Wittgenstein's Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition is the only CD-ROM to give you instant facsimile and text access to the 20,000 pages of the philosopher's Nachlass as catalogued by Professor von Wright in his 1982 publication The Wittgenstein Papers. -/- The result of 10 years of academic research and editorial work by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen this electronic edition is the first scholarly resource to apply a uniform, well-documented, consistent set of editorial principles to (...) the writings. The CD-ROM is a joint publication between Oxford University Press and the Wittgenstein Archives and is published in Text & Facsimile and Text Only formats. (shrink)

To date, much of the work on Responsible Innovation (RI) has focused on the ‘responsible’ part of RI. This has left the ‘innovation’ part in need of conceptual innovation of its own. If such conceptual innovation is to contribute to a coherent conception of RI, however, it is crucial to better understand the relation between responsibility and innovation first. This paper elucidates this relation by locating responsibility and innovation within Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology. It structures his work into three ‘stages’, each (...) described in terms of their leading experience and objectivation regime. This analysis identifies a need for constant innovation of political and technological systems, originating from and motivated by our responsibility to others. It also shows the relation between responsibility and innovation to be threefold: foundational, ethical and structural. These insights could help RI to avoid some pitfalls of ‘regular’ innovation, and provide moral grounding for important aspects of RI. (shrink)

There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental imagery of the content of utterances (; ; ; ; ; ; ). This imagery can have motor or perceptual content. Three main questions about the process remain under‐explored, however. First, are lexical associations with perception or motion sufficient to yield mental simulation, or is the integration of lexical semantics into larger structures, like sentences, necessary? Second, what linguistic elements (e.g., verbs, nouns, etc.) trigger mental simulations? Third, how (...) detailed are the visual simulations that are performed? A series of behavioral experiments address these questions, using a visual object categorization task to investigate whether up‐ or down‐related language selectively interferes with visual processing in the same part of the visual field (following ). The results demonstrate that either subject nouns or main verbs can trigger visual imagery, but only when used in literal sentences about real space—metaphorical language does not yield significant effects—which implies that it is the comprehension of the sentence as a whole and not simply lexical associations that yields imagery effects. These studies also show that the evoked imagery contains detail as to the part of the visual field where the described scene would take place. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore Cassirer’s view of social contract theory. We maintain that Cassirer has established a linguistic turn of social contract theory, by exploring the conditions for the possibility of a promise. For that purpose Cassirer’s theory of the linguistic sign, as inspired by the linguistic theory of Wilhelm von Humboldt, becomes decisive, because of its specific nature and direction into the future. First, in Section 1, we explore previous social contract theorists, from Nicholas von Cusa to Immanuel (...) Kant. In Section 1, as a result, we establish the concept of the promise as the core concept of social contract theory, and as the fundamental philosophical problem conveyed by the natural lawyers. Moreover, in Section 2, we investigate the conditions for the possibility of a promise, and relate it to the symbolic nature of the human being. The promise, hence the capacity to enter into a contract, becomes a characteristically human activity, hence an expression of human dignity. (shrink)

The theory of technological mediation aims to take technological artifacts seriously, recognizing the constitutive role they play in how we experience the world, act in it, and how we are constituted as (moral) subjects. Its quest for a compatible ethics has led it to Foucault’s “care of the self,” i.e., a transformation of the self by oneself through self-discipline. In this regard, technologies have been interpreted as power structures to which one can relate through Foucaultian “technologies of the self” or (...) ascetic practices. However, this leaves unexplored how concrete technologies can actuallysupportthe process of self-care. This paper explores this possibility by examining one such technology: a gamified To-Do list app. Doing so, it first shows that despite the apparent straightforwardness of gamification, confrontation and shame play an important role in how the app motivates me to do better. Second, inspired by Ihde’s schema of human-technology relations, it presents different ways in which the app may confront me with myself. Subsequently, it accounts for the motivation and shame that this technologically mediated confrontation with myself invokes through a Levinasian account of ethical subjectivity. In so doing, it also shows how Levinas’ phenomenology implies a responsibility for self-care and how nonhuman, technological others may still call me to responsibility. It concludes with a reflection on the role of gamification in technologically mediated subjectivation and some implications for design. (shrink)

Sociocultural developmental psychology can drive new directions in gadgetry science. We use autobiographical memory, a compound capacity incorporating episodic memory, as a case study. Autobiographical memory emerges late in development, supported by interactions with parents. Intervention research highlights the causal influence of these interactions, whereas cross-cultural research demonstrates culturally determined diversity. Different patterns of inheritance are discussed.

Large scale DNA-mutation screening in patients with hereditary retinal diseases greatly enhances our knowledge about retinal function and diseases. Scientists, clinicians, patients, and families involved with retinal disorders may directly benefit from these developments. However, certain aspects of this expanding knowledge, such as the correlation between genotype and phenotype, may be much more complicated than we expect at present.

According to Dem. or. 23.199, Menon of Phasalos was honoured with Athenian citizenship for rescuing Eion. If this happened in 476 BC as commonly assumed, this would have been the only case of franchise through the assembly to predate Pericles’ law of citizenship. The Eion episode should thus rather be dated to 424 BC, even though the historian Thukydides claims the merit of saving the city for himself without mentioning the Pharsalian (Thuk. IV 106.4). This silence, however, serves an apologetic (...) purpose, since Thukydides was banned from Athens soon after defending Eion (V 26.5). Menon was thus identical with the homonymous commander of Thessalian troops in 431 BC (II 22.3) and the father of the Pharsalian Thukydides attested as proxenos in Athens in 411 BC (VIII 92.8). Neither of them ever was a citizen of Athens, which is further confirmed by Dem. or. 13.23, who specifies Menon’s reward as ateleia. (shrink)

This article provides a critical realist take on comparative methodology. Heeding the call for greater attention to the ontological presuppositions inherent in all methods, it first outlines comparative methods as they have traditionally been conceived and practised. Discerning two important aspects of these approaches - their notion of causality and their reliance on inductive inferences - the discussion moves on to consider their applicability within a critical realist social science. Arguing that the ontological presuppositions of traditional approaches to comparative methodology (...) are not compatible with the ontology of critical realism, it seeks to specify some initial steps in the direction of designing a new approach securing this compatibility. Important to this new approach is theoretical, or abductive, comparison and the need to be context-sensitive. (shrink)

We combine two recent probabilistic approaches to natural language understanding, exploring the formal pragmatics of communication on a noisy channel. We first extend a model of rational communication between a speaker and listener, to allow for the possibility that messages are corrupted by noise. In this model, common knowledge of a noisy channel leads to the use and correct understanding of sentence fragments. A further extension of the model, which allows the speaker to intentionally reduce the noise rate on a (...) word, is used to model prosodic emphasis. We show that the model derives several well-known changes in meaning associated with prosodic emphasis. Our results show that nominal amounts of actual noise can be leveraged for communicative purposes. (shrink)