Abstract In this paper I discuss Polycarp Ikuenobe's view that it is rational to believe, in an African context, in the existence of witches and witchcraft. First, I attempt to show that it is not possible to prove empirically that witches and witchcraft are real, as Ikuenobe assumes. I argue that even though witches and witchcraft are part of the social reality in which many Africans live, they do not have the same ontological status as theoretical entities in scientific research. (...) Second, I try to show that Ikuenobe's attempt to demonstrate that the belief in witches and witchcraft has a rational foundation is not convincing. Admittedly, Africans, who live in magic-ridden cultures, have reasons that locally justify their belief in witches and witchcraft. However, when the justification offered for this belief is assessed by external standards, employed within scientific discourse, it turns out to be insufficient. (shrink)

Self-cultivation—taking pedagogical action to educate oneself—is an integral part of non-formal adult education. Ever since Greek antiquity, it has been a central ingredient in the western philosophical and educational tradition. However, we argue that the global challenges that have emerged in the present era of the ecological crisis call for a new kind of understanding of this basic educational phenomenon. Based in particular on recent work in dark ecology and its central concept of the ‘uncanny’, we outline a few key (...) features of our time in relation to the contemporary challenge of self-cultivation. We then review extant literature on self-cultivation to ascertain whether the theoretical resources that have been used to conceptualise it in the past are capable of addressing these new aspects of self-cultivation. We conclude that each of the theoretical resources analysed here offer valuable insights into the novel challenges facing self-cultivation, though not all important questions can be answered. By specifying the contributions and limitations of these theoretical resources, we pave the way for future work on conceptualising self-cultivation for our times. (shrink)

It is not uncommon to be frustrated by the outcome of an election or a decision in voting, law, economics, engineering, and other fields. Does this 'bad' result reflect poor data or poorly informed voters? Or does the disturbing conclusion reflect the choice of the decision/election procedure? Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow's famed theorem has been interpreted to mean 'no decision procedure is without flaws'. Similarly, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen dashes hope for individual liberties by showing their incompatibility with societal needs. (...) This highly accessible book offers a new, different interpretation and resolution of Arrow's and Sen's theorems. Using simple mathematics, it shows that these negative conclusions arise because, in each case, some of their assumptions negate other crucial assumptions. Once this is understood, not only do the conclusions become expected, but a wide class of other phenomena can also be anticipated. (shrink)

The authors study how an aerosol technology research group constructed a research agenda for itself and how its activity was changed in the process. The group's research agenda was heterogeneous, comprising several research areas in which the knowledge of aerosols was applied in different industrial contexts. The authors analyze the development of one of these areas, the research on the production of ultrafine particles from 1992 to 1997, employing the concept of mediated activity that has been developed in the cultural-historical (...) theory of activity. In the analysis, the activity is seen as the coevolution of the subject, the means, and the research object and the networks of collaboration with other activities. The applications developed in the collaborative networks significantly influence the identity and learning of the researchers, the construction of tools and instruments, and the selection of the phenomena to be studied. (shrink)

R. G. Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine has been widely discussed in recent years by his commentators. However, most philosophers who discuss the re-enactment doctrine touch only briefly on his view of the identity of thoughts. This is surprising because Collingwood claims that the historian's successful re-enactment of the thought behind the historical agent's action involves re-thinking the same thought as the agent and not merely a copy of his thought.

The article discusses the allegedly decontextualized and ahistorical traits in positivist educational research and curriculum by examining its emergence in early twentieth-century empirical education. Edward Lee Thorndike’s educational psychology is analyzed as a case in point. It will be shown that Thorndike’s positivist educational psychology stressed the need to account for the reality of schooling and to produce knowledge of the actual contexts of education. Furthermore, a historical analysis informed by Michel Foucault’s history of the human sciences reveals that there (...) are multiple historical temporalities involved in Thorndike’s educational psychology. This allows a new critical angle to be taken on positivist educational research. The question concerning the contexts of empirical education turns to examining the way the conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge in education involve practices of contextualization as well as paradoxical and self-defeating elements. (shrink)

Images of brains circulate today as rationales for decision-making and selectivity in policies, curriculum, preservice teacher education and inservice professional development. The excitement over brain-based research, its visual reach and authorizing role accompanies longstanding debates in which the status attributed to biology, physiology and allied psychological approaches has been considered prejudicial. This article traces a series of dislocations in the linkages forged between discourses of vision and epistemic authorization, and how they still inhere in contemporary debates over brain imaging. The (...) critical history that the article offers within the general framework of Visual science and technology studies requires questioning some of the core tenets of visual culture, including what gets to count as the visual, ‘its’ role in legitimation, and the primacy assigned to looking and observation as strategies of truth-production. (shrink)

The 21st century is steeped in claims to interconnection, technological innovation, and new affective intensities amid challenges to the primacy and centrality of 'the human'. Flashpoint epistemology attends to the lived difficulties that arise in teaching, policymaking, curriculum and research among continuous practices of differentiation, and for which there is no pre-existing template for judgment, resolution or action. Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 1 examines contemporary collisions and reworkings of cultural-political issues in education through arts and humanities-based approaches. How and whether lines (...) are (re)drawn in educational practice - and via who-what - between justice, morality, religion, ethics, subjectivities, intersectionality, the sublime and the senses are a particular focus. The volume offers innovative relational approaches and new narrativization strategies, examining the aporia experienced when operating in educational domains of inevitable, recurring, difficult, fortuitous and/or unforeseen flashpoints. The chapters will engage researchers seeking new approaches to education's complexities, nested discourses, and ever-moving horizons of enactment. It will also benefit post/graduate students and teachers whose work intersects with sociological, philosophical and cultural studies and who are curious about claims to interconnection, the ethical quandaries embedded in practice, and the affordances and limits of technological innovation. (shrink)

It is well known that decision methods based on pairwise rankings can suffer from a wide range of difficulties. These problems are addressed here by treating the methods as systems, where each pair is looked upon as a subsystem with an assigned task. In this manner, the source of several difficulties is equated with the standard concern that the “whole need not be the sum of its parts.” These problems arise because the objectives assigned to subsystems need not be compatible (...) with that of the system. Knowing what causes the difficulties leads to resolutions. (shrink)

Bruno Latour (2004) claims that modernist critique, the kind that removes the false veils of ideology, ‘has run out of steam’. Despite its theoretical variety, it often consists in pointing out how...

In this article I discuss Wittgenstein's view of what is involved in understanding other cultures. I show that he is not committed to cultural relativism, as some of his critics argue. As he sees it, the real differences between cultures do not involve any fundamental conceptual, epistemic or other barriers that would make it impossible for us to understand and criticise other cultures. Shared forms of life and man's natural history provide a foothold for us when we attempt to understand (...) other cultures. (shrink)

Sen's classic social choice result supposedly demonstrates a conflict between Pareto and even minimal forms of liberalism. By providing the first direct mathematical proof of this seminal result, we underscore a significantly different interpretation: rather than conflicts among rights, Sen's result occurs because the liberalism assumption negates the assumption that voters have transitive preferences. This explanation enriches interpretations of Sen's conclusion by including radically new kinds of societal conflicts, it suggests ways to sidestep these difficulties, and it explains earlier approaches (...) to avoid the difficulties. (shrink)

We discuss the relationships between positional rules (such as plurality and approval voting as well as the Borda count), Dodgson’s, Kemeny’s and Litvak’s methods of reaching consensus. The discrepancies between methods are seen as results of different intuitive conceptions of consensus goal states and ways of measuring distances therefrom. Saari’s geometric methodology is resorted to in the analysis of the consensus reaching methods.

We take a fresh look at voting theory, in particular at the notion of manipulation, by employing the geometry of the Saari triangle. This yields a geometric proof of the Gibbard/Satterthwaite theorem, and new insight into what it means to manipulate the vote. Next, we propose two possible strengthenings of the notion of manipulability (or weakenings of the notion of non-manipulability), and analyze how these affect the impossibility proof for non-manipulable voting rules.

In a recent paper (Okasha, Mind 120:83–115, 2011), Samir Okasha uses Arrow’s theorem to raise a challenge for the rationality of theory choice. He argues that, as soon as one accepts the plausibility of the assumptions leading to Arrow’s theorem, one is compelled to conclude that there are no adequate theory choice algorithms. Okasha offers a partial way out of this predicament by diagnosing the source of Arrow’s theorem and using his diagnosis to deploy an approach that circumvents it. In (...) this paper I explain why, although Okasha is right to emphasise that Arrow’s result is the effect of an informational problem, he is not right to locate this problem at the level of the informational input of a theory choice rule. Once the informational problem is correctly located, Arrow’s theorem may be dismissed as a problem. (shrink)

In many voting systems, voters’ preferences on a set of candidates are represented by linear orderings. In this context, scoring rules are well-known procedures to aggregate the preferences of the voters. Under these rules, each candidate obtains a fixed number of points, sk\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$s_k$$\end{document}, each time he/she is ranked k\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$k$$\end{document}th by one voter and the candidates are ordered according to the total number of (...) points they receive. In order to identify the best scoring rule to use in each situation, we need to know which properties are met by each of these procedures. Although some properties have been analyzed extensively, there are other properties that have not been studied for all scoring rules. In this paper, we consider two desirable social choice properties, the Pareto-optimality and the immunity to the absolute loser paradox, and establish characterizations of the scoring rules that satisfy each of these specific axioms. Moreover, we also provide a proof of a result given by Saari and Barney, where the scoring rules meeting reversal symmetry are characterized. From the results of characterization, we establish some relationships among these properties. Finally, we give a characterization of the scoring rules satisfying the three properties. (shrink)