Open access to information is now a universal phenomenon thanks to rapid technological developments across the globe. This open and universal access to information is a key value of democratic societies because, in principle, it supports well-informed decision-making on individual, local, and global matters. In practice, however, without appropriate readiness for navigation in a dynamic information landscape, such access to information can become a threat to public health, safety, and economy, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. In the past, this (...) readiness was often conceptualized in terms of adequate literacy levels, but the contemporarily observed highest-ever literacy levels have not immunized our societies against the risks of misinformation. Therefore, in this Perspective, we argue that democratization of access to information endows citizens with new responsibilities, and second, these responsibilities demand readiness that cannot be reduced to mere literacy levels. In fact, this readiness builds on individual adequate literacy skills, but also requires rational thinking and awareness of own information processing. We gather evidence from developmental, educational, and cognitive psychology to show how these aspects of readiness could be improved through education interventions, and how they may be related to healthy work-home balance and self-efficacy. All these components of education are critical to responsible global citizenship and will determine the future direction of our societies. (shrink)

According to Kripke’s thesis of the necessity of origin, if an object has an origin, it necessarily has that origin. Kripke’s thesis has special cases that we may refer to as “origin theses” when applied to certain types of objects, such as humans and tables. While origin theses have intuitive plausibility, why they are true remains unclear. This paper addresses a prominent line of defense for origin theses. In a celebrated note in Naming and Necessity, Kripke briefly presented an incomplete (...) argument. Advocates of this line of defense attempt to establish origin theses by proposing additional principles with which to complete Kripke’s argument. I call these defenses “Kripkean defenses.” The usual debate in the literature regarding Kripkean defenses has focused on the justifiability of the proposed principles. In this paper, I highlight a neglected issue that arises for Kripkean defenders, even if the debate is assumed to be settled in their favor. I argue that, even if Kripke’s argument is sound, it falls short of establishing origin theses, leaving an inferential gap. How to close the gap is a new problem for Kripkean defenders. My goal in the paper is to offer a solution that I believe is their best hope. If I am right, Kripkean defenders should commit themselves to the Aristotelian view that individuals such as human beings and tables are, in a robust Aristotelian sense, substances with irreducible powers that emerge from the powers of their causal origin. (shrink)

In traditional Chinese literary criticism, textual strategies comparable to intertextuality have governed Chinese critics’ and poets’ reading and writing aboutliterature throughout the dynasties. Drawing on the intertextual theories of Kristeva and Riffaterre, the paper probes into the phenomenon of sign system-mutations in two highly influential ancient texts: the Confucian Classic of Changes of the fifth century B.C.E. and Liu Xie’s The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, an ars poetica in the third century. The transformation of sign systems from (...) nonverbal to verbal, in the case of the Changes, and from literate to literary or “creative” to “theoretical”, in the case of the Dragons, bears witness to the Hjelmslevian reciprocity of object-semiotic and meta-semiotic. (shrink)

Will a "Cultural Revolution" occur in the United States? What I mean is, will the American media employ political means of the type used during China's Cultural Revolution? Based on my understanding of the United States, the answer is yes.

I tease out two early Christian puzzles about agency: (a) agential control: how can agents self-constitute if their primary experience of themselves is not one of control, as in Greek antiquity, but of relative powerlessness? And (b) ethical expertise: how can agents constitute themselves as ethical agents if they cannot trust themselves to recognize, and act in the light of, the good? I argue, first, that Foucault saw the importance of these puzzles and focused on extreme obedience as affording a (...) possible resolution; second, that he failed to resolve the puzzles because of his reliance on an overly voluntarist and reflective understanding of obedience as an exercise of will; and finally, that turning to Cassian’s own thoughts on the relation between extreme obedience and humility as kenosis affords us a way out of the puzzles. (shrink)

Different nations responded to the global spread of COVID-19 differently. How do people view the governance practices and effects of various countries? What factors affect their views? Starting from the three-dimensional model of cognitive-affective-media, this study examines how pandemic perception, the national feeling, which is the emotional preference of public for different countries, and media use affect the Chinese public views on the performance of other countries in controlling COVID-19. After performing regression analysis on the data of 619 Chinese public (...) samples collected by an online survey, it reveals the following: pandemic perception is negatively correlated with the evaluation of controlling-pandemic performance in different countries by Chinese residents, whereas national feeling is positively correlated with the evaluation of controlling-pandemic performance. The use of media has different characteristics in the evaluation of controlling-pandemic performance in different countries by Chinese residents. Television has a significant influence on the evaluation of controlling-pandemic performance in the United States, China, and Germany by Chinese residents. Collectivist cultural orientation has no significant impact on the evaluation of the anti-pandemic performance of different countries by Chinese residents, whereas virus perception only has a significant impact on the evaluation of the controlling-pandemic performance of the United States and Italy. Research has confirmed the existence of the cognitive-affective-media model in the evaluations by public on the governance of other countries, and prospects for the superimposed role of media in the cognitive-affective model. (shrink)

Using electromagnetic levitation in combination with the oscillating drop technique and drop calorimeter method, the surface tensions and specific heats of undercooled liquid Co-10 wt% Mo, Co-26.3 wt% Mo, and Co-37.6 wt% Mo alloys were measured. The containerless state during levitation produces substantial undercoolings up to 223 K , 213 K and 110 K respectively for these three alloys. In their respective undercooling ranges, the surface tensions were determined to be 1895 m 0.31, 1932 m 0.33, and 1989 m 0.34 (...) mN m m 1 . According to the Butler equation, the surface tensions of these three Co-Mo alloys were also calculated, and the results agree well with the experimental data. The specific heats of these three alloys are determined to be 41.85, 43.75 and 44.92 J mol m 1 K m 1 . Based on the determined surface tensions and specific heats, the changes in thermodynamics functions such as enthalpy, entropy and Gibbs free energy are predicted. Furthermore, the crystal nucleation, dendrite growth and Marangoni convection of undercooled Co-Mo alloys are investigated in the light of these measured thermophysical properties. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the relation between phenomenology and anthropology by placing Foucault?s first published piece, Introduction to Binswanger?s?Dream and Existence? in dialectical tension with The Order of Things. I argue that the early work, which so far hasn?t received much critical attention, is of particular interest because while OT is notoriously critical of anthropological confusions in general, and of?Man? as an empirico-transcendental double in particular, IB views?existential anthropology? as a unique opportunity to establish a new and fruitful relation (...) between transcendental forms and empirical contents. This is because IB focuses on a specific object,?Menschsein?, which is neither the transcendental subject nor an empirical being. Thus for the young Foucault existential anthropology occupies a fertile methodological middle ground between transcendental approaches and empirical forms of analysis. I first interpret anthropology in the light of phenomenology and defend the view that Menschsein is neither a transcendental structure nor a concrete particular, but as the instantiation of the first in the second. I argue that for anthropology to yield the full theoretical benefits Foucault claims for it, the particular cases of Menschsein examined in existential analysis have to be regarded as exemplary. I then read phenomenology back in the light of anthropology and examine how, for Foucault, the analysis of Menschsein in dreams benefits fundamental ontology by affording us a clearer view of some of the main existentiale than the focus on everyday waking experience in Being and Time. Finally, I turn to the limits and difficulties of this early position and my reading of it, and to their consequences for Foucault?s later view. (shrink)

The metaphor of parasites or parasitism has dominated literary critical discourse since the 1970s, prominent examples being Michel Serres in France and J. Hillis Miller in America. In their writings the relationship between text and paratext, literature and criticism, is often likened to that between host and parasite, and can be therefore deconstructed. Their writings, along with those by Derrida, Barthes, and Thom, seem to be suggesting the possibility of a semiotics of parasitism. Unfortunately, none of these writers has drawn (...) enough on the biological foundation of parasitism. Curiously, even in biology, parasitism is already a metaphor through which the signified of an ecological phenomenon involving two organisms is expressed by the signifier of “[eating] food at another’s [side] table”. This paper will make some preliminary remarks on semiotics of parasitism, based on the notions of Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll) and structural coupling (Maturana and Varela). It will look into the phenomenon of co-evolutionary process in community ecology. With reference to empirical history, the project will briefly surveythe literary and medical praxis of the 17th century England where large number of creative writings referred to the phenomenon of parasitism, which was deeply embedded in religious practice (e.g., the Eucharist) and political life (e.g., the courtier ecology in monarchy) of the times. Finally, it will touch upon the possible ‘parasitic’ relationship between language and biology. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explain why and how the middle class in Korea decisively joined the democratic movement in 1987 by drawing special attention to the role played by the “middling grassroots” (MG). MG was formed out of the common experience of student activism and contesting subcultures, which were widely dispersed over Korean university campuses during the 1980s. In addition, this paper examines the contrasting views on the Korean democratic transition by Bruce Cumings and Adam Przeworski. This substantive analysis attempts (...) to show how such discord can be resolved by working out a mediating variable between action and social structure. It is suggested that the concept of MG is a good example of such a mediating variable. (shrink)

Wittgenstein uses the word "philosophy" in the Tractatus in three different senses: philosophy as experience (Erlebnis) aiming at solving the problem of the meaning of life and world, philosophy as elucidation (Erläuterung) aiming at determining the nature o f philosophy, clearly demarcating what can be said from what cannot, and philosophy as profession. The latter only consists in the work of analyzing the propositions brought about by philosophy as experience - which cannot be pursued professionally as well as philosophy as (...) elucidation - and in pointing out the nonsensicalness of these propositions. (shrink)

Abstract This paper studies Olivi's account of perceptual representation. It addresses two main questions: (1) how do perceptual representations originate? and (2) how do they represent their objects? Regarding (1), it is well known that Olivi emphasizes the activity of the soul in the production of perceptual representations. Yet it is sometimes argued that he overstresses the activity of the soul in a way that yields a philosophically problematic result. I argue that Olivi was well aware of the problem that (...) could be raised for his theory and that he sought to cope with it. Regarding (2), Pasnau argues that for Olivi, causal relationships with external objects determine the content of perceptual representations. I argue that, rather, perceptual representations are about their objects because they are their similitudes. This makes him an internalist about representational content. (shrink)

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce (...) acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large-scale experiments using crowd-sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state-of-the-art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic. (shrink)

What we regard as real are the objects of the phenomenal world which we perceive. We regard those that we see objectively, as in the third person perspective, as real. What then is the mind that pe...

China has undergone unprecedented changes since the Reform and Opening-up policy in 1978. Policy experimentation (PE) has been key in generating and catalysing reforms in the process. This study proposes a conceptual framework to describe the different pathways of PE-enabled reforms. Comparing two empirically informed case studies, this study demonstrates the functions of this policy tool plays within China’s higher education policy-making and development: generative, rhetorical and regulatory. The paper argues that PE can be a genuinely productive mechanism for producing, (...) identifying and negotiating new policy options while allowing the government to supervise and regulate institutional reform behaviours. However, under certain conditions, it assumes more of a symbolic role allowing the government to acquire or consolidate reform legitimacy without engaging substantial innovation. By highlighting those key roles of PE, this paper provides a distinctive perspective for understanding the policy-making and reform process in China’s higher education development. (shrink)

Hope is hard to characterise because of the exceptional diversity of its applications, to the point that one may wonder whether there is continuity between ordinary cases of hope and what is often called 'hope against hope'. In this paper, I shall follow the relatively small but growing literature on hope and examine propositional hopes, i.e. hopes of the form 'hoping that p', with a particular focus on recent work by Philip Pettit and Adrienne Martin. I shall do this first (...) by identifying a significant difficulty encountered by what has become known as the 'orthodox definition'. The OD defines hope by means of two necessary and sufficient conditions: A hopes that p if and only if A desires that p and A assigns to p a degree of probability between 0 and 1. On this definition, to hope is to desire an outcome we deem neither certain nor impossible. Note that the relevant probability assignment is subjective: the OD allows, for example, that children can hope for Father Christmas to visit them on Christmas Eve. (shrink)

Due to the crucial role of customers’ brand citizenship behaviors on brand strength, this study explored the relationship between brand uniqueness, brand credibility, brand intimacy, brand love, and brand citizenship behavior in Taiwan’s restaurant context. The participants are the customers of Wang Steak, a famous restaurant chain in Taiwan. A total of 358 valid responses were gathered from a questionnaire survey, with a response rate of 71.6%. We used structural equation modeling to analyze the data. Brand uniqueness, brand credibility, and (...) brand intimacy all have a positive relationship with brand love. Moreover, brand love was positively associated with brand citizenship behavior. The findings provide greater insights into the relationship of perceived brand uniqueness, brand credibility, brand intimacy, and brand love with customers’ brand citizenship behaviors. (shrink)

本书从历史诠释的历史、历史本体的诠释性、历史认识的诠释性、历史叙述的诠释性等多方面对历史诠释性进行了探索。.

although mostly known to specialists nowadays, Kenelm Digby was a remarkable figure on the intellectual scene of the early seventeenth century. He has been described as “one of the most influential natural philosophers” of his time,1 and corresponded with many of the great scholars of his days, including Descartes, and the French pioneer of atomism, Pierre Gassendi. In the later years of his life, Digby, alongside men like Robert Boyle, became one of the founding members of the Royal Society.2Digby authored (...) one major work of philosophy: the Two Treatises of 1644. This work consisted of a long First Treatise on bodies, and a shorter, Second Treatise on the human soul. In the First Treatise, Digby argued... (shrink)

This article approaches Confucianism as a lost art of living and asks how we can make it relevant again for us. Central to this approach is the cultivation of heart-mind designed to help cure ourselves of self-oblivion and self-centeredness so prevalent in our culture today. It is based on the idea of Li, the same as Spinoza’s God, the absolute Being that has nothing to do with human aspirations at all. To seek this, Li is therefore to gain true freedom. (...) Two preeminent Neo-Confucians of Joseon Korea, Yi Hwang and Yi I, discuss the method of Jing, paying full attention and being watchful, for that end. (shrink)

When ancient Chinese philosophy culminated in the sixth to third centuries BCE, “hundreds of flowers [intellectual schools] were blooming”, yet not many theoreticians were particularly interested in questions regarding the relationship between animal and human life — despite their profuse discussion of, and heated debates about, both “nature” and “human nature” in their writings. This indifferent attitude towards creatures lower than humans is best illustrated by Confucius (551–479 BCE), who observed: “It is impossible to associate with birds and beasts, as (...) if they were the same as us.” Later, however, this condescending attitude of the Sage would be challenged by the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi (370 to 301 BCE), who untiringly advocates the equity of all creatures in the universe — a place where both living and fabulous organisms cohabit and co-evolve with one another, as well as with their environments. Morever, even Confucius’s descendent Mencius (c.372–289 BCE) did not endorse his mentor’s position, for the latter’s own writings are likewise inhabited by all kinds of creatures which not only serve the passive role of poetic figuration, but actually also construct their respective Umwelten, paralleled by the umwelt-construction of human beings. Recent advances in biosemiotics and ecosemiotics have enabled us to reread some of these philosophical texts, and to shed new light on this obscure aspect of Chinese thinking. This paper will draw upon the sign reflections of C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) and Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), and make use of a composite analytical method of text semiotics and dialogue studies, to examine a number of political and ethical allegories by Zhuangzi and Mencius. Acknowledging the necessarycircularity of interpretation and the homogeneity of observer and observed, the essay explores the ways in which ancient philosophical texts can be made compatible with contemporary biological and semiotic thinking. (shrink)