Models of category learning have been extensively studied in cognitive science and primarily tested on perceptual abstractions or artificial stimuli. In this paper, we focus on categories acquired from natural language stimuli, that is, words. We present a Bayesian model that, unlike previous work, learns both categories and their features in a single process. We model category induction as two interrelated subproblems: the acquisition of features that discriminate among categories, and the grouping of concepts into categories based on those features. (...) Our model learns categories incrementally using particle filters, a sequential Monte Carlo method commonly used for approximate probabilistic inference that sequentially integrates newly observed data and can be viewed as a plausible mechanism for human learning. Experimental results show that our incremental learner obtains meaningful categories which yield a closer fit to behavioral data compared to related models while at the same time acquiring features which characterize the learned categories. (shrink)

A critical, philosophical engagement of the psychological structures that propagate the continued oppression of women. In this book, the Italian feminist thinker Lea Melandri argues that systemic violence against women has deep psychoanalytic roots. Drawing inspiration from the work of Freud and the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli, along with feminist practices of consciousness-raising, Melandri demonstrates how male dominance and female subservience are established by society through a binary and oppositional understanding of sex and gender. This understanding—and the oppression and (...) violence against women that results—is inscribed in the psyches of both men and women, and is replicated anew from generation to generation. Melandri analyzes women in media, politics, philosophy, and literature to show how this plays out, and calls for awareness of these deep psychic structures and expectations formed within the dynamics of society and primary family relations. Lea Melandri is one of Italy’s best-known feminist thinkers and activists. She is the author of many books and continues to write and advocate for women’s rights. In 2012, she was awarded by the city of Milan the Ambrogino d’oro, one of the city’s highest honors. Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College at Western University, Canada. He the editor of Contemporary Italian Political Philosophy and the coeditor (with Inna Viriasova) of Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy, both also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

Philosophical treatments of the self in a range of different traditions have positioned it outside the realm of ordinary worldly objects. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this seemingly widespread and persistent temptation to mystify the self is that the epistemic properties of I-thought are apt to give rise to an illusion of transcendence about their objects—that is, about ourselves.

Whilst Rahimzadeh et al. (2023) apply a critical lens to the pedagogical use of LLM bioethics assistants, we outline here further reason for skepticism. Two features of LLM chatbots are of signific...

Many challenges to economic and social well-being require close collaboration between business, government, and civil-society actors. In this context, the involvement of multiple companies rather than a single company may enhance such cross-sector social partnerships’ outcomes. However, extant literature cautions about the tensions arising from companies’ competitive interests and the detrimental effects on the CSSP’s social outcome. Similarly, studies analyzing simultaneous collaboration and competition suggest shielding off competitive elements from the collaboration. Based on insights into two multi-company CSSPs, we conversely (...) find that government and NGO partnership managers deliberately leveraged competition through the CSSP design. They used similar segmentation mechanisms to enhance CSSP contributions, but differed in the way they integrated collaborative and competitive elements, leading to sustained corporate commitment in one CSSP and unmet promises in the other. These insights expose the paradoxical nature of coopetition at the interface of social and economic goals, and advance current research by indicating competition’s positive effects and the respective partnership design implications. On this basis, our study helps reveal and better understand sustainability-related tensions and opportunities at the inter-organizational level. (shrink)

Suppose that the following describes an intelligible scenario. A subject is wired up to another's body in such a way that she has bodily experiences ‘as from the inside’ caused by states and events in the other body, that are subjectively indistinguishable from ordinary somatosensory perception of her own body. The supposed intelligibility of such so-called crossed wire cases constitutes a significant challenge to the claim that our somatosensory judgements are immune to error through misidentification relative to uses of the (...) first person pronoun. After all, the subject in this case is liable to commit precisely the sort of error ruled out by such a claim. In this paper I argue that the proponent of this challenge must establish at least two things: that the subject is committing an error of misidentification, and that her judgement shares its epistemic grounds with our ordinary somatosensory judgements. Neither condition, I argue, can be reached from the stipulations permitted into the starting descriptions of the cases. (shrink)

This book focuses on a question issued from The Architectonic of Pure Reason, one of the most important sections of Kant's first Critique: what is the human being? It suggests that the answer to this question is tied to a particular account of the unity of reason - one that stresses its purposive character.

Libertarians often invoke the principle of self-ownership to discredit distributive interventions authorized by the more-than-minimal state. But if one takes a democratic approach to the justification of ownership claims, including claims of ownership over oneself, the validity of the self-ownership principle is theoretically inseparable from the normative justification of the state. Since the idea of the state is essential to the very assertion (not just the positive enforcement) of the principle of self-ownership, invoking the principle to discredit a distribution of (...) ownership authorized by the state commits libertarians also to weakening that principle's validity. Put differently, appealing to the self-ownership principle to circumscribe the state's power to distribute property is problematic when the state is necessary to assert the validity of that principle. This is because anytime the self-ownership principle is used to undermine a state-based distribution of property it is also implicitly eroding the ground for asserting its own validity.1. (shrink)

Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency offers a fresh, nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi's dialectical account shows how principles and agency really can interact.

Matteo Bonotti’s book on Partisanship and Public Reason in Diverse Societies is grounded on a theory of partisanship that sees the demands of public reason as internal to the very definition of a party. Bonotti suggests that partisanship is not only compatible with but essential to the stability and legitimacy of a well-ordered liberal society. My paper aims to raise some questions internal to the liberal account of partisanship so as to probe the methodological foundations and plausibility of the liberal (...) framework taken as a whole. My argument is that the assumption of a sufficiently just liberal society on which the book grounds its defence of partisanship makes us ill-equipped to face some of the most critical challenges that liberal societies face in the world that we live. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that our non-first-personal ways of thinking of ourselves – those we would naturally express in language without using first person pronouns – are just as important to our agency as our indexical ways of thinking of ourselves. They are just important in different ways. Specifically, I argue that a thinker who is systematically excluded from these non-first-personal modes of self-directed thought would be excluded from participation in some of the domains of agency (...) we value most as part of a full human life: the domains of agency associated with our social identities. (shrink)

This paper brings into focus the idea that just as no third-personal way of thinking could capture the self-consciousness of first-person thought, no first- or third- personal way of thinking could capture the especially intimate way we have of relating to each other canonically expressed with our uses of ‘you’. It proposes, motivates and defends the view that second-person speech is canonically expressive of a distinctive way we have of thinking of each other, under a concept that refers de jure (...) to its addressee and whose availability depends on standing in a relation of interpersonal self-consciousness with another. (shrink)

heories of embodied cognition (e.g., Perceptual Symbol Systems Theory; Barsalou, 1999, 2009) suggest that modality specific simulations underlie the representation of concepts. Supporting evidence comes from modality switch costs: participants are slower to verify a property in one modality (e.g., auditory, BLENDER-loud) after verifying a property in a different modality (e.g., gustatory, CRANBERRIES-tart) compared to the same modality (e.g., LEAVES-rustling, Pecher et al., 2003). Similarly, modality switching costs lead to a modulation of the N400 effect in event-related potentials (ERPs; Collins (...) et al., 2011; Hald et al., 2011). This effect of modality switching has also been shown to interact with the veracity of the sentence (Hald et al., 2011). The current ERP study further explores the role of modality match/mismatch on the processing of veracity as well as negation (sentences containing “not”). Our results indicate a modulation in the ERP based on modality and veracity, plus an interaction. The evidence supports the idea that modality specific simula- tions occur during language processing, and furthermore suggest that these simulations alter the processing of negation. (shrink)

This dissertation abstract and the reflection commentary present the work done by Dr. Lea Stadtler. Comprising four articles, the dissertation explores the challenge of designing successful public–private partnerships for development and contributes to the discourse on partnerships and business engagement in society. Article I adopts the company perspective and develops a conceptual framework for interest alignment in PPPs for development. Based on a theoretical analysis, Article II examines the role that different structures play in handling common design challenges. Articles III (...) and IV are empirical: The former analyzes how partners cope with tensions occurring on the PPP’s boundaries, while Article IV explores the roles of broker organizations, which increasingly facilitate the partnering process of PPPs for development. This extended dissertation abstract introduces the dissertation’s research focus and summarizes each article’s research question, methods, and main findings. The reflection commentary in the appendix discusses the author’s views of her dissertation journey as a junior scholar and the research process. (shrink)

In clinical practice, evidence suggests that teaching ethics using normative ethical theory has little influence on the ethical actions of providers in practice. Thus, new training methods are needed that improve clinician response to ethical problems. A sensemaking approach to ethics training has demonstrated promise as an evidence-based pedagogical method to improve ethical reasoning and response. Project ECHO is theoretically linked to improved sensemaking. This study examines the effectiveness of ECHO and training in use of sensemaking approaches to ethical response (...) by clinicians. A quasi-experimental design study using univariate linear regression was used to examine the effect of the three types of ethics training on ethical response self-efficacy scores, while controlling for participant characteristics of years in practice, discipline and sex. We found evidence that training in sensemaking through participation in ECHO promotes improved ethical response self-efficacy of clinicians. However, results also suggest that a traditional ECHO format that does not explicitly introduce sensemaking strategies into the training does not result in the same learning outcomes as measured through an ethical response self-efficacy survey. This study found important preliminary results to support use of sensemaking approaches in clinical ethics training. (shrink)

In the last thirty years historians of republicanism have offered us the image of Harrington as the true hero of Machiavellism. This paper suggests instead that Harrington adopted Machiavelli's method in political science, but shared only few of his master's values, often referring to those cherished in anti-Machiavellian circles, as in the case of the agrarian laws. Indebted to the anti-Machiavellian Petrus Cunaeus's analysis of the Jewish Jubilee laws, Harrington transformed Cunaeus's specific observations into a general law of his own (...) political science. This paper emphasizes the originality and modernity of such science, based on the inextricable interconnectedness between politics and economics. Further, it argues that this science entails a new, post-Machiavellian theory of liberty and property. (shrink)

The proliferation of public–private partnerships for development as an answer to many public challenges calls for careful evaluation. To this end, tailored frameworks are fundamental for helping understand the PPPs’ impact and for guiding corrective adjustment. Scholars have developed frameworks focusing on the partners’ relationships, the order of effects, and the distinction between outputs and outcomes. To capture a PPP’s complexity and multiple linkages with its environment, we argue that a thorough evaluation should adopt a stakeholder-oriented approach and consider the (...) costs and benefits that a PPP implies for them—especially as taxpayers’ money is involved. For this purpose, we build on a stakeholder-oriented evaluation framework from the nonprofit business partnership literature. In line with our broad evaluation conception, we extend it with the manifold ripple effects that PPPs for development have and include the time dimension for the links between different PPP stages and related outcomes to become clearer. Applying this framework to an illustrative case, we highlight important direct and especially indirect stakeholder outcomes, which a narrow evaluation would omit, point to the challenges involved in the evaluation endeavor, and identify interesting future research areas. (shrink)

In this article, we shed light on the emergence, diffusion, and use of socio-technological future visions. The artificial intelligence future vision of the German federal government is examined and juxtaposed with the respective news media coverage of the German media. By means of a content analysis of frames, it is demonstrated how the German government strategically uses its AI future vision to uphold the status quo. The German media largely adapt the government´s frames and do not integrate alternative future narratives (...) into the public debate. These findings are substantiated in the framing of AI futures in policy documents of the German government and articles of four different German newspapers. It is shown how the German past is mirrored in the German AI future envisioned by the government, safeguarding the present power constellation that is marked by a close unity of politics and industry. The German media partly expose the government´s frames and call for future visions that include fundamentally different political designs less influenced by the power structures of the past and present. (shrink)

The move to remote learning during COVID-19 has impacted billions of students. While research shows that school closure, and the pandemic more generally, has led to student distress, the possibility that these disruptions can also prompt growth in is a worthwhile question to investigate. The current study examined stress-related growth (SRG) in a sample of students returning to campus after a period of COVID-19 remote learning (n= 404, age = 13–18). The degree to which well-being skills were taught at school (...) (i.e., positive education) before the COVID-19 outbreak and student levels of SRG upon returning to campus was testedviastructural equation modeling. Positive reappraisal, emotional processing, and strengths use in students were examined as mediators. The model provided a good fit [χ2= 5.37,df= 3,p= 0.146, RMSEA = 0.044 (90% CI = 0.00–0.10), SRMR = 0.012, CFI = 99, TLI = 0.99] with 56% of the variance in SRG explained. Positive education explained 15% of the variance in cognitive reappraisal, 7% in emotional processing, and 16% in student strengths use during remote learning. The results are discussed using a positive education paradigm with implications for teaching well-being skills at school to foster growth through adversity and assist in times of crisis. (shrink)

A well-known debate in normative ethics is that between proponents of Act Consequentialism and Rule Consequentialism. Given the structural similarities between Rule Consequentialism and existing forms of Contractualism, one might expect a similar debate to arise among contractualists. However, this is not the case. Some, following T. M. Scanlon, even argue that this question is “misconceived” – that there is something deeply mistaken about considering the possibility of an act-based form of contractualism. In this paper, I challenge this claim.

Do we think in a language-like format? Taking the marker of language-like formats to be the property of unconstrained systematicity, this paper considers the following master argument for the claim that we do: language is unconstrainedly systematic, if language is unconstrainedly systematic then so is thought, so thought is unconstrainedly systematic. It is easy to feel that there is something right about this argument, that there will be some way of filling in its details that will vindicate the idea that (...) our thought must be unconstrainedly systematic given that the language in which we express it is. Clearly, however, the second premise needs support—we need a principled reason for moving from the unconstrained systematicity of language to the unconstrained systematicity of thought. This paper gives three passes at formulating such a principle. This turns out to be much harder than it might seem. We should, I conclude, resist falling too easily for the lure of this master argument for the language-like format of thought. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article explores the justification of states' territorial rights. It starts by introducing three questions that all current theories of territorial rights attempt to answer: how to justify the right to settle, the right to exclude, and the right to settle and exclude with reference to a particular territory. It proposes a ‘permissive’ theory of territorial rights, arguing that the citizens of each state are entitled to the particular territory they collectively occupy, if and only if they are also politically (...) committed to the establishment of a global political authority realizing just reciprocal relations. The article is developed by introducing some key features of the permissive theory and by explaining how such an account addresses the questions of settlement, exclusion and particularity in ways that significantly improve on existing rival accounts (most prominently: acquisition theories, legitimacy-based theories and nationalist theories). (shrink)

Due to the elusive nature of the surviving documentation, it is often difficult to assess in what areas and to what extent the Tridentine prescriptions on sacred images led to acts of censorship directed at works of art. The Milanese diocese at the time of Archbishop Carlo Borromeo (1564–84) stands out as a rare case for which policies concerning the control of sacred art and their practical implementation are relatively well documented. This article examines Borromeo’s legislation on religious artworks and (...) how it was translated into practice, highlighting the role played by the administrative system of his diocese in the effort to identify and censor inappropriate works of art. I bring to light these dynamics through an in-depth analysis of the so-called Index of Profane Paintings, a document recording the results of a systematic enquiry into artworks that did not comply with Tridentine standards, carried out in the Milanese diocese under Borromeo. Despite being the only known evidence of an investigation of this kind made in the sixteenth century, this document has been largely ignored by art historians. I discuss the date and circumstances in which the Index was compiled, as well as the methods and targets of the enquiry it records. I then examine the problems raised by the artworks denounced and the solutions envisaged for them, exploring their relationship with contemporary religious and visual culture. A revised transcription and an English translation of the document are given in the Appendices. (shrink)

Is it possible to justify territorial rights? Provided a justification for territorial rights can be found, does it ground claims toparticularterritories? And provided a claim to particular territories can be justified, what kind of claim is it? Is it a claim to jurisdiction? A claim to control resources? A claim to control the movement of people across borders? In this paper I review some prominent accounts seeking to answer these questions. After outlining their main features, I focus on some difficulties (...) they encounter, in particular with regard to the justification of exclusion. (shrink)

This article explores the tensions between cosmopolitanism and sovereignty as a means to conceptualize the ethics of European foreign policy. It starts by discussing the claim that, in order for the EU to play a meaningful role as an international actor, a definition of the common ethical values orienting its political conduct is required. The question of a European federation of states and its ethical conceptualization emerges clearly in some of the philosophical writings of the 17th and 18th centuries. I (...) seek to provide an outline of the main arguments presented by authors such as Saint Pierre, Rousseau and Kant regarding the implications of the emerging difference between cosmopolitanism and the law of nations in the ethics of international relations. The article focuses on the normative significance of the concept of sovereignty as it emerges in modern political philosophy and highlights its tensions with the ideas of moral and political cosmopolitanism. This exploration serves a double function: theoretical and practical. From the theoretical perspective it leads to a better understanding of the tensions involved in conceptualizing a common ethical orientation for the states of Europe. From the practical standpoint it sheds light on some persistent difficulties the European Union faces in trying to move beyond an intergovernmental political arrangement in the field of foreign policy. (shrink)

This article investigates the emergence of the concept of stress in the 1930s and outlines its changing disciplinary and conceptual frames up until 1960. Originally stress was a physiological concept applied to the hormonal regulation of the body under stressful conditions. Correlated closely with chemical research into corticosteroids for more than a decade, the stress concept finally became a topic in cognitive psychology. One reason for this shift of the concept to another discipline was the fact that the hormones previously (...) linked to the stress concept were successfully transferred from laboratory to medical practice and adopted by disciplines such as rheumatology and dermatology. Thus the stress concept was dissociated from its hormonal context and became a handy formula that allowed postindustrial society to conceive of stress as a matter of individual concern. From a physiological phenomenon stress turned into an object of psychological discourse and individual coping strategies. (shrink)

CYBATHLON is an international championship where people with severe physical disabilities compete with the aid of state-of-the-art assistive technology. In one of the disciplines, the BCI Race, tetraplegic pilots compete in a computer game race by controlling an avatar with a brain-computer interface. This competition offers a perfect opportunity for BCI researchers to study long-term training effects in potential end-users, and to evaluate BCI performance in a realistic environment. In this work, we describe the BCI system designed by the team (...) Mirage91 for participation in the CYBATHLON BCI Series 2019, as well as in the CYBATHLON 2020 Global Edition. Furthermore, we present the BCI’s interface with the game and the main methodological strategies, along with a detailed evaluation of its performance over the course of the training period, which lasted 14 months. The developed system was a 4-class BCI relying on task-specific modulations of brain rhythms. We implemented inter-session transfer learning to reduce calibration time, and to reinforce the stability of the brain patterns. Additionally, in order to compensate for potential intra-session shifts in the features’ distribution, normalization parameters were continuously adapted in an unsupervised fashion. Across the aforementioned 14 months, we recorded 26 game-based training sessions. Between the first eight sessions, and the final eight sessions leading up to the CYBATHLON 2020 Global Edition, the runtimes significantly improved from 255 ± 23 s to 225 ± 22 s, respectively. Moreover, we observed a significant increase in the classifier’s accuracy from 46 to 53%, driven by more distinguishable brain patterns. Compared to conventional single session, non-adaptive BCIs, the inter-session transfer learning and unsupervised intra-session adaptation techniques significantly improved the performance. This long-term study demonstrates that regular training helped the pilot to significantly increase the distance between task-specific patterns, which resulted in an improvement of performance, both with respect to class separability in the calibration data, and with respect to the game. Furthermore, it shows that our methodological approaches were beneficial in transferring the performance across sessions, and most importantly to the CYBATHLON competitions. (shrink)

This article theorises the relationship between 1970s US Third World queer and feminist movements and Latin American anti-imperialist revolutions of the late twentieth century. I focus upon the historically occluded relationships between Third World feminists and queers in Chile and the United States throughout the transition to neoliberalism. My archive includes June Jordan’s little-known writings on Chile, the writings of Audre Lorde, and, primarily, a 1973 Third World feminist poetry reading staged in San Francisco shortly after the Pinochet coup. By (...) assembling this unconventional archive, I intervene into the domestication of US anti-racist queer, black and feminist of colour politics. I argue for the profoundly internationalist foundation of these formations. I work to re-animate a moment when the affective economies of anti-colonial ‘global revolution’ opened up space for the imagination of joint struggle – allowing a visceral sense of struggle’s urgency and vitality in ways that have since been partially eclipsed. (shrink)

Confirmatory bias, defined as the tendency to misinterpret new pieces of evidence as confirming previously held hypotheses, can lead to implacable, even incorrect decision making. It is one of the biases, along with anchoring, framing, and other judgment heuristic errors, that may lead to non-optimal behavior. This paper tests for the existence of confirmatory bias behavior in a uniquely economic setting (tax policy) and in a context relatively lacking in ambiguity. It also tests whether the confirmatory bias phenomenon can be (...) prevalent enough to affect aggregate outcomes, a characteristic important in economic models in particular. The results indicate not only that confirmatory bias exists, but that the confirmatory bias effect may be stronger for evidence relating to losses than for comparable evidence relating to gains. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungLokale, religionsbezogene Ereignisse werden vermehrt global diskutiert – auch die „Handschlag-Affäre“. Bauend auf Forschung zu Öffentlichkeit, zusammenfallenden Kontexten und islamfeindlichen Online-Diskursen argumentiert der Beitrag, dass in der medialen Verbreitung der Affäre geografische, zeitliche und soziale Räume zusammenfielen, was die negativen Folgen für die involvierten Akteure miterklärt. Das geografische und zeitliche Zusammenfallen wird anhand von Metadaten von 279 Nachrichten- und 152 Webseiten-/blog-artikeln (dt. und engl.; veröffentlicht 2015–2017) veranschaulicht. Das soziale Zusammenfallen wird durch eine thematische Analyse von 45 Webseiten-/blog-artikeln der islamfeindlichen Online-Öffentlichkeit (...) illustriert. Ergebnisse zeigen eine mediale Ausbreitung von lokal zu global (geografische Räume), eine Zeitverzögerung zwischen Ereignis und Skandalisierung (zeitliche Räume) und eine ideologische Rekontextualisierung in der islamfeindlichen Öffentlichkeit (soziale Räume). (shrink)