From the time of its birth, Popper 's theory of falsifiability has been fiercely criticized from various viewpoints. In the author's view, however, those various criticisms all have the same root in their assumption that a falsification must be certain and conclusive. As the theory of falsifiability has never had such an assumption, it is the source of misunderstanding. By discarding it, we can reply to every criticism and thereby clarify the role of falsifiability in our search for better knowledge; (...) that is, it makes our attitude open to a yet unknown world. (shrink)

From the time of its birth, Popper’s theory of falsifiability has been fiercely criticized from various viewpoints. In the author’s view, however, those various criticisms all have the same root in their assumption that a falsification must be certain and conclusive. As the theory of falsifiability has never had such an assumption, it is the source of misunderstanding. By discarding it, we can reply to every criticism and thereby clarify the role of falsifiability in our search for better knowledge; that (...) is, it makes our attitude open to a yet unknown world. Key Words: Popper • falsifiability • openness • inconclusive falsification • second Popper legend. (shrink)

Finding truthmakers for negative truths has been a problem in philosophy for a long time. I will present and discuss the solution to this problem offered by Bertrand Russell, Raphael Demos, D. M. Armstrong, and myself. I will argue that some negative truths do not require truthmakers and that truthmakers for the other negative truths are the entities that these negative truths imply exist. I will also argue that truthmakers for general truths of the form, only X, Y, Z, and (...) etc. are F's, are the sum of each X, Y, Z, and etc.'s being F, and hence that sometimes truthmakers do not necessitate truths. (shrink)

Involuntary eye movement during gaze fixation, referred to as fixational eye movement, consists of two types of components: a Brownian motion like component called drifts-tremor and a ballistic component called microsaccade with a mean saccadic amplitude of about 0.3° and a mean inter-MS interval of about 0.5 s. During GZ fixation in healthy people in an eccentric position, typically with an eccentricity more than 30°, eyes exhibit oscillatory movements alternating between centripetal drift and centrifugal saccade with a mean saccadic amplitude (...) of about 1° and a period in the range of 0.5–1.0 s, which has been known as the physiological gaze-evoked nystagmus. Here, we designed a simple experimental paradigm of GZ fixation on a target shifted horizontally from the front-facing position with fewer eccentricities. We found a clear tendency of centripetal DRT and centrifugal MS as in GEN, but with more stochasticity and with slower drift velocity compared to GEN, even during FEM at GZ positions with small eccentricities. Our results showed that the target shift-dependent balance between DRT and MS achieves the GZ bounded around each of the given targets. In other words, GZ relaxes slowly with the centripetal DRT toward the front-facing position during inter-MS intervals, as if there always exists a quasi-stable equilibrium posture in the front-facing position, and MS actions pull GZ intermittently back to the target position in the opposite direction to DRT. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem por objetivo compreender e descrever a experiência mística da pessoa humana, em uma perspectiva individual mística e psicológica. O ponto de partida desta reflexão é a doutrina de Teresa de Jesus (1515-1582), espanhola, fundadora da Ordem do Carmelo Descalço, mística, santa e doutora da Igreja e a visão da psicologia analítica de Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1962), suíço, conferencista internacional, psicólogo, médico e psiquiatra. A finalidade, portanto, de toda pesquisa é mostrar como ambos descrevem a mesma realidade, (...) isto é, o centro místico da alma da pessoa humana, se bem que em linguagem diferentes. Na mística de Teresa, o centro místico da alma é o próprio Deus quem está no centro e na psicologia analítica de Jung, o centro místico da alma é o “Selfbat” (Si-Mesmo), que é o centro do ser humano. (shrink)

A robot that is easy to teach not only has to be able to adapt to humans but also has to be easily adaptable to. In order to develop a robot with mutual adaptation ability, we believe that it will be beneficial to first observe the mutual adaptation behaviors that occur in human–human communication. In this paper, we propose a human–human WOZ (Wizard-of-Oz) experiment setting that can help us to observe and understand how the mutual adaptation procedure occurs between human (...) beings in nonverbal communication. By analyzing the experimental results, we obtained three important findings: alignment-based action, symbol-emergent learning, and environmental learning. (shrink)

A remarkable collection of interviews and dialogues that discuss culture, ideology, history, Marxism, modernity, post-modernity, post-colonialism, globalization, and the role of the university and the intellectual in today's society.

We think the present moment is a timely one for debating the relation between evidentiary protocols and academic disciplines. Since academic practices for constituting and deploying evidence tend to be discipline-specific, the much-discussed crisis of the disciplines in recent years has given rise to a series of controversies about the status of evidence in current modes of investigation and argument: deconstruction, gender studies, new historicism, cultural studies, new approaches to the history and philosophy of science, the critical legal studies movement, (...) and so on. Unfortunately, these controversies too often devolve into oversimplified debates about who has the evidence and who does not, who did their homework and who did not, or about the dangers of an ill-defined academic relativism. Attention needs to be better and otherwise directed: at the configuration of the fact-evidence distinction in different disciplines and historical moments, for example; or at the relative function of such notions as “self-evidence,” “experience,” “test,” “testimony,” and “textuality” in various academic discourses; or at the ways in which the invoked “rules of evidence” are themselves the products of historical developments, and themselves undergo redifferentiation and reformulation. James Chandler, professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of Wordsworth’s Second Nature . He is currently completing England in 1819, studies in and of romantic case history. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, teaches philosophy and the history of science at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations and is editing a collection of essays on Heidegger, philosophy, and National Socialism. Harry Harootunian, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry and professor of history and East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, is the author of Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokigawa and editor, with Masao Miyoshi, of Postmodernism and Japan. (shrink)

1. Kant on the “Conditions of the Possibility” of Experience -- Claude Piché // 2. Plato and Kantian Transcendental Constructivism -- Tom Rockmore // 3. Kant and Fichte on the Notion of (Transcendental) Freedom -- Violetta L. Waibel // 4. Fichte, Transcendental Ontology, and the Ethics of Belief -- Steven Hoeltzel // 5. Transcendental Philosophy as “Therapy of the Mind”: Fichte’s “Facts of Consciousness” Lectures -- Benjamin D. Crowe // 6. From Transcendental Philosophy to Hegel’s Developmental Method -- William F. (...) Bristow // 7. How Transcendental Is Cohen’s Critical Idealism? -- Halla Kim // 8. Heidegger’s Failure to Overcome Transcendental Philosophy -- Eric S. Nelson // 9. Others as the Ground of Our Existence: Levinas, Løgstrup, and Transcendental Arguments in Ethics -- Robert Stern // 10. Raising Validity Claims for Reasons: Transcendental Reflection in Apel’s Argumentative Discourse -- Matthias Kettner // 11. Transcendental Arguments Based on Question-Answer Contradictions -- Yukio Irie // 12. Consequences of the Transcendental-Pragmatic Consensus Theory of Truth -- Michihito Yoshime // 13. On Jürgen Habermas’s Cognitive Theory of Morality -- Yasuyuki Funaba . (shrink)