Context Shifting Arguments (CSA) ask us to consider two utterances of an unambiguous, non-vague, non-elliptic sentence S. If the consensus intuition is that what’s said, or expressed or the truth-conditions, and so possibly the truthvalues, of these utterances differ, then CSA concludes S is context sensitive. Consider, for example, simultaneous utterances of ‘I am wearing a hat’, one by Stephen, one by Jason. Intuitively, these utterances can vary in truth-value contingent upon who is speaking the sentence, while (...) holding hat-wearing constant, and so they express distinct propositions and differ in their truth conditions. Since these differences are not the result of ambiguity (lexical or structural), vagueness, conversational implicature, or syntactic ellipsis, we have pretty strong evidence that ‘I am wearing a hat’ is context sensitive. (shrink)

In this paper I present how the normative inferentialist can make the distinction between sentence meaning and content of the utterance. The inferentialist can understand sentence meaning as a role conferred to that sentence by the rules governing inferential transitions and content of the utterance as just a part of sentence meaning. I attempt to show how such a framework can account for prominent scenarios presented by contextualists as a challenge to semantic minimalism/literalism. I argue that inferentialism can address contextualist (...) challenges in a simple and effective manner by understanding sentence meaning as broad, but invariant. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The truth-conditions of utterances are often underdetermined by the meaning of the sentence uttered, as suggested by the observation that the same sentence has different intuitive truth-values in different contexts. The intuitive difference is usually explained by assigning different truth-conditions to different utterances. This paper poses a problem for explanations of this kind: These truth-conditions, if they exist, are epistemically inaccessible. I suggest instead that truth-conditional underdetermination is ineliminable and these utterances have no truth-conditions. Intuitive truth-values are explained by (...) the effect that all the most reasonable interpretations have on the common ground: An utterance is intuitively true when it is true on all interpretations that answer the question under discussion. (shrink)

I distinguish, and discuss the relations between, five types of context-shift involving indexicals. For 'intentional' indexicals - indexicals whose value depends upon the speaker's intention - we can shift the context more or less 'at will', by manifesting one's intention to do so. For other indexicals we can shift the context through pretense. Following a number of authors, I distinguish two types of context-shifting pretense, corresponding to two sets of linguistic phenomena. The fourth type of (...) case is that of expressions which are not really indexical, but perspectival, and for which we do not need to appeal to the notion of context-shift in order to account for their shifty behaviour. The fifth category I introduce and discuss is that of 'shiftable indexicals'. Do we need it, given that we already have the other four categories? My answer is a qualified 'yes'. (shrink)

The Liar sentence L, which reads ‘L is not true’, can be used to produce an apparently valid argument proving that L is not true and that L is true. There has been increasing recognition of the appeal of contextualist solutions to the Liar paradox. Contextualist accounts hold that some step in the reasoning induces a context shift that causes the apparently contradictory claims to occur at different contexts. Attempts at identifying the most promising contextualist account often rely on (...) timing arguments, which seek to isolate a step at which the context cannot be claimed to have shifted or must have shifted. The literature contains a number of timing arguments that draw incompatible conclusions about the location of the context shift. I argue that no existing timing arguments succeed. An alternative strategy for assessing contextualist accounts evaluates the plausibility of their explanations of why the context shifts. However, even this strategy yields no clear verdict about which contextualist account is the most promising. I conclude that there are some grounds for optimism and for pessimism about the potential to adequately motivate contextualism. (shrink)

A context-shifting example involves a putatively non-ambiguous, non-elliptical, non-indexical declarative sentence, some distinct utterances of which differ in truth value despite sameness of place, time, surrounding objects, and other physical factors. Charles Travis has spawned a large literature by arguing that such examples undermine compositional truth-conditional semantics. After explaining how prior responses to Travis’s examples fail in the metaphysical details, the present essay develops a new approach that treats a wide range of subject terms as disguised indexicals sensitive (...) to mereological structure. (shrink)

Keith DeRose has argued that context shifting experiments should be designed in a specific way in order to accommodate what he calls a ‘truth/falsity asymmetry’. I explain and critique DeRose's reasons for proposing this modification to contextualist methodology, drawing on recent experimental studies of DeRose's bank cases as well as experimental findings about the verification of affirmative and negative statements. While DeRose's arguments for his particular modification to contextualist methodology fail, the lesson of his proposal is that there (...) is good reason to pay close attention to several subtle aspects of the design of context shifting experiments. (shrink)

SOCREAL 2013 : 3rd International Workshop on Philosophy and Ethics of Social Reality 2013. Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, 25-27 October 2013. Session 4 : Agency, Responsibility, and Intentionality.

My modest aim in this paper is to prove certain relations between some type of hyper-intensional operators, namely context shifting operators, and compositionality in natural languages. Various authors (e.g. von Fintel & Matthewson 2008; Stalnaker 2014) have argued that context-shifting operators are incompatible with compositionality. In fact, some of them understand Kaplan’s (1989) famous ban on context-shifting operators as a constraint on compositionality. Others, (e.g. Rabern 2013) take contextshifting operators to be compatible with compositionality (...) but, unfortunately, do not provide a proof, or an argument in favor of their position. The aim of this paper is to do precisely that. Additionally, I provide a new proof that compositionality for propositional content (intension) is a proper generalization of compositionality for character (hyper-intensions). (shrink)

This thesis argues for two main points concerning the philosophy of natural language semantics. Firstly, that the objects of assertion are distinct from the entities appealed to in the compositional rules of natural language semantics. Secondly, natural languages contain context-shifting operators known as "monsters". In fact, it will be shown that these theses are simply two sides of the same coin.

On a traditional view, the semantics of natural language makes essential use of a context parameter, i.e. a set of coordinates that represents the situation of speech. In classical semantic frameworks, this parameter plays two key roles: first, context contributes to determining the content of utterance; second, it is crucial for defining logical consequence. I point out that recent empirical proposals about context shift in natural language (in particular, context-shifting semantics in the style of Anand (...) and Nevins 2004) are incompatible with the traditional view of context. At the same time, there is increasing cross-linguistic support for this brand of context shift. Hence I suggest that context has no place in semantic theory proper. We should revert back to so-called multiple-indexing frameworks that were developed by Montague and others, and relegate context to the postsemantic stage. (shrink)

In this paper, I report new empirical data on folk semantic intuitions concerning color adjectives in so-called context-shifting experiments. Contextualists present such experiments — that is, they describe different conversational contexts in which a given sentence is uttered — in order to argue that context can shape meaning and truth conditions to such a degree that competent speakers would give opposite truth evaluations of the same sentence in different contexts. The initial findings of Hansen and Chemla (2013) (...) suggest that laypersons’ semantic judgments are sensitive to context in the same way that is predicted by contextualists. In this paper, I focus on context-shifting experiments that involve color adjectives; also, I present experiments that are a partial replication and methodological extension of Hansen and Chemla’s study. One aim of my study was to corroborate these authors’ findings using a bigger sample (total N = 1128), but the main goal was to test the stability of results in different methodological variants of empirical adaptations of context-shifting experiments. This part of the study addresses the issues pointed out in my earlier paper (Ziółkowski 2017), where I argued that certain experimental settings (within-subjects) might bring data that is more favorable to contextualism than other settings (between-subjects). My study compares three different experimental settings: within-subjects (with randomized order of context presentation), between-subjects (where participants evaluating different contexts aredistinct groups), and “contrastive design” (where both contexts are presented side by side on the same screen). My results are highly consistent across the methodological variants I employed, but while they show some of the effects expected by contextualists, it is disputable whether they bring strong support to contextualism with respect to color adjectives. (shrink)

According to an influential view, empathy has, and should have, a role in ethics, but it is by no means clear what is meant by 'empathy', and why exactly it is supposed to be morally good. Recently, Peter Goldie has challenged that view. He shows how problematic empathy is, and argues that taking an external perspective is morally superior: we should focus on the other, rather than ourselves. But this argument is misguided in several ways. If we consider conversation, there (...) is no need to see an opposition between a focus on the other and on ourselves. I propose to shift the perspective of the discussion towards the needs of those who are supposed to benefit from empathy, and to study how people communicate their imaginative processes towards their receivers. I end with an exploration of theoretical resources for an account of mutual perspective- shifting. (shrink)

In this paper I present a linguistic investigation of the literary style known as free indirect discourse within the framework of formal semantics. I will argue that a semantics for free indirect discourse involves more than a mechanism for the independent context shifting of pronouns and other deictic elements. My argumentation is fueled by literary examples of free indirect discourse involving what I call language shifts: -/- Most of the great flame-throwers were there and naturally, handling Big John (...) de Conquer and his works. How he had done everything big on earth, then went up tuh heben without dying atall. Went up there picking a guitar and got all de angels doing the ring-shout round and round de throne...that brought them back to Tea Cake. How come he couldn’t hit that box a lick or two? (Hurston 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God) -/- Free indirect discourse combines elements of both, but it seems decidedly closer to direct discourse. I examine the reigning semantic analysis of free indirect discourse, a variant of the demonstrative account of direct discourse featuring “double context dependence” (Banfield 1982,Schlenker 2004). After showing that this type of account has fundamental difficulties with language shift data like (1), I close with a brief sketch of an alternative analysis based on “mixed quotation.”. (shrink)

The paper is primarily concerned with laying out the space of positions that purport to account for semantic context sensitivity of natural language expressions and with making a prima facie case for relativism. I start with distinguishing between pre-semantic, semantic and post-semantic context sensitivity. In the following section I briefly present the classic picture of indexicals due to David Kaplan and assess some arguments for the introduction of certain parameters in the circumstances of evaluation (specifically, time). In section (...) III I envisage two views that purport to expand semantic context sensitivity beyond expressions from “the basic set”: indexicalism and contextualism. In section IV, by means of an example taken from John Perry, I draw attention to a specific form of semantic context sensitivity, namely that in which what is affected by context are the circumstances of evaluation of utterances rather than their content. The example leads to the necessity of distinguishing between two roles of context: a content-determinative one and a circumstance-determinative one. In section V I introduce relativism as the view incorporating the claim that context has a circumstance-determinative role and contrast it with the two views presented before. In the final section I analyze a certain type of argument usually adduced in favor of contextualism (the so-called “context-shifting arguments”) and show that in order to work it has to rule out relativism. I conclude by claiming that the battle must be fought by giving arguments to the effect that a certain parameter should or should not be part of the circumstances of evaluation rather than the content of utterances. (shrink)

Much of the extant discussion focuses on the question of whether contextualism resolves skeptical paradoxes. Understandably. Yet there has been less discussion as to the internal structure of contextualist theories. Regrettably. Here, for instance, are two questions that could stand further discussion: (i) what is the linguistic basis for contextualism and (ii) what is the parameter that shifts with context?

Within the philosophy of science, the realism debate has been revitalised by the development of forms of structural realism. These urge a shift in focus from the object oriented ontologies that come and go through the history of science to the structures that remain through theory change. Such views have typically been elaborated in the context of theories of physics and are motivated by, first of all, the presence within such theories of mathematical equations that allow straightforward representation of (...) the relevant structures; and secondly, the implications of such theories for the individuality and identity of putative objects. My aim in this talk is to explore the possibility of extending such views to biological theories. An obvious concern is that within the context of the latter it is typically insisted that we cannot find the kinds of highly mathematised structures that structural realism can point to in physics. I shall indicate how the model-theoretic approach to theories might help allay such concerns. Furthermore, issues of identity and individuality also arise within biology. Thus Dupre has recently noted that there exists a ‘General Problem of Biological Individuality’ which relates to the issue of how one divides ‘massively integrated and interconnected’ systems into discrete components. In response Dupre advocates a form of ‘Promiscuous Realism’ that holds, for example, that there is no unique way of dividing the phylogenetic tree into kinds. Instead I shall urge serious consideration of those aspects of the work of Dupre and others that lean towards a structuralist interpretation. By doing so I hope to suggest possible ways in which a structuralist stance might be extended to biology. (shrink)

Although “transition” is an established area of educational research, there has been little empirically exploration of how shifts in the ways that knowledge is packaged and valued impact on students’ reading and writing as they transition into higher education. This article draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study that traced the experiences, practices and understandings of 11 students from their last year of A-levels through to their second year of undergraduate study. Analysis shows that the forms of knowledge privileged and the (...) ways that knowledge is packaged vary significantly between the two educational contexts, impacting on students’ engagement with texts as they transition into university. This article further illustrates that as a result of shifts in what counts as knowledge between these levels, students face challenges adapting to undergraduate literacies, which disrupts the simplistic notion of transition evoked in the dominant positioning of “the transition to uni... (shrink)

It is widely accepted that our initial intuitions regarding knowledge attributions in stakes-shifting cases (e.g., Cohen’s Airport) are best explained by standards variantism, the view that the standards for knowledge may vary with contexts in an epistemically interesting way. Against standards variantism, I argue that no prominent account of the standards for knowledge can explain our intuitions regarding stakes-shifting cases. I argue that the only way to preserve our initial intuitions regarding such cases is to endorse position variantism, (...) the view that one’s epistemic position may vary with contexts in an epistemically interesting way. Some had argued that epistemic position is incompatible with intellectualism. In reply, I point out that position variantism and intellectualism are compatible, if one’s truth-relevant factors with respect to p can vary with contexts in an epistemically interesting way. (shrink)

Despite widespread recognition that psychiatry would be better served by a classificatory system based on etiology rather than mere description, it goes without saying that much of the necessary work is yet to be done. In this chapter I take up the increasingly important question of how mechanistic explanation fits into the larger effort to build a scientifically sound etiological and nosological framework. I sketch a rough picture of what mechanistic explanation should look like in the context of psychiatric (...) research, with a focus on several potential challenges posed by the special features of many psychiatric conditions. These include the role of social and environmental factors, the relatively transient nature of symptoms, the presumably complex organization of underlying systems, and the likelihood that many disorders are the product of nonstandard development. I suggest that these explanatory challenges can be met with a sufficiently broad notion of mechanism, one that allows for something less than the flawless execution of internal operations, appeals to the influence of contextual factors, and attends to organizational relations both within the mechanism itself and across the wider cognitive system. (shrink)

The movement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research from universities to big corporations has had a significant impact on the development of the field. In the past, AI research was primarily conducted in academic institutions, which foster a culture of peer reviewing and collaboration to enhance quality improvements. The growing interest in AI among corporations, especially regarding Machine Learning (ML) technology, has shifted the focus of research from quality to quantity. Corporations have the resources to invest in large-scale ML projects and (...) they are often more interested in fast results than in ensuring that AI algorithms are reliable and safe. This paper proposes that the description of a Darwinian process made by the mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson can be used to understand the implications of ML research scenario. The context of the Darwinian process—or lack thereof—can be used to draw a parallel between historical and current implications of technology expansion strongly driven by economic interests, making clear the consequences of shifting AI research from academia to industry. Finally, this paper indicates future directions for AI research to create a healthier environment for the evolution of ML technology. (shrink)

This book engages with the dynamic intersection of several domains such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, and pedagogy, in order to critically analyze and reinvent our understanding of curriculum. The chapters raise important questions such as: what are the conditions of possibility for a living curriculum in which Eros and intellect (or reason and intuition) are not separated? How is it possible to escape ideology that keeps us bound to defunct categories? What are the ingredients of an inquiry that is able (...) to grasp curriculum as an expanding interpersonal movement? How do the teacher-learner ensemble get creatively constituted beyond obstructive dualities? How can we reinvent meaning in curriculum without totalization? Which indigenous understandings can be recovered in order to reinvent curriculum with greater relevance for diverse peoples? This volume addresses elements of reason, nonreason, becoming, dissipation, violence, uncertainty, transcendence, love, and death in order to come to a critical understanding of the relationship between knowledge and knower from these multiple perspectives. (shrink)

This paper studies European chemists’ shifting ontologies of materials by comparing the ways in which they classified materials. The focus is on plant materials, their different identities, and the changing ways chemists sorted out and ordered plant materials in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The main goals of the paper are to follow the development of plant materials from ordinary, everyday materials and commodities in the early eighteenth century to purified carbon compounds and organic substances familiar only to (...) experts in the 1830s, and to reconstruct chemists’ ways of classifying these objects in different practical and intellectual contexts.The study of changes in European chemists’ ways of classifying plant materials over more than a century brings to the foreground a trajectory of ontological shifts that is ‘punctuated’ in the 1750s, the 1790s, and the 1830s. Early eighteenth-century plant materials, which were commodities of the apothecary trade and other arts and crafts, were elevated epistemically as compound components or ‘proximate principles’ of plants in the 1750s, reduced to organic compounds in the 1790s, and replaced by carbon compounds in the 1830s. The last, third transformation of the epistemic constitution of materials and the mode of their classification was accompanied by a deep transformation of the material culture of plant chemistry. After the late 1830s, many of the eighteenth-century vegetable commodities disappeared from chemists’ agenda or were split into different substances individuated and identified in new ways. Coal tar products, and new organic artefacts containing chlorine or bromine, entered the chemical laboratory in the 1820s and became fused with the purified rest of the previous plant and animal substances. The material objects of the new culture of organic chemistry became detached from the materials applied in the extant arts and crafts. It was only in the late 1850s, with the rise of the synthetic dye industry, that a great number of these laboratory substances became involved in industrial production.Keywords: Commodities and scientific objects; Historical ontology; Classification; Plant chemistry; Organic chemistry. (shrink)

George G. Simpson (1902–1984) and Stephen J. Gould (1941–2002) were both engaged with the normative – i.e., social, cultural, political, and even ethical – consequences of their evolutionary theorizing. However, there is a normative point of departure between Simpson and Gould’s work in that regard that has received little attention. Yet, their motivations converge into a larger program of resistance and social protection from misconstrued and illegitimate overreaches of the biological sciences leading up to and after the peak of the (...) modern synthesis. (shrink)

Source: Author: Roksana Dayani, Fazel Asadi Amjad This article is devoted to analyze verbal interactions in Oleanna [1993] within Grice’s Cooperative Principles [1975] in order to illustrate how the shift of power gradually takes place in the academic discourse of the play. Maxims of this principle are applied on John’s utterances in the first act on which the foundation of asymmetric relationship is laid. As expected within Grice’s framework, the breaching of maxims, besides their observation, is performed by John through (...) four ways of violating, opting out, clashing and flouting. The conversational implicaturs consequently generating from the flouting of some maxims, most frequently of quality, and quantity, conflict with Carol’s assumptions about the state of professorship in academic context which motivate her for gaining power. The study, thereby, aims to demonstrate how clashing and flouting of maxims by John make him weak to Carol’s new voice and culminate in reversal in teacher-student relationship in the play. ]]>. (shrink)

The Nahdlatul Ulama are important parts that greatly value the inheritance of the classical Islamic treasures contained in the work of the Imam Mazhab. Its wealth of sources of understanding, NU has its own uniqueway of responding to reform, while maintaining harmony in tradition and cultural heritage, moderate, tolerant, not extreme, as well as promoting goodness and preventing badness. This paper examines the positioning of NU and its relation to Ahlussunnah wa al-Jama‘ah based on the social context that accompanies (...) it and the actors involved in it. There are three locus, places, or cultural fields that have important significance because they are a source of discourse, ideas and practices of mazhab in contemporary NU communities: Pesantren, Islamic College and Non-Governmental Organization. This paper uses three approaches: Thomas Kuhn’s Shifting Paradigm, Karl Manheim’s Sociology of Knowledge and Abed al-Jabiri’s Epistemology are used to study knowledge that is not only the result of theory, but also part of the process of sociology and epistemology. The results show that the majority of Pesantren when understanding and interpreting Aswaja An-Nahdliyyah are heavier and dominant based on Bayani and Irfani. Whereas the scholar of NU and NGOs that had been Bayani and Irfani shifted to Burhani’s epistemological model. In other words, methodologically they want a change in understanding Aswaja from qauli to manhaji, Bayani-Irfani to Burhani,monolithic-dichotomic to integrative-progressive. (shrink)

Institutional talk, including service encounter discourse, has typically been taken to be ‘asymmetrical’ and the participants of these encounters to be constrained in terms of their allowable conversational contributions. This article explores shifts of alignment from normative serverclient alignments into different directions, involving symmetrical positionings of various kinds in travel agency spoken discourse. It is shown how these shifts occur and at which points in the interaction they might be found. The relevance of the commercial institutional context is also (...) considered. It is argued that these shifts from the supposedly unmarked asymmetrical alignment are motivated by orientations to relational goals and politeness/facework concerns, and they function as interpersonal devices achieving various relational configurations. These shifts are then related to levels of sociality that can be found in these, and other, face-to-face interactions. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the question of whether there is justification for regulations that place limits on food choices. I begin by discussing Sarah Conly’s recent defense of paternalist limits on food choice. I argue that Conly’s argument is flawed because it assumes a particular conception of health that is not universally shared. I examine this conception of health in some detail, and I argue that we need to shift our focus from individual behaviors and lifestyle to the broader (...) social and environmental context. Such a shift allows us to see the ways in which industry practices are negatively impacting our well-being (a broader concept than “health”). I argue that state regulatory activity surrounding the conditions under which food is grown, processed, marketed, and sold needs to be strengthened. As a result, there are likely to be some indirect limitations on food choice. These indirect limitations are justified, but regulations in which the goal is to change individual behavior or lifestyle are not. (shrink)

This book answers both the 'what' and the 'why' question raised by indexical shift in crosslinguistic perspective. What are the possible profiles of an indexical shifting language, and why do we find these profiles and not various equally conceivable others? Drawing both from the literature (published and unpublished) and from original fieldwork on the language Nez Perce, Amy Rose Deal puts forward several major generalizations about indexical shift crosslinguistically and present a theory that attempts to explain them. This account (...) has consequences for the way we think about the semantics of attitude verbs, the nature of contexts, the typology of first person, and the relationship between indexicals and logophors, of course along with numerous consequences for the analysis of particular languages (e.g. Nez Perce, Uyghur, Korean, English, Zazaki, Amharic, Mishar Tatar). The book contains numerous glossed examples from a range of languages (including a detailed description of Nez Perce indexical shift, based on original fieldwork, as described above); a bibliography; and an appendix providing grammatical background about Nez Perce. (shrink)

This study examines a significant gap in the role of providing ethical guidance and support for community-based research. University and health-based ethical review committees in New Zealand predominantly serve as ‘gatekeepers’ that consider the ethical implications of a research design in order to protect participants and the institution from harm. However, in New Zealand, community-based researchers routinely do not have access to this level of support or review. A relatively new group, the New Zealand Ethics Committee, formed in 2012, responds (...) to the uneven landscape of access for community-based research. By offering ethical approval inclusive of the review of a project’s study design outside institutional settings, NZEC has endeavoured to move beyond a gatekeeping research governance function to that of bridge-building. This change of focus presents rich possibilities but also a number of limitations for providing ethical review outside conventional institutional contexts. This paper reports on the NZEC’s experience of working with community researchers to ascertain the possibilities and tensions of shifting ethics review processes from research governance to a focus on research ethics in community-based participatory research. (shrink)

Almost everywhere throughout the Majority World, that is Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Middle East and North Africa, Christianity used to be called the ‘white-man's religion’. But that is the case no more—the church has exploded all over the MW. In this paper I would like to look at this shift in Christianity worldwide, and what implications it has for the global church, and especially for us in Asia. My purpose here is not to highlight the weaknesses of the Western (...) church and to glorify the growth of the churches in the MW. Rather my hope is that this will help us have a clearer understanding of the challenges before us so that we can labor more fruitfully for the advance of the gospel in the Asian context. In the process I will also raise questions which hopefully will help point the way forward. (shrink)

Epistemological contextualism states that propositions about knowledge, expressed in sentences like “S knows that P,” are context-sensitive. Schaffer (2005) examines whether one of Lewis’ (1996), Cohen’s (1988) and DeRose’s (1995) influential contextualist accounts is preferable to the others. According to Schaffer, Lewis’ theory of relevant alternatives succeeds as a linguistic basis for contextualism and as an explanation of what the parameter that shifts with context is, while Cohen’s theory of thresholds and DeRose’s theory of standards fail. This paper (...) argues that Schaffer’s analysis is unsatisfactory since it fails to show that thresholds and standards cannot cope with skepticism, as it is ultimately the conversation participants who control how the conversation plays out. Moreover, Schaffer fails to show that gradability is of no importance in inquiries. (shrink)

The term “listening niche” refers to the contexts in which people listen to music including what music they are listening to, with whom, when, where, and with what media. The first experiment investigates undergraduate students’ music listening niches in the initial COVID-19 lockdown period, 4 weeks immediately after the campus shut down abruptly. The second experiment explores how returning to a hybrid semester, the “new normal,” further affected these listening habits. In both experiments, the participants provided a list of their (...) most frequently listened-to songs during the respective period of time. From these, they identified one song that seemed most associated with this period, their “signature song,” and stated why this song seemed relevant. These reasons were coded on nine underlying themes. Three clusters were found to underlie the themes: emotional responses memory associations, and discovery of new music. We identified songs and reasons for selecting them that represented the three clusters and related these to the lyrical content. Compared to before the pandemic, participants in both experiments report listening more in general and on Spotify, but there were no differences in listening between lockdown and the new normal. Whom they were listening with shifted overtime from family members to significant others and finally to other friends and roommates. These results demonstrate how students listen to and find new music that is meaningful to them during this unprecedented pandemic. (shrink)

Context is a pivotal concept for social scientists in their attempt to weave singularities or universals to moral codes and political orders. However, in this, social scientists might be neglecting the ways in which individuals or groups who are excluded from the collective production of knowledge want to politicize their concerns also by claiming their uniqueness and singularity. In this article, drawing on the public controversy about access to dementia drugs on the U.K. National Health Service and on the (...) work of pioneering sociologist Helen McGill Hughes on “human interest stories,” the author argues that the “politics of singularities” can be articulated in two related ways within technical controversies. First, it expresses the unraveling of sociotechnical ties caused by institutional failure to take concerns into account. Second, it expresses the concrete uniqueness of persons caught by standardized, “universal” and impersonal implements and/or policies. Both these effects are underpinned by resourcing to allegorical expression, a literary form that while fostering political imagination in technological democracies might weaken Science and Technology Studies' ambitions to influence decision making. (shrink)

The question of how the ‘border’ is conceived in international law, and how it shapes identity and peoples’ lives, remains largely unexplored in the international legal literature. This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the meaning of the border in international law, and in the contemporary context, by drawing on the work of the philosopher and political theorist, Étienne Balibar, and by reflecting, in the light of his work, on the recent decision of the House of Lords (...) in R v Immigration Officer at Prague Airport. It is shown that international law's focus on the territorial border may render invisible other borders which are significant for subaltern groups, and thereby fail to address the manner in which borders affect lives and determine outcomes. Borders are not stable and ‘univocal’, but instead, ‘multiple’, shifting in meaning and function from group to group. They are also being ‘exported’ such that a person may experience a foreign border while still within the territory of their own country. In highlighting the multiplicity of borders, the article seeks to prompt further reflection on the articulation and application of norms of international law in a way that addresses the realities of the contemporary context. (shrink)

This paper offers a historical analysis of contemporary practices of shopping for vegetables in the highly dynamic context of urban Hanoi during the period from 1975 to 2014. Focusing on everyday shopping practices from a food safety perspective, we assess the extent to which the policy-enforced process of supermarketization has proven to be an engine of change in daily vegetable purchasing while improving food safety. In depicting transitions in shopping practices, we combine a social practices approach with historical analysis. (...) Providing a historical analysis of a broad and complex spectrum of everyday practices of purchasing fresh vegetables, we identify the key drivers of change. We discuss different modalities of shopping and demonstrate that no single retail modernization format can be said to exist. Rather than contrasting an idealized supermarket model with the traditional modalities of food shopping, we offer a varied, more diverse set of shopping practices that displays different strategies for coping with food safety issues. When discussed from a historical perspective, food practices are shown to be highly dynamic, being constantly reinvented and reconfigured by consumers who use their established skills, routines, and social networks to sometimes resist top-down enforced supermarketization while developing the coping strategies that best suit their local circumstances. (shrink)

Arguments for context-sensitivity are often based on judgments about the truth values of sentences: a sentence seems true in one context and false in another, so it is argued that the truth conditions of the sentence shift between these contexts. Such arguments rely on the assumption that our judgments reflect the actual truth values of sentences in context. Here, I present a non-semantic explanation of these judgments. In short, our judgments about the truth values of sentences are (...) driven by heuristics that are only fallible reflections of actual truth values. These heuristics can lead to different truth-value judgments in different contexts, even when the sentence at issue is not semantically context-sensitive. As a case study, I consider Sterken’s (Philos. Imprint, 15, 2015a) argument for the context-sensitivity of generic generalisations. I provide a non-semantic explanation of Sterken’s truth-value judgments, which builds on Leslie’s (Philos Perspect 21(1):375–403, 2007; Philos Rev 117(1):1–47, 2008) theory of default generalisation. (shrink)

Abstract: I argue that practically all vague language is context-sensitive in a covert and unfamiliar way. I first outline a novel puzzle concerning the interaction of conditionals and vagueness. I then argue that the best way of resolving the puzzle is through positing context-sensitive penumbral connections between sundry parts of language. I argue that these penumbral connections shift through a distinct form of Lewisian accommodation. The upshot is that meaning is a far shiftier thing than has typically been (...) thought. (shrink)

Death is an invariant of human existence, a kind of its “omega point”. At the same time, the attitude towards it is not a constant, but rather undergoes changes, being incorporated in a wide sociocultural context. The mail goal of the article is an analysis of the nature of these changes at the present stage specifically under the influence of rapid biotechnological progress and dilemmas generated by these changes. Firstly, there is a tendency of increasing optimism: some theorists tend (...) to perceive death not as an inevitable reality, but rather as a problem and a challenge. At the same time a radical direction arises, believing that death can be overcome only through the complete separation of man from its body substrate. The utopian nature of this project forces more moderate theorists to look for indirect way, which consists in a “war” with aging as the main predecessor of death, up to attempts of its complete abolition. Gradually, the formation of scientific immortology as a kind of opposition for thanatology takes place. At the same time, many theorists, and even more ordinary people remain skeptical position about the prospects for victory over death. It can be concluded that biomedical progress actualizes general human intention for self-preservation and death avoidance, but science requires an assessment of not only the objective possibilities for overcoming death but also both ontological and anthropological consequences of it. (shrink)