This article is a study of three major metaphors organizing nationalistic discourse about Cyprus in two online forums for Turkish university students. The analysis suggests that discussants symbolically warranted their constructions of the future of Cyprus and Turkish Cypriots with metaphors of blood and heroism that emphasized their personal and collective memory of sacrifice. Sports metaphors were used predominantly to convey a sense of the strategic importance of Cyprus. In addition, discussants employed gender and sexual metaphors to structure the tension (...) between nationalist feelings associated with motherland Turkey as a pure, virgin female, and the geopolitical demands of the nation-state, portrayed as a father faced with uneasy choices. (shrink)

La autora presenta una critica a la concepcion clasica de los sentidos asumida por la mayoria de autores naturalistas que pretenden explicar el contenido mental. Esta crítica se basa en datos neurobiologicos sobre los sentidos que apuntan a que estos no parecen describir caracteristicas objetivas del mundo, sino que actuan de forma ʼnarcisita', es decir, representan informacion en funcion de los intereses concretos del organismo.El articulo se encuentra también en: Bechtel, et al., Philosophy and the Neuroscience.

A common view in both philosophy and the vision sciences is that, in human vision, wavelength information is primarily ‘for’ colouring: for seeing surfaces and various media as having colours. In this article we examine this assumption of ‘colour-for-colouring’. To motivate the need for an alternative theory, we begin with three major puzzles from neurophysiology, puzzles that are not explained by the standard theory. We then ask about the role of wavelength information in vision writ large. How might wavelength information (...) be used by any monochromat or dichromat and, finally, by a trichromatic primate with object vision? We suggest that there is no single ‘advantage’ to trichromaticity but a multiplicity, only one of which is the ability to see surfaces and so on as having categorical colours. Instead, the human trichromatic retina exemplifies a scheme for a general encoding of wavelength information given the constraints imposed by high spatial resolution object vision. Chromatic vision, like its partner, luminance vision, is primarily for seeing. Viewed this way, the ‘puzzles’ presented at the outset make perfect sense. 1 Reframing the Problem1.1 Introduction1.2 Three puzzles1.2.1 Why is trichromatic vision an anomaly in diurnal mammals?1.2.2 Why does the colour system occupy such a large and central part in human vision?1.2.3 Why are the blue cones so rare?1.3 Recasting the question2 The Costs and Benefits of Spectral Vision2.1 Spectral information and object vision2.2 Encoding the spectral dimension of light2.2.1 ‘General’ versus ‘specific’ encoding2.2.2 Spectral encoding and the monochromat2.2.3 Spectral encoding and the dichromat2.2.4 Spectral encoding and the human trichromat2.3 Three puzzles revisited2.3.1 Why is trichromatic vision an anomaly in diurnal mammals?2.3.2 Why does the colour system occupy such a large and central part in human vision?2.3.3 Why are the blue cones so rare3 Conclusion. (shrink)

: In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett presents the Multiple Drafts Theory of consciousness, a very brief, largely empirical theory of brain function. From these premises, he draws a number of quite radical conclusions—for example, the conclusion that conscious events have no determinate time of occurrence. The problem, as many readers have pointed out, is that there is little discernible route from the empirical premises to the philosophical conclusions. In this article, I try to reconstruct Dennett's argument, providing both the philosophical (...) views behind the empirical premises, and the hidden empirical arguments behind the derivation of the philosophical conclusions. (shrink)

Throughout the text, fundamental questions concerning the nature of visual perception are addressed.

Studies on participation and spatial orientations of college students have examined aspects of university life, as projected through language, from a reportorial or narrative perspective, but hardly any one of these studies has been devoted exclusively to how students' participation structure, together with the activities participants orient to at the participation space, evokes shared socio-academic backgrounds and cultural constraints, a major way to gain access into the students' cognitive and pragmatic tendencies. This research, thus, addresses itself to Nigerian college students' (...) participation configuration, their participant roles, and the illocutionary goals of their encounters within the Goffmanian participation framework and discourse pragmatic parameters. For data, 100 interactions amongst students of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, were taped and scrutinised for participation forms and spatial descriptions. Two types of participation structure are manifest in the interactions, namely, unmarked and marked participations. The unmarked participation structure is the regular frame in which Goffman's ratification and non-ratification framework is strictly observed. The marked participation configuration, an unexpected interactional frame which bifurcates into accommodated and non-accommodated structures, takes interruptions by unaccredited participants as appropriate or inappropriate. The paper contends that participation configuration and contextual elements prescribe participant roles together with the pragmatic functions assigned to language and actions in the interactions. Thus, the illocutionary goals of participants, rooted in socio-academic matters and enabled by participation structures, spatial orientations and body language manipulations are contextually negotiated. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend divine conceptualism against one prominent critique from William Lane Craig in his book God and Abstract Objects. Craig argues that the divine conceptualist’s only way out of the “bootstrapping objection” results in an unpalatable concession of defeat to the metaphysical anti-realist. Craig’s argument depends on an analysis whereby God is causally or logically prior to the divine concepts. As such, the conceptualist may resist it by adopting—following Ralph Cudworth—a version of divine conceptualism which does not (...) construe the relationship between God and His thoughts as one of either causal or logical priority. (shrink)

Nigerian Pidgin is a popular informal communicative code in Nigerian social, economic and political experience. It is sometimes spoken in formal situations in the hospital setting when participants find it pragmatically convenient. Despite its communicative significance, little research has been carried out on the use of Pidgin in conversational interactions in Nigerian hospitals, a gap this study fills by investigating how Pidgin is used in constructing emotions relating to social and medical conditions in hospitals. Seventy five interactions between doctors and (...) clients in Nigerian Pidgin were sampled; the data analysis was based centrally on relevance theory. Nigerian Pidgin evokes negative and positive emotions. Negative emotions manifest as pain and fear, while positive emotions appear as excitement and relief. Doctors and clients gain access to each other’s intentions through their shared knowledge of Pidgin, their co-construction of ailments, and their contextually based local interactional resources. They thus negotiate emotions as cue-dependent variables that are steered with the help of cognitive processes. (shrink)

Rönesans ve ardında Aydınlanma dönemiyle beraber gerçekleşen bilimsel ilerlemeler fazlaca dikkat çekmeyi başarmıştır. Bunun sonucunda modern bilim, bilginin en güvenilir kaynağı olarak kabul edilerek onun her meseleyi çözebileceği bir zemine oturtturulmuştur. Öyle ki bilim, Tanrı’nın var olup olmadığına dair de bilgi üretebileceği dillendirilmiştir. Bu aşamada ideolojik yaklaşımların ve din adına sergilenen bazı temelsiz akıl dışı argümanların katkısıyla da bilim artık kutsal bir müesseseye dönüştürülmüştür. Kutsala dönüştürülen bilim, bir diğer kutsal olan dinle artık ortak bir zeminde buluşamayacak hale dönüşmüş ve yanlış (...) bir dikotomiye alet edilmiştir. Dolayısıyla artık ilerleyen bilim, yavaş yavaş “Tanrı’yı yok etmeye” başlamıştır. Artık bu hale dönüşen bilim anlayışı ateistlerin de en büyük destek noktaları olmuştur. Kutsala dönüşen bu bilim anlayışı her ne kadar temelde Hıristiyanlık inancına karşıt olarak ortaya çıkmış olsa da yer yer tüm inançlara yansıtılmaya çalışılmıştır. Oysaki bilimden, “bilimin ilerlemesiyle Tanrı’nın yok olacağına” dair veri sunmasını beklemek aslında bilimin sınırlarından bihaber olmayı gerekli kılmaktadır. Bilimin ilerlemesiyle inancın yok olacağı söylemi, İslam dini açısından kabul edilebilir bir argüman olarak görülmemektedir. Çünkü İslam, aklı dinamik olarak tasvir etmekte ve tabiatı Tanrı’nın varlığının delili olarak sunmaktadır. Diğer taraftan bilimin ilerlemesiyle Tanrı’ya yer kalmayacağını iddia edenlerin unutmaması gereken önemli husus, dinin/imanın bir bilgi eksikliği olmadığı aksine bilginin insanı tasdiğe yönelttiği gerçeğidir. Ayrıca Müslümanların bilimde geri kalmalarının sebebini onların inançlarına bağlayanlar, bunu siyasi, sosyal ve ekonomik bazı sebeplerde araması gerekmektedir. (shrink)