In language, recombination of a discrete set of meaningless building blocks forms an unlimited set of possible utterances. How such combinatorial structure emerged in the evolution of human language is increasingly being studied. It has been shown that it can emerge when languages culturally evolve and adapt to human cognitive biases. How the emergence of combinatorial structure interacts with the existence of holistic iconic form-meaning mappings in a language is still unknown. The experiment presented in this paper studies the role (...) of iconicity and human cognitive learning biases in the emergence of combinatorial structure in artificial whistled languages. Participants learned and reproduced whistled words for novel objects with the use of a slide whistle. Their reproductions were used as input for the next participant, to create transmission chains and simulate cultural transmission. Two conditions were studied: one in which the persistence of iconic form-meaning mappings was possible and one in which this was experimentally made impossible. In both conditions, cultural transmission caused the whistled languages to become more learnable and more structured, but this process was slightly delayed in the first condition. Our findings help to gain insight into when and how words may lose their iconic origins when they become part of an organized linguistic system. (shrink)

Das Positionspapier adressiert Probleme und Schwierigkeiten, die sich aus dem elektronischen Publizieren und den derzeitigen bibliometrischen Bewertungsverfahren wissenschaftlicher Expertise ergeben. Hierzu zählen u.a. der ‚Markt‘ der Informationen (Stichwort: Verlagsoligopole), das Wissenschaftler:innen-Tracking und die Metrisierung der Wissenschaft. -/- Es richtet sich insbesondere an Vertreter:innen die akademischen Philosophie als Fachdisziplin. Das Papier enthält Empfehlungen dazu, wie die identifizierten Problempunkte innerhalb der Disziplin lösungsorientiert angegangen werden können. Folgende Punkte werden zur Diskussion gestellt: -/- - Diamond-Open-Access im Bereich des elektronischen Publizierens: Infrastruktur in die (...) Hände der wissenschaftlichen Community - Peer Review: Begutachtung nach Kriterien der Wissenschaftlichkeit - Bewerbungsverfahren: Nutzung von Visualisierungen statt Metriken - Promotionsphase: Trennung der Rollen von Betreuung und Begutachtung - Datenhoheit: Unterbindung des Wissenschaftler-Trackings -/- Die Empfehlungen zielen auf eine unmittelbare Stärkung der Autonomie des Wissenschaftsbetriebs. (shrink)

in a late note, dated 1797, Kant refers to the schematism of the pure understanding as one of the most difficult as well as one of the most important issues treated in the Critique of Pure Reason.1 His treatment of this theme is indeed notorious for its obscurity.2 As I see it, part of the problem is caused by the fact that Kant frames his discussion in terms that he could expect his readers to be familiar with, while he gradually (...) develops ideas that breach any traditional account of cognition. This holds for his references to the power of judgment and the related view that cognition is a matter of subsuming intuitions under concepts3 as well as for the suggestion that there is an initial gap between categories... (shrink)

While we endorse Heidegger’s effort to reclaim Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, we hold, first, that his reading is less original than is often assumed and, second, that it unduly marginalizes the critical impetus of Kant’s philosophy. This article seeks to shed new light on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and related texts by relating Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant to, on the one hand, the epistemological approach represented by Cohen’s Kant’s (...) Theory of Experience and, on the other, the metaphysical readings put forward by Heimsoeth, Wundt and others in the 1920s. On this basis, we argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant remains indebted to the methodological distinction between ground and grounded that informed Cohen’s reading and was transferred to the problem of metaphysics by Wundt. Even if Heidegger resists a ‘foundationalist’ mode of this distinction, we argue that his focus on the notions of ground and grounding does not... (shrink)

This book addresses universal tendencies of human vowel systems from the point of view of self-organisation. It uses computer simulations to show that the same universal tendencies found in human languages can be reproduced in a population of artificial agents. These agents learn and use vowels with human-like perception and production, using a learning algorithm that is cognitively plausible. The implications of these results for the evolution of language are then explored.

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 101 Heft: 3 Seiten: 376-406.

Numerous studies in the fields of Science and Technology Studies and philosophy of technology have repeatedly stressed that scientific practices are collective practices that crucially depend on the presence of scientific technologies. Postphenomenology is one of the movements that aims to draw philosophical conclusions from these observations through an analysis of human–technology interactions in scientific practice. Two other attempts that try to integrate these insights into philosophy of science are Ronald Giere’s Scientific Perspectivism and Davis Baird’s Thing Knowledge. In this (...) paper, these two approaches will be critically discussed from the perspective of postphenomenology. We will argue that Giere and Baird problematically assume that scientific instruments have a determined function, and that all human members of a scientific collective have immediate access to this function. However, these assumptions also allow them to offer a clear answer to the question how scientists can collectively relate to scientific phenomena. Such an answer is not yet formulated within the postphenomenological perspective. By adding a postphenomenological touch to the semiotic approach in Actor-Network Theory, we offer an account of how different individual human–technology relations are integrated into larger scientific collectives. We do so by showing that scientific instruments not only help constitute scientific phenomena, but also the intersubjectivity within such collectives. (shrink)

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. While ‘being there for you’, partners take care (...) of each other in mutually dependent ways. While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Vor dem Hintergrund der Diskussion über soziale Ungleichheit wird analysiert, welche Rolle soziale Determinanten in den Prozessen der Aufnahme und der Aufrechterhaltung der Sportteilnahme spielen. In der vorliegenden Längsschnittstudie wurden 481 Personen im Anfangsalter zwischen 33 und 56 Jahren zu vier Messzeitpunkten bezüglich ihres Sportverhaltens befragt. In der Aufnahmephase haben Frauen eine mehr als dreimal höhere Wahrscheinlichkeit sportlich aktiv zu werden als Männer. Dieser Einfluss wird durch die familienbezogenen Variablen mediiert, was die Bedeutung der vermittelnden Instanz Interaktionskontext unterstreicht. In (...) der Aufrechterhaltungsphase spielt der Sozialstatus eine wichtige Rolle, wobei dieser Einfluss nicht von den zeitbezogenen Arbeitsbelastungen mediiert wird. (shrink)

Two computer simulations are investigated that model interaction of cultural evolution of language and biological evolution of adaptations to language. Both are agent‐based models in which a population of agents imitates each other using realistic vowels. The agents evolve under selective pressure for good imitation. In one model, the evolution of the vocal tract is modeled; in the other, a cognitive mechanism for perceiving speech accurately is modeled. In both cases, biological adaptations to using and learning speech evolve, even though (...) the system of speech sounds itself changes at a more rapid time scale than biological evolution. However, the fact that the available acoustic space is used maximally (a self‐organized result of cultural evolution) is constant, and therefore biological evolution does have a stable target. This work shows that when cultural and biological traits are continuous, their co‐evolution may lead to cognitive adaptations that are strong enough to detect empirically. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION. 1. THE THEATRE. 1. In olden time the Arabian desert was, as it is at this da)7, the roaming-ground of independent Bedouin tribes. ...

Women intimately interact with various medical technologies and prosthetic artifacts in the context of breast cancer. While extensive work has been done on the agency of technological artifacts and how they affect users’ perceptions and experiences, the agency of users is largely taken for granted hitherto. In this article, we explore the agency of four women who engage with breast cancer technologies and artifacts by analyzing their narrative accounts of such engagements. This empirical discussion is framed within the tradition of (...) science and technology studies, philosophy of technological mediation and phenomenology of embodied agency as ‘I can/not’. This approach leads to the conclusions that women’s technologically mediated agencies range from being restricted to extended, take place on different bodily levels, within complex temporal structures, and are determined by certain socio-cultural contexts. Furthermore, it reveals that such agency shaping does not imply a one-way conditioning relationship between technologies and users, but rather involves a reciprocal relationship in which both subject and object are co-constituted. We therefore suggest that the ‘material turn’ in philosophy of technology also needs to take into account technologically mediated, material human beings in order to gain a better understanding of human existence. (shrink)

Many disabled people face some form of exclusion or discrimination. One of the most damaging, yet pervasive, types of exclusion is sexual exclusion. Various factors hinder sexual opportunities for disabled persons, such as social attitudes around body image, gender, and sexuality. In this paper, I engage with Sheila Jeffreys's paper, “ Disability and the Male Sex Right,” wherein she argues that discourse around sexual rights for disabled people is a veiled way of promoting male dominance over women. Though Jeffreys raises (...) many pertinent issues, she assumes that when a disabled man seeks commercial sex, he does so as an act of domination or violence. I argue that when a disabled man seeks commercial sex, he is seeking the goods of sex, such as connection, intimacy, and pleasure. (shrink)

While Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason maintains that things in themselves cannot be known, he also seems to assert that they affect our senses and produce representations. Following Jacobi, many commentators have considered these claims to be contradictory. Instead of adding another artificial solution to the existing literature on this subject, I maintain that Kant’s use of terms such as thing-in-itself, noumenon, and transcendental object becomes perfectly consistent if we take them to acquire a different meaning in the (...) various parts of the work. Challenging the opposed interpretations of Allison and Langton, I argue that Kant’s account of things in themselves is primarily relevant to the second-order reflection on the possibility and limits of a scientific metaphysics that the Critique undertakes. (shrink)

The author introduces a normative conception of coherence, derived from a pragmatic interpretation of the application of norms to concrete cases. A distinction is made between the justification of a norm and its application. In the case of moral norms, justification and application can be analysed as two different discursive procedures which give rise to different aspects of the principle of impartiality. Impartial justification requires a procedure by which all interests concerned are taken into account whereas impartial application requires a (...) procedure where all features of a situation are considered. The complete description of a concrete case makes necessary a coherent interpretation of all the valid norms which are prima facie applicable. This requirement of an ideal coherent system of norms is restricted to interpretive “paradigms” in the case of legal norms, because it is necessary to produce singular judgments under the restrictive conditions of scarce time and incomplete knowledge. (shrink)

Focusing on the section ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that the method Hegel employs in this work does not capture the full significance of the French Revolution. I claim that Hegel’s method is reformist rather than revolutionary: Hegel deliberately restricts his analyses to transformations that occur within the element of thought and presents the changes that occur within this element as logically ensuing from one another. This approach, I argue, is at odds with (...) the very concept of a revolution. Seen in this way, efforts to frame Hegel’s philosophy as revolutionary are misguided. (shrink)

While having a breast reconstruction, women have certain expectations about their future breasted bodies. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze these expectations in the process of reconstruction. By applying a qualitative, phenomenological study within a longitudinal research design, this paper acknowledges the temporarily complex, contextualized, embodied, and subjective nature of the phenomenon of expectations. The analysis identified expectations regarding three different aspects of women’s embodiment: their gazed body, their capable/practical body, and their felt body. After reconstruction, (...) these women try to reconfigure—adjust, level or retrospectively rewrite—their expectations. Further, some women face what apparently arrives totally unexpected, namely a strange feeling breast or a failed reconstruction. The development of these women’s expectations can be understood as an active, continuously evolving, difficult and sometimes impossible dynamic of expecting the surprise that is a breast reconstruction. Within this dynamic, women formulate and reconfigure—by definition—unrealistic expectations and validate and try to achieve unexpected futures. We suggest that medical professionals can facilitate this dynamic in various ways. (shrink)

The present paper aims to trace back Kant’s account of the schematism of the pure understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason to the Dissertation. I do so by discussing Kant’s understanding of sensible cognition in view of his assessment of metaphysics. I argue, first, that Kant in both texts aims to defend metaphysics against skeptical attacks by discarding those of its elements he considers unwarranted and, second, that this undertaking hinges on his account of concepts that function as the (...) sensible condition of cognition. Yet whereas Kant argues in 1770 that metaphysics must be purely intellectual, he in 1781 draws on his earlier account of sensible concepts to argue, against the Wolffians, that determining intelligible objects by purely intellectual means does not amount to cognition proper. (shrink)

In this paper the author criticizes the way Robert Alexy reconstructs the relationship between legal and practical reasoning. The core of Alexy's argumentation (Alexy 1978) is considered the claim that legal argumentation is a “special case” of general practical discourse. In order to question this claim, the author analyzes three different types of argument: (1) that legal reasoning is needed by general practical discourse itself, (2) that there are similarities between legal argumentation and general practical discourse, (3) that there is (...) a correspondence between certain types of argument in general practical discourse and in legal argumentation.**. (shrink)

Reality TV is immensely popular, and various shows in this media genre involve a storyline of infertility and infertility treatment. Feminists argue that normative and constructed realities about infertility and infertility treatment, like those in reality TV, are central to the emancipation of women. Such realities are able to steer viewers' perceptions of the world. This article examines the emancipatory significance of representations of women on 'infertility reality TV shows'. While the women in these shows all have 'abnormal' qualities, we (...) consider their portrayal as figurations of monstrosity. In the literature, monstrosity is understood as a way to challenge nonemancipatory norms by offering an alternative identity. Through a content analysis of seven reality TV shows, we identified four types of in/fertile monsters: the cyborg, the freak, the abject, and the childless. We show that these monsters are predominantly non-emancipatory as they all involve mechanisms of altering, excluding, or condemning infertility in relation to what is considered normal and acceptable womanhood. Therefore, at the end of this article, we make a plea for more diverse and emancipatory representations of infertile women in popular culture. (shrink)

This chapter examines Hegel’s conception of philosophical critique in order to shed light on the force and limits of the method that has become known as immanent critique. At least in modern philosophy, it was Kant who first conceived of critique as a form of reflection that draws its criterion from reason itself. As I argue, Hegel is deeply indebted to Kant in this respect. The chapter begins with an analysis of Hegel's seminal essay ‘On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (...) Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in Particular’, published in 1802. After a brief discussion of the Phenomenology, I turn to his Philosophy of Right. These texts make clear, I argue, that the criterion from which immanent critique takes its bearings is necessarily tainted with a particularity that it cannot affirm without losing its force. According to this account, immanent critique comes to refer to a form of reflection that is more complicated and more precarious than Kant and Hegel seem to have assumed. (shrink)

This paper contributes to a theory of rational choice for decision-makers with incomplete preferences due to partial ignorance, whose beliefs are representable as sets of acceptable priors. We focus on the limiting case of `Complete Ignorance' which can be viewed as reduced form of the general case of partial ignorance. Rationality is conceptualized in terms of a `Principle of Preference-Basedness', according to which rational choice should be isomorphic to asserted preference. The main result characterizes axiomatically a new choice-rule called `Simultaneous (...) Expected Utility Maximization'. It can be interpreted as agreement in a bargaining game (Kalai-Smorodinsky solution) whose players correspond to the (extremal) `acceptable priors' among which the decision maker has suspended judgment. An essential but non-standard feature of Simultaneous Expected Utility choices is their dependence on the entire choice set. This is justified by the conception of optimality as compromise rather than as superiority in pairwise comparisons. (shrink)

Focusing on the section ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that the method Hegel employs in this work does not capture the full significance of the French Revolution. I claim that Hegel’s method is reformist rather than revolutionary: Hegel deliberately restricts his analyses to transformations that occur within the element of thought and presents the changes that occur within this element as logically ensuing from one another. This approach, I argue, is at odds with (...) the very concept of a revolution. Seen in this way, efforts to frame Hegel’s philosophy as revolutionary are misguided. (shrink)

Shedding new light on Kant’s use of the term ‘transcendental’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, this article aims to determine the elements that Kant’s transcendental philosophy has in common with Wolffian ontology as well as the respects in which Kant turns against Wolff. On this basis I argue that Wolff’s, Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of metaphysics – qua first philosophy – have a deeper affinity than is commonly assumed. Bracketing the issue of Kant’s alleged subjectivism, I challenge the opposition (...) between metaphysical and non-metaphysical readings of Hegel’s Science of Logic. One the one hand, I argue that Hegel was more deeply indebted to Kant than he generally admits. On the other hand, I hold that this debt concerns Kant’s conception of metaphysics rather than his alleged subjectivism. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, debates about Hegel’s Science of Logic have largely turned around the metaphysical or non-metaphysical nature of this work. This debate has certainly issued many important contributions to Hegel scholarship. Yet it presupposes, in my view, a set of oppositions that thwart an adequate assessment of Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant. I hope to show in this paper that Hegel is deeply indebted to Kant, but not to the Kant who is commonly brought into play to argue for the (...) non-metaphysical nature of the Science of Logic. If Kant ’s own Critique of Pure Reason defies oppositions such as that between epistemology and metaphysics, then they cannot be employed to determine the extent to which Hegel’s Logic moves beyond Kant. By focusing instead on the system of pure reason that Kant intended to elaborate, I hope to bring out the ontological thrust of both Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s Science of Logic. My paper thus intends to highlight the deep continuity between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s Logic, yet without reducing the latter to the kind of epistemology commonly attributed to Kant. (shrink)