The target paper shows how cultural adaptations to ecological problems can underpin “paradoxical” patterns of phenotypic variation. We argue: (1) Gendered social learning is a cultural adaptation to an ecological problem. (2) In evolutionarily novel environments, this adaptation generates arbitrary-gendered outcomes, leading to the paradoxical case of larger sex differences in more gender equal societies.

Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie thoroughly evaluate the evidence for menstrual cycle shifts in ratings of several male characteristics and conclude that their analyses fail to provide supportive evidence for consistent cycle effects. The topic of menstrual cycle shifts in mate preferences has been strongly debated, with disagreements over both scientific content and practice. Here, we attempt to take a step back from these acrimonious exchanges and focus instead on how to interpret menstrual cycle shifts in mate preference tasks, independently (...) from the question of when, or if, task performance varies with cycle stage. A greater consideration of domain-general mechanisms could provide an opportunity for investigating how evolved predispositions interact with socially transmitted information in biasing women’s responses on mate preference tasks. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:464 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Claire Raymond and Sarah Corse A Distorting Mirror: Educational Trajectory After College Sexual Assault This article focuses on the broad and specific impacts of college sexual assault on student-survivors’ academic performance, academic trajectory, and their sense of self in relation to the university community. We frame this study with, and relate our findings to, the historic and (...) theoretical literatures that provide the context for this essay, including the large and burgeoning literature on the sexual assault of women college students and recent studies analyzing the role of fraternities in sexual assault, students’ fears and perceptions about college assault, bystander intervention training, and survivors’ grade-point averages after assault.1 Our study also builds on the history of feminist resistance to rape, feminist writings about rape, and campus activism against rape, with the 1. Cortney Franklin, Leana Allen Bouffard, and Travis C. Pratt, “Sexual Assault on the College Campus: Fraternity Affiliation, Male Peer Support, and Low Self-Control,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 39, no. 11 (2012): 1457– 80; Christine A. Gidycz, John R. McNamara, and Katie M. Edwards, “Women ’s Risk Perception and Sexual Victimization: A Review of the Literature,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 11, no. 5 (2006): 441–56; Jennifer Katz and Jessica Moore, “Bystander Education Training for Campus Sexual Assault Prevention: An Initial Meta-Analysis,” Violence and Victims 28, no. 6 (2013): 1054–67; Douglas W. Pryor and Marion R. Hughes, “Fear of Rape among College Women: A Social Psychological Analysis,” Violence and Victims 28, no. 3 (2013): 443–65; Carol E. Jordan, Jessica L. Combs, and Gregory T. Smith, “An Exploration of Sexual Victimization and Academic Performance among College Women,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 15, no. 3 (2014): 191–200. Claire Raymond and Sarah Corse 465 goal of shedding light on one aspect of the problem. Groundbreaking (and in some cases controversial) works analyzing the cultures of rape, such as Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will and Peggy Sanday’s “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape” (in which Sanday creates the concept of the rape-producing culture—a concept that is central to our argument in this essay), found immediate reception with feminist activists of the 1970s and early 1980s.2 Mary Koss’s work regarding the scope of rape in college settings is also foundational to our study of campus rape.3 Susan Estrich, Catharine MacKinnon, and other feminist theorists in the mid-1980s developed critical apparatuses to shift the understanding of rape, providing a feminist framework wherein rape is interpreted as violence committed against a woman—in opposition to the patriarchal argument that rape is caused by a woman’s actions or is the product of her distortion of events after the fact.4 Angela Davis and bell hooks were deeply influential in framing understandings of the racial and racist aspects of feminist discussions of rape, while legal scholar Sarah Deer has more recently broadened understandings of the racialized discourse of rape, and Lisa Wade has written on twenty-first century hookup culture and the ways that this social landscape promulgates rates of maleon -female rape that are significantly higher on college campuses than in the general population.5 2. Peggy Reeves Sanday, “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 4 (1981): 5–27; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). 3. Mary P. Koss, Christine A. Gidycz, and Nadine Wisniewski, “The Scope of Rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 55, no. 2 (1987): 162–70. 4. Susan Estrich, Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimizes Women Who Say No (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Duncan Chappell, Robley Geis, and Gilbert Geis, eds., Forcible Rape: The Crime, the Victim and the Offender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). 5. Angela Davis, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist,” in her Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 172–201; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End... (shrink)

This book considers different forms of voluntarism developed from the 13th to 18th centuries. By crossing the conventional dividing line between the medieval and early modern periods, the volume draws important new insights on the historical development of voluntarism. Voluntarism places a special emphasis on the will when it comes to the analysis and explanation of fundamental philosophical questions and problems. Since the Middle Ages, voluntarist considerations and views played an important role in the development of different theories of action, (...) ethics, metaethics, and metaphysics. The chapters in this volume are grouped according to three distinct kinds of voluntarism: psychological, ethical, and theological voluntarism. They address topics such as the threat of irrationality as the standard objection to voluntarism, incontinent actions and their explanation, the nature of the will as rational appetite, the relationship between intellect and will, the implications of conceptions of the will for political freedom, and the relations between divine freedom and the modal status of eternal truths. The chapters not only consider towering figures of the Middle Ages--Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Gent, William of Ockham, Francisco de Vitoria--and early modern period--René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Samuel Pufendorf--but also engage with less well-known figures such as Peter John Olivi, John of Pouilly, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Christian August Crusius. Varieties of Voluntarism in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in medieval philosophy, early modern philosophy, the history of ethics, and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Aisha's Coming Out The Legal Controversy Understanding the Context Violence Physical Violence Phenomenological Violence Epistemic Violence Aisha's Crossing Over Notes.

An important thinker who contributed to eighteenth-century debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, Catharine Trotter Cockburn pursued the life of a dramatist and essayist, despite the prevailing social, cultural, and moral prescriptions of her day. Cockburn’s philosophical writings were polemical pieces in defence of such philosophers as John Locke and Samuel Clarke, in which she grappled with the moral and theological questions that concerned them and produced her own unique answers to those questions. Her works are interesting both for (...) their approach to philosophical issues that continue to be debated today and for the way that they inform our understanding of the early-modern period. (shrink)

I propose a number of criteria for the adequacy of an account of pictorial realism. Such an account must: explain the epistemic significance of realistic pictures; explain why accuracy and detail are salient to realism; be consistent with an accurate account of depiction; and explain the features of pictorial realism. I identify six features of pictorial realism. I then propose an account of realism as a measure of the information pictures provide about how their objects would look, were one to (...) see them. This account meets the criteria I have identified and is superior to alternative accounts of realism. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is what, in Art and Illusion, Gombrich calls "the riddle of style". This is the problem of why people at different times and in different cultures have depicted objects in very different ways. An adequate solution to this problem will comprise an explanation of why depiction has a history. The problem seems intractable because of three common assumptions about the history of depiction that, while independently plausible, are inconsistent. First, we assume that this history is (...) a history of realism. Artists from a wide range of cultures and ages seem to have shared the common goal of capturing the visual appearances of the objects they depicted. Secondly, we assume that depictive styles differ from context to context in part because of features internal to the contexts in which they emerged. Finally, we are loathe to accept the claim that differences of style necessarily result from differences in technical capacity. However, these assumptions are in conflict. If artists throughout history sought to capture the appearances of the things they depicted and did not differ markedly in their technical capacities, then surely the pictures each produced should not depend on features internal to the contexts in which they emerged and should instead look more alike. -/- I argue that the history of style is not, in its entirety, a history of realism. Throughout history, pictures have been used to inform viewers about a wide variety of things other than their objects' appearances. Investigating the purposes for which pictures were used in particular historical and cultural contexts will help us to understand why certain styles were appropriate to those contexts. Nevertheless, it will not help us to understand why certain styles were appropriate to just one among a number of contexts in which pictures were used for a single purpose. To understand this, we need to know what cognitive environment was shared by the members of the relevant community. This will enable us to understand why, given the purpose for which pictures were used in that community, a certain style was more informative than another. In addition to cataloguing stylistic changes, therefore, the historian of art has two further tasks: to investigate both the various purposes for which pictures have been used and the cognitive environments of those who used them. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the influential view that depiction, like language, depends on arbitrary conventions. I argue that this view, however it is elaborated, is false. Any adequate account of depiction must be consistent with the distinctive features of depiction. One such feature is depictive generativity. I argue that, to be consistent with depictive generativity, conventionalism must hold that depiction depends on conventions for the depiction of basic properties of a picture’s object. I then argue that two considerations jointly (...) preclude depiction from being governed by such conventions. Firstly, conventions must be salient to those who employ them. Secondly, those parts of pictures that depict basic properties of objects are not salient to the makers and interpreters of pictures. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to provide a unified solution to a wide range of philosophical problems raised by fiction. While some of these problems have been the focus of extensive philosophical debate, others have received insufficient attention. In particular, the epistemology of fiction has not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny it warrants. There has been considerable discussion of what determines the contents of works of fiction, but there have been few attempts to explain how audiences identify their contents, (...) or to identify the norms governing the correct understanding and interpretation of works of fiction. -/- This book answers a wide range of both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning fiction in a way that clarifies the relations between them. The metaphysical questions include: What distinguishes works of fiction from works of non-fiction?; What is the nature of fictive utterances?; What determines the contents of works of fiction?; What kinds of fictive content are there?; How broad in scope is fictive content?; and What kinds of things are fictional entities? The epistemological questions include: How do audiences identify the contents of authors’ fictive utterances?; How does understanding a work of fiction differ from interpreting it?; and What role does thinking and talking about fiction from an external perspective play in enabling communication through fiction? It develops the first single theory that provides answers to all these questions. (shrink)

In June 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the Criminal Code's prohibition on assisted death. Just over a year later, the federal government crafted legislation to entrench medical assistance in dying (MAiD), the term used in Canada in place of physician‐assisted death. Notably, Canada became the first country to allow nurse practitioners to act as assessors and providers, a result of a strong lobby by the Canadian Nurses Association. However, a legislated approach to assisted death has proven challenging (...) in a number of areas. Although it facilitates a degree of accountability, precision and accessibility, it has also resulted in particular challenges negotiating the diverse perspectives of such a morally contentious act. One of these challenges is the tendency to conflate what is legal and what is moral in a modern liberal constitutionalism that places supreme value on autonomy and choice. Such a conflation tends to render invisible the legal and moral/ethical considerations necessary for nurses and nurse practitioners to remain ethical actors. In this paper, we introduce this conflation and then discuss the process of lawmaking in Canada, including the legalization of MAiD and the contributions of nursing to that legalization. We then engage in a hypothetical dialogue about the legal and moral/ethical implications of MAiD for nursing in Canada. We conclude with an appeal for morally sustainable workspaces that, when implementing MAiD, appropriately balance patient choices and nurses’ moral well‐being. (shrink)

Like every great word, “representation/s “ is a stew. A scrambled menu, it serves up several meanings at once. For a representation can be an image—visual, verbal, or aural. Think of a picture of a hat. A representation can also be a narrative, a sequence of images and ideas. Think of the sentence, “Nancy Reagan wore a hat when she visited a detoxification clinic in Florida.” Or, a representation can be the product of ideology, that vast scheme for showing forth (...) the world and justifying its dealings. Think of the sentence, “Nancy Reagan, in her hat, is a proper woman.” In the past twenty years, feminist thinking about representation has broken apart. This fracture is both cause and symptom of the larger collapse of a feminist cultural consensus. Some of the rifts have been thematic. That is to be represented? Others have been theoretical. What is the nature of representation itself? I wish to map these rifts, especially those in the United States, and to wonder about the logic of a new cultural consensus.In the late 1960s, feminists began to share a cultural consensus about the representation of women and gender. Few who built up that consensus were village idiots. Even without being semioticians, everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the signifier and the signified in that odd couple, the sign, were ones of convenience. Everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the sign and the referent, that hubbub out there, or somewhere, were also ones of convenience. Some survived. Others were obsolete, cold, hostile, ending in separation or divorce. Everyone more or less knew that when I exclaimed, “Nancy Reagan wears a hat,” it was easier for a fellow citizen of my linguistic community to understand me than for a stranger to do so. Nevertheless, the consensus offered a rough, general theory of representation that extolled the possibility of a fit between “reality” and its “description” or “image.” Catharine R. Stimpson is professor of English and dean of the Graduate School at Rutgers University. She is presently at work on a book about Gertrude Stein. (shrink)

Through an historical investigation of the concept of the zero from Gauthiot to Deleuze, this paper examines a peculiar object, the signifying nothing. Saussure founds his science of linguistics on the claim that the opposition between something and nothing provides the minimal condition for the existence of language. What is this nothing and how can it be recognized? What can account for the zero—as structuralist linguists call a marked nothing—in language? The essay first considers linguists’ responses to these problems, before (...) turning to later redeployments of the zero as the index for the fundamental questions raised by the structuralist project as such. (shrink)

Depiction is the form of representation distinctive of figurative paintings, drawings, and photographs. Accounts of depiction attempt to specify the relation something must bear to an object in order to depict it. Resemblance accounts hold that the notion of resemblance is necessary to the specification of this relation. Several difficulties with such analyses have led many philosophers to reject the possibility of an adequate resemblance account of depiction. This essay outlines these difficulties and argues that current resemblance accounts succumb to (...) them. It then develops an alternative resemblance account, drawing on Grice's account of nonnatural meaning and its role in determining sentence meaning to argue that something depicts an object if it bears intention-based resemblances to the object that jointly capture its overall appearance. In addition to solving the metaphysical problem of what it is for something to depict an object, this account also sheds significant light on the epistemological issue of how we are able to work out that something depicts an object. This essay argues that our ability to work out that something depicts an object results from both our more general ability to identify intentions from the products of communicative behavior and our knowledge of stylistic conventions. This account avoids the difficulties that face rival attempts to analyze depiction in terms of resemblance. It also clarifies and explains the features that distinguish depictive from nondepictive representation. (shrink)

Critical realism, a philosophical framework originally developed by Roy Bhaskar in the 1970s, represents a relatively new approach to research generally and to nursing research in particular. This article explores the ontological and epistemological tenets of critical realism and examines the application of critical realist principles to nursing research and practice through a review of the literature. It is evident that few published nursing research studies have, as of yet, utilized critical realism as their paradigm of choice. Both the strengths (...) and limitations of the presentation and use of critical realism in these studies are discussed in this article. Given the varying degrees of success of the authors in explicating critical realism as a philosophical framework, the value of critical realism to the research study, and the ways in which usage of the critical realist framework influenced development of the study and interpretation of findings, it is evident that the quality of future publications espousing the use of critical realism must continue to be strengthened significantly. (shrink)

However, Stein's self-images are more than appropriations of a male identity and masculine interests. Several of them are irrelevant to categories of sex and gender. In part, Stein is an obsessive psychologist, a Euclid of behavior, searching for "bottom natures," the substratum of individuality. She also tries to diagram psychic genotypes, patterns into which all individuals might fit. Although she plays with femaleness/maleness as categories, she also investigates an opposition of impetuousness and passivity, fire and phlegm; a variety of regional (...) and national types; and the dualism of the "dependent independent," who tends to resist. In part, as she puzzles her way towards knowing and understanding, she presents herself as engaged in aural and oral acts, listening and hearing before speaking and telling. That sense of perception as physical also emerges in a passage in which she, as perceiver/describer, first incorporates and then linguistically discharges the world: "Mostly always when I am filled up with it I tell it, sometimes I have to tell it, sometimes I like to tell it, sometimes I keep on with telling it."1 · 1. The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress , p. 325. Catharine R. Stimpson, associate professor of English at Barnard College, is the editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the author of J.R.R. Tolkien as well as other essays and fiction. See also: "Visual Rhetoric in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Paul K. Alkon in Vol. 1, No. 4; "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship" by Carolyn Burke in Vol. 8, No. 3. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a descriptive definition of art that is able to accommodate the existence of bad art, while illuminating the value of good art. This, I argue, is something that existing definitions of art fail to do. I approach this task by providing an account according to which what makes something an artwork is the institutional process by which it is made. I argue that Searle’s account of institutions and institutional facts shows that the existence of all (...) institutions is due to their being perceived by their participants to perform some humanly valuable function. I then identify the functions to which the existence of art institutions is due. I then use these functions to provide a reductive institutional definition of art. Finally, in section seven, I examine the account’s consequences for the value of good art. (shrink)

Transcriptional repression and silencing have been strongly associated with hypoacetylation of histones. Accordingly, histone deacetylases, which remove acetyl groups from histones, have been shown to participate in mechanisms of transcriptional repression. Therefore, current models of the role of acetylation in transcriptional regulation focus on the acetylation status of histones and designate histone acetyltransferases, which add acetyl groups to histones, as transcriptional coactivators and histone deacetylases as corepressors. In recent years, an accumulation of studies have shown that these enzymes also target (...) non‐histone proteins and that histone deacetylases have clear roles as coactivators at a variety of genes, some of which are key regulators of cell growth and survival. This review summarizes the evidence for histone deacetylases as coactivators and provides models of coactivation mechanisms, some of which integrate roles of acetylated histones and non‐histone proteins in transcription. BioEssays 30:15–24, 2008. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The genre to which an artwork belongs affects how it is to be interpreted and evaluated. An account of genre and of the criteria for genre membership should explain these interpretative and evaluative effects. Contrary to conceptions of genres as categories distinguished by the features of the works that belong to them, I argue that these effects are to be explained by conceiving of genres as categories distinguished by certain of the purposes that the works belonging to them are intended (...) to serve. (shrink)

According to ontological nihilism there are, fundamentally, no individuals. Both natural languages and standard predicate logic, however, appear to be committed to a picture of the world as containing individual objects. This leads to what I call the \emph{expressibility challenge} for ontological nihilism: what language can the ontological nihilist use to express her account of how matters fundamentally stand? One promising suggestion is for the nihilist to use a form of \emph{predicate functorese}, a language developed by Quine. This proposal faces (...) a difficult objection, according to which any theory in predicate functorese will be a notational variant of the corresponding theory stated in standard predicate logic. Jason Turner (2011) has provided the most detailed and convincing version of this objection. In the present paper, I argue that Turner's case for the notational variance thesis relies on a faulty metasemantic principle and, consequently, that an objection long thought devastating is in fact misguided. (shrink)

There is a variety of epistemic roles to which photographs are better suited than non-photographic pictures. Photographs provide more compelling evidence of the existence of the scenes they depict than non-photographic pictures. They are also better sources of information about features of those scenes that are easily overlooked. This chapter examines several different attempts to explain the distinctive epistemic value of photographs, and argues that none is adequate. It then proposes an alternative explanation of their epistemic value. The chapter argues (...) that photographs play the epistemic roles they do because they are typically rich sources of depictively encoded information about the scenes they depict, and reliable depictive representations of those scenes. It then explains why photographs differ from non-photographic pictures in both respects. (shrink)

According to anti-individualism, the basic building blocks of the world are not individuals. The anti-individualist argues that standard, individual-entailing claims–for instance, that Theia is a cat–are mistaken in presupposing that there are individuals, but that such claims correspond to statements in a feature-placing language devoid of these presuppositions. Instead, the world is entirely made up of non-individualistic features–structurally akin to familiar examples such as it's raining or it's snowing–that are arranged in particular ways. Since features do not carve out individual (...) differences, however, this seems to entail that there is a class of statements in an individualistic language–statements expressing mere differences in which object is which–the members of which all correspond to the same anti-individualist description. That is, anti-individualism seems to entail anti-haecceitism, according to which all differences in ways the world could be supervene on qualitative differences. In this paper, I argue that, on the contrary, the anti-individualist has the resources to accommodate non-qualitative differences among ways the world could be. Moreover, haecceitistic anti-individualism does justice to the motivations for rejecting individuals while nevertheless accommodating intuitions that certain kinds of scenarios are metaphysically distinct. (shrink)

It is generally recognised that an adequate resemblance-based account of depiction must specify some standard of correctness which explains how a picture’s content differs from the content we would attribute to it purely on the basis of resemblance. For example, an adequate standard should explain why stick figure drawings do not depict emaciated beings with gargantuan heads. Most attempts to specify a standard of correctness appeal to the intentions of the picture’s maker. However, I argue that the most detailed such (...) attempt to date is incomplete. I argue that an adequate standard can be given only if one construes a picture’s content as being pictorially implicated, in a way analogous to that in which Grice explains an utterance’s meaning as being conversationally implicated. I propose a theory of pictorial implicature and use it as the basis for an intention-based standard of correctness. I show how this standard is able to explain both the ways in which the content of pictures differs from the content we would attribute to them solely on the basis of resemblance, and how we are able to apply an intention-based standard of correctness even though we lack any independent knowledge of the intentions of pictures’ makers. (shrink)

Virtue signaling—using public moral discourse to enhance one’s moral reputation—is a familiar concept. But, what about profile pictures framed by “Vaccines work!”? Or memes posted to anti-vaccine groups echoing the group’s view that “Only sheep believe Big Pharma!”? These actions don’t express moral views—both claims are empirical (if imprecise). Nevertheless, they serve a similar purpose: to influence the judgments of their audience. But, where rainbow profiles guide their audience to view the agent as morally good, these acts guide their audience (...) to view the agent as epistemically good. They are instances of epistemic virtue signaling. The first goal of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic virtue signaling. I argue that epistemic virtue signaling occurs through both behavioral and propositional signals, and serves purposes similar to those of moral virtue signaling across a wide variety of discourses. The second is to show that there is much work for this concept to do. In particular, this concept illuminates a double bind faced by those who suffer from and seek to overcome testimonial injustice. I close by demonstrating how this double bind arises in the dissolution of medical autonomy, focusing on the care gap faced by pregnant women of color in the United States today, as compared with their white counterparts. (shrink)

The "Kinsey Report" suggests the existence of such a mentality. Of 142 women with much homosexual experience, 70 percent reported no regrets. This consciousness has manifested itself in literature in two ways. First, in lesbian romanticism: fusions of life and death, happiness and woe, natural imagery and supernatural strivings, neoclassical paganism with a ritualistic cult of Sappho, and modern beliefs in evolutionary progress with a cult of the rebel. At its worst an inadvertent parody of fin de siecle decadence, at (...) its best lesbian romanticism ruthlessly rejects a stifling dominant culture and asserts the value of psychological autonomy, women, art, and a European civilization of the sensuous, sensual, and voluptuous. Woolf's Orlando is its most elegant and inventive text, but its symbol is probably the career of Natalie Barney, the cosmopolitan American who was the prototype of Valerie Seymour.23· 23. See Rubin, introduction to Vivien's A Woman Appeared to Me, and George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney .Catherine R. Stimpson, professor of English at Rutgers University, is the former editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. The author of both critical essays and fiction, she recently co-edited, with Ethel Spector Person, Women, Sex and Sexuality. (shrink)

How does being a woman affect one’s epistemic life? What about being Black? Or queer? Standpoint theorists argue that such social positions can give rise to otherwise unavailable epistemic privilege. “Epistemic privilege” is a murky concept, however. Critics of standpoint theory argue that the view is offered without a clear explanation of how standpoints confer their benefits, what those benefits are, or why social positions are particularly apt to produce them. For this reason, many regard standpoint theory as being out (...) of step with epistemology more broadly. But this need not be so. This article articulates a minimal version of standpoint epistemology that avoids these criticisms and supports the normative goals of its feminist forerunners. This account serves as the foundation for developing a formal model in which to explore standpoint epistemology using neighborhood semantics for modal logic. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a unified account of cinematic representation as primary depiction. On this account, cinematic representation is a distinctive form of depiction, unique in its capacity to depict temporal properties. I then explore the consequences of this account for the much-contested question of whether cinema is an independent representational art form. I show that it is, and that Scruton’s argument to the contrary relies on an erroneous conception of cinematic representation. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

An adequate account of the nature of genre and of the criteria for genre membership is essential to understanding the nature of the various categories into which comics can be classified. Because they fail adequately to distinguish genre categories from other ways of categorizing works, including categorizations according to medium or according to style, previous accounts of genre fail to illuminate the nature of comics categories. I argue that genres are sets of conventions that have developed as means of addressing (...) particular interpretative and/or evaluative concerns, and have a history of co‐instantiation within a community, such that a work’s belonging to some genre generates interpretative and evaluative expectations among the members of that community. Genres are distinct from styles in consisting of conventions, and are distinct from media both in consisting of conventions and in generating interpretative and evaluative expectations. (shrink)

This volume of specially written essays by leading philosophers offers to set the agenda for the philosophy of depiction.

From the time when Friedrich Conrads published1 the first systematic study of the method of composition employed by Vergil in the Aeneid it has been recogmzed that Bk. III. is especially involved in the contradictions existing between the various parts of the poem. It is not my purpose in this paper to attempt an exhaustive study of this aspect of Bk. III.; the industry of classical scholars in the last half-century renders needless further repetition of this sort. I wish merely (...) to present a few suggestions which may help to reconcile the passages generally regarded as hopelessly contradictory. (shrink)

The metaphysical question of what determines the contents of fictive utterances is closely related to the epistemological question of how audiences identify the.