In this paper, we explore the architecture of downward causation on the basis of three central cases. We set out by answering the question of how top-down causation is possible in the universe. The universe is not causally closed, because of irreducible randomness at the quantum level. What is more, contextual effects can already be observed at the level of quantum physics, where higher levels can modify the nature of lower-level elements by changing their context, or even creating them. (...) As one moves up through higher levels, contextual effects on lower levels occur on various scales within nature, which is crucial in biology in general and the brain in particular. We then argue that there are important logical downward causes.objects have causal effects on material-energetic systems. It can be shown that abstract objects have measurable effects on lower levels, which needs to be accounted for by successful explanations of real phenomena such as intentional action. Intentional action has the form of deductive causation from logical structures to human agency. Without this assumption, we would not be warranted in believing that our physical theories latch onto a universe that is essentially the way we discover it to be. Denying top-down causation on account of the idea that the universe permits only bottom-up constitution of wholes from lower-level elements leads to undermining the very possibility of knowledge and science. Thus, it can be rejected as a global form of explanation. We sketch a model for mind-body interaction according to which the various levels of a human organism together enable the emergence of mental top-down effects. They are necessary conditions for the emergence of human mindedness. Once it is clear that downward causation is a widespread natural phenomenon, the apparent mystery of mental causation is, in principle, solved. (shrink)

The distinction between top-down and bottom-up effects is widely relied on in experimental psychology. However, there is an important problem with the way it is normally defined. Top-down effects are effects of previously-stored information on processing the current input. But on the face of it that includes the information that is implicit in the operation of any psychological process – in its dispositions to transition from some types of representational state to others. This paper suggests a way (...) to distinguish information stored in that way from the kind of influence of prior information that psychologists are concerned to classify as a top-down effect. So-drawn, the distinction is not just of service to theoretical psychology. Asking about the extent of top-down processing is one way to pose some of the questions at issue in philosophical debates about cognitive penetrability – about the extent of the influence of cognitive states on perception. The existence of a theoretically-useful perception-cognition distinction has come under pressure, but even if it has to be abandoned, some of the concerns addressed in the cognitive penetrability literature can be recaptured by asking about the extent of top-down influences on any given psychological process. That formulation is more general, since it can be applied to any psychological process, not just those that are paradigmatically perceptual. (shrink)

The neural correlates of software programming skills have been the target of an increasing number of studies in the past few years. Those studies focused on error-monitoring during software code inspection. Others have studied task-related cognitive load as measured by distinct neurophysiological measures. Most studies addressed only syntax errors. However, a recent functional MRI study suggested a pivotal role of the insula during error-monitoring when challenging deep-level analysis of code inspection was required. This raised the hypothesis that the insula is (...) causally involved in deep error-monitoring. To confirm this hypothesis, we carried out a new fMRI study where participants performed a deep source-code comprehension task that included error-monitoring to detect bugs in the code. The generality of our paradigm was enhanced by comparison with a variety of tasks related to text reading and bugless source-code understanding. Healthy adult programmers participated in this 3T fMRI experiment. The activation maps evoked by error-related events confirmed significant activations in the insula [p < 0.05]. Importantly, a posterior-to-anterior causality shift was observed concerning the role of the insula: in the absence of error, causal directions were mainly bottom-up, whereas, in their presence, the strong causal top-down effects from frontal regions, in particular, the anterior cingulate cortex was observed. (shrink)

When word pairs having a familiar order are sequentially flashed on a computer in their non-familiar order, , observers have a strong phenomenology of seeing them in familiar order . Reversal errors remained frequent even when participants obtained perceptual experience of reverse-display items by beginning with a block of longer-duration trials. A forced-choice order-detection procedure reduced but did not eliminate reversal errors, showing that “fast pairs” is a robust perceptual illusion. Even adjective + noun pairs showed reversal errors, and reversal (...) errors increased with the log frequency of the word pair, consistent with a strong role for statistical processing at the level of multi-word units. (shrink)

We argue that intelligible appeals to interlevel causes (top-down and bottom-up) can be understood, without remainder, as appeals to mechanistically mediated effects. Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of causal and constitutive relations, where the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. The idea of causation would have to stretch to the breaking point to accommodate interlevel causes. The notion of a mechanistically mediated effect is preferable because it can do all of the required work without appealing to mysterious interlevel causes. (...) When interlevel causes can be translated into mechanistically mediated effects, the posited relationship is intelligible and should raise no special philosophical objections. When they cannot, they are suspect. (shrink)

This book presents the latest research, conducted by leading philosophers and scientists from various fields, on the topic of top-down causation. The chapters combine to form a unique, interdisciplinary perspective, drawing upon George Ellis's extensive research and novel perspectives on topics including downwards causation, weak and strong emergence, mental causation, biological relativity, effective field theory and levels in nature. The collection also serves as a Festschrift in honour of George Ellis' 80th birthday. The extensive and interdisciplinary scope of this book (...) makes it vital reading for anyone interested in the work of George Ellis and current research on the topics of causation and emergence. (shrink)

In many fields in the life sciences investigators refer to downward or top-down causal effects. Craver and Bechtel defended the view that such cases should be understood in terms of a constitution relation between levels in a mechanism and causation as solely an intra-level relation. Craver and Bechtel, however, provided insufficient specification as to when entities constitute a higher-level mechanism. In this paper I appeal to graph-theoretic representations of networks that are now widely employed in systems biology and neuroscience (...) to identify mechanisms with the modules that exhibit high clustering. As a result of the interconnections of nodes in these modules/mechanisms, they often exhibit complex dynamic behaviors that constrain how the individual components respond to external inputs, an important feature of cases viewed as involving top-down causation. (shrink)

On the basis of two large scale diary studies (n = 2022, n = 762) We study differences in the effects of dispositions and situations in the formation of positive and negative retrospective affect (retrospective-PA and retrospective-NA, respectively), the affect associated with extended (e.g. daily) experiences, as opposed to very short (episodic) experiences. We suggest that the differences between retrospective-PA and retrospective-NA is due to the fact that positive retrospective evaluation (i.e. the evaluation of positive retrospective affect) involves primarily (...) top-down processing, in which people resort to their dispositions in making these evaluations, whereas negative retrospective evaluation (the evaluation of negative retrospective affect) is primarily based on the cumulative affects of individual experiences. (shrink)

Since time immemorial, the phenomenon of leadership and its understanding has attracted the attention of the business world because of its important role in human groups. Nevertheless, for years efforts to understand this concept have only been centred on people in leadership roles, thus overlooking an important aspect in its understanding: the necessary moral dimension which is implicit in the relationship between leader and follower. As an illustrative example of the importance of considering good morality in leadership, an empirical study (...) is conducted in which a good performance of the "leader-follower" relationship is reflected when individuals perceive ethical leadership in higher hierarchical managerial levels. To be precise, findings of this study demonstrate that follower job response is improved through an ethics trickle-down partial effect from the Top Manager to the immediate supervisor, and also reveal both key aspects and managerial level on which the practice of ethical leadership should rest upon to have a stronger effect on the follower positive job response. Practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are finally presented. (shrink)

The current study replicated and extended the results from a study conducted by Narayan, Mak, and Bialystok (2017) that found effects of top‐down linguistic information on a speaker discrimination task by examining four conditions: rhymes (day‐bay), compounds (day‐dream), reverse compounds (dream‐day), and unrelated words (day‐bee). The original study found that participants were more likely to judge two words to be spoken by the same speaker if the words cohered lexically (created lexical compounds such as day‐dream) or were phonologically (...) related (rhymes, such as day‐bay), but their study contained two limitations: (a) Same‐ and different‐speaker trials were analyzed separately, which obscures effects of response bias, and (b) cross‐gender pairs were used in the different‐speaker trials, potentially inflating performance. The current study addresses these limitations by including only within‐gender trials and by examining sensitivity and bias using signal detection theory. Our results not only provide support of the original study but also provide clear evidence that listeners are biased to judge two words as being produced by the same person when they share either phonological information (rhymes) or lexical‐semantic coherence (compounds). Thus, the current study provides an important modified replication of previous research. (shrink)

People categorize objects slowly when visual input is highly impoverished instead of optimal. While bottom-up models may explain a decision with optimal input, perceptual hypothesis testing (PHT) theories implicate top-down processes with impoverished input. Brain mechanisms and the time course of PHT are largely unknown. This event-related potential study used a neuroimaging paradigm that implicated prefrontal cortex in top-down modulation of occipitotemporal cortex. Subjects categorized more impoverished and less impoverished real and pseudo objects. PHT theories predict larger impoverishment effects (...) for real than pseudo objects because top-down processes modulate knowledge only for real objects, but different PHT variants predict different timing. Consistent with parietal-prefrontal PHT variants, around 250 ms, the earliest impoverished real object interaction started on an N3 complex, which reflects interactive cortical activity for object cognition. N3 impoverishment effects localized to both prefrontal and occipitotemporal cortex for real objects only. The N3 also showed knowledge effects by 230 ms that localized to occipitotemporal cortex. Later effects reflected (a) word meaning in temporal cortex during the N400, (b) internal evaluation of prior decision and memory processes and secondary higher-order memory involving anterotemporal parts of a default mode network during posterior positivity (P600), and (c) response related activity in posterior cingulate during an anterior slow wave (SW) after 700 ms. Finally, response activity in supplementary motor area during a posterior SW after 900 ms showed impoverishment effects that correlated with RTs. Convergent evidence from studies of vision, memory, and mental imagery which reflects purely top-down inputs, indicates that the N3 reflects the critical top-down processes of PHT. A hybrid multiple-state interactive, PHT and decision theory best explains the visual constancy of object cognition. (shrink)

A critical issue in perception is the manner in which top‐down expectancies guide lower level perceptual processes. In speech, a common paradigm is to construct continua ranging between two phonetic endpoints and to determine how higher level lexical context influences the perceived boundary. We applied this approach to music, presenting participants with major/minor triad continua after brief musical contexts. Two experiments yielded results that differed from classic results in speech perception. In speech, context generally expands the category of the (...) expected stimuli. We found the opposite in music: The major/minor boundary shifted toward the expected category, contracting it. Together, these experiments support the hypothesis that musical expectancy can feed back to affect lower‐level perceptual processes. However, it may do so in a way that differs fundamentally from what has been seen in other domains. (shrink)

The framework of effective field theory is a natural one in which to understand the claim that the spacetime of general relativity is an emergent low-energy phenomenon. I argue for a pragmatic understanding of EFT, given that the appropriate conception of emergence it suggests is necessarily epistemological in a sense. Analogue models of spacetime are examples of the top-down approach to EFT. They offer concrete illustrations of spacetime emergent within an EFT, and lure us toward a strong analogy between condensed (...) matter physics and GR. I argue that we should be wary of this strong analogy, not least because the pragmatic view of EFT places limits on how much we can legitimately draw from it. On the other hand, programs that treat GR as an EFT and calculate quantum corrections are an example of the bottom-up approach and are explicitly pragmatic in character. I explore what we may learn about the nature of emergent spacetime by comparing these two approaches. (shrink)

Based on social learning theory and the trickle-down effects, in which behavioral patterns cascade from one management level to the next, we attempt to answer whether upper-level managers’ temporal leadership can be transferred to lower-level managers to form their temporal leadership, and what the mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions for this occurrence are. By analyzing the data from 234 middle-level managers and 686 junior managers/employees, we found that top managers’ temporal leadership was positively associated with middle-level managers’ temporal leadership (...) through the mediating role of middle-level managers’ temporal leadership perspective and that the relationship was moderated by middle-level managers’ identification with the top manager. Identification with the top manager, in particular, strengthens both the top manager’s positive effect on middle-level managers’ temporal leadership and the top manager’s temporal leadership’s mediating role in this relationship through their temporal leadership perspective. The theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are investigated. (shrink)

Is gender-emotion stereotype a “one-hundred percent” top-down processing phenomenon, or are there additional contributions to cognitive processing from background clues when they are related to stereotypes? In the present study, we measured the gender-emotion stereotypes of 57 undergraduates with a face recall task and found that, regardless of whether the emotional expressions of distractors were congruent or incongruent with targets, people tended to misperceive the fearful faces of men as angry and the angry faces of women as fearful. In particular, (...) there was a significantly larger effect in the distractor-incongruent condition. The revised process-dissociation procedure analysis confirmed that both automatic and controlled processing have their own independent effects on gender-emotion stereotypes. This finding supports a dual-processing perspective on stereotypes and contributes to future research in both theory and methodology. (shrink)

Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross-cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians and (...) Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited. (shrink)

Perception of time is susceptible to distortions; among other factors, it has been suggested that the perceived duration of a stimulus is affected by the observer’s expectations. It has been hypothesized that the duration of an oddball stimulus is overestimated because it is unexpected, whereas repeated stimuli have a shorter perceived duration because they are expected. However, recent findings suggest instead that fulfilled expectations about a stimulus elicit an increase in perceived duration, and that the oddball effect occurs because the (...) oddball is a target stimulus, not because it is unexpected. Therefore, it has been suggested that top-down attention is sometimes sufficient to explain this effect, and sometimes only necessary, with an additional contribution from saliency. However, how the expectedness of a target stimulus and its salient features affect its perceived duration is still an open question. In the present study, participants’ expectations about and the saliency of target stimuli were orthogonally manipulated with stimuli presented on a short (Experiment 1) or long (Experiment 2) temporal scale. Four repetitive standard stimuli preceded each target stimulus in a task in which participants judged whether the target was longer or shorter in duration than the standards. Engagement of top-down attention to target stimuli increased their perceived duration to the same extent irrespective of their expectedness. A small but significant additional contribution to this effect from the saliency of target stimuli was dependent on the temporal scale of stimulus presentation. In Experiment 1, saliency only significantly increased perceived duration in the case of expected target stimuli. In contrast, in Experiment 2, saliency exerted a significant effect on the overestimation elicited by unexpected target stimuli, but the contribution of this variable was eliminated in the case of expected target stimuli. These findings point to top-down attention as the primary cognitive mechanism underlying the perceptual extraction and processing of task-relevant information, which may be strongly correlated with perceived duration. Furthermore, the scalar properties of timing were observed, favoring the pacemaker-accumulator model of timing as the underlying timing mechanism. (shrink)

Physics underlies all complexity, including our own existence: how is this possible? How can our own lives emerge from interactions of electrons, protons, and neutrons? This book considers the interaction of physical and non-physical causation in complex systems such as living beings, and in particular in the human brain, relating this to the emergence of higher levels of complexity with real causal powers. In particular it explores the idea of top-down causation, which is the key effect allowing the emergence of (...) true complexity and also enables the causal efficacy of non-physical entities, including the value of money, social conventions, and ethical choices. (shrink)

A principal goal of the discipline of artificial morality is to design artificial agents to act as if they are moral agents. Intermediate goals of artificial morality are directed at building into AI systems sensitivity to the values, ethics, and legality of activities. The development of an effective foundation for the field of artificial morality involves exploring the technological and philosophical issues involved in making computers into explicit moral reasoners. The goal of this paper is to discuss strategies for implementing (...) artificial morality and the differing criteria for success that are appropriate to different strategies. (shrink)

Cognitive systems face a tension between stability and plasticity. The maintenance of long‐term representations that reflect the global regularities of the environment is often at odds with pressure to flexibly adjust to short‐term input regularities that may deviate from the norm. This tension is abundantly clear in speech communication when talkers with accents or dialects produce input that deviates from a listener's language community norms. Prior research demonstrates that when bottom‐up acoustic information or top‐down word knowledge is available to (...) disambiguate speech input, there is short‐term adaptive plasticity such that subsequent speech perception is shifted even in the absence of the disambiguating information. Although such effects are well‐documented, it is not yet known whether bottom‐up and top‐down resolution of ambiguity may operate through common processes, or how these information sources may interact in guiding the adaptive plasticity of speech perception. The present study investigates the joint contributions of bottom‐up information from the acoustic signal and top‐down information from lexical knowledge in the adaptive plasticity of speech categorization according to short‐term input regularities. The results implicate speech category activation, whether from top‐down or bottom‐up sources, in driving rapid adjustment of listeners' reliance on acoustic dimensions in speech categorization. Broadly, this pattern of perception is consistent with dynamic mapping of input to category representations that is flexibly tuned according to interactive processing accommodating both lexical knowledge and idiosyncrasies of the acoustic input. (shrink)

Mechanisms to engage lay citizens in science and technology are currently in vogue worldwide. While some engagement exercises aim to influence policy making, research suggests that they have had little discernable impacts in this regard. We explore the potentials and challenges of facilitating citizen engagement in nanotechnology from the “topdown,” addressing the following questions: Can academics and others within institutions initiate meaningful engagement with unorganized lay citizens from the top-down? Can they facilitate effective engagement among citizens, scientists, and policy makers (...) while building citizen engagement capacities? Is it possible to create independent bottom-up citizen engagement in scientific and technological issues from the top-down, and what are the challenges in doing so? Our experiences show that although academics can build citizens' individual, collective, and political capacities to engage with each other, scientists, and policy makers, this work is enormously time and energy intensive, and institutional support is needed to sustain it. (shrink)

Despite continuing interest in the impact of employees’ emotional intelligence in explaining for their engagement and emotional exhaustion, there are still large gaps in our understanding of the role played by contextual EI-related factors, such as an EI-related organizational culture and supervisors’ emotionally intelligent behavior. This two-study research approaches EI from a macro-level perspective, attempting to address three objectives: to develop and define a theoretical concept of EI-supportive organizational culture, to develop and validate measures of organizations’ EI-related values and practices, (...) and to investigate their top-down effect on employee engagement and exhaustion, via supervisor EI-related behavior. In the first study, we conceptualize and develop measures of perceived EI-related organizational values and human resource management practices, as separate yet related dimensions of organizations’ EI-related culture, and test their validity. In the second study, we build on the job demands-resources theory and Ability-Motivation-Opportunity framework to develop and test a model of the process links between perceived EI-related values and HRM practices and employee engagement and exhaustion, using a large sample of employees across industries in the USA workforce. In line with our hypotheses, the findings suggest that EI-supportive HRM practices have a top-down effect on employee engagement and exhaustion via supervisor EIB, whereas low regard for emotions values has a top-down effect on employee exhaustion via supervisor emotional misbehavior. Results are discussed in the context of the JD-R theory, AMO framework, and the EI literature. (shrink)

Biologists have long known that animal population dynamics are regulated by a combination of bottom-up and top-down forces. Yet, economists have argued that human population dynamics can also be influenced by intraspecific cooperation. Despite awareness of the role of interspecific cooperation in influencing resource availability and animal population dynamics, the role of intraspecific cooperation under different environmental conditions has rarely been considered. Here we examine the role of what we call “lateral forces” that act within populations and interact with external (...) top-down and bottom-up forces in influencing population dynamics using an individual-based model linking environmental quality, intraspecific cooperation, and population size. We find that the proportion of cooperators is higher when the environment is poor and population sizes are greatest under intermediate resources levels due to the contrasting effects of resource availability on behavior and population size. We also show that social populations are more resilient to environmental change than non-social ones because the benefits of intraspecific cooperation can outweigh the effects of constrained resource availability. Our study elucidates the complex relationship between environmental harshness, cooperation, and population dynamics, which is important for understanding the ecological consequences of cooperation. (shrink)

Selective attention depends on goal-directed and stimulus-driven modulatory factors, each relayed by different brain rhythms. Under certain circumstances, stress-related states can change the balance between goal-directed and stimulus-driven factors. However, the neuronal mechanisms underlying these changes remain unclear. In this study, we explored how psychosocial stress can modulate brain rhythms during an attentional task and a task-free period. We recorded the EEG and ECG activity of 42 healthy participants subjected to either the Trier Social Stress Test, a controlled procedure to (...) induce stress, or a comparable control protocol, flanked by an attentional task, a 90 s of task-free period and a state of anxiety questionnaire. We observed that psychosocial stress induced an increase in heart rate, self-reported anxiety, and alpha power synchronization. Also, psychosocial stress evoked a relative beta power increase during correct trials of the attentional task, which correlates positively with anxiety and heart rate increase, and inversely with attentional accuracy. These results suggest that psychosocial stress affects performance by redirecting attentional resources toward internal threat-related thoughts. An increment of endogenous top-down modulation reflected an increased beta-band activity that may serve as a compensatory mechanism to redirect attentional resources toward the ongoing task. The data obtained here may contribute to designing new ways of clinical management of the human stress response in the future and could help to minimize the damaging effects of persistent stressful experiences. (shrink)

This experiment investigated the effect of format (line vs. bar), viewers’ familiarity with variables, and viewers’ graphicacy (graphical literacy) skills on the comprehension of multivariate (three variable) data presented in graphs. Fifty-five undergraduates provided written descriptions of data for a set of 14 line or bar graphs, half of which depicted variables familiar to the population and half of which depicted variables unfamiliar to the population. Participants then took a test of graphicacy skills. As predicted, the format influenced viewers’ interpretations (...) of data. Specifically, viewers were more likely to describe x–y interactions when viewing line graphs than when viewing bar graphs, and they were more likely to describe main effects and “z–y” (the variable in the legend) interactions when viewing bar graphs than when viewing line graphs. Familiarity of data presented and individuals’ graphicacy skills interacted with the influence of graph format. Specifically, viewers were most likely to generate inferences only when they had high graphicacy skills, the data were familiar and thus the information inferred was expected, and the format supported those inferences. Implications for multivariate data display are discussed. (shrink)

Sequential decision theory formally solves the problem of rational agents in uncertain worlds if the true environmental prior probability distribution is known. Solomonoff's theory of universal induction formally solves the problem of sequence prediction for unknown prior distribution. We combine both ideas and get a parameter-free theory of universal Artificial Intelligence. We give strong arguments that the resulting AIXI model is the most intelligent unbiased agent possible. We outline how the AIXI model can formally solve a number of problem classes, (...) including sequence prediction, strategic games, function minimization, reinforcement and supervised learning. The major drawback of the AIXI model is that it is uncomputable. To overcome this problem, we construct a modified algorithm AIXItl that is still effectively more intelligent than any other time t and length l bounded agent. The computation time of AIXItl is of the order t x 2^l. The discussion includes formal definitions of intelligence order relations, the horizon problem and relations of the AIXI theory to other AI approaches. (shrink)

Philosophy for Children (P4C) provides educators with the process and structures to engage children in inquiring as a group into 'big' moral, ethical, and spiritual questions, while also considering curricular necessities and the demands of national and local standards. Based on the actual experiences of educators in diverse and global classroom contexts, this comprehensive guide gives you the tools you need to introduce philosophical thinking into your classroom, curriculum and beyond. Drawing on research-based educational and psychological models, this book highlights (...) the advantages gained by students who regularly participate in philosophical discussion: from building cognitive and social/emotional development, to becoming more informed citizens. Helpful tools and supplementary online resources offer additional frameworks for supporting and sustaining a higher level of thinking and problem-solving among your students. This practical guide is essential reading for teachers, coaches, and anyone wondering how you can effectively teach philosophy in your classroom. (shrink)

The harm of horizontal knowledge hiding behavior to individuals and organizations has been discussed and confirmed by many studies. The negative consequences of top-down knowledge hiding have now emerged as a new focus of research. This study aims to enrich the understanding of the consequences of supervisor knowledge hiding by exploring its trickle-down effect and mechanism. Based on the displaced aggression theory in psychology, this paper analyses and examines the cognitive psychological process and mechanism informing employee knowledge hiding from colleagues (...) when faced with their supervisor’s malicious knowledge hiding behavior. Using a three-stage time-lag questionnaire survey strategy, we collect 233 valid samples of full-time employees from representative provinces and cities in China, covering multiple industries. The following findings are observed: Supervisor knowledge hiding from subordinates positively affects subordinate knowledge hiding from colleagues ; Revenge motivation plays a mediating role; Traditionality weakens the influence of supervisor knowledge hiding on a subordinates’ revenge motivation. This study confirms the trickle-down effects of supervisor knowledge hiding behavior, extends research on the consequences of top-down knowledge hiding and its mechanism and provides new insights for organizational practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Figures of Entanglement: Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism ed. by Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. HananSavannah Greer DowningFigures of Entanglement: Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism. Edited by Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan. Routledge, 2021. xvi + 122 pp. $168 (hardcover), $47.16 (electronic book). ISBN: 9780367903794.Rhetorical scholars have turned to various new materialist frameworks (...) to shift the discipline's historically anthropocentric focus and fully engage matter's rhetoricity. While all such frameworks attempt to challenge "the anthropocentric assumption that nonhuman matter is intrinsically passive or non-agential and thus external to or separable from (human) meaning," Figures of Entanglement enters this burgeoning conversation by centering the unique contributions of Karen Barad (xi, x). Readers may recognize this collection from a 2016 special issue of Review of Communication. Yet, with a new foreword by editors Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan and an afterword by Laurie Gries, this collection makes Barad's distinct approach to matter's rhetoricity even more apparent, underscoring its fruitful potential for new materialist rhetorics invested in ethical, political transformation.In the book's foreword Gamble and Hanan differentiate Barad's per-formative new materialism from "vital" as well as what they refer to as "negative" new materialisms to show the generative potential of Barad's framework and the notion of entanglement (x). Other new materialisms tend to be "inclusionary"—add matter and stir—and fail to complicate "the human" itself and its differences (xiv, xi). First, vital and negative new materialisms maintain a distinction between being and knowing, allowing humans to emerge with a unique capacity to "objectively observe and know the existence of something essential, determinate, and unchanging about [End Page 395] reality that precedes and remains unaffected by both its own activities and our observations of it" (xi). On the contrary, Barad's performative approach suggests that "no aspect of reality—including human thought, meaning, and observation—is in any sense external to matter or ever remains entirely unchanged by matter's ongoing performances" (x). Here, humans are not "outside" of observation, but all observation "human or otherwise" co-constitutes what is observed (xi). Second, failing to interrogate "the human" in an attempt to observe matter's vitality is an ethical flaw that makes other approaches less capable of grappling with difference: they have been charged with "erasing associations between race, gender, and matter" and (re)producing a homogenizing, "Western-colonialist notion of humanness" (xiv). In contrast, Barad's is a "thoroughly relational," performative new materialism (1).Barad's concept of "entanglement" draws attention to the indeterminacy of matter and meaning, but it is accompanied by an ethical imperative to examine how difference, human or otherwise, is produced and the implications of power imbalances that arise through these enactments. For Barad, the notion of entanglement does not dissolve difference; difference is what matters. Indeed, they give us a way of thinking about how performative intra-actions produce difference through material-discursive practices, or apparatuses—differences that may be expected but are not inevitable. Rhetorical scholars are therefore invited to interrogate the production of boundaries that cause harm and reconfigure them, rather than assume the discreteness of boundaries from the start. Gamble and Hanan thus make a convincing case for how Barad's work may contribute to important scholarship in decolonial and critical rhetorics for which vital and negative new materialisms are less equipped.Gamble and Hanan utilize the introduction to show how Barad's per-formative new materialism both "supports and affirms" rhetorical materialism, or rhetoric's materiality, and enriches it (5). Ushered in by Michael Calvin McGee, "standard" rhetorical materialism worked to challenge the centuries-old debate about rhetoric's secondary, supplementary status vis-à-vis philosophy by recognizing rhetoric as part of a "shifting and dynamic material history" (6). Building upon this view, Ronald Walter Greene utilizes Foucault's notion of the apparatus to demonstrate how even the "material history" McGee called our attention to is itself "produced by apparatuses"—history is not "outside" of meaning (6). Instead, rhetoric's materiality is a "publicity effect" produced through technologies of rhetoric and intersecting power... (shrink)

Summary The present study analyses recent criticisms against the use of modern-historical methodologies in Biblical Studies. These methodologies abstract from the historical horizon of the researcher. In order to relate properly to the historicality of the researcher, historical objectivism needs to be transformed into historical hermeneutics. Recent developments in the historical methodology of biblical scholars are unable to reckon with the historicality of the researcher due to the partial or incorrect implementation of Gadamer’s views on reception history. I analyse the (...) views of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Gadamer on historicality and contend that the study of reception history is a necessary condition for conducting historical study from within the limits of our historicality. Reception history should not be a distinct methodological step to study the “Nachleben” of biblical texts, but needs to clarify how the understanding of these texts is already effected by their history of interpretation. The awareness of the presuppositions that have guided previous interpretations of biblical texts enables us to be confronted by their alterity. This confrontation calls for a synthesis between reception-historical and historical-critical methodology that introduces a new paradigm for conducting historical study in Biblical Studies in dialogue with other theological disciplines. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrior experiments indicated that reading literary fiction improves mentalising performance relative to reading popular fiction, non-fiction, or not reading. However, the experiments had relatively small sample sizes and hence low statistical power. To address this limitation, the present authors conducted four high-powered replication experiments testing the causal impact of reading literary fiction on mentalising. Relative to the original research, the present experiments used the same literary texts in the reading manipulation; the same mentalising task; and the same kind of participant (...) samples. Moreover, one experiment was pre-registered as a direct replication. In none of the experiments did reading literary fiction have any effect on mentalising relative to control conditions. The results replicate earlier findings that familiarity with fiction is positively correlated with mentalising. Taken together, the present findings call into question whether a single session of rea... (shrink)