Following Brunswik (1952), social judgement theorists have long relied on regression models to describe both an individual's judgements and the environment about which such judgements are made. However, social judgement theory is not synonymous with these compensatory, static, structural models. We compared the characterisations of physicians' judgements using a regression model with that of a non-compensatory process model (called fast and frugal). We found that both models fit the data equally well. Both models suggest that physicians use few cues, that (...) they disagree among themselves, and that their stated cue use is discrepant with the models' stated cue use. However, the fast and frugal model is easier to convey to physicians and is also more psychologically plausible. Implications for how social judgement theorists conceptualise the process of vicarious functioning are discussed. (shrink)

Simple heuristics and regression models make different assumptions about behaviour. Both the environment and judgment can be described as fast and frugal. We do not know whether humans are successful when being fast and frugal. We must assess both global accuracy and the costs of Type I and II errors. These may be “smart heuristics that make researchers look simple.”.

This article reflects on the problem of false belief produced by the integrated psychological and algorithmic landscape humans now inhabit. Following the work of scholars such as Lee McIntyre (Post-Truth, MIT Press, 2018) or Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, Yale University Press, 2019) it combines recent discussions of fake news, post-truth, and science denialism across the disciplines of political science, computer science, sociology, psychology, and the history and philosophy of science that variously address (...) the ineffectiveness, in a digital era, of countering individual falsehoods with facts. Truth and falsehood, it argues, rather than being seen as properties or conditions attached to individual instances of content, should now be seen as collective, performative, and above all persuasive phenomena. They should be practically evaluated as networked systems and mechanisms of sharing in which individually targeted actions are combining with structural tendencies (both human and mechanical) in unprecedented ways. For example, the persuasive agency of apparent consensus (clicks, likes, bots, trolls) is newly important in a fractured environment that only appears to be, but is no longer ‘public’; the control of narratives, labels, and associations is a live, time-sensitive issue, a continuous contest, or ongoing cusp. Taking a social approach to truth yields observations of new relevance; from how current strategies of negative cohesion, blame, and enemy-creation depend crucially on binary ways of constructing the world, to how the offer of identity/community powerfully cooperates with the structural tendencies of algorithm-driven advertiser platforms towards polarisation. Remedies for these machine-learned and psychological tendencies lie in end-user education. So the Arts and Humanities, whether via comparisons with previous historical periods, or via principles of critical thinking and active reading, offer crucial resources to help counter what since 1997 silicon valley executives and scholars have called ‘persuasive technology’ (Fogg in Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What we Think and Do, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003; Hamari et al. (eds) in Persuasive Technology, Springer International Publishing, 2014; Harris in How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Every Day, 2017; Lanier in Who Owns the Future? Simon & Schuster, 2014 and Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Picador, 2019). The article proposes a paradigm shift in public understandings of this new social environment: from a culture of discovery, where what matters is what exists or is in fact the case, to a culture of iteration, where what matters is what gets repeated. (shrink)

This volume traces the evolution of Whig and Tory, Puritan and Anglican ideas across a tumultuous period of British history, from the mid-seventeenth century through to the Age of Enlightenment. This volume, a tribute to Mark Goldie, traces the evolution of Whig and Tory, Puritan and Anglican ideas across a tumultuous period of British history, from the mid-seventeenth century through to the Age of Enlightenment. Mark Goldie, Fellow of Churchill College and Professor of Intellectual History at Cambridge University, is one (...) of the most distinguished historians of later Stuart Britain of his generation and has written extensively about politics, religion and ideas in Britain from the Restoration through to the Hanoverian succession. Based on original research, the chapters collected here reflect the range of his scholarly interests: in Locke, Tory and Whig political thought, and Puritan, Anglican and Catholic political engagement, as well as the transformative impact of the Glorious Revolution. They examine events as well as ideas and deal not only with England but also with Scotland, France and the Atlantic world. Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain will be of interest to later Stuart political and religious historians, Locke scholars and intellectual historians more generally. JUSTIN CHAMPION is Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. JOHN COFFEY is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester. TIM HARRIS is Professor of History at Brown University. JOHN MARSHALL is Professor of History at John Hopkins University. CONTRIBUTORS: Justin Champion, John Coffey, Conal Condren, Gabriel Glickman, Tim Harris, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, Clare Jackson, Warren Johnston, Geoff Kemp, Dmitri Levitin, John Marshall, Jacqueline Rose, S.-J. Savonius-Wroth, Hannah Smith, Delphine Soulard. (shrink)

This introduction to a special section on ‘Photography and the State’ reflects on trends in photography theory exemplified in essays by Jens Andermann, Ariella Azoulay, Andrea Noble, and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen. It suggests that the contributors make a powerful argument for photography’s emergent contribution to theories of the state and of sovereignty. It situates this work in the context of a growing body of scholarship (by theorists such as Natalia Brizuela, Paula Cortés-Rocca, Clare Harris, Chris Pinney, and Karen Strassler) attuned (...) to photography’s role in political imagination in post-colonial and post-imperial spaces, and underscores movement of the field away from inter-subjective conceptions of photographic ethics and debates about indexicality. (shrink)

Can architecture help us find our place and way in today's complex world? Can it return individuals to a whole, to a world, to a community? Developing Giedion's claim that contemporary architecture's main task is to interpret a way of life valid for our time, philosopher Karsten Harries answers that architecture should serve a common ethos. But if architecture is to meet that task, it first has to free itself from the dominant formalist approach, and get beyond the notion (...) that its purpose is to produce endless variations of the decorated shed. In a series of cogent and balanced arguments, Harries questions the premises on which architects and theorists have long relied—premises which have contributed to architecture's current identity crisis and marginalization. He first criticizes the aesthetic approach, focusing on the problems of decoration and ornament. He then turns to the language of architecture. If the main task of architecture is indeed interpretation, in just what sense can it be said to speak, and what should it be speaking about? Expanding upon suggestions made by Martin Heidegger, Harries also considers the relationship of building to the idea and meaning of dwelling. Architecture, Harries observes, has a responsibility to community; but its ethical function is inevitably also political. He concludes by examining these seemingly paradoxical functions. (shrink)

One thing this book attempts to show is that Kant's antinomies open a way towards an overcoming of that nihilism that is a corollary of the understanding of reality that presides over our science and technology. But when Harries is speaking of the antinomy of Being he is not so much thinking of Kant, as of Heidegger. Not that Heidegger speaks of an antinomy of Being. But his thinking of Being leads him and will lead those who follow him (...) on his path of thinking into this antinomy. At bottom, however, the author is neither concerned with Heidegger’s nor Kant’s thought. He shows that our thinking inevitably leads us into some version of this antinomy whenever it attempts to grasp reality in toto, without loss. All such attempts will fall short of their goal. And that they do so, Harries claims, is not something to be grudgingly accepted, but embraced as a necessary condition of living a meaningful life. That is why the antinomy of Being matters and should concern us all. (shrink)

A philosophical exploration of the origin and limits of the modern world.

Ever since Aristotle, metaphor has been placed in the context of a mimetic theory of language and of art. Metaphors are in some sense about reality. The poet uses metaphor to help reveal what is. He, too, serves the truth, even if his service is essentially lacking in that "Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else."1 Thus it is an improper naming. This impropriety invites a movement of interpretation that can come to rest only (...) when metaphorical has been replaced with a more proper speech. This is not to say, however, that such replacement is possible nor that interpretation can ever come to rest. What metaphor names may transcend human understanding so that our language cannot capture it. In that case, proper speech would be denied to man. But regardless of whether we seek proper speech with man, for example, with the philosopher, or locate it beyond man with God, or think it only an idea that cannot find adequate realization, as long as we understand metaphor as an improper naming, we place its telos beyond poetry. · 1. Aristotle Poetics 21. 1457b. 6-7. Karsten Harries, chairman of the department of philosophy at Yale University, is the author of several works on aesthetics, including The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation. He is currently writing a book on the Bavarian rococo church. See also: "On Thinking about Aristotle's 'Thought'" by James E. Ford in Vol. 4, No. 3. (shrink)

ASKED WHETHER, in the light of recent attempts to use philosophy to change our goals and to help transform society, he saw a social mission for his philosophy, Heidegger gave a negative reply: "If one wants to answer this question, one has to ask first: what is society? and consider that society today is only the absolutization of modern subjectivity and that from this perspective a philosophy which has overcome the stand-point of subjectivity is not even permitted to participate in (...) the discussion." What rules out such participation is the fact that Heidegger’s thinking, as he himself interprets it for us, has pushed beyond his own time in such a way that given all that the age considers important it must seem beside the point. The work of the later Heidegger is an extended untimely meditation. This untimeliness helps to explain the apolitical character of this work. (shrink)

MANY, PERHAPS MOST OF US, tend to connect art with the past. Faced with the art of our own time we become unsure: everything important seems to have been done, the vocabulary of art exhausted, and attempts to develop new vocabularies more interesting than convincing. Ours tends to be an autumnal view of art. The association of art and museum has come to replace such older associations as art and church, or art and palace. As we know it, the museum (...) is a comparatively recent institution, emerging only in the first half of the nineteenth century, thus lagging somewhat behind such related phenomena, as e.g., archeology, art-history, and neo-gothic architecture, all expressions of a museal [[sic]] attitude extending far beyond art to religion and even to nature. Consider the significance of setting aside a certain part of nature as a national monument. Monuments serve to commemorate, most often the dead. What do such natural monuments commemorate? Perhaps nature herself? But does nature need commemorating? Does it, too, lie behind us? Will future generations know nature only in the form of natural monuments? We do indeed live in an age which increasingly forces us to question whether nature still has a place in the modern world, whether it is not rather a relic from the past. By trying to preserve nature in specially created parks or monuments we show that this loss, although perhaps inevitable, is nevertheless felt to be serious. (shrink)

The paper examines important discrepancies between major figures influencing the intellectual development of biosemiotics. It takes its perspective from the work of Gregory Bateson. Unlike C. S. Peirce and J. von Uexküll, Bateson begins with a strong notion of interaction. His early writings were about reciprocity and social exchange, a common topic among anthropologists of the time, but Bateson’s approach was unique. He developed the notion of meta-patterns of exchange, and of the “abduction” of these metapatterns to a variety of (...) other phenomena, in both biology and in game theory. Later, Bateson’s concept of ecology of mind, the product of interactive phenomena, was modified by a non-purposive cybernetics. Biosemiotics has yet to adopt Bateson’s interactive stance, which is absent from Peirce’s approach to communication, of Uexküll’s functional cycles, and of Hoffmeyer’s discussion of the relation between culture and environment. Rather than pursuing notions of appropriate “subjectivity” through changed ethical response to ecological conditions (Hoffmeyer’s discussion of empathy), the paper discusses the advantages of an approach that continues to focus on conditions of paradox and pathology. Specifically, Bateson’s resolution of the relation between culture and environment arises from situations of blocked communication where ecological bonds become binds. (shrink)

The evil of the holocaust demands a radical rethink of the traditional Christian understanding of Judaism. This does not mean jettisoning Christianity's deepest convictions in order to make it conform to Judaism. Rather, Richard Harries develops the work of recent Jewish scholarship to discern resonances between central Christian and Jewish beliefs. This thought-provoking book offers fresh approaches to contentious and sensitive issues. A key chapter on the nature of forgiveness is sympathetic to the Jewish charge that Christians talk much (...) too easily about forgiveness. Another chapter on suffering in Judaism and Christianity rejects the usual stereotypes and argues for important common ground, for example in the idea that God suffers in the suffering of his people. There are also chapters on the state of Israel and the place of Jerusalem in Christian and Jewish thought. Richard Harries argues that the basic covenant is not with either Judaism or Christianity but with humanity. These, like other religions, are different, distinctive voices in response to God's primal affirmation of human life, which for Christians is achieved and given in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the light of this the author maintains - controversially - that Christians should not be trying to convert Jews to Christianity. Rather Jews and Christians should stand together and build on the great amount they have in common to work together for a better world. (shrink)

Originally published in 1968, Karsten Harries's classic work provides a philosophical understanding of how modern art differs fundamentally from the art of earlier periods.

If the Enlightenment turned to reason to reoccupy the place left vacant by the death of God, the last two centuries have undermined such faith in reason. We cannot escape this history. The specter of nihilism haunts Either/Or. To exorcize it is Kierkegaard s most fundamental concern. But where are we to turn? To an aesthetic transfiguration of, or escape from reality? Does ethics promise an answer? Or is all that is left an irrational leap to religion? All such questions (...) are shadowed by the specter of Kitsch.What does it mean to be authentic in the modern world? ". (shrink)

The paper examines the sudden disappearance in the United States of millions of honeybees in managed bee colonies. The major research undertaken in the U.S. concentrates on finding the pathogens responsible. This paper suggests an alternative avenue of research a) that as a result of global warming there is a disjunction between bees pollinating cycles and the life cycle of plants b) that understanding changes in “timing cycles” as a result of global warming is the key to understanding the disappearance (...) of the bees. It notes that Gregory Bateson argued that any condition of ecosystem collapse would be characterized first by a collapse in its communicative order rather, than from changed physical states. The collapse of bee colonies and demise of other pollinators is a seeming confirmation of Gregory Bateson argument. Honeybees are ‘go betweens’ in ecosystemic order. It also argues that an appropriate topology of timing cycles and their recursions would enable better visual comprehension of the heterarchical ‘pattern which connects’, in Bateson’s phrase, and prompt awareness of possible catastrophe in human food supplies. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the importance of the use of indigenous languages in formal contexts for the future of Africa’s peoples. Inter-cultural communication using one language wrongly assumes that the unfamiliar can be expressed using familiar terms. This author argues that long-term immersion by a Westerner amongst a non-Western people is a singular means of acquiring insights about them. Long-term participant observation forms the basis of the research for this article. When communicated globally, anti- racism strategies are found to be problematic (...) in their apparent denial of realities of non-Western cultures. The failure of many African communities to recognize and deal with the peculiarities of their own cultural contexts has potentially tragic consequences. Use of European languages is contributing to enormous dependence on the West and/or magic, and to gross under-development. Vulnerable intercultural exposure using non-Western languages and resources with concentrated efforts at understanding people’s theologies is advocated as the way forward. (shrink)

What need is there for an environmental aesthetics? The answer to that question is by no means obvious. To be sure, that we need to protect our environment has become a cliché that I am just a bit wary about repeating it here – the statement hardly bears much discussion any longer. Is it not obvious that we need to make sure that all those natural resources on which we depend for our survival will continue to be available, not just (...) to us, but to future generations? And when we think here of natural resources, we should consider them in the widest possible sense so that they include what the ancients thought of as the four elements, air, water, earth and fire. And here I invite you to think of them in their modern transformations. Even space has become an increasingly scarce resource. But if all this is indeed obvious, if the facts today speak loudly enough, it is not at all clear why we should be in need of an environmental aesthetics? What, if anything, does aesthetics have to contribute to our attempt to meet the environmental problems we face? (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values, and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 25 features lectures given by Frans B.M. de Waal, Richard Dawkins, Christine M. Korsgaard, Seyla Benhabib, and Harry Frankfurt.

Theoretical Perspective on Smell is the first collection of scholarly articles to be devoted exclusively to philosophical research on olfaction. The essays, published here for the first time, bring together leading theorists working on smell in a format that allows for deep engagement with the emerging field, while also providing those new to the philosophy of smell with a resource to begin their journey. The volume’s 14 chapters are organized into four parts: -/- I. The Importance and Beauty of Smell (...) II. Smell in Time and Space III. What We Perceive through Smell IV. Smell and Other Senses -/- The collection solidifies the area as an important emerging branch of perceptual philosophy by presenting the cutting edge research being done by innovative early career researchers, as well as by those more senior and established within the field. -/- Table of Contents 1. Introduction Andreas Keller and Benjamin Young -/- Part I: The Importance and Beauty of Smell -/- 2. The Role of Smell in Consciousness Barry C. Smith -/- 3. The metacognitive gap: Why we both trust and mistrust our sense of smell Ophelia Deroy -/- 4. Perfumes and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature Chiara Brozzo -/- 5. Aesthetics, Olfaction, & Environment Michael Aaron Lindquist -/- Part II: Smell in Time and Space -/- 6. Smell and the Space Between Us Clare Batty -/- 7. The Temporal Structure of Olfactory Experience Keith A. Wilson -/- Part III: What We Perceive through Smell -/- 8. How Biology Perceives Chemistry: A Causal Analysis of the Stimulus in Olfaction and its Implications for Scientific and Philosophical Theorizing Ann-Sophie Barwich -/- 9. The Accuracy Conditions of Olfactory Perception Andreas Keller -/- 10. Maybe We Don't Smell Molecular Structure Benjamin D. Young -/- 11. Stuff & Nonsense: Against Mizrahi on Olfaction Harry Sherwood -/- 12. The Layering of Smell William G. Lycan -/- Part IV: Smell and the Other Senses -/- 13. From Odors to Flavors: Perceptual organization in the chemical senses Becky Millar -/- 14. Seeing and hearing flavors Błażej Skrzypulec -/- 15. Smelling Gustatory Qualities Louise Richardson. (shrink)

This volume has its origins in the colloquium 'Art, Politics, Technology -- Martin Heidegger 1889-1989' held at Yale University in 1989. The centenary provided the obvious occasion: regardless of whether deplored or welcomed, the far-reaching influence of Heidegger today is beyond question, an influence underscored in that centenary year by the literally scores of conferences that took place all over the world.

Austin Farrer is often called the one genius the Church of England produced in the 20th Century. His innovative ideas crossed a host of theological disciplines. Assessing his continuing importance and introducing him to a new generation of readers, Austin Farrer for Today brings together a stellar collection of writers to reflect on Farrer’s contribution to biblical theology, philosophy, language, doctrine, prayer and preaching. Chapters include: •Rowan Williams on Farrer as a doctrinal theologian •Morwenna Ludlow on Farrer's language and symbolism (...) •Jane Shaw on Farrer as preacher •John Barton, on typology in Farrer. (shrink)

One is, however, somewhat puzzled to discover that what Wild considers to be of value in Being and Time is thought less important by Heidegger, while what Heidegger takes to be the key issue of the work, is seen by Wild only to detract from and obscure its real merits. Has Heidegger failed to understand his own earlier work? In that case it must seem doubtful whether he ever understood it in the first place; on this view Heidegger appears somewhat (...) like one of those inspired rhapsodes of Plato, who could not give account of the significance of their words. Or does the later Heidegger wilfully misinterpret his earlier work? Karl Löwith was perhaps the first one to suggest this. Or is Heidegger right when he complains that Being and Time had failed to communicate its central thought effectively? In view of these divergent ways of reading Being and Time, it may be advisable to pause before one proceeds to attack or praise the book, and to raise the question: how is this book to be read? John Wild's comments imply one, and indeed rather common way of reading Being and Time. But can this approach do justice to the work, or is it, as Heidegger suggests, a misreading? (shrink)

The two central themes of Fasti are twice linked in this way. The association, which at once gives the poem the appearance of having a literary ancestry in the aetiological tradition, might have seemed inevitable: any verse narrative account of a festival is very likely to contain an αтιоν of it. Callimachus' hymns illustrate this assertion, and there are clearly defined hymnic elements in Fasti to bear out the comparison, for example the listing of Venus' αεтαί and Πρáξεις at 4.91ff. (...) and the instructions to the devotees of Pales at 4.731–48. 4 To state the obvious fact that the poem combines Roman antiquities with Alexandrian aetiology, a blending of which more straightforward examples are to be found in the fourth book of Propertius, is only a prelude to establishing what Ovid really achieves in Fasti. Traditional elements are, as I hope to show, cunningly exploited to create ‘counter–effects’ and to subject the material to the constantly varying and wide–ranging influences of the poet's literary background. Though the notion of causa is central to Fasti, the poem is much more than an amalgam of such influences as the aetiological prose works of Varro and Verrius Flaccus with the aetiological poetics of Propertius 4.5 These sources combined to provide material for the foundation of the finished structure, which was to be the creative manipulation of these antiquarian and literary stimuli directed at providing a vehicle for the regular themes of the Ovidian persona. (shrink)

The initiators of information theory had deliberately tried to expunge ‘meaning’ from aspects of their theory. Bateson’s ecology of mind was consistent with physical definitions of information as feedback and constraint yet tied these cybernetic mechanisms into context of messages, meta-messages, and their meaning. Thus Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology was of a most unusual type: a theory of informational constraint with no located mind, a theory of agency in which conscious purpose was no longer the guiding executor of mental activity. At (...) the same time Bateson rejected many premises of phenomenology: self-hood or body-hood could not be arbitrarily cut off from the reflexive and recursive system of communication in which human beings were always involved. Embodiment, the interactions that evoke the ‘fabric’ (Merleau-Ponty) of life, involve communicative interactions both as persons within a system of social relations and also as living organisms within a system of ecological relations. (shrink)

In the Rules the young Descartes likens his method to the thread that guided Theseus. The simile is born of a confidence that he has seen through the art of the followers of Daedalus and this has given him a model of how to unriddle the labyrinth of the world. From the very beginning Descartes had an interest not only in optics, perspective, and painting, but in using his knowledge of them to duplicate some of the effects said to have (...) been created by the thaumaturgic magicians. Anamorphoses and automata not only provided Descartes with examples of deceptive appearance, but also pointed the way to the solution of the riddle they posed. Yet it is precisely the attempt to take this exit from the labyrinth of the world that threatens to lead back into it, as the search for truth is threatened by the infinity of space. To claim absolute truth, the natural philosopher would have to show that the mechanical model he has proposed is the only one that could account for the phenomena in question. This, as Descartes himself is forced to recognize, he is unable to do. Are we back in the labyrinth? Instead of seeing in Descartes's method an Ariadne's thread, Father Bourdin likens that method to Icarus. Annoyed, Descartes ridicules the good Father. But Bourdin's too often empty rhetoric raises a serious question: is Descartes Theseus, Daedalus, or Icarus? At stake is our understanding of the world we live in. (shrink)

When the only advice on offer is unhelpful, a potential missionary might need to be advised to seek an alternative. Jesus, we take it, was not building a worldly empire. Christian mission has become associated with colonialism. Dominant advice often pushes Western missionaries to positions of strength. In order to be vulnerable, one needs an alternative to such advice. Economic domination of Africa by the West makes it hard to know when Africa’s people, long engrossed in patron/client relationships, are not (...) talking for power. Use of English to describe Africa leads to massive false imputing of Western histories onto African societies. A little linguistic wisdom exposes the naivety of many contemporary understandings of the acumen of translation. (shrink)