scientific status. There is little point in basing an argument on some supposed scientific gold standard if what glitters is iron pyrites (fools' gold). -/- Neil Levy's opening paragraph contains the statement "Yet in other respects they seem quite irrational; so much so that the term moral insanity has sometimes been applied to them" (p. 129). This both asserts that there is a category "them," namely the psychopaths, and connects them to "moral insanity." Moral insanity entered the language of psychiatry when Pritchard chose to use the term to translate Pinel's category of mania sans deliré (Pritchard 1836). Pinel was attempting to conceptualize a range of disorders that bordered on insanity in the sense of severe disturbances of affect, judgment, and behavior, but that were not accompanied by hallucinations or delusions (Pinel 1798/1964). In today's terminology, the cases he described would probably fall into diagnostic groups, including major depression, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, and a range of personality disorders. A number of his more striking case histories involved antisocial and even murderous behavior, which probably reflected Pinel's role in assessing offenders for the criminal courts of Paris. Pritchard's use of the English word "moral" reflected an appeal first to its use at the time to designate something which was like or similar, but not identical (a usage the OED labels "vulgar"), and second moral in the sense of ethical, conforming to virtuous behavior. Anglophones seized on the latter meaning, although Pinel emphasized the former. Forty years later, Henry Maudsley, the most widely read psychiatrist of his generation, could assert that moral insanity was as real as Colour blindness, some people being Colour blind and some moral blind (Maudsley 1879). Moral insanity became connected variously to phrenology with its own bump over the underlying moral cortex, with the twisted genetics of degeneration, with atavistic theories of criminality, and with a range of disorders of brain from epilepsy to frontal lobe damage (Combed 1853; Ellis 1890; Pick 1989). Although it is anachronistic to use the terms "psychopathy" and "moral insanity" together, it is clear they occupied a similar social and psychiatric space, albeit in different era. This should caution against too ready acceptance of psychopathy which may turn out to be as empty and dangerous a conceptualization as moral insanity. Why dangerous? Dangerous to those labeled, because the morally insane and the moral imbeciles were placed in preventive detention in asylums and prisons, and even sterilized in some jurisdictions. Dangerous to society, because it gave a spurious scientific justification for viewing crime not as reflecting the social evils of deprivation, ignorance, and inequality but as the ravages of the born criminals. -/- Psychopaths are not, as Levy asserts, "(causally) responsible for … more than fifty percent of violent crime" (p. 129). A proportion of violent offenders, which varies widely between observers, are labeled psychopaths. This is often on the basis of Hare's psychopathy checklist, which is a subjective, albeit through training aspiring to be reproducible, and to some extent self-sustaining, evaluation system (Hare 1980, 2003). Part of the checklist gathers data on prior antisocial behavior; part constrains the examiner to subjectively estimate such matters as glibness and callousness, part requires judgments about whether the... (shrink)

Marc Ereshefsky’s project of eliminative pluralism holds that, as there is no unifying feature among all species concepts, we ought to doubt the existence of the species category. Here, I argue that one promising strategy for saving the species category is to reframe it as a natural kind after the practice turn. I suggest situating the species category within a recent account of natural kinds proposed by Marc Ereshefsky and Thomas Reydon called “scientific kinds”. Scientific kinds highlight (...) ontological boundaries. More importantly, they recognize boundaries drawn from the lab and the field, not only from the armchair. The point of this exercise is to situate the species category within an account of natural kinds that is sensitive to scientific practice. In order to argue for a realist interpretation of the species category, and not merely a pragmatic one, I rely on an approach to scientific metaphysics from Ken Waters that shifts the attention from “theory focused” to “practice-centered” analysis. (shrink)

This article examines Nancy Fraser's attempt to repair the apparent schism between economic and cultural struggles for justice. Fraser has argued that the only analysis equipped to theorize the relationship between economic and cultural injustices is a `perspectival dualist' one, which treats the two forms of injustice as analytically separate and irreducible, at the same time as providing tools for theorizing potential harmonies between the claims of groups agitating for economic and cultural justice. Fraser's contribution has been hugely influential, but (...) this article investigates how a series of significant shifts in her position have cast doubt on the coherence and utility of her approach. Specifically, it examines recent revisions to the social theory underpinning Fraser's account, and shows how a number of (necessary) concessions to `anti-dualist' positions call into question the diagnosis of the schism that her framework seeks to resolve, and undercut her arguments for a `perspectival dualist' approach to social theory. In light of concerns over Fraser's social theory, this article also questions whether the political ideals of recognition and redistribution retain their critical or analytical value. Key Words: anti-dualism • culture • economy • Nancy Fraser • justice • perspectival dualism • ontological dualism • recognition • redistribution. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that categories play significant roles in the appreciation of artworks. This paper argues that the correct categories of artworks are institutionally established through social processes. Section 1 examines the candidates for determining correct categories and proposes that this question should shift the focus from category membership to appreciative behaviour associated with categories. Section 2 draws on Francesco Guala’s theory of institutions to show that categories of artworks are established as rules-in-equilibrium. Section 3 reviews the (...) explanatory benefits of this institutional theory of the correct category. [Winner of the 2022 Debates in Aesthetics Essay Prize]. (shrink)

Feminist explorations of the sublime and the beautiful have developed in markedly different directions. This is not surprising given the different histories of the two terms. Whereas the nature of the beautiful had been of key importance to Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, it was only during the Englightenment period that a strong contrast was established between the beautiful and the sublime. But this was also the time when there was a decisive shift away from (...) regarding the well-honed male body as best exemplifying the ideal of the beautiful, and beauty itself was domesticated and downgraded. As Mary Wollstonecraft registered in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft 1996 [1792])--one of the earliest European feminist texts--to associate women with the duties of being beautiful in this newly demoted mode was, in effect, to give them the status of subordinate beings. Instead, Wollstonecraft aspired to the newly emergent category of the sublime, which was all too frequently being denied to ideally "feminine" women. (shrink)

Arguably one of the most fundamental phase shifts that occurred in the intellectual history of Western culture involved the ontological reduction of secondary qualities to primary qualities. To say the least, this reduction worked to undermine the foundations undergirding Aristotelian thought in support of a scientific view of the world based strictly on an examination of the real—primary— qualities of things. In this essay, I identify the so-called “Causal Argument” for a reductive view of secondary qualities and seek to deflect (...) this challenge by deriving some plausible consequences that support a non-reductive view of secondary qualities from an Aristotelian view (via the philosophical commentary of Thomas Aquinas). Specifically, my argument has two facets. First, I show that Aristotle’s view both implies recognition of the extramental existence of secondary qualities and is a prima facia natural view to take regarding the ontology of secondary qualities. Second, I show that the Causal Argument, which is thought to undermine a natural view of secondary qualities as real things, loses its bite when one examines perception in light the ontological relationship among the categories of quality, quantity and substance. (shrink)

Processes constitute the world of human experience - from nature to cognition to social reality. Yet our philosophical and scientific theories of nature and experience have traditionally prioritized concepts for static objects and structures. The essays collected here call for a review of the role of dynamic categories in the language of theories. They present old and new descriptive tools for the modelling of dynamic domains, and argue for the merits of process-based explanations in ontology, cognitive science, semiotics, linguistics, philosophy (...) of mind, robotics, theoretical biology, music theory, and philosophy of chemistry and physics. The collection is of interest to professional researchers in any of these fields; it establishes - for the very first time - crossdisciplinary contact among recent process-based research movements and might witness a conceptual paradigm shift in the making. (shrink)

The present studies investigated children’s and adults’ intuitive beliefs about the physical nature of essences. Adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 10 years old) were asked to reason about two different ways of determining an unknown object’s category: taking a tiny internal sample from any part of the object (distributed view of essence), or taking a sample from one specific region (localized view of essence). Results from three studies indicated that adults strongly endorsed the distributed view, (...) and children showed a developmental shift from a localized to distributed view with increasing age. These results suggest that even children go beyond mere placeholder notions of essence, committing to conceptual frameworks of how essences might be physically instantiated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 13.1 (2005) 37-75 [Access article in PDF] The Nature of Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts in Music Education Elvira Panaiotidi North Ossetian State Pedagogical Institute, Russia The advent of the praxial philosophy of music education in the mid-1990s and its systematic development in David Elliott's Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education1 created an unprecedented situation in music education in North America. Having brought (...) to an end the monopoly of one theoretical approach, that of music education as aesthetic education (MEAE), it challenged the music education community with a choice. While Elliott tried to convince music educators of the falsity of MEAE and of the advantages of his own conception, Bennett Reimer and his proponents defended their position. The polemic between "aestheticians" and "praxialists," represented by the exchange between Reimer and Elliott in the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 2 brought to light a methodological deficiency in music education theory, namely, its inability to provide tenacious theoretical footing which could help settle the dispute. How do changes in the theory and practice [End Page 37] of music education occur? What are the rational standards by which to judge theories? What is the nature and logic of a dynamic development in music education theory and practice? These and similar questions have remained largely unapproached by music educators.The present paper is an attempt to initiate a discussion on these issues by exposing one possible metatheoretical strategy. As the title suggests, the strategy I am going to employ is based on the concept of paradigm. This Greek term which was once used to describe Platonic ideas, nowadays broadly circulates in descriptions of transformative processes in nearly every domain of life: we hear about paradigm shifts in musicology, the job market and tax policy, genetics, and so on. It is usually used as a kind of unproblematic category with a precisely defined and commonly accepted meaning, so that no indication of the origin of its usage in a given context is provided. In most cases, however, it turns out that "paradigm shift" is equivalent to and stands for "change" of whatever type, scope, or depth and is preferred because it is a mode or perhaps because it sounds more pretentious. In contrast to this tendency, both "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" are taken here most seriously and their usage is intimately related to the tradition in philosophy of science established by Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.3 This may appear dubious after we have been recently told that the impact of this book and the very concept of paradigm have "been largely, but not entirely, for the worse," namely, "to dull the critical sensibility of the academy" and "to kill the historicist impulse."4 "Kuhnification," it has been argued, is responsible for the suppression of free inquiry and bringing about "paradigmitis," a syndrome characterized by "a collective sense of historical amnesia and political inertia."5 Nonetheless, it is my contention that the paradigm approach per se is not dismissed by the criticism of Kuhn's conception and can be modified in such a way as to be made fruitful for structuring music education discourse and the explication of theory development in music education. To show how this is possible is the task before me.Underlying this project is the idea that theory development in music education can be adequately grasped and appraised in terms of more general units than specific theories which I shall call paradigms. That I am giving preference to this term and not choosing another from the group of providers of the conceptual framework that have been suggested throughout the history—"research tradition" (Laudan), "research programme"(Lakatos), "comprehensive cosmological point of view" (Feyerabend)—is that I find it more pertinent: it is neutral enough and allows for modifications which are necessary in view of the specific nature of music education discourse.In what follows, I will begin with an examination of Peter Abbs' account of paradigms and paradigm shifts in arts education. I... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the research program of formal ontology developed by M. Scheler before his last 1922 theoretical shift. Scheler’s theory of dialectical negation will be also investigated. In regard to the first topic, the focus will be on the complex architecture of Scheler’s formal ontology, deepened within a theoretical framework of realistic ontology: integrated into this framework, formal ontology becomes a basic tool for building phenomenological realisms. In regard to the second topic, the (...) focus will be on the close theoretical relationship between Scheler’s mature suggestion of a phenomenological objective dialectics essence-being underlying his theory of the “functionalization of the essential knowledge” (Funktionalizierung der Wesenserkenntnis) ─ systematically presented for the first time in the 1921 work Probleme der Religion ─, and the formal ontological foundation of a logical theory of a “pluralistic” dialectical negation, that is, dually, an intuitionistic, hence paracomplete, and a paraconsistent negation. Finally, it will be introduced the basics of a semiotic interpretation of Scheler’s phenomenological formal ontology within the rigorous framework of Category Theory (TC). This interpretation “strengthens” the traditional (inter)subjective side of phenomenological analysis with a new ─ in the application suggested ─ “in the third person” objective side of semiotic analysis, that shares with the first one a common pre-logical and ante-predicative level of inquiry. (shrink)

Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences—learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership—influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then made a large number of unsupervised categorization decisions about new items. In all three experiments, the unsupervised experience altered participants’ implicit and explicit mental category boundaries, their explicit beliefs about the most representative members of each category, (...) and even their memory for the items encountered during the supervised learning phase. These changes were influenced by both the range and frequency distribution of the unlabeled stimuli: mental category boundaries shifted toward the middle of the range and toward the trough of the bimodal distribution of unlabeled items, whereas beliefs about the most representative category members shifted toward the modes of the unlabeled distribution. One consequence of this shift in representations is a false-consensus effect (Experiment 3) where participants, despite receiving very disparate training experiences, show strong agreement in judgments about representativeness and boundary location following unsupervised category judgments. (shrink)

The study of social inequality and stratification has long been at the core of sociology and the social sciences. In this article, I argue that certain tendencies have become entrenched in our dominant paradigm that leave many researchers pursuing coarse-grained analyses of how difference relates to inequality. Centrally, despite the importance of categories and categorization for how researchers study social inequality, contemporary theories of categories are poorly integrated into conventional research. I contend that the widespread and often unquestioned use of (...) state categories as categories of analysis reinforces these tendencies. Using research on colorism as an inspiration, I highlight several components of what I call the infracategorical model of inequality, which urges researchers to disaggregate difference by shifting our focus from membership in categories to the cues of categories, membership in subcategories, and perceived typicality. (shrink)

Claudia Nadeau-Morissette | : En théorie littéraire comme dans tout domaine scientifique, certaines catégories font fortune au point de ne plus être remises en question par les chercheurs. Ce fut le cas de l’idéalisme et du réalisme dans l’interprétation de l’oeuvre romanesque de Premchand. De concepts théoriques, ces catégories sont devenues les échafauds sur lesquels s’est construit un schéma idéologique en trois phases de l’oeuvre et de la pensée de cet écrivain, le faisant passer du stade de l’idéalisme au réalisme. (...) Le présent article examine comment s’est opéré ce glissement chez les critiques de Premchand et les conséquences qu’il a eues dans l’analyse de la dimension religieuse de son oeuvre. | : In the theory of literature, like in any scientific domain, some categories become so popular that they are left unquestioned by the scholars. This is the case of idealism and realism when it comes to the interpretation of the fiction works of Premchand. These categories, from theoretical concepts, become the base on which an ideological schema of this writer’s work and thought is constructed in three steps, evolving from the stage of the idealism to that of the realism. The present article looks at how this shift finds its way with the critics of Premchand and the consequences they have on the analysis of the religious dimension of his work. (shrink)

This paper analyzes and compares the doctrines of categories of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, each of which is first discussed separately. The paper explains the essential double perspective of the problem, showing how a logico-linguistic analysis of the form of rational discourse serves for them as an important clue to ontological problems. Although Aristotle and Kant’s doctrines differ significantly, they both endorse a kind of isomorphism between language/thought and reality. By contrast, Hegel, who takes a critical attitude toward the capability (...) of human language and discursive thinking, rejects the possibility of deriving the structure of reality from the forms of predication or judgment. Nevertheless, the forms of judgment do play an equally crucial role in Hegel’s doctrine, though in a very different way from his predecessors. It is the structural “deficiency” of the judgmental form that turns out to be the driving force for the dialectical movement of the Concept. By shifting the primary concern from the categories themselves to the transitions between them, Hegel opens up the possibility of a dynamic system of categories. (shrink)

In this article we apply one of the key concepts in cognitive linguistics, the radial category, to inflectional morphology. We advance the Paradigm Structure Hypothesis, arguing that inflectional paradigms are radial categories with internal structure primarily motivated by semantic relationships of markedness and prototypicality. It is possible to construct an expected structure for a verbal paradigm, facilitating an empirical test for our hypothesis. Data tracking an on-going morphological change in Russian documents the distribution of conservative vs. innovative forms across (...) the cells of the verbal paradigm. A logistic regression model that takes into account the sources of variation (the frequencies of individual verbs and paradigm slots, and individual verb preferences) shows that the language change is implemented differently across the paradigm forms, confirming the expected structure. In addition to markedness and prototypicality, we investigate the impact of frequency and show that there is a good, albeit not perfect match between the expected hierarchy and frequency. We conclude that the diachronic change analyzed in this article gives evidence for the structure of paradigms modeled on the radial category. (shrink)

This paper investigates relationships between procedural-memory, declarative-memory, and working-memory skills and adult native English speakers’ novel sound-category learning. Participants completed a sound-categorization task that required integrating two dimensions: one native (vowel quality), one non-native (pitch). Similar information-integration category structures in the visual and auditory domains have been shown to be best learned implicitly (e.g., Maddox, Ing, & Lauritzen, 2006). Thus, we predicted that individuals with greater procedural-memory capacity would better learn sound categories, because procedural memory appears to support (...) implicit learning of new information and integration of dimensions. Seventy undergraduates were tested across two experiments. Procedural memory was assessed using a linguistic adaptation of the serial-reaction-time task (Misyak, Christiansen, & Tomblin, 2010a, 2010b). Declarative memory was assessed using the logical-memory subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale-4th edition (WMS-IV; Wechsler, 2009). Working memory was assessed using an auditory version of the reading-span task (Kane et al., 2004). Experiment 1 revealed contributions of only declarative memory to dimensional integration, which might indicate not enough time or motivation to shift over to a procedural/integrative strategy. Experiment 2 gave twice the speech-sound training, distributed over two days, and also attempted to train at the category boundary. As predicted, effects of declarative memory were removed and effects of procedural memory emerged, but, unexpectedly, new effects of working memory surfaced. The results may be compatible with a multiple-systems account in which declarative and working memory facilitate transfer of control to the procedural system. (shrink)

La Seconde Guerre mondiale marque un tournant majeur dans le contrôle de la prostitution à la Martinique. La présence imposée de milliers de marins de métropole, immobilisés suite au blocus qui paralyse l’île, entraîne l’établissement de nouvelles mesures néo-réglementaristes à Fort-de-France. Ces mesures visent à fournir un moyen de gérer les relations interraciales dans la ville portuaire, dans un contexte colonial singulier où la citoyenneté française avait été octroyée à tous les habitants de l’île suite à l’abolition de l’esclavage. Adaptées (...) aux pratiques locales, ces mesures sont lourdes de conséquences pour de nombreuses femmes, et ce indépendamment de leur activité sexuelle révélant ainsi le caractère poreux de la catégorie « prostituée » en temps de guerre. Les femmes ciblées par ces initiatives parviennent toutefois à contourner ces contraintes, dévoilant ainsi les limites du système établi. (shrink)

This article applies Jack Goody’s critique of Western classifications of historical and ethnographical phenomena to the current discourses of orientalism themselves in an endeavor to understand the sociological basis of what might be called the shift from orientalism to occidentalism. The argument compares the current emergence of anti-civilizational and self-critical discourses to historical examples of similar phenomena and argues that the current shift itself, so well represented in works that may seem similar to Goody’s but which are very (...) more narrowly ideological and lacking in a more general critical stance, are reflexes of the declining hegemony of powerful imperial centers within global systems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 13.1 (2005) 37-75 [Access article in PDF] The Nature of Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts in Music Education Elvira Panaiotidi North Ossetian State Pedagogical Institute, Russia The advent of the praxial philosophy of music education in the mid-1990s and its systematic development in David Elliott's Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education1 created an unprecedented situation in music education in North America. Having brought (...) to an end the monopoly of one theoretical approach, that of music education as aesthetic education (MEAE), it challenged the music education community with a choice. While Elliott tried to convince music educators of the falsity of MEAE and of the advantages of his own conception, Bennett Reimer and his proponents defended their position. The polemic between "aestheticians" and "praxialists," represented by the exchange between Reimer and Elliott in the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 2 brought to light a methodological deficiency in music education theory, namely, its inability to provide tenacious theoretical footing which could help settle the dispute. How do changes in the theory and practice [End Page 37] of music education occur? What are the rational standards by which to judge theories? What is the nature and logic of a dynamic development in music education theory and practice? These and similar questions have remained largely unapproached by music educators.The present paper is an attempt to initiate a discussion on these issues by exposing one possible metatheoretical strategy. As the title suggests, the strategy I am going to employ is based on the concept of paradigm. This Greek term which was once used to describe Platonic ideas, nowadays broadly circulates in descriptions of transformative processes in nearly every domain of life: we hear about paradigm shifts in musicology, the job market and tax policy, genetics, and so on. It is usually used as a kind of unproblematic category with a precisely defined and commonly accepted meaning, so that no indication of the origin of its usage in a given context is provided. In most cases, however, it turns out that "paradigm shift" is equivalent to and stands for "change" of whatever type, scope, or depth and is preferred because it is a mode or perhaps because it sounds more pretentious. In contrast to this tendency, both "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" are taken here most seriously and their usage is intimately related to the tradition in philosophy of science established by Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.3 This may appear dubious after we have been recently told that the impact of this book and the very concept of paradigm have "been largely, but not entirely, for the worse," namely, "to dull the critical sensibility of the academy" and "to kill the historicist impulse."4 "Kuhnification," it has been argued, is responsible for the suppression of free inquiry and bringing about "paradigmitis," a syndrome characterized by "a collective sense of historical amnesia and political inertia."5 Nonetheless, it is my contention that the paradigm approach per se is not dismissed by the criticism of Kuhn's conception and can be modified in such a way as to be made fruitful for structuring music education discourse and the explication of theory development in music education. To show how this is possible is the task before me.Underlying this project is the idea that theory development in music education can be adequately grasped and appraised in terms of more general units than specific theories which I shall call paradigms. That I am giving preference to this term and not choosing another from the group of providers of the conceptual framework that have been suggested throughout the history—"research tradition" (Laudan), "research programme"(Lakatos), "comprehensive cosmological point of view" (Feyerabend)—is that I find it more pertinent: it is neutral enough and allows for modifications which are necessary in view of the specific nature of music education discourse.In what follows, I will begin with an examination of Peter Abbs' account of paradigms and paradigm shifts in arts education. I... (shrink)

The deployment of the Albanian admirative as well as the evidential particles kinse ‘allegedly’ and gjoja ‘supposedly’ in Kosovar electronic news sources to render either dubitative or neutral reports — depending on both the source and the timing — contributed to the project of an independent Kosovo. The usages can be divided into three periods: 1994–1997, 1998–1999, and post-1999. During the first period, usage was exclusively dubitative and deployed for Serbian news sources. During the second period, which corresponded to the (...) intensification of the armed uprising, usage shifted to neutrality, and during the third period, after the NATO bombing campaign, it returned somewhat to dubitativity, this time aimed at UN and NATO sources. The discussion demonstrates how pragmatics and grammatical categories contribute to the construction of political narratives and argues that a socially informed linguistic analysis is crucial to understanding how politics is performed in the world. (shrink)

This article investigates how late nineteenth century Japanese philosophers responded to large categories of ideas imported from the West and for which there were no Japanese equivalents; mainly "science," "religion," and "philosophy." Discussions on whether Buddhism or Confucianism would fall under "philosophy" or "religion" accompanied a re-categorization of ideas. Some philosophers made elaborate reconstructions of Buddhism and Confucianism as modern philosophies. However, over time, Japanese categorizations of Buddhism and Confucianism shifted from "philosophy" (tetsugaku) to "thought" (shisō). Investigating Meiji philosophy from (...) the perspective of this problem of categories makes it is possible to reevaluate it on its own terms. (shrink)

Abstract -/- Quantifier domain restriction (QDR) and two versions of nominal restriction (NR) are implemented as restrictions that depend on a previously introduced interpreter and interpretation time in a two-dimensional semantic framework on the basis of simple type theory and categorial grammar. Against Stanley (2002) it is argued that a suitable version of QDR can deal with superlatives like tallest. However, it is shown that NR is needed to account for utterances when the speaker intends to convey different restrictions for (...) multiple uses of the same quantifying determiner. We argue that NR generally fares better with such examples but also observe that examples like Every sailor waves at every sailor might be pragmatically anomalous. An account of contextual domain restriction is proposed that (i) excludes these anomalous readings (but it is shown how they could be included), (ii) makes it possible to express different contextual domain restrictions as long-range dependencies on an interpreter and an interpretation time, and (iii) additionally models restrictions based on locative constructions as general mereological constraints introduced by shifting the index. (shrink)

The Case for a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism. In this article Domenico Losurdo sketches a history of the category of totalitarianism, rehearsing the various shifts it has been subject to since the October revolution. While the roots of the notion are to be located both in the violence inflected by the colonial enterprise upon indigenous populations and the violence exercised at the very heart of the capitalist metropolis, upon the poor and the outcast, such violence did (...) take on a number of unprecedented characteristics in the twentieth century phenomenon of total war. The imperatives of the cold war were subsequently to lead western liberals to the formulation of a strange indictment of the revolutionary. (shrink)

Following the recent recognition that humans are an active force in nature that gave rise to a new geological epoch, this article explores the implications of the shift to the Anthropocene for social theory. The argument assumes that the emerging conditions compel an expansion and deepening of the timescale of the social-theoretical perspective and that such an enhancement has serious repercussions for the concept of human agency. First, the Anthropocene is conceptualized as a nascent cognitively structured cultural model rather (...) than simply a geological epoch. Second, the vast and deep timescale, in the light of which the new time unit and its generative agency alone make sense, is analysed along with the human world's objective, sociocultural and subjective axes. Finally, the elements of the concept of agency are recomposed in their temporal and relational contexts. At the reflexive level throughout, the need for social theory to develop a cognitive-theoretical approach in conjunction with a weak naturalistic ontology is suggested. (shrink)

A careful, theoretical clarification of gender roles has only recently begun in social and political philosophy. It is the aim of the following piece to reveal that an analysis of women’s traditional position - her distinctive activities, labor and surrounding sense of ‘mine’ - can not only make valuable contributions towards clarifying traditional property disputes, but may even provide elements for a new conception of ownership. By way of illustration, the article focusses on the influential work of John Rawls and (...) argues that - when Rawls’s own analysis and principles of justice are supplemented by an account of what is here called ‘reproductive labor’ - his theory in fact tends to a form of democratic socialism. Stated somewhat differently, my aim is to shift the terms of the property debate as posed by Rawls fromwithinhis own position. I hope to show that the real ownership question which now emerges is no longerwhether‘justice as fairness’ countenances a private property or socialist form of democracy, but what preciseformsuch a socialism should take. (shrink)

that wilfrid sellars was a more subtle and sophisticated philosopher than his father, Roy Wood Sellars, is, I believe, a rather uncontroversial assessment, one which, with fatherly pride, Roy1 would most probably have endorsed. Even considering the radical shift in philosophical methods and attitude which took place in the United States in the decades of Wilfrid's philosophically formative years, Wilfrid's unrelenting philosophical acumen and imagination, his unflinching resolve to doggedly pursue a problem on a variety of fronts at once (...) (arguably the cause of his... (shrink)

Rosamond Rhodes calls for a reconceptualization of research ethics and a fundamental shift in attitude toward both research subjects and scientific investigators. She recognizes the limits of the e...

This article examines task-setting sequences in university tutorial sessions. Classes from three higher education institutions were audio- and video-recorded. The resulting data, which included both tutor-led and peer group discussions, were transcribed and analysed using conversation analysis. A number of themes emerged from our analysis. First, we found that the tutor's opening turns routinely followed a three-part sequence, the interpersonal and metadiscursive functions of which, we argue, are crucial components in the educative process. Second, we found that students displayed discursively (...) their reluctance to engage in discussion activities and a resistance towards academic or intellectual identities. In contrast to findings from previous studies of tutor—student interaction, we found that interactional power was negotiated in complex and contradictory ways. This, in turn, may embody a range of complex social functions including attention to the `face' concerns of the group, category membership and orientation to broader cultural trends. (shrink)