The present article discusses the measurement of social class in the social psychology of education research. It was evident that social class experiences are conflated with the socioeconomic status indicators and the subjective measure of the class context was underrepresented. However, this was discussed in Rubin et al about the intersectional nature of social class taking into account both objective and subjective indicators. The derivation of the social class experience from the objective and subjective measures were critically discussed. An effort (...) was made to understand whether these translations are category mistake or not. Three trajectories will be utilized to address the category mistake, that is, 1) subjectivity and objectivity debate in the measurement of social class in social psychology of education, 2) debates encircling around the position of social psychology and its underutilized concept such as social class as scientifically objective facets in social sciences and 3) operationalism of social class and category mistake. (shrink)

The Interface Theory of Perception, as stated by D. Hoffman, says that perceptual experiences do not to approximate properties of an “objective” world; instead, they have evolved to provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to the world. Conscious Realism states that the objective world consists of ‘conscious agents’ and their experiences. Under these two theses, consciousness creates all objects and properties of the physical world: the problem of explaining this process reverses the mind-body problem. In support of the interface theory (...) I propose that our perceptions have evolved, not to report the truth, but to guide adaptive behaviors. Using evolutionary game theory, I state a theorem asserting that perceptual strategies that see the truth will, under natural selection, be driven to extinction by perceptual strategies of equal complexity but tuned instead to fitness. I then give a minimal mathematical definition of the essential elements of a “conscious agent.” Under the conscious realism thesis, this leads to a non-dualistic, dynamical theory of conscious process in which both observer and observed have the same mathematical structure. The dynamics raises the possibility of emergence of combinations of conscious agents, in whose experiences those of the component agents are entangled. In support of conscious realism, I discuss two more theorems showing that a conscious agent can consistently see geometric and probabilistic structures of space that are not necessarily in the world per se but are properties of the conscious agent itself. The world simply has to be amenable to such a construction on the part of the agent; and different agents may construct different structures as seeming to belong to the world. This again supports the idea that any true structure of the world is likely quite different from what we see. I conclude by observing that these theorems suggest the need for a new theory which resolves the reverse mind-body problem, a good candidate for which is conscious agent theory. (shrink)

The right to self‐defense has played a major role in objections to gun regulation. Many contend that gun regulations threaten this right. While much philosophical discussion has focused on the relation between guns and this right, less attention has been paid to the argument for the right of self‐defense itself. In this article, I examine this argument. Gunrights defenders contend that the right of self‐defense is needed to explain why interferences in self‐defense are wrong. I propose an alternative explanation for (...) such wrongs, one which does not posit the existence of a self‐defense right, and then show how it undermines their claim that there exists a strong presumption against gun regulation. I conclude by articulating the implications of this alternative explanatory account for other rights. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel, secular account of the virtue of humility. There are only two such accounts in recent philosophical literature: one defended by Julia Driver, the other by George Schueler. Driver attaches the virtue of humility to people who underestimate their merits, or lack beliefs about their merits altogether. Schueler thinks that humility requires indifference to how we are regarded vis-à-vis our accomplishments. This paper brings out the limitations of those accounts and constructs a new one which is (...) free of them. The new account derives directly from the under-appreciated approach defended a century ago by Hastings Rashdall, who developed a secular (albeit religiously-inspired) account of humility according to which true humility reflects love for one's neighbour. After indicating the flaws in Rashdall's approach, I develop an account based on his intuitions. Specifically, I argue that humility requires suppressing our egos when they lead us to neglect or disregard other duties. Humility comprises two dimensions: a private dimension, for when we uphold self-regarding duties rather than succumb to the temptations of ego; and a public dimension, for when we display fidelity to other-regarding duties at the expense of the pleasures of ego. (shrink)

Does natural selection favor veridical percepts—those that accurately depict objective reality? Perceptual and cognitive scientists standardly claim that it does. Here we formalize this claim using the tools of evolutionary game theory and Bayesian decision theory. We state and prove the “Fitness-Beats-Truth Theorem” which shows that the claim is false: If one starts with the assumption that perception involves inference to states of the objective world, then the FBT Theorem shows that a strategy that simply seeks to maximize expected-fitness payoff, (...) with no attempt to estimate the “true” world state, does consistently better. More precisely, the FBT Theorem provides a quantitative measure of the extent to which the fitness-only strategy dominates the truth strategy, and of how this dominance increases with the size of the perceptual space. The FBT Theorem supports the Interface Theory of Perception, which proposes that our perceptual systems have evolved to provide a species-specific interface to guide adaptive behavior, and not to provide a veridical representation of objective reality. (shrink)

The discourse on labor engagement, underutilization, and unemployment has been a prominent focus in development literature, particularly in developing economies. These issues influence migration patterns and gross domestic output and, in some cases, contribute to youth restiveness. This study delves into the intricate relationship between investments in human capital, represented by spending on education and health, and its repercussions on youth employment outcomes in India. We gathered annual data spanning the years 1990 to 2021 from various Indian states. We employed (...) the bootstrap-based bias correction for panel fixed effects estimation techniques to enhance the analytical accuracy. The findings of our investigation reveal that investments in human capital, encompassing both private and government health expenditures as well as expenditures on primary, secondary, and tertiary education, exert significant but varying impacts on youth employment in India. These results carry important policy implications. To effectively address the persistent challenge of youth unemployment in India, it is imperative to prioritize consistent and disproportionate investments in education over health. This shift in focus could prove instrumental in reversing the trend of youth unemployment and fostering sustainable economic growth. (shrink)

The Euro-American far-right represents a highly diverse political movement comprising numerous ideological tendencies. It includes the European New Right, the US ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-lite’, far-right accelerationism, traditionalism, and new forms of political misogyny. Despite the diversity in ideas and activities, this article argues that an overarching theme of the ‘fear of white extinction’ travels across and animates each major contemporary far-right tendency. The article explores a variety of older and contemporary metaphysical themes that are deployed in contemporary fascism. These include (...) new configurations of racism, occultist ideas of nature and vitalism, the rendering of culture and civilization in ‘biocultural’ and ‘anthropological’ terms, and ideas about cosmic destiny. The article considers how older ideas from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hans Günther, Ludwig Klages, Arnold Gehlen and others are mobilized in contemporary fascism to generate a critique of liberal modernity, one which leads remorselessly to a logic of white supremacy and apocalyptic violence. (shrink)

In his liberal theory of justice, John Rawls stipulates that the principles of justice selected will be generally complied with. This assumption of full compliance is characteristic of what Rawls calls “ideal theory,” i.e., a theory that seeks to formulate and justify ideal principles of justice. David Schmidtz contends that the full compliance assumption undermines the practical relevance of ideal theory. I argue that Schmidtz’s criticisms of full compliance do not succeed. Understanding why his arguments fail requires an examination of (...) both Schmidtz’s and Rawls’s views of the nature of justice and the function of political philosophy. I explain why full compliance can plausibly be assumed in Rawls’s ideal theory given the conception of justice he employs, and articulate the problem Schmidtz’s argument faces if it relies on his view of the role of political philosophy. (shrink)

In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson argues that most people in the United States and other liberal societies spend their working lives under the kind of autocratic rule we would normally associate with communist dictatorships. They are forced to work in oppressive environments, deprived of many freedoms, and given practically no say over working conditions. Even in their nonworking lives workers are frequently subjected to employer scrutiny and sanction. And (...) the legal framework and economic realities surrounding employment are such that exit is viable for only a small minority. Anderson’s work has generated great interest and, along with it, several criticisms that take exception to her observations, economic assumptions, and conclusions. This paper delineates the various economic claims made against Private Government so as to facilitate further inquiry of these issues. (shrink)

Ştefan Aug. Doinaş and Basarab Nicolescu, two great spirits related through the generosity of the humanist vision, met, held an epistolary dialogue and had common projects. Doinaş commented upon a few of the innovative concepts proposed by Basarab Nicolescu and he also aesthetically transfigured, in literary pages, certain concepts of transdisciplinarity.

This paper argues that Samuelson's criticisms of Sraffa mainly concentrated on Sraffa's claim that the propositions of his book (Sraffa 1960) did not depend on the assumption of constant returns to scale. Garegnani's defence of Sraffa against Samuelson's criticisms remained ineffective because Garegnani's own interpretation of Sraffa's prices as classical 'centre of gravitation' or 'long term' prices requires constant returns to scale assumption. The paper goes on to critique Garegnani's interpretation of Sraffa and the classical economics to show that Garegnani's (...) interpretation of Sraffa and the classical economics is highly problematic and that Samuelson's criticism of Sraffa does not hit the target because Sraffa's prices are not necessarily 'equilibrium' prices and therefore there is no need of returns to scale assumption in his theory. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article focuses on the interweaving of constructive praxis with communication inontogenesis, inphylogenesisand in biocultural niche evolution (ecogenesis), within anEvoDevoSocioframework. I begin by discussing the nature of symbolization, its evolution from communicative signaling and its elaboration into semantic systems. I distinguish between thesymbol-readyand thelanguage-readybrain, leading to a discussion of linguistic conceptualization and itsdual groundingin organism and language system. There follows an outline account of the interpenetration in the human biocultural niche-complex ofsemiosphereandtechnosphere,mediated by the evolution of the niche of infancy. Symbolization (...) (the foundation of the semiosphere) is by definition normative; the normative character of the technosphere is demonstrated by the interrelations in human development between affordance, action schema and canonical functional object schema. A model of the neuro-computational implementation of dual grounding is proposed. (shrink)

The following are some of the entries received in the contest presented in our March, 1960 issue. The starred essays were judged as winners and were awarded $25.00 prizes.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The article examines some recent areas of Al Qaeda and salafi-jihadi ideology and argues that, while there has been an evolution in strategy since 9/11, the core elements of salafi-jihadi ideology have remained unchanged. The article explores ideological, technical and aesthetic aspects of Al Qaeda and salafi-jihadi literature. It is argued that salafi-jihadi ideology is characterized by a particular association between political virtue and visceral violence, an association that dominates the aesthetic and cultural universe created by salafi-jihadis. Existing views that (...) salafi-jihadi thought represents an ethical project or a project for humanity or a response to military occupations are, it is argued, consequences of a broader philosophical and social theory tradition that privileges a specifically theological idea of sacrifice. Instead, it is argued that salafi-jihadi ideology is characterized by an array of sharp oppositions. These contrasting doublets of ideas include ones about the temporal world and the afterlife, authoritarian law and violent chaos, loyalty and enmity, defilement and plenitude, tangible lands and imagined spaces. These severe theoretical oppositions in salafi-jihadi thinking are outlined and considered in relation to broader social theory. The article also considers the sociological importance of ideas of Paradise and the afterlife in salafi-jihadi thought. The distinct nature of salafi-jihadi thought, and the understanding of political violence it contains, are considered in relation to nationalist jihadi and political Islamist tendencies. (shrink)

This article explores the ideological and historical basis of new authoritarian South Asian and Hindu movements, and considers the links between their ideologies and the history of racial and ethnic formations in the west during the Enlightenment period. Using Paul Gilroy's work on radical black conservatism as a starting point, the author explores some of the metaphysical ideas behind the late modern recovery of primordial ethnic belonging. The author considers the possibilities of a volkish anti-racism in contemporary movements by highlighting (...) the similarities between contemporary right-wing Hindu revival and older German romantic strands that cultivated `primordial' nationalisms based on an appropriation of archaic Vedic scriptures. The background to the concept `Aryan' is explored. The author considers how many far-right ideas about ethnicity and nationalism have found a deep resonance in `New Age' writings. The conclusion links these themes to a broader discussion of metaphysical ideas. (shrink)

In this path breaking volume, leading researchers from psychology, linguistics, philosophy and primatology offer complementary perspectives on the role of intersubjectivity in the context of human development, comparative cognition and...

This exploratory study investigates the manifold conceptions of the internal auditing of risk culture prevalent among four influential actors of the financial sector—regulators, normalizers, consultants, and implementers. By inductive analysis of 20 interviews and 295 documents, we illustrate a two-step interpretive scheme utilized by the four actors in their IA approaches of risk culture: defining broad goals and designing visibility schemes. The visibility schemes were tied to the demarcation, measurement, as well as the IA data collection techniques of risk culture. (...) Our results indicate two dichotomous interpretations among the four actors concerning the IA of risk culture. The first interpretation, prevalent among regulators and implementers, promotes the control of risk culture primarily through verification. The second interpretation, adopted by consultants and normalizers, promotes the control of risk culture by IA along with the empowerment of employees through training programs. Our results not only contribute to understanding IA expansions, specifically to non-tangible domains such as risk culture but also enrich the literature exploring the mechanisms different stakeholders utilize to shape weakly professionalized IA practices. (shrink)

A thought tradition, like that of the philosophies of India, tends to fall in the stereotype of systems and doctrines. But the dynamics of understanding demand fresh interpretations, relating contents and strands of classical Indian philosophy to themes and concerns of present-day thought. Drawing from mainstream Vedanta and allied areas, this study focuses on the crucial question of 'human' significance. This guiding motive is examined in thematic interaction with a range of relevant topics on methodology, knowledge and most importantly, human (...) condition. The explorations, based on source materials, offer critical reflections across the arena of East-West thought. (shrink)

Drug Safety Communications are used by the Food and Drug Administration to inform health care providers, patients, caregivers, and the general public about safety issues related to FDA-approved drugs. To assess patient knowledge of the messaging contained in DSCs related to the sleep aids zolpidem and eszopiclone, we conducted a large, cross-sectional patient survey of 1,982 commercially insured patients selected by stratified random sampling from the Optum Research Database who had filled at least two prescriptions for either zolpidem or eszopiclone (...) between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2013. Among the 594 respondents, two-thirds reported hearing generally about drug safety information prior to starting a new drug, with the remaining one-third “rarely” or “never” hearing such information. Providers and pharmacists were primary sources of drug safety information. Two-thirds of zolpidem users and half of eszopiclone users reported having heard about the related DSC messages, ability to accurately identify the major factual messages was limited. Respondents reacted to new drug safety information about their sleep aids by reporting that they would want to learn about alternative ways to help them sleep and seek out more information about the safety of their specific sleeping pill. Opportunities may exist for the FDA to work with providers and pharmacies to help ensure the DSC information is more widely received and is more fully understood by those taking the affected medications. (shrink)

This article presents a novel control approach, hybrid neuro-fuzzy, for the load frequency control of a four-area interconnected power system. The advantage of this controller is that it can handle nonlinearities, and at the same time, it is faster than other existing controllers. The effectiveness of the proposed controller in increasing the damping of local and inter-area modes of oscillation is demonstrated in a four-area interconnected power system. Areas 1 and 2 consist of a thermal reheat power plant, whereas Areas (...) 3 and 4 consist of a hydropower plant. Performance evaluation is carried out by using fuzzy, artificial neural network, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, and conventional proportional and integral control approaches. Four different models with different controllers are developed and simulated, and performance evaluations are carried out with said controllers. The result shows that the intelligent HNF controller has improved dynamic response and is at the same time faster than ANN, fuzzy, and conventional PI controllers. (shrink)