In the recent history of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the notion of habit has been reduced to a stimulus-triggered response probability correlation. In this paper we use a computational model to present an alternative theoretical view (with some philosophical implications), where habits are seen as self-maintaining patterns of behavior that share properties in common with self-maintaining biological processes, and that inhabit a complex ecological context, including the presence and influence of other habits. Far from mechanical automatisms, this organismic (...) and self-organizing concept of habit can overcome the dominating atomistic and statistical conceptions, and the high temporal resolution effects of situatedness, embodiment and sensorimotor loops emerge as playing a more central, subtle and complex role in the organization of behavior. The model is based on a novel “iterant deformable sensorimotor medium” (IDSM), designed such that trajectories taken through sensorimotor-space increase the likelihood that in the future, similar trajectories will be taken. We couple the IDSM to sensors and motors of a simulated body and environment and show that under certain conditions, the IDSM forms self-maintaining patterns of activity that operate across the IDSM, the body, and the environment. We present various environments and the resulting habits that form in them. The model acts as an abstraction of habits at a much needed sensorimotor “meso-scale” between microscopic neuron-based models and macroscopic descriptions of behavior. Finally, we discuss how this model and extensions of it can help us understand aspects of behavioral self-organization, historicity and autonomy that remain out of the scope of contemporary representationalist frameworks. (shrink)

When we assume that we have cultural competence rather than thoroughly engaging in what Dewey calls the pattern of inquiry, we fail to achieve cultural humility. By analyzing how habits undermine inquiry and underlie failure in situations that call for cultural humility, we may be better equipped to address unintentional offenses. In this essay, I define cultural humility and contrast it with cultural competence, explaining why aiming for cultural competence alone is problematic. Next, I consider the attributes necessary for cultural (...) humility and the attitudes that Dewey considers beneficial for inquiry. This is followed by an outline of Dewey’s pattern of inquiry and explanation of how unquestioned habits of thought short-circuit our ability to become culturally humble. I suggest that we forgo attempting to achieve cultural competence and instead use Dewey’s pattern of inquiry with the attitudes he recommends as tools to work toward cultural humility. (shrink)

Health behaviours of preschool children have a considerable impact on the shaping of habits later on in their lives. Parents’ and guardians’ role is to develop positive health patterns and represent exemplary models to be followed by children. The aim of the paper is to present the use of correspondence analysis for the assessment of the relationship between eating habits of parents and children, as well as for the determination of the most common situations in which preschool children consume (...) fast-food products and to find the relationship between the frequency of fast-food consumption and BMI values in preschool children. The tests were carried out with the use of an own survey carried out in kindergartens in Białystok among parents dropping off and picking up children. 149 correctly filled questionnaires were obtained. The statistical analysis employs the chi-squared test and correspondence analysis. Among the tested children, a statistically significant relationship between body weight and sex was obtained. In the group of children and parents consuming fast-foods, a statistically significant relationship between the frequency of children’s and parents’ consumption of the products in question was noticed. A statistically significant relationship between the age of introduction of fast-food products into the child’s diet and their BMI was found. A situation that was statistically significant as far as contribution to frequent consumption of fast-food products by children, i.e. at least once a week, were children and parents shopping together. The relationship between the frequency of fast-food consumption by parents and children was presented in the form of correspondence maps, as well as the relationship between the child’s BMI and the age when the first fast-food product is served, and the relationship between the child’s BMI and the frequency of their consumption of fast-foods. Unfortunately, despite the high awareness among parents of the harmful effects of fast-food products and the widespread health education programmes, a number of the children in kindergartens were overweight or even obese. For this reason, the quality of the educational programmes in kindergartens, as well as in various media outlets, needs to be improved, with emphasis put on their effectiveness, in order to minimise the problem of the occurrence of overweight and obesity in children. It is also important for parents rearing children to pay special attention not only to their children’s menus, but also to foods consumed in the presence of children. (shrink)

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and (...) enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person’s well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We end by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, in particular with respect to addiction research. (shrink)

Habits form a crucial part of the everyday conceptual scheme used to explain normal human activity. However, they have been neglected in debates concerning folk-psychology which have concentrated on propositional attitudes such as beliefs. But propositional attitudes are just one of the many mental states. In this paper, I seek to expand the debate by considering mental states other than propositional attitudes. I conclude that the case for the autonomy and plausibility of the folk-psychological explanation is strengthened when one considers (...) an example from the non-propositional-attitude mental states: habits. My main target is the radical eliminativist program. As regards habits, eliminativists could argue in two distinct but related ways. They can either abandon the concept "habit" altogether or retain the folk-psychological term "habit" by reducing it to the causal chain of the observed behavior pattern, as is sometimes done in social theory. I contend that both of these strategies are defective. The correct way to talk about habits is in terms of manifestations and activating conditions, not in terms of causal chains. Hence, if eliminativists take up either of the two arguments given above, they will not succeed. Correspondingly, by the added generality gained through the consideration of habits, the case for folk-psychology is strengthened. (shrink)

From time to time we explain what people do by referring to their habits. We explain somebody’s putting the kettle on in the morning as done through “force of habit”. We explain somebody’s missing a turning by saying that she carried straight on “out of habit”. And we explain somebody’s biting her nails as a manifestation of “a bad habit”. These are all examples of what will be referred to here as habit explanations. Roughly speaking, they (...) explain by referring to a pattern of a particular kind of behaviour which is regularly performed in characteristic circumstances, and has become automatic for that agent due to this repetition. (shrink)

In Paradigms and Barriers Howard Margolis offers an innovative interpretation of Thomas S. Kuhn's landmark idea of "paradigm shifts," applying insights from cognitive psychology to the history and philosophy of science. Building upon the arguments in his acclaimed Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, Margolis suggests that the breaking down of particular habits of mind—of critical "barriers"—is key to understanding the processes through which one model or concept is supplanted by another. Margolis focuses on those revolutionary paradigm shifts— such as the (...) switch from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican worldview—where challenges to entrenched habits of mind are marked by incomprehension or indifference to a new paradigm. Margolis argues that the critical problem for a revolutionary shift in thinking lies in the robustness of the habits of mind that reject the new ideas, relative to the habits of mind that accept the new ideas. Margolis applies his theory to famous cases in the history of science, offering detailed explanations for the transition from Ptolemaic to cosmological astronomy, the emergence of probability, the overthrow of phlogiston, and the emergence of the central role of experiment in the seventeenth century. He in turn uses these historical examples to address larger issues, especially the nature of belief formation and contemporary debates about the nature of science and the evolution of scientific ideas. Howard Margolis is a professor in the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and in the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality and Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, both published by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

: In this paper I will focus on the notion of “dominant patterns”, as revealed by the recently discovered typescript of what we can assume to be Dewey’s fragmentary and incomplete preliminary lecture notes for the Lecture Series on Social and Political Philosophy. I will show that the way the notion of “dominant patterns” is dealt with in the text of the lecture notes is not only consistent with the conceptual content of the whole series of the Lectures (...) in China as published by R. W. Clopton and Tsuin-Chen, but also gives us further arguments to appreciate the centrality of this question to the development of Dewey’s philosophical project during this period. In particular, I will argue that a comparative reading of the lecture notes and of the Lectures in China allows us to appreciate the central role dominant patterns play for Dewey’s understanding of social groupings as embodying habitual patterns of action and the way habit formation shapes and gives content to the interests that groups identify with and are identified by in social practices. Secondly, I will argue that such a comparative reading allows us to appreciate how in the lecture series Dewey has developed the notion of dominant patterns into a theory of social domination which is basically described in terms of habitualized recognitive relations. Hence, the discovery of the lecture notes is also very helpful in deepening our understanding of the Deweyan approach to the question of social recognition – and in particular of the dynamics of institutional recognition and its ideological function – and how it relates to habitualized patterns of dominant-subservient relations. -/- domination, habits, social philosophy, struggle for recognition, conflict, groups, hegemony, power, institutionalization. (shrink)

In the present study, we explore how reading habits (e.g., reading from left to right in French or reading from right to left in Arabic) influence thescanningand theconstructionof mental models in spatial reasoning. For instance, when participants are given a problem like A is to the left of B; B is to the left of C, what is the relation between A and C? They are assumed to construct the model: A B C. If reading habits influence the scanning process, (...) then readers of French should inspect models from left to right, whereas readers of Arabic should inspect them from right to left. The prediction following this analysis is that readers of French should be more inclined to produce “left” conclusions (i.e., A is to the left of C), whereas readers of Arabic should be more inclined to produce “right” conclusions (i.e., C is to the right of A). Furthermore, one may expect that readers of French show a greater ease in constructing models following a left-to-right direction than models following a right-to-left direction, whereas an opposite pattern might be expected for readers of Arabic. We tested these predictions in two experiments involving French and Yemeni participants. Experiment 1 investigated the formulation of conclusions from spatial premises, and Experiment 2, which was based on non-linguistic stimuli, examined the time required to construct mental models from left to right and from right to left. Our results show clear differences between the two groups. As expected, the French sample showed a strong left-to-right bias, but the Yemeni sample did not show the reverse bias. Results are discussed in terms of cultural influences and universal mechanisms. (shrink)

TThis paper aims to evidence the inherently metonymic nature of co-speech gestures. Arguing that motivation in gesture involves iconicity (similarity), indexicality (contiguity), and habit (conventionality) to varying degrees, it demonstrates how a set of metonymic principles may lend a certain systematicity to experientially grounded processes of gestural abstraction and enaction. Introducing visuo-kinetic signs as an umbrella term for co-speech gestures and signed languages, the paper shows how a frame-based approach to gesture may integrate different cognitive/functional linguistic and semiotic accounts (...) of metonymy (e.g., experiential domains, frame metonymy, contiguity, and pragmatic inferencing). The guiding assumption is that gestures metonymically profile deeply embodied, routinized aspects of familiar scenes, that is, the motivating context of frames. The discussion shows how gestures may evoke frame structures exhibiting varying degrees of groundedness, complexity, and schematicity: basic physical action and object frames; more complex frames; and highly abstract, complex frame structures. It thereby provides gestural evidence for the idea that metonymy is more basic and more directly experientially grounded than metaphor and thus often feeds into correlated metaphoric processes. Furthermore, the paper offers some initial insights into how metonymy also seems to induce the emergence of schematic patterns in gesture which may result from action-based and discourse-driven processes of habituation and conventionalization. It exemplifies how these forces may engender grammaticalization of a basic physical action into a gestural marker that shows strong metonymic form reduction, decreased transitivity, and interacting pragmatic functions. Finally, addressing basic metonymic operations in signed lexemes elucidates certain similarities regarding sign constitution in gesture and sign. English and German multimodal discourse data as well as German Sign Language (DGS) are drawn upon to illustrate the theoretical points of the paper. Overall, this paper presents a unified account of metonymy’s role in underpinning forms, functions, and patterns in visuo-kinetic signs. (shrink)

Urbanization affects concurrent human-animal interactions as a result of altered resource availability and land use pattern, which leads to considerable ecological consequences. While some animals have lost their habitat due to urban encroachment, few of them managed to survive within the urban ecosystem by altering their natural behavioral patterns. The feeding repertoire of folivorous colobines, such as gray langur, largely consists of plant parts. However, these free-ranging langurs tend to be attuned to the processed high-calorie food sources to attain (...) maximum benefits within the concrete jungle having insignificant greenery. Therefore, besides understanding their population dynamics, the effective management of these urbanized, free-ranging, non-human primate populations also depends on their altered feeding habits. Here, we have used a field-based experimental setup that allows gray langurs to choose between processed and unprocessed food options, being independent of any inter-specific conflicts over resources due to food scarcity. The multinomial logit model reveals the choice-based decision-making of these free-ranging gray langurs in an urban settlement of West Bengal, India, where they have not only learned to recognize the human-provisioned processed food items as an alternative food source but also shown a keen interest in it. However, such a mismatch between the generalized feeding behavior of folivorous colobines and their specialized gut physiology reminds us of Liem's paradox and demands considerable scientific attention. While urbanization imposes tremendous survival challenges to these animals, it also opens up for various alternative options for surviving in close proximity to humans which is reflected in this study, and could guide us for the establishment of a sustainable urban ecosystem in the future. (shrink)

This article explores the contributions of nineteenth-century philosophers of habit to understanding the rigidity of desire. Focusing on the work of Félix Ravaisson, I argue that Of Habit (1838) makes sense of something that much queer theory fails to address in its investment in the subversion of identity: the tendency of desire to return to known objects and follow well-worn paths, a tendency that does not always result in the affirmation of norms or the consolidation of power. Of (...) Habit offers a new set of terms—crystallization, patterning, and necessity, among others—for comprehending the limits of desire’s flexibility without naturalizing gender or sexuality as permanently fixed or inherent. In so doing, it offers an alternative to queer theories that, indebted to Judith Butler’s performativity thesis, attribute the rigidities of sexual life entirely to the productive power of cultural prohibitions and discursively constructed norms. (shrink)

Abstract: The following is an outline of an emerging foundation for science that begins to explain living forms and their patterns of movement beyond the sphere of mechanistic interactions. Employing an event ontology based on a convergence of quantum physics and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, coupled with the controversial yet promising theory of formative causation, this development will explore possible influences on the outcomes of events beyond any combination of external forces, laws of Nature, and chance. If it (...) turns out there are no such additional influences--beyond mechanistic causes--it is difficult to see how agency or free will could exist. Assuming agency exists, as Whitehead apparently does, while committing to an event ontology in which process is fundamental leads to interesting questions about the natures of any entities that might participate in events. Furthermore, what might the purposes and agendas of such entities be based upon, beyond memory traces or DNA code? This ontological model, recognizing processes as fundamental, leads to a revised cosmology where the trajectory of a series of events may be due to more than rearrangement of material bits according to external forces and where goal-directed, recurring processes and the emergence of mind are not so surprising. Just as special relativity reduces to classical treatment when speeds slow down, this scientific model for a living world reduces to mechanistic materialism whenever conditions are more limited. Though this development is based on a philosophy of process, there are some dissimilarities with respect to Whitehead’s particular version. (shrink)

Recurrent, unvarying, and seemingly purposeless patterns of action and cognition are part of normal development, but also feature prominently in several neuropsychiatric conditions. Repetitive stereotyped behaviors can be viewed as exaggerated forms of learned habits and frequently correlate with alterations in motor, limbic, and associative basal ganglia circuits. However, it is still unclear how altered basal ganglia feedback signals actually relate to the phenomenological variability of RSBs. Why do behaviorally overlapping phenomena sometimes require different treatment approaches−for example, sensory shielding (...) strategies versus exposure therapy for autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder, respectively? Certain clues may be found in recent models of basal ganglia function that extend well beyond action selection and motivational control, and have implications for sensorimotor integration, prediction, learning under uncertainty, as well as aesthetic learning. In this paper, we systematically compare three exemplary conditions with basal ganglia involvement, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and autism spectrum conditions, to gain a new understanding of RSBs. We integrate clinical observations and neuroanatomical and neurophysiological alterations with accounts employing the predictive processing framework. Based on this review, we suggest that basal ganglia feedback plays a central role in preconditioning cortical networks to anticipate self-generated, movement-related perception. In this way, basal ganglia feedback appears ideally situated to adjust the salience of sensory signals through precision weighting of new sensory information, relative to the precision of predictions based on prior generated models. Accordingly, behavioral policies may preferentially rely on new data versus existing knowledge, in a spectrum spanning between novelty and stability. RSBs may then represent compensatory or reactive responses, respectively, at the opposite ends of this spectrum. This view places an important role of aesthetic learning on basal ganglia feedback, may account for observed changes in creativity and aesthetic experience in basal ganglia disorders, is empirically testable, and may inform creative art therapies in conditions characterized by stereotyped behaviors. (shrink)

Our lives are guided by habits. Most of the activities we engage in throughout the day are initiated and carried out not by rational thought and deliberation, but through an ingrained set of dispositions or patterns of action—what Aristotle calls a hexis. We develop these dispositions over time, by acting and gauging how the world responds. I tilt the steering wheel too far and the car’s lurch teaches me how much force is needed to steady it. I come too (...) close to a hot stove and the burn I get inclines me not to get too close again. This feedback and the habits it produces are bodily. They are possible because the medium through which these actions take place is a physical, sensible one. The world around us is, in the language of postphenomenology, an opaque one. We notice its texture and contours as we move through it, and crucially, we bump up against it from time to time. The digital world, by contrast, is largely transparent. Digital media are designed to recede from view. As a result, we experience little friction as we carry out activities online; the consequences of our actions are often not apparent to us. This distinction between the opacity of the natural world and the transparency of the digital one raises important questions. In this chapter, I ask: how does the transparency of digital media affect our ability to develop healthy habits online? If the digital world is constructed precisely not to push back against us, how are we supposed to gauge whether our actions are good or bad, for us and for others? The answer to this question has important ramifications for a number of ethical, political, and policy debates around issues in online life. For in order to advance cherished norms like privacy, civility, and fairness online, we need more than good laws and good policies—we need good habits, which dispose us to act in ways conducive to our and others’ flourishing. (shrink)

This book constitutes the first treatment of C. S. Peirce’s unique concept of habit. Habit animated the pragmatists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who picked up the baton from classical scholars, principally Aristotle. Most prominent among the pragmatists thereafter is Charles Sanders Peirce. In our vernacular, habit connotes a pattern of conduct. Nonetheless, Peirce’s concept transcends application to mere regularity or to human conduct; it extends into natural and social phenomena, making cohesive inner and outer (...) worlds. Chapters in this anthology define and amplify Peircean habit; as such, they highlight the dialectic between doubt and belief. Doubt destabilizes habit, leaving open the possibility for new beliefs in the form of habit-change; and without habit-change, the regularity would fall short of habit – conforming to automatic/mechanistic systems. This treatment of habit showcases how, through human agency, innovative regularities of behavior and thought advance the process of making the unconscious conscious. The latter materializes when affordances form the basis for modifications in action schemas and modes of reasoning. Further, the book charts how indexical signs in language and action are pivotal in establishing attentional patterns; and how these habits accommodate novel orientations within event templates. It is intended for those interested in Peirce’s metaphysic or semiotic, including both senior scholars and students of philosophy and religion, psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as mathematics, and the natural sciences. (shrink)

This paper refers to habitation in the Byzantine Empire from the 7th to the 11th centuries and attempts a reappraisal of the patterns used to describe, evaluate and interpret the distribution of archaeological remains. Based on the study of a region in western Greek mainland, several contradictions between the historical and the archaeological evidence on settlement are being discussed; those reveal the prevalence of dispersed rather than nuclear patterns of habitation in the area. These patterns are further (...) discussed within the context of medieval settlement around the Mediterranean. The physical form of Middle Byzantine Episcopal sees is sought for while the term ‘κάστρον’ is examined against the “archaeological imaginary” of 6th–11th c. Byzantine fortified settlements. It is concluded that the contextualization of archaeological and historical evidence for Middle Byzantine settlements in Southern Epiros demonstrates instead a rather flexible organization of habitation; episcopal sees do not seem to have corresponded to any clear distinct type of settlement. It is therefore suggested that during periods of rapid social change expressed through a transformation of habitation, specific forms or sizes of settlements cannot be correlated to specific functions or other political or socioeconomic activities. There should rather be more of “hybrid” settlement formations of changing nature and mixed qualities. Given the dynamic development pattern of Byzantine habitats, there is room for such “open” analytical categories in the archaeology of settlements, in order to facilitate descriptions of find distributions which do not conform to the available theoretical patterns. These new categories could further lead to an emergence of new interpretation schemes bringing out the spatial differentiation and uniqueness which seems to have been very much the case in the evolution of Byzantine provincial settlement patterns. (shrink)

BackgroundHeavy media use has been linked to sleep problems in children, which may also extend to the infancy period. While international parent-advisory agencies, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, advise no screen time before 18 months, parents often do not follow this recommendation. Research on Italian infants’ early access to media is sparse, and only very few studies have investigated links with sleeping habits.MethodTo address this gap, we examined concurrent associations between parent-reported surveys of child technology use and sleeping (...) patterns. The Italian version of the 60 item Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure Survey, developed as part of a larger international study,, the Brief Screening Questionnaire for Infant Sleep Problems Sadeh, 2004) were completed online by 264 Italian parents of 8- to 36-month-olds and a subset completed the Parenting Stress Index Abidin, 1995) between April 2017 and April 2018.ResultsMore devices located in the child’s room and the more time spent watching TV or using an iPad were associated with less hours of sleep at night. Furthermore, more time spent watching TV or using a smartphone, as well as the number of devices in the room was associated with going to sleep later at night. Instrumental media use was associated with less sleep.ConclusionLike other countries, Italian infants have high levels of exposure to media, and differences in media patterns were associated with sleep patterns. Cultural factors influence both instrumental reasons for media use and sleep practices. Further research should explore how media use may serve to regulate emotion as a function of both contextual factors and individual differences. (shrink)

What should I do? Philosophical reflection on this question has raised a variety of puzzles concerning the nature of ethics and of practical reasoning. In this paper, I focus on some new complications raised by current discussions concerning value pluralism, incomparability, and the nature of all-things-considered judgments. I suggest that part of the debate has proceeded in a way that obscures aspects of how we make good decisions in the face of a plurality of values (and identities) pulling us in (...) different directions. In particular, I argue that the debate has been shaped by a line of thought that does not adequately recognize reason’s role in ensuring that one’s policies and/or habits of consideration support a reasonable pattern of choice. The oversight makes choosing well, given pluralism, more puzzling and challenging than it needs to be. After sketching out the apparent puzzle and considering two recent responses, I defend what I see as a common-sense view of the matter. (shrink)

Maintenance of proper health and prevention of diseases of civilization are now significant public health problems. Nutrition is an important factor in the development of youth, as well as the current and future state of health. The aim of the study was to show the benefits of the application of cluster analysis to assess the dietary habits of high school students. The survey was carried out on 1,631 eighteen-year-old students in seven randomly selected secondary schools in Bialystok using a self-prepared (...) anonymous questionnaire. An evaluation of the time of day meals were eaten and the number of meals consumed was made for the surveyed students. The cluster analysis allowed distinguishing characteristic structures of dietary habits in the observed population. Four clusters were identified, which were characterized by relative internal homogeneity and substantial variation in terms of the number of meals during the day and the time of their consumption. The most important characteristics of cluster 1 were cumulated food ration in 2 or 3 meals and long intervals between meals. Cluster 2 was characterized by eating the recommended number of 4 or 5 meals a day. In the 3rd cluster, students ate 3 meals a day with large intervals between them, and in the 4th they had four meals a day while maintaining proper intervals between them. In all clusters dietary mistakes occurred, but most of them were related to clusters 1 and 3. Cluster analysis allowed for the identification of major flaws in nutrition, which may include irregular eating and skipping meals, and indicated possible connections between eating patterns and disturbances of body weight in the examined population. (shrink)

The current scientific and political discussion on the under‐representation of women within the Internet once again associates women with disinterest in technology in an essentialist manner. Gender‐specific attributions are unquestioningly transferred to the new media, and it is assumed that women behave in unfailing conformity with existing gender stereotypes. The intention of this paper is to show that gender research has to perform differentiated empirical studies of actual Internet use. Gender studies can then make a concrete contribution to the task (...) of overcoming the genderdifferentiated inequalities in the access to and the use of the Internet. I shall begin by briefly outlining the dilemma of gender studies in the technical area. In the second section I shall describe the reasons for the gender‐differentiated Internet access data, using quantitative Internet studies from the USA, calling for a de‐dramatisation of difference in this context. In the third section, I will overcome the dichotomous view of the digital divide and present a research framework for differentiated study of differing use habits and use requirements. This section illustrates that such an approach does not make the gender category superfluous, but challenges gender studies to present context‐related studies, in which individual behaviour may be interpreted in the context of gender symbols and structures. My fourth step will be to explain how the new possibilities of online research can and should be used to gain further understanding in the sense of differentiated study designs. Finally, I will finish with a short outlook where I am calling for an equal representation of all societal groups in the Internet and therefore for an empowerment particularly of women. (shrink)

Social groups seem to be entities that are dependent on us. Given their apparent dependence, one might adopt Social Creationism—the thesis that all social groups are social objects created through (some specific types of) thoughts, intentions, agreements, habits, patterns of interaction, and practices. Here I argue that not all social groups come to be in the same way. This is due, in part, to social groups failing to share a uniform nature. I argue that some groups (e.g., racial and (...) gender groups) are social kinds. They either falsify Social Creationism or are created as mere byproducts of property instantiation. In contrast, I argue that other groups (e.g., teams and committees) are social objects. When restricted to groups like these, Social Creationism holds. The conclusions have more than just metaphysical import. The differences between groups and how they come to be help to explain why some groups appear to be natural, why some fail to rely on intentions, and why certain sorts of groups are widespread and persistent. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of the social foundations of a theory of democracy. It purports to show that a social ontology of democracy is the necessary counterpart of a political theory of democracy. It notably contends that decisions concerning basic social ontological assumptions are relevant not only for empirical research, but bear a significant impact also on normative theorizing. The paper then explains why interactionist rather than substantialist social ontologies provide the most promising starting point for building a social (...) ontology of democracy. It then introduces and examines the three notions of habits, patterns of interaction, and forms of social organization, conceived as the main pillars of an interactionist social ontology of democracy and briefly discusses some major implications of this approach for democratic theory. (shrink)

The author argues for the following as constituents of the moral virtue of open-mindedness: a second-order awareness that is not reducible to first-order doubt; strong moral concern for members of the moral community; and some freedom from reactive habit patterns, particularly with regard to one's self-narratives, or equanimity. Drawing on Buddhist philosophical accounts of equanimity, the author focuses on the third constituent, equanimity, and argues that it is a central, but often ignored, component of the moral virtue of (...) open-mindedness, and its absence can explain many failures of open-mindedness. (shrink)

We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal interidentities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two (...) related notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilise and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency towards an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realise relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending towards a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them. (shrink)

The concept of “autonomy”, once at the core of the original enactivist proposal in The Embodied Mind, is nowadays ignored or neglected by some of the most prominent contemporary enactivists approaches. Theories of autonomy, however, come to fill a theoretical gap that sensorimotor accounts of cognition cannot ignore: they provide a naturalized account of normativity and the resources to ground the identity of a cognitive subject in its specific mode of organization. There are, however, good reasons for the contemporary neglect (...) of autonomy as a relevant concept for enactivism. On the one hand, the concept of autonomy has too often been assimilated into autopoiesis and the implications are not always clear for a dynamical sensorimotor approach to cognitive science. On the other hand, the foundational enactivist proposal displays a metaphysical tension between the concept of operational closure, deployed as constitutive, and that of structural coupling ; making it hard to reconcile with the claim that experience is sensorimotorly constituted. This tension is particularly apparent when Varela et al. propose Bittorio as a model of the operational closure of the nervous system as it fails to satisfy the required conditions for a sensorimotor constitution of experience. It is, however, possible to solve these problems by re-considering autonomy at the level of sensorimotor neurodynamics. Two recent robotic simulation models are used for this task, illustrating the notion of strong sensorimotor dependency of neurodynamic patterns, and their networked intertwinement. The concept of habit is proposed as an enactivist building block for cognitive theorizing, re-conceptualizing mental life as a habit ecology, tied within an agent’s behaviour generating mechanism in coordination with its environment. Norms can be naturalized in terms of dynamic, interactively self-sustaining, coherentism. This conception of autonomous sensorimotor agency is put in contrast with those enactive approaches that reject autonomy or neglect the theoretical resources it has to offer for the project of naturalizing minds. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I will first reconstruct a Deweyan model of social ontology, based on the process of habituation. Habit ontology leads to a social philosophy that is not merely descriptive, since it involves a critical redescription of the social world. I will argue that a habit-modeled social ontology is critical insofar as it includes an account of social transformation and of the inevitability of social conflict. Such an understanding is based on a diagnosis of social pathologies (...) of our form of life and includes an account of the experience of domination. Accordingly, it is described as a matter of an imbalance of recognition that embodies subjugating patterns and is seen from the critical perspective of freedom understood as emancipation from oppression. This leads to a reconstruction of the genesis of critical attitudes from life's processes of habituation, which leads to an extended naturalist account of social authority. (shrink)

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)

BackgroundChildren’s sensory processing patterns are linked with their eating habits; children with increased sensory sensitivity are often picky eaters. Research suggests that children’s eating habits are also partially influenced by attention to food and beverage advertising. However, the extent to which sensory processing influences children’s attention to food cues remains unknown. Therefore, we examined the attentional bias patterns to food vs. non-food logos among children 4–12 years with and without increased oral sensory sensitivity.DesignChildren were categorized into high vs. (...) typical oral sensory sensitivity by the Sensory Profile-2. We used eye-tracking to examine orientation and attentional bias to food vs. non-food logos among children with high vs. typical oral sensory sensitivity. We used a mixed model regression to test the influence of oral sensory sensitivity to attentional biases to food vs. non-food logos among children.ResultsResults showed that children with high oral sensory sensitivity showed attentional biases toward non-food logos; specifically, children with high oral sensory sensitivity oriented more quickly to non-food logos as compared to food logos, as well as spent more time looking at non-food logos as compared to food logos. Findings were in the opposite direction for children with typical oral sensory sensitivity.ConclusionSensory sensitivity may be an individual characteristic that serves as a protective mechanism against susceptibility to food and beverage advertising in young children. (shrink)

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as “shared expectations,” the “selective patterning of attention and behaviour,” “cultural evolution,” “cultural inheritance,” and “implicit learning” are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater (...) specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process “thinking through other minds” (TTOM) – in effect, the process of inferring other agents’ expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has seriously disrupted the individual buying habits along with their consumption patterns. Previous studies indicated that anxiety and depression were related to impulse buying. However, no research has explored the mechanism possibly underlying the association between anxiety, depression, and impulse buying. Based on the regulatory focus theory and the emotion-cognition-behavior loop, this study aimed to examine the impacts of negative emotions on impulse buying and the mediating role of cognitive characteristics during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April (...) 2021, 734 Chinese undergraduates were recruited by cluster sampling and they completed self-report measures of anxiety, depression, intolerance of uncertainty, cognitive flexibility, and impulse buying. Results showed that impulse buying was positively associated with anxiety, depression, and intolerance of uncertainty, while it was negatively associated with cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility fully mediated the effects of anxiety and depression on cognitive facet of impulse buying. Meanwhile, intolerance of uncertainty fully mediated the effects of anxiety and depression on affective facet of impulse buying. Overall, this study shows that different pathways can explain how anxiety and depression exacerbate two aspects of impulse buying, and it highlights the importance of cognitive characteristics for the link between negative emotions and impulse buying. Intervention programs should focus on increasing cognitive flexibility and tolerance to uncertainty of high-risk individuals, so as to strengthen their adaptive purchase behaviors. (shrink)

Harmful but culturally cherished practices often endure in spite of the damages they cause. Meat consumption is increasingly becoming one of such cases and may provide an opportunity from which to observe these phenomena. Growing evidence indicates that current and projected production and consumption patterns are important contributors to significant environmental problems, public health degradation, and animal suffering. Our aim is to contribute to a further understanding of the psychological factors that may hinder or promote personal disposition to change (...) food habits to benefit each of these domains. Drawing from previous evidence, this study explores the proposition that some consumers are motivated to resort to moral disengagement strategies when called upon to consider the impacts of their food habits. Data were collected from six semi-structured focus groups with a sample of 40 participants. Although affirming personal duties towards preserving the environment, promoting public health, and safeguarding animal welfare, participants did not show personal disposition to change their meat consumption habits. Several patterns of response that resonate with the principles of moral disengagement theory were observed while discussing impacts and the possibility of change. Results seem to support the proposition that the process of moral disengagement may play a role in hindering openness to change food habits for the benefit of the environment, public health, and animals, and point towards the relevance of further exploring this approach. (shrink)

Recent Darwin scholarship has provided grounds for recognising the Origin as a literary as well as a scientific achievement. While Darwin was an acute observer, a gifted experimentalist and indefatigable theorist, this essay argues that it was also crucial to his impact that the Origin transcended the putative divide between the scientific and the literary. Analysis of Darwin’s development as a writer between his journal-keeping on HMS Beagle and his construction of the Origin argues the latter draws on the pattern (...) of the Romantic or Kantian sublime. The Origin repeatedly uses strategies which challenge the natural-theological appeal to the imagination in conceiving nature. Darwin’s sublime coaches the Origin’s readers into a position from which to envision nature that reduces and contains its otherwise overwhelming complexity. As such, it was Darwin’s literary achievement that enabled him to fashion a new ‘habit of looking at things in a given way’ that is the centrepiece of the scientific revolution bearing his name. (shrink)

In the early exploration and colonization of the Americas, Europeans encountered unfamiliar climates that challenged received ideas from classical geography. This experience drove innovative efforts to understand and explain patterns of weather and seasons in the New World. A close examination of three climatic puzzles (the habitability of the tropics, debates on the likelihood of a Northwest Passage, and the unexpectedly harsh weather in the first North American colonies) illustrates how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century observers made three intellectual breakthroughs: conceiving (...) of climates as a distinct subject of inquiry, crossing the hitherto-separated disciplines of geography and meteorology, and developing new theories regarding the influence of prevailing winds on patterns of weather and seasons. While unquantified and unsystematic, these novel approaches promoted a new understanding of climates critical to the emergence of climate science. This study offers new insights into the foundations of climatology and the role of the New World in early modern science. (shrink)

While I agree with most of Maiese and Hanna’s (2019) claims in The Mind-Body Politic, I argue that it is possible to offer a fuller explanation of the effects of ideologies and how they are implemented by adopting a narrative analysis to examine the role that narratives play in shaping the social and material conditions of institutions, and individuals’ cognitive habits and affective frames. A narrative analysis maintains that much of our perceptions of and experiences in the world are shaped (...) by the synthesis of conceptual and affective knowledge that we encounter in socio-cultural narratives. Socio-cultural narratives are understood here as narratives that establish, shape, and reinforce cultural beliefs and practices or societal social structures, process, and organizations. By utilizing a narrative analysis we can then employ an additional methodology to examine and understand how we, as individuals, develop and change our particular embodied habits and affective framing patterns. I show how this can be done by focusing on, and expanding upon, Maiese and Hanna’s discussion of neoliberalism and the backfire effect, where individuals resist changes to their affective framing patterns and habitual ways of being in the world. (shrink)

The internet has been discussed as a major agent of change for political communication and participation. One important dimension of possible effects is the influence of online communication on the participation habits of citizens. In this article, panel survey data from Germany that cover almost the first decade of this century are used in order to test causal hypotheses about this transformation process. The results highlight that new forms of political communication are mainly a complement to existing forms with few (...) substitution effects. Additionally, the data demonstrate the strong role habitualization plays, particularly in the field of political information seeking and traditional forms of political discussion and participation, while online communication is still evolving with yet less fixed patterns of action. (shrink)

In his earlier work Robert Bellah coined the concept of ‘civil religion’ for that ‘unique American combination of secularization, individualism and pluralism’. Such a civil religion is supposed to work as an integrative factor on the level of societies and as a motivational factor on the level of individuals. At both levels, it supplies the meaning of meaning, a meaningful ‘ultimate reality’ which draws people together and delivers them with a personal idea of vocation or ‘calling’.Unfortunately, as Bellah and his (...) research team state in books such as Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, this balanced normative pattern is waning. Societal self-descriptions in the U.S. are confined to a vocabulary of ‘Lockean individualism’. They are no longer balanced by biblical and republican traditions, which provided ‘the language needed to make moral sense of one’s life’. At the same time, however these field studies observed that many urged “for a renewal of commitment and community.” Bellah and his research team conclude: “such a renewal is indeed a world waiting to be born if we only had the courage to see it.” Because of the erosion of the shared symbolic system that provided some ‘ultimate social meaning’, Bellah conceives society to be disintegrating. Group solidarity cannot be mobilized any more, individuals feel atomized and lack trust and belief. Well-versed in the Durkheimian tradition, Bellah can only observe society in terms of normative integration. If shared values and beliefs are being hollowed out, social order can only be plunged into a crisis.The following analysis will not proceed along this Durkheimian path. We see no compelling reason to conceive of society in terms of normative integration alone. Instead we plug into the vocabulary of Luhmann’s systems theory and observe society as synonymous with all ongoing communications. Society only consists of communications and nothing else. This implies for example that human beings do not belong to society, . For psychic systems can only process thoughts, feelings, desires, but no communications! (shrink)

The leading philosophers of science of the first half of the twentieth century had little use for the history of science. There are several possible explanations for this. One is that philosophers of science sometimes (knowingly or not) mimic the methodological habits and values of scientists. Many philosophers of science are motivated by admiration for the perceived rigor and intellectual hygiene of the exact sciences. Historical sense is not normally a cardinal virtue among physicists. Hence, those philosophers who take their (...) methodological cues from their scientific heroes are unlikely to think of philosophy as a historical discipline. Indeed, the idea of a close relationship between history and philosophy may have fallen into disrepute as a consequence of its association with idealist philosophers, of whom Hegel is the most notorious. Then there is Feyerabend's explanation, which is that the philosophy of science was transformed by the spectacular advances in formal logic which took place in the late nineteenth century. The development of modern formal logic made possible a range of hitherto inconceivable projects in the philosophy of science. The most radical of these was the positivist attempt to replace philosophy with the logical analysis of scientific language. Equally dependent on the new logic was Popper's attempt to explain the workings of empirical science using only deductive patterns of inference. According to Feyerabend, the philosophical projects engendered by the advances in formal logic came to dominate so thoroughly that everything else was marginalized (see feyerabend). It was not necessary for philosophers to know anything about the history of science, but they did have to be competent logicians: “As always maturity in a narrow domain means illiteracy elsewhere” (Feyerabend 1981, p. 20). (shrink)

In this article I pursue both a systematic and a historical interest. I develop the sentiment of unease as a feminist-pragmatist concept systematically. The main references are the terms habit and situation in John Dewey and the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Perkins Gilman reflects experiences of unease as a writer and as a (social) theorist. The paper is therefore also a historical appreciation of the theoretical work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. With Perkins Gilman, uneasiness appears to be an (...) expression of an androcentric world, more generally speaking, of a world in which gender relations are understood according to the pattern of normality and deviation. This can be generalized and unease can be understood as an expression of power asymmetries that damage the epistemic authority of some. Such a view is critical of a widespread tendency to individualize negative feelings and attribute them to individuals, who are then classified either as in need of individual coaching or as pathological, and who can therefore theoretically be passed over. (shrink)

Darwin’s fifth chapter, “The Laws of Variation,” may stand in the shadow of the first four that climax with his presentation of “Natural Selection,” but its importance should not be underestimated. It deals with philosophical and methodological issues in the study of variation that would be hotly debated for decades after the publication of the book, many of which are still unsettled today. As the chapter title suggests, Darwin felt that a proper scientific study of variation had to discover the (...) laws of nature that governed it. He could not simply let it be random. He looked for laws in the patterns of co-occurrence of changes in different parts of the body or the same part in different species and also in the apparent consistencies in the effects of environment and habit. There is no one main line of argument in this chapter, but rather an exploration of multiple possible conceptions, patterns, and laws of variation—all ways in which variation might not be entirely random. For example: To what extent was variation responsive to environmental changes or to the organism’s needs and habits? And if Darwin admitted such responses, then how was his theory any different from Lamarck’s? Do all parts of the organism vary freely and independently or are there hidden connections, correlations, or trade-offs between varying parts of the body? Why do related species seem often to vary in similar ways? Many of these questions are still with us, in modern evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”) and studies of epigenetics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Sharing BreathJody Sperling (bio)My work as choreographer dwells on the inseparability between breath and atmosphere. There are no firm boundaries between the air we breathe in, the air surrounding us, and the air enveloping the planet. This is as true for air as it is for water—there is only one global ocean, although by convention we divide the seas into named regions. When you move through the ocean (...) of air enveloping you, you displace it and create dynamic unseen wakes in your midst.Beginning with my dance, "Turbulence" (2011),1 I sought to visualize such patterns of air disturbance into kinetic sculptural forms. To do so, the six dancers deployed Loie Fuller-style costumes, disquieting the air and materializing its gyrations. An early innovator of performance technology, Fuller danced in robes fashioned from hundreds of yards of silk with embedded wands that extended her body's motion into space. Serendipitously introduced to Fuller's work in 1997, I became seduced by the genre for the way it imbues the doer with an expanded sense of self. Whirling in the Fuller-style garments, I felt, and still feel, integrated into the atmosphere as an eddy or gust.With "Wind Rose" (2019),2 a collaboration with composer Matthew Burtner, I focused on making the connections between breath and wind palpable. Wind is said to be the breath of the planet, a driver of earthly life. A windrose is a meteorological tool that graphically represents wind speed, direction and variability at a particular time and place. I thought, what if I designed choreography with the intention not to create human motion, but in order to create a windrose—an atmospheric snapshot—in the performing space? At the start of "Wind Rose," the five dancers stand shoulder to shoulder and circle the stage so as to forge a human turbine. As the dancers accelerate their cyclonic motion, they push a swelling air wave towards the audience.For another section, I choreographed eight motions, each of which was connected with a sound. The sounds were made either by the dancers whipping their Fuller-style costumes through the air or by the dancers' breathy vocalizations. Matthew took my eight sound-breath-moves and composed a fugue. The dancers perform this music-motion score so that [End Page 155] they stir up a breeze pattern—a fugue that can be felt, as well as seen and heard.Wind has been changing along with climate. Locally, winds are becoming more chaotic. Globally, the high winds are slowing down and the polar jet stream is becoming wonky. But we are not in the habit of listening to the changing winds. One of the root causes of climate inaction has been a deep disconnect between people and their atmosphere. Many among the privileged live out their lives in climate-controlled habitats. Recently, though, even wealthy nations and the elite are starting to feel the heat. These days, no matter how deeply you bury your head in the sand, your butt will still get scorched.As a way of grappling with life in the Anthropocene, I have been formulating an open inquiry called ecokinetics. I conceived ecokinetics as a choreographic corollary to ecoacoustics, an environmental mode of music composition pioneered by Matthew Burtner, my long-time musical collaborator. According to Matthew, "ecoacoustics embeds environmental systems into musical and performance structures using new technologies" (Burtner). Ecokinetics asks, how can we relate human movement to environmental systems? How can choreography (aesthetically patterned human motion) illuminate, echo, expand upon the movement vectors present at a site and help us better understand local ecologies? How can dance entwine with media technologies to embody the processes of natural systems? Ecokinetics is part personal movement practice, part pedagogical tool, and part performance methodology.In its essence, ecokinetics repudiates the separation of humans from nature, a pervasive Colonialist mindset that needs constant undoing. In order to make progress on climate change, we must feel—truly and deeply—that we are part of the planet and not apart from it. This is the opposite of what the billionaires' space club aims to accomplish. Bezos, Branson, and Musk, et al. view distance from Earth as a... (shrink)

Influential contemporary thinkers have declared that the belief in individual autonomy rests on an illusion. They have argued that our subjectivity is shaped by the language we speak and the traditions to which we belong. One should not, however, overestimate the impact of these theoretical criticisms. The idea of individual autonomy is part of a larger pattern of belief which has not ceased to exert its influence on our habits of thinking and behaving.The belief that we are fully autonomous subjects (...) is associated with the belief that we should identify ourselves with the detached, objectifying attitude which is an essential element of the scientific outlook. We like to believe that our real self is to be distinguished from any role we happen to fulfill or any position we happen to occupy. Instead of admitting that we are constituted in our deepest self by our commitments and allegiances, we would prefer to see these commitments and allegiances as the expressions of our individual desires and free decisions. The kind of individualism which is related to the idea of individual autonomy need not be amoral or egoistic, but it can easily be combined with a kind of moral universalism. A commitment to an abstract ideal is not incompatible with individual autonomy. (shrink)

While attending seminary school in Pennsylvania, Martin Luther King Jr. cultivated “the arts of pulpit oratory,” the habit of visualizing philosophical problems and other objects of criticism by invoking many-sided jewels and multi-runged ladders. This article appropriates King's jewels and ladders as tools for humanizing juridico-discursive practice toward migrants/emigrants/immigrants and refugees. By drawing attention to the process whereby persons are subordinated and become subpersons, we are able to see how the standpoint of racialized dehumanization is historically patterned and furthermore (...) involves an overlap of legal, political, and artistic expressions. Consequently, jewels and ladders become theoretical as well as practical tools for visualizing the moral standing of migrant/refugee populations in modernity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Robert Leo CRITICISM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN SHELLEY'S A DEFENCE OF POETRY IN his "Ode to Liberty" Shelley locates by encircling and enfolding metaphors a mythic Hellenic moment, one in which verse was yet "speechless" and philosophy still burdened with "lidless eyes." Greece— always for Shelley either the displaced Garden of prethematic unity or the mythic dream of integrated civic and aesthetic life—is about to inaugurate Athens and the (...) "wrinkled image" of historical consciousness.1 Poetry, thinking, and the tilling of an earth "to human use" are implicitly related and foreseen as destiny: from their enchanted caves Prophetic echoes flung dim melody. On the unapprehensive wild The vine, the corn, the olive mild, Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled; And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea, Like the man's dark thought in the infant's brain, Like aught that is which wraps what is to be, Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child, Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain Her lidless eyes for thee... (11. 49-60). Shelley could be describing the reading or speaking of a text, for poetic experience is an originating moment which unfolds our reflections and anticipations. Poetry elides speechlessness and the empty gaze. Its goings are all returnings, its experience is always inventive before meanings codify and resolve: "Every original language near to its source," we find in the Defence (p. 279), "is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem; the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry." What was dark to experience is now illumined, 46 John Robert Leo47 as different regions in experience are uncovered or redistributed by language across our shifting horizons. Thus this bringing-foward-intoclarity, this moving of the previously inexpressed into articulation, is the pattern not only behind Shelley's view ofGreece producing a "sun-fire garlanded" Athens (1. 68), but also the more pervasive design describing other regarded experience. James Edie puts it this way: "We... can learn to make distinctions in our experience by attending to differences of meaning which are normally below the level of our own cultural threshold. By attending to a given region of experience, we can lower the differential thresholds already sedimented in our language almost indefinitely and make what was implicit in our experience more and more explicit."2 Edie's comments may be taken as responses to questions emerging from modernist readings of Shelley and other visionary poets—Blake, Hart Crane, or Charles Olson are instances—who sense the poetic project as a criticism of consciousness, within the lived body, as it struggles to make a world. How do language and the imagination consort in the critical regeneration of our lives? In what sorts of ways is renascence the uncovering and unfolding of an indefinite wholeness by the unlayering of fixed habits and attitudes? How does Shelley's Defence of Poetry, both a text on aesthetics and a reading of the world, suggest their alignment? What methods from critical discourse make Shelley's poetics present to our experience and thought? The adjustment of these issues is the task of the remainder of my article. First I examine Shelley's organization of consciousness into "reason" and "imagination" and trace the meanings of these functions in their immediate social context. A brief dispute with the reductive idealism of Platonic tradition allows for my third procedure, which is a phenomenological description of the imaginative field according to Husserl. Finally, I try to explicate Shelley's understanding of imaginative "decentering" within our experience. I Poetry and prose are saturated with references to phenomena. Texts refer to interior and exterior events (memory, rain), which are objects ofandfor consciousness. Shelley grasps this co-givenness of consciousness and world, their correlativity, as a condition revealed and strengthened by metaphor, which itself arrests us as "that of which we are speaking through words."3 But if it is the nature of language to be both perceptual and yet transcendental, both present and absent, it still exists as the imagination's voice in... (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyze the Philonic notion of \"the city of soul\" which Philo uses in his commentary on the Septuagint, and especially in his two treatises: De confusione linguarum (107-109, 196) and De posteritate Caini (52-62). First the exegetic context and allegorical method are examined, including the biblical verses (Gen. 11,1-9; Ex. 4,17) and the way Philo interprets them. It can be seen how the biblical motives are modified by him and subordinated to the external (...) conception of the city that he probably draws from the Greek or Hellenistic notions, in particular the conception of polls understood simultaneously as an actual city and as its legal constitution. Then the structure of the psychic or moral city is analyzed, including its \"buildings\" (and \"walls\"), \"habitants\" and \"laws,\" which are allegorical presentations for the moral function of language, virtues or vices and laws or constitution of the inner city. Although Philo\'s allegorical interpretation is here succeeded only to a certain degree due to his difficulties in clear distinguishing the moral components of the soul, the pattern of the city appears to be a useful exegetical tool in bringing out important aspects of moral life. In the last place, the author reconstructs Philo\'s ethical views present in his allegoric commentary. The \"city of soul\" should be regarded mainly as its moral state, taken in its dynamic or static dimension. The moral qualification of this state exclusively depends upon soul\'s attitude towards God who is the source of every good, virtue and the freedom of choice. Therefore, main virtues of sage are knowledge coming from God and piety towards him; and his internal \"laws\" are God\'s laws. A vicious man is standing on the opposite side; he is ruled by the pride and forgets God, deprives himself of freedom and lets the irrational mob of vices master him, submitting himself to the needs of his senses and the body. (shrink)

Interactive Whiteboard has recently been used to replace the TWB, with many of its features being observed to help teachers in educational activities. This is based on effectively and efficiently increasing the teacher-student interaction. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the determinants of Behavioral Intention and the use of interactive whiteboards by K-12 teachers, in remote and rural Chinese areas. The Modified-Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 model was used in this analysis, as a learning medium to (...) deliver the subject matter to students. The sample and population were also the teachers in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, where 171 voluntary respondents participated in this study. Furthermore, the obtained data were processed using a Structural Equation Model approach, through the Smart-PLS software. The results showed that Habit and Hedonic Motivation had a significant influence on the Behavioral Intention of teachers, toward the utilization of IWB in remote and rural areas. Besides this, Facilitating Conditions and BI also had a significant positive effect on Usage Behavior. Based on these results, important information was provided to school principals, local governments, and teachers for education quality improvement, regarding the patterns of increasing IWB utilization in remote and rural areas. (shrink)