A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint that characterizes how a collective manages differences and pursues disagreement through argument in a polylogue. The macroscope addresses broader analytic problems posed by various conceptualizations of large-scale argument, such as fields, spheres, communities, and institutions. The design incorporates a two-tier methodology for detecting argument patterns of the arguments performed in arguing by an interactive collective that produces views, or topographies, of the ways that issues are (...) generated in the making and defending of standpoints. The design premises for the macroscope build on insights about argument patterns from pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating research and theory on disagreement management and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The design reconceptualizes prototypical and stereotypical argument patterns for characterizing large-scale argumentation. A prototype of the macroscope is tested on data drawn from six threads about oil-drilling and fracking from the subreddit Changemyview. The implementation suggests the efficacy of the macroscope’s design and potential for identifying what communities make controversial and how the disagreement space in a polylogue is managed through stereotypical argument patterns in terms of claims/premises, inferential relations, and presentational devices. (shrink)

This is the first of two papers concerned with the philosophical significance of dualities as applied in recent fundamental physics. The general idea is that, for its peculiarity, this ‘new’ ingredient in theory construction can open unexpected perspectives in the current philosophical reflection on contemporary physics. In particular, today’s physical dualities represent an unusual type of intertheory relation, the meaning of which deserves to be investigated. The aim is to show how discussing this point brings into play, at the same (...) time, what is intended by a 'theory’ and in which sense dualities are to be considered 'symmetries'. This paper is introductory and focusses on the first form of duality explicitly applied in twentieth century physics, that is electromagnetic duality as discussed in Dirac’s theory of magnetic poles. The extension of electromagnetic duality in the context of quantum field theory and string theory is explored in a forthcoming companion paper. (shrink)

This open access book features essays written by philosophers, biologists, ecologists and conservation scientists facing the current biodiversity crisis. Despite increasing communication, accelerating policy and management responses, and notwithstanding improving ecosystem assessment and endangered species knowledge, conserving biodiversity continues to be more a concern than an accomplished task. Why is it so?The overexploitation of natural resources by our species is a frequently recognised factor, while the short-term economic interests of governments and stakeholders typically clash with the burdens that implementing conservation (...) actions imply. But this is not the whole story. This book develops a different perspective on the problem by exploring the conceptual challenges and practical defiance posed by conserving biodiversity, namely: on the one hand, the difficulties in defining what biodiversity is and characterizing that “thing” to which the word ‘biodiversity’ refers to; on the other hand, the reasons why assessing biodiversity and putting in place effective conservation actions is arduous. (shrink)

This paper investigates Negative Concord, arguing that it results from a systematic lexical ambiguity: the items that participate in Negative Concord ("n-words" in Laka's 1990 terminology) are ambiguous between negative polarity items and their genuinely negative counterparts. I try to show that on empirical grounds the proposed account compares favorably with other analyses that shy away from ambiguity. I furthermore suggest that the ambiguity is not implausible conceptually because it can be viewed as reflecting an intermediate stage of the Jespersen (...) Cycle. Negative Concord can be observed in many languages. The data discussed here are taken from Romance, primarily Spanish. (shrink)

Some authors have claimed that Hegel's ‘determinate negation’ should be distinguished from ‘logical’ or ‘formal’ negation, that is, from a view of negation as a contradictory forming operator. In contrast, I argue that dialectical determinate negation involves a view of negation as a contradictory forming operator, and can therefore count as formal negation in every respect. However, as it is clear in contemporary glutty semantics of negation, one may distinguish between different accounts of the relationship between negation, contradiction and content. (...) I suggest that, differently from classical negation, and as glutty negation, dialectical negation has partial content. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss a proposal for reform in the teaching of Euclidean geometry that reveals the symbiotic relationship between axiomatics and pedagogy. We examine the role of intuition in this kind of reform, as expressed by Mario Pieri, a prominent member of the Schools of Peano and Segre at the University of Turin. We are well aware of the centuries of attention paid to the notion of intuition by mathematicians, mathematics educators, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and others. To set (...) a context for Pieri’s proposal, we only seek to open a small window on views of the pedagogical role of intuition, from primary education to university study that may have informed early 20th century efforts to improve the teaching of geometry at the secondary school level. Pieri addressed the topic of intuition in many of his axiomatizations, including those in projective geometry which was his main area of concentration in foundations. We focus here primarily on his axiom systems for elementary geometry, which embraced the transformational approach of Felix Klein’s vision for the subject. Our goal is to convey Pieri’s thoughts on how to integrate two types of intuition, denoted as sensible and rational, in his endeavors to improve the teaching of the geometry of Euclid. We show how Pieri’s views on geometric intuition and pedagogical reform were either ignored or misrepresented in several notable publications at the turn of the 20th century. In particular, we give Pieri a voice in response to specific comments made in the early 1900s by Federigo Enriques, Ugo Amaldi, and Florian Cajori in widely circulated publications inspired by Klein. (shrink)

In our contemporary age, where a combination of individualism and mutual distrust is unhappily common among people and society is “liquid” and disoriented, so-called intermediate units are a precious resource that promotes positive coexistence within organizations and in local communities, too. The present contribution describes an example of such an intermediate unit, the Talent Club, located in a peripheral neighborhood of a metropolitan area in northern Italy. This case study shows the development of positive living and working together in organizations (...) and their transformation in the tool for community development and good coexistence. Qualitative and quantitative data show that the relational aspect is crucial because it promotes authentic exchange among people, supporting participation and social cohesion against self-referential habits and isolation. Although at present the Talent Club is mostly functioning in a affiliating coexistence among members, seeds of a more generativ... (shrink)

Based on in-depth interviews, this article examines a sample of 48 Canadian women’s feelings about their changed postpartum bodies, their sense of self, and the factors that affect both. Our findings suggest that understanding women’s postpartum feelings requires contextualizing them in the work of infant care and women’s life circumstances, as well as ideologies about mothering and feminine appearance. Motherhood afforded the women in this study a new appreciation of their bodies, and a positive embodied sense of themselves, but only (...) if they felt their bodies performed maternal functions well. Concerns about appearance persisted and became especially salient when women faced the return to paid work. Moreover, varied life circumstances influenced women’s overall feelings about their changed bodies as insecurities were displaced onto women’s body images. (shrink)

This article examines how specific realist and projectivist versions of manipulability theories of causation deal with the problem of objectivity. Does an agent-dependent concept of manipulability imply that conflicting causal claims made by agents with different capacities can come out as true? In defence of the projectivist stance taken by the agency view, I argue that if the agent’s perspective is shown to be uniform across different agents, then the truth-values of causal claims do not vary arbitrarily and, thus, reach (...) a satisfactory level of objectivity. My argument connects Price’s considerations on the situation of deliberation, whose structure, common to all agents, is the same with respect to both decision making and causal claims on a concept inspired by Douglas’s classification of objectivity of thought processes: the perspective of the detached agent. I further argue that, despite his agent-independent concept of intervention, Woodward’s claim of a stronger objectivity standard cannot be achieved, as the relativity of causal concepts to a variable set brings about the issue of the agent’s choice of variables. Consequently, a more permissive objectivity standard applies to both views. (shrink)

The article examines science-policy conversations mediated by social science in attempts to govern, or set up terms for, scientific research. The production of social science research accounts about science faces challenges in the domains of emerging technosciences, such as nano. Constructing notions of success and failure, participants in science actively engage in the interpretation of policy notions, such as the societal relevance of their research. Industrial engagement is one of the prominent themes both in policy renditions of governable science, and (...) in the participants’ attempts to achieve societally relevant research, often oriented into the future. How do we, as researchers, go about collecting, recording, and analyzing such future stories? I examine a series of recent interviews conducted in a number of US universities, and in particular at a university campus on the West Coast of the United States. The research engages participants through interviews, which can be understood as occasions for testing the interpretive flexibility of nano as “good” scientific practice and of what counts as societal relevance, under what circumstances and in view of what kind of audiences. (shrink)

In the decade following hepatitis B vaccine’s 1981 approval, U.S. health officials issued evolving guidelines on who should receive the vaccine: first, gay men, injection drug users, and healthcare workers; later, hepatitis B-positive women’s children; and later still, all newborns. States laws that mandated the vaccine for all children were quietly accepted in the 1990s; in the 2000s, however, popular anti-vaccine sentiment targeted the shot as an emblem of immunization policy excesses. Shifting attitudes toward the vaccine in this period were (...) informed by hepatitis B’s changing popular image, legible in textual and visual representations of the infection from the 1980s through the 1990s. Notably, the outbreak of AIDS, the advent of genetically engineered pharmaceuticals, and a Democratic push for health reform shaped and reshaped hepatitis B’s public image. Hepatitis B thus became, in turn, an AIDS-like scourge; proof of a new era of pharmaceuticals; a threat from which all American children had a right to be protected; and a cancer-causing infection spread by teenage lifestyles. The metamorphosis of the infection’s image was reflected in evolving policy recommendations regarding who should receive the vaccine in the 1980s, and was key to securing broad uptake of the vaccine in the 1990s. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo reconstruir la ética de la resistencia que Nietzsche propone en _El Anticristo _partiendo de la imagen que se ofrece en el prólogo a modo de declaración de intenciones: “preferible _vivir en medio del hielo_”. Dicha ética le exige al individuo la superación de la psicología de la convicción o de la fe y recurre, como método, a la Filología entendida como “_ephexis _en la interpretación”. La apropiación nietzscheana de ese término procedente del pirronismo obliga (...) a medir la utilidad de las enseñanzas escépticas para un individuo que aspira a autorrealizarse, _a llegar a ser el que es_. Con este fin ha de poner entre paréntesis los lugares comunes y asegurarse una posición hermenéutica propia que quiere evitar la_ des-simismación_ y que renuncia, por ello, a implicarse en la rutina democrática de las sociedades modernas. En sintonía con la sensibilidad pirrónica que anima a cultivar la distancia y la indiferencia, se acabará mostrando, en primer lugar, que Nietzsche se dirige exclusivamente a una comunidad de lectores afines y que, en segundo lugar, suspende la vocación política de su propuesta. (shrink)

800x600 Normal 0 21 false false false RO X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Review of Mihaela Frunză, Expertiza etică și bioetica. Studii de caz (Ethical Expertise and Bioethics. Case Studies). Cluj-Napoca, Limes Publishing House, 2010.

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 177-208.

An exchange of letters among proper names and natural-kind terms, dealing with various identity and individuation problems (rigid designation, use-mention ambiguities, translation) from their point of view.

Biological conservation has a long story, but what distinguishes Conservation Biology from previous conservation fields is its multidisciplinary scope and its character as a mission-oriented crisis discipline. These characteristics suggested the introduction of the metaphor of biological conservation as a sort of surgery. This paper is about the initial stages of such surgery. Firstly, some data about the so-called “Big Sixth”—the disease—will be presented together with some information about Conservation Biology—the surgeon. Then epistemic and epistemological difficulties in extinction assessment and (...) conservation prioritization, and triage in particular, will be pointed out. It will be argued that, while data deficiency arising from empirical and practical constraints can in principle be overcome, a different order of difficulties stems from the competition among several species concepts. In this case, it will be suggested that the extent of complications is of such significance to require a thorough re-assessment of the very nature of the patients, i.e., outside the metaphor, of the concept of species. (shrink)

In recent decades, affective scientists have begun using concepts and tools from dynamical systems theory (DST) to characterise emotional processes. This article considers how the concept of emergence might be used to develop this approach. Emotions are explicated as ‘emergent products’ that diachronically constrain the operations of their parts in virtue of feedback loops (a classical feature of nonlinear dynamical systems). The explication is shown to be broadly consistent with what is sometimes called ‘pattern’ emergence. Casting emotions as emergent patterns (...) is shown to shed light on a major conceptual and empirical challenge emotion theorists have faced over the past century: identifying and measuring the presence of emotional episodes (Lindquist et al., 2012; Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014), dubbed here the ‘boundary problem’ (following Colombetti, 2014). In particular, the explication suggests seeing the emotional ‘signatures’ thought to accompany emotional episodes as fragile and context-bound: likely to hold under a relevant class of interventions (Woodward, 2005), but not without exception beyond that class. This in turn may suggest a need to significantly revise the statistical methods currently used to measure the presence of emotional ‘signatures’. The casting of emotions as emergent patterns also functions as a further case study supporting the value of ‘pattern emergence’ (Winning & Bechtel, 2019) as a powerful vehicle for characterising the objects of investigation — compound and context-sensitive — ubiquitous in the biological sciences. (shrink)

Non sempre il pensiero politico di Karl Jaspers ha ricevuto l’attenzione che merita.

Hallucination lies at an intriguing border between psychiatry and philosophy. Although Behrendt & Young (B&Y) tie their proposal to Kantian transcendental idealism, other philosophical positions are equally consistent. Cognition is underconstrained by reality not only in hallucination but also in autism and dreaming. Sensory underconstraint is insufficient to encompass schizophrenia. There is also a breakdown in integrative capacity on the cognitive side. From a wider clinical perspective than schizophrenia, there can be underconstraint or overconstraint in sensory and cognitive functionalities.

The essay focuses on the Italian evolutionist Tito Vignoli, whose work is the result of a fruitful contamination between philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, zoology and physiology. His most regarded book, Mito e scienza (1879), and some of his minor writings deal with the theory of myth, art and aesthetics in the new framework of Darwin's ideas.

Receiving another person’s gestures is an aesthetic production and an ethical pursuit. Cuffari finds support for this claim in Merleau-Ponty’s sustained comparisons between speaking, writing, and painting and in his concepts of reversibility and encroachment in The Prose of the World. She considers complex instances of gesture reception in interactions occurring in family life, poetic response to racist speech, and a robotic art exhibition. Gestures signify according to a logic of appropriative disclosure, wherein gesturing bodies select and stylize features of (...) shared space and history in an effort to say something new. Gesture receivers complete acts of meaning making by confronting and co-inhabiting the coherent deformations of another’s stylized and expressive action. Cuffari calls for efforts to perceive ourselves perceiving as a conscious practice of artistic stance towards conversational meaning co-construction. Recevoir les gestes d’une autre personne est une production esthétique et une recherche éthique. Cuffari trouve un soutien à cette thèse dans les comparaisons de Merleau-Ponty entre parler, écrire et peindre, et dans ses concepts de la réversibilité et de l’entrelacement dans La prose du monde. Elle prend en considération des instances complexes de réception de gestes dans des interactions qui se produisent dans la vie familiale, la réponse poétique à un discours raciste, une exposition d’art robotique. Les gestes signifient selon une logique du dévoilement et de l’appropriation, où les corps gesticulants sélectionnent et stylisent les caractères de l’espace partagé et de l’histoire dans un effort de dire quelque chose de nouveau. Ceux qui reçoivent les gestes accomplissent des actes de signification en confrontant et en co-habitant les déformations cohérentes d’une action stylisée et expressive d’un autre. Cuffari appelle à des efforts pour nous percevoir nous-mêmes en percevant, en tant que pratique consciente artistique à l’égard de la co-construction conversationnelle du sens.Ricevere il gesto di un’altra persona implica una produzione estetica ed una ricerca etica. Cuffari poggia la sua tesi sul confronto che Merleau-Ponty stabilisce tra parlare, scrivere e dipingere e sul concetto di reversibilità e di intreccio ne La prosa del mondo. L’autrice esamina la complessa questione della ricezione del gesto in diversi contesti: interazioni della vita famigliare, risposta poetica al discorso raziale e una mostra di arte robotica. I gesti significano in base ad una logica di disvelamento e appropriazione, in cui i corpi che performano i gesti individuano e stilizzano i caratteri di uno spazio condiviso e di una storia nello sforzo di esprimere qualcosa di nuovo. I riceventi del gesto vengono a completarne il significato confrontando e coabitando le deformazioni coerenti dell’azione stilizzata e espressiva di un altro. Cuffari ci chiama così a percepirci noi stessi nell’atto di percepire in quanto pratica artistica cosciente rispetto alla co-costruzione discorsiva del significato. (shrink)

This book provides an answer to the question: «Where does the point-of-view shot come from?» It investigates the emergence of this filmic form as the product of a culture and its history, unravelling the difference between a point-of-view shot and a character's subjective viewpoint.

Mammals have a very complex, tightly controlled, and developmentally regulated process of dosage compensation. One form of the process equalizes expression of the X‐linked genes, present as a single copy in males (XY) and as two copies in females (XX), by inactivation of one of the two X‐chromosomes in females. The second form of the process leads to balanced expression between the X‐linked and autosomal genes by transcriptional upregulation of the active X in males and females. However, not all X‐linked (...) genes are absolutely balanced. This review is focused on the recent advances in studying the dosage compensation phenomenon in mammals. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Benedetto Croce’s interpretation and critique of Hegel’s dialectic in Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel (1906)and I compare it with a very similar critique elaborated by Gilles Deleuze around sixty years later (in Différence et répetition, 1968, Nietzsche et la philosophie,1962 and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? 1991). Even if they are two very different authors, belonging to very different traditions and contexts, both Croce andDeleuze criticise Hegel with a (...) very similar argument, namely by saying that Hegel did not adequately take into account the concept of difference, and subordinated it to opposition (or negation). In addition, albeit by taking different roads, both Croce and Deleuze thought that philosophy has its own specific logic, and this logic is a logic of concept. (shrink)

The richness and subtlety of the felt presence phenomenon introduced by “Felt Presence: the uncanny encounters with the numinous Other” (Solomonova et al., this issue) offers a challenge to the emerging field of new media. How to create a computer-mediated environment which can engender a spontaneous, creative, and individualized experience such as felt presence? The Other experiment described in this paper explores the possibility of unfolding phenomenological and poetic aura of felt presence experience in a media-rich environment with liminal stimulation, (...) dosed carefully, and open to interpretation. (shrink)

The article demonstrates that post-Soviet academic debates about theoretical concepts and visions of truth can be usefully interpreted in terms of different “class positions” of knowledge producers. One academic faction is interested in academic freedom, autonomy, and corporate solidarity, as the social and cultural capitals of its members are involved with the global symbolic market. The capitals of the other group are invested into the slightly modified Soviet academic system and local symbolic fields. Intellectuals necessarily are aligned with more powerful (...) social actors and thus become involved in divisions and struggles that they cannot escape. (shrink)

Over the years, researchers of numerous fields have suggested different criteria and conventions for the transcription of oral samples. Current practice by workers who carry out transcriptions in the Spanish legal system is not standardized and does not follow any general criteria. Indeed, the standards followed by professionals in this context are characterized by their heterogeneity. This contribution highlights the benefits of adhering to a particular set of criteria and conventions agreed upon by 115 transcribers to make the transcription process (...) more efficient, improve its comprehension and add to the value of transcriptions as key documents within the legal system that may have a direct impact on the right of the parties involved. (shrink)

In Politics III, 4.1277a15–16 Aristotle presents phronēsis as the characteristic excellence of the good ruler. Difficulties arise when we consider that, on his view, a good ruler should always be loyal to his constitution, even when its prescriptions are contrary to moral goodness. This paper investigates the condition of a wise ruler in imperfect communities by attempting to answer the following questions: Would a wise ruler be capable of retaining his practical wisdom in a deviant community and stay loyal to (...) the constitution? Can the quality of any deviant polis be improved by the ruler’s practical wisdom without losing its distinctive nature? It is argued that Aristotle believes in the possibility of improving a deviant constitution compatibly with its preservation, and that such a possibility does not undermine the ruler’s practical wisdom. The only one constitution that leaves this possibility open is the polity. (shrink)

In this commentary we raise three issues: (1) Is it motherese or song that sets the stage for very early mother-infant interaction? (2) Does the infant play a pivotal role in the complex temporal structure of social interaction? (3) Is the vocal channel primordial or do other modalities play an equally important role in social interaction?