Thinking out of habit: an embodied perspective In the second half of the twentieth century, habit had received little attention in the cognitive sciences and philosophy of cognition. This despite the extensive theoretical attention habit received in phenomenology and pragmatism. This is because due to influence of behaviorism and the cognitivist revolution, habit was reduced to mechanical stimulus-response reaction that is learned through drill and repetition, and therefore habit cannot be considered intelligent. In this article I argue that a richer (...) and more accurate notion of habit is possible through an embodied vision of cognition, namely enactivism and ecological psychology. This means that we can consider habit as intelligent without equating habit with reflective thought. Such a notion is possible because both enactivism and ecological psychology have their conceptual roots in pragmatism and phenomenology. Secondly, an embodied vison of cognition can describe how our habits are formed from sensorimotor contingencies and are self-organizing patterns of behavior in interaction with an environment. This can be described through the metaphor of ‘laying down a path’, whereby taking a shortcut across a field of grass a path is formed, which enables walking across the field of grass. Laying down a path is more than a metaphor, but also an example of the sociomaterial dimension of habit. Habits are always formed in an interaction between an organism and an environment that is, in our case both material and social. (shrink)

In order to contain public care expenditure, policymakers in the Netherlands have over the last decades formulated in ever more stringent ways what ought to be expected from spouses, partners, and family members with regard to care for dependent relatives. The current Dutch coalition cabinet plans to shift the principal responsibility for nonmedical care, including demanding forms of care such as long-term personal care, to individuals and families. I argue that these policy developments imply cost redistribution rather than cost containment (...) and that this redistribution is disadvantageous for women. (shrink)

This article is about the logic of the concept of "coherence" as used by historians to justify an argument. Despite its effectiveness in historical arguments, coherence is problematic for epistemologists and some theorists of history. The main purpose of this paper is to present some insights that bear upon the logical status of coherence. As will be demonstrated, this will also shed some light on the allegedly dubious epistemological position of coherence. In general I will argue that, logically seen, coherence (...) is a property of a set of related beliefs which makes it possible to justify a choice out of different factually justifiable interpretations. Coherence disambiguates vague or ambiguous observations. As words lose their vagueness or ambiguity in contexts, so do contexts disambiguate historical facts. My argument will be based on some relatively recent findings about the cognitive processes underlying vision and reading. Research in the field of text linguistics is used to show what kinds of relationship exist between historical representations that might be considered to cohere. (shrink)

An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self-paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both German (...) and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross-linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect. (shrink)

Departing from Pierre Bayle's discussion of Spinoza in the entry 'Japan' in his Dictionaire, this article discusses how debates about the Far East functioned as a foil for the polemics generated by the Radical Enlightement. The central point of investigation is a debate between Gerard Vossius and Georg Hornius, integrating three main issues where ideas about the East challenged accepted European authority: sacred history, republicanism, and natural philosophy. The article demonstrates that the onset of radicalism involved a plethora of old, (...) new and exotic ideas, from logic to linguistics and Hermeticism, before crystallizing into the scientific and political notions now associated with modernity. (shrink)

Pleidooi vooor eerherstel van de politiek, door de PvdA-fractieleider.

Setting the two hypotheses of complete neglect and full use of base rates against each other is inappropriate. The proper question concerns the degree to which base rates are used (or neglected), and under what conditions. We outline alternative approaches and recommend regression analysis. Koehler's conclusion that we have been oversold on the base rate fallacy seems to be premature.

The appliances people adopt, and the way they use them, can critically influence the sustainable energy transition. People are often attracted to appliances with many setting options that offer them more control. Yet, operating many setting options can have negative consequences for users and the management of sustainable energy systems, which may obstruct sustainability goals. We aim to study how to reduce the preference for many setting options without reducing the perceived attractiveness of the appliance. In line with our theorizing (...) we found that people opt for appliances with fewer setting options when they are asked to reflect on which options they would like to have from a list of possible setting options, while being equally satisfied with the appliance. In addition, we show that this is especially the case when asking people to select which setting options they would like an appliance to have, as this will feel like they gain options, rather than asking them which options they are willing to give up as this feels like losing options that their appliance could have. Our findings offer relatively easy and cost-efficient ways to decrease people’s desire for many setting options on appliances, decreasing stress on the user and the energy system, while ensuring satisfaction with and acceptance of the appliance. (shrink)

Martens vs. KIRAC: les extrêmes se touchent? This paper discusses the relationship between art and politics by taking Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation on the ‘politicization of art’ and the ‘aestheticization of politics’ as a starting point. The work of Dutch artist Renzo Martens and the work of art collective KIRAC are considered to be exemplifying the two sides of Benjamin’s formulation, and at the same time as representative of wider tendencies of the contemporary art world. I argue that, in their (...) extreme and contradictory positions, these sides also share a common, art-hostile moment, one that I counter with a conception of art as ‘acting as if’ (doen alsof) – with the dual dimension of acting (a form of praxis or performance) and ‘as if’ (imagined). Based on this idea of ‘acting as if’ I argue that art’s relationship to politics is one of productive contradiction. (shrink)

Thijs Lijster considers the thought of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno on such key topics as the relationship between art and historical experience, between avant-garde art and mass culture, and between the intellectual and the public.

Is het niet vreemd om te zeggen dat een verhaal uit de achtste eeuw voor Christus ons iets kan vertellen over onze hedendaagse westerse cultuur? Hoe kan de beschrijving van een wereld die geregeerd wordt door goden, heksen, nimfen en allerlei mythische gedrochten bijdragen aan ons zelfbegrip? Dat is minder vreemd dan het lijkt. Juist omdat Homeros helemaal aan het begin van onze beschaving stond, kunnen wij in retrospectief herkennen wat de nieuwe wereld scheidde van de oude. De homerische epen (...) vormen een eerste definitie van de westerse cultuur, zij geven de contouren aan van een manier van denken en handelen die de wereld tot op de dag van vandaag beheerst. (shrink)

The metaphor of base and superstructure has been one of the most controversial elements in Marxist aesthetics. In this text I discuss some of the many questions it raises. Today, many theorists believe that its problems are so extensive that it has lost all plausibility. I believe, however, that in rejecting the Marxist framework, aesthetics and cultural theory risks throwing out the baby with the bath water and jeopardizes its critical potential. Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj (...) Žižek, I will propose a heuristic reinterpretation of the metaphor of base and superstructure. (shrink)

John Rawls famously argued that the Difference Principle would be chosen by any rational agent in the original position. Derek Parfit and Philippe Van Parijs have claimed, contra Rawls, that it is not the Difference Principle which is implied by Rawls’ original position argument, but rather the more refined Lexical Difference Principle. In this paper, we study both principles in the context of social choice under ignorance. First, we present a general format for evaluating original position arguments in this context. (...) We argue that in this format, the Difference Principle can be specified in three conceptually distinct ways. We show that these three specifications give the same choice recommendations, and can be grounded in an original position argument in combination with the well-known maximin rule. Analogously, we argue that one can give at least four plausible specifications of the Lexical Difference Principle, which however turn out to give different recommendations in concrete choice scenarios. We prove that only one of these four specifications can be grounded in an original position argument. Moreover, this one specification seems the least appealing from the viewpoint of distributive justice. This insight points towards a general weakness of original position arguments. (shrink)