Contributed articles on Advaita, Hindu philosophy, Vedic and Sanskrit literature.

In his recent Knowledge and its Limits, Timothy Williamson argues that no non-trivial mental state is such that being in that state suffices for one to be in a position to know that one is in it. In short, there are no “luminous” mental states. His argument depends on a “safety” requirement on knowledge, that one’s confident belief could not easily have been wrong if it is to count as knowledge. We argue that the safety requirement is ambiguous; on one (...) interpretation it is obviously true but useless to his argument, and on the other interpretation it is false. (shrink)

Linguistic forms with dedicated evidential meanings have been described for a number of Australian languages (eg. Donaldson 1980, Laughren 1982, Wilkins 1989) but there has been little written on how these are used in social interaction. This paper examines evidential strategies in ordinary Garrwa conversations, by taking into account what we know more generally about the status of knowledge and epistemic authority in Aboriginal societies, and applying this understanding to account for the ways knowledge is managed in `ordinary' interactions.

This volume features the complete text of all regular papers, posters, and summaries of symposia presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science ...

Pragmatic sociology is often read as a reaction to and an alternative to Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. This article, in contrast, offers an assessment of pragmatic sociology in terms of its contribution to the theory of culture in general and its affinities with repertoire theory in particular. Whereas the tendency has been to conceive of repertoires as largely unstructured entities, pragmatic sociology has demonstrated a systematic interest in their internal contents and structure, which it has even expanded through its more recent (...) turn to historical and macro comparative analysis. In the process, however, pragmatic sociology has also been leaning towards a form of cultural sociology that actually challenges some major aspects of repertoire theory–thus also bringing into relief the dilemmas facing any attempt at further elaboration of what is now a growing strand of cultural theory. (shrink)

Siphonous seaweeds, which constitute a vital component of coral reefs, are structurally simple, single‐celled coenocytic macroscopic green algae. Kim et al.1 have recently shown the extraordinary wound‐repair and propagation mechanism of one such siphonous green alga—Bryopsis plumosa. Nucleocytoplasmic aggregates, which are released after injury to this plant, are membraneless structures that can survive in seawater for 10–20 minutes, before they are surrounded by a gelatinous envelope. Subsequently, a cell membrane and cell wall are synthesized around each of these aggregates and (...) the resulting individual cells, so formed, develop into new plants. This report represents a significant advance in our understanding of wound response and, more significantly, is probably the first example of transient survival of life without a cell membrane! BioEssays 24:588–590, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Preferences for options that do not secure optimal outcomes, like the ones catalogued by Sunstein, derive from two sources: cognitive heuristics and deontological rules. Although rules may stem from automatic affective reactions, they are deliberately maintained. Because strongly held convictions have important behavioral implications, it may be useful to regard cognitive heuristics and deontological rules as separate sources of nonconsequential judgment in the moral domain.

Basic philosophical concepts and major works of the Sautrantrika school in Buddhist philosophy; a study.

Linguistic studies of evidentiality, the coding of source of knowledge, have often appeared divided into two camps: those whose focus is the semantic, morphological and typological characteristics of grammaticalized morphological evidential systems, and those whose focus is on the social functions of non-grammaticalized evidential constructions as markers of epistemic authority and responsibility. While interest in the discourse functions of all evidential systems has been growing as seen in the recent special issue of the journal Pragmatics and Society on ‘Evidentiality in (...) Interaction’, there has been little direct attention on whether the deployment of evidential strategies in discourse varies according to the grammatical status of the grammatical resources available to the speaker. This article examines the nature of both grammaticalized and non-grammaticalized evidential systems in a number of languages to show that while the underlying pragmatics of evidentiality is the same regardless of grammatical system, nonetheless grammaticalized evidential systems provide important evidence of the particular features of knowledge sources that are used in routine ways in discourse sufficiently to motivate their development into grammatical systems. (shrink)

Smajdor addresses the problem of inferior clinical outcomes among adults with impairments of capacity to give informed consent (AWIC). She notes that AWIC are generally excluded from clinical trials to protect them against harms and avoid exploitation and claims there is a causal link between involvement in clinical trials and favourable outcomes. She argues, given this link, that we should increase AWIC representation in clinical trials and can justifiably do so by recognising the capacity of AWIC to assent. AWIC form (...) a diverse group, with multiple aetiologies, including, for example, Down syndrome, traumatic brain injury and dementia. In some cases, the inability to consent may fluctuate so that the same person could be AWIC only at certain times. Yet despite these differences, the group has a shared unmet need. We agree with Smajdor that AWIC outcomes should be improved, but question whether simply increasing representation in clinical trials is sufficient to achieve this. We identify the following points: 1. AWIC are under-represented in clinical trials. There is evidence of widespread exclusion of AWIC in clinical trials within the UK and abroad and it is often a specific exclusion criterion.1 2. AWIC have worse clinical outcomes and a lower life expectancy. The life expectancy …. (shrink)

Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana Blumberg encounters a crisis in the classroom that sends her back to the most basic questions about education and prompts a life-changing journey that ultimately takes her from East Lansing to Tel Aviv. As she explores how civic and religious commitments shape the culture of her humanities classrooms, Blumberg argues that there is no education without ethics. When we know what sort of society we seek to build, our (...) teaching practices follow. In vivid classroom scenes from kindergarten through middle school to the university level, Blumberg conveys the drama of intellectual discovery as she offers novice and experienced teachers a pedagogy of writing, speaking, reading, and thinking that she links clearly to the moral and personal development of her students. Writing as an observant Jew and as an American, Blumberg does not shy away from the difficult challenge of balancing identities in the twenty-first century: how to remain true to a community of origin while being a national and global citizen. As she negotiates questions of faith and citizenship in the wide range of classrooms she traverses, Blumberg reminds us that teaching - and learning - are nothing short of a moral art, and that the future of our society depends on it. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the implications of a specific type of anger — termed here ‘civic’ anger — with regard to the place of emotions and their relation to regimes of justification in the framework of Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of critical capacity. Drawing upon interviews with a sample of Israeli philanthropic mega-donors, it will highlight the distinctive features and context-bound operation of civic anger as a type of moral and political emotion that has not yet (...) received its due conceptualization. In the case at hand here, civic philanthropic anger will be shown to correspond to a cultural configuration that included regimes of justification equivalent to those already identified by Boltanski and Thévenot (mainly ‘civic’ and ‘industrial’), but also allowed a distinctive cluster of emotions to develop into an additional, ‘quasi’ regime of justification (‘benevolence’). As such, it points to ways in which a renewed sociology of morality needs enlist the fecund idea of regimes of justification, but also draw more systematic theoretical and empirical attention to the variable and multifaceted relation between emotions and justifications in practices of moral interpretation. (shrink)

I have argued that orthographic processing cannot be understood and modeled without considering the manner in which orthographic structure represents phonological, semantic, and morphological information in a given writing system. A reading theory, therefore, must be a theory of the interaction of the reader with his/her linguistic environment. This outlines a novel approach to studying and modeling visual word recognition, an approach that focuses on the common cognitive principles involved in processing printed words across different writing systems. These claims were (...) challenged by several commentaries that contested the merits of my general theoretical agenda, the relevance of the evolution of writing systems, and the plausibility of finding commonalities in reading across orthographies. Other commentaries extended the scope of the debate by bringing into the discussion additional perspectives. My response addresses all these issues. By considering the constraints of neurobiology on modeling reading, developmental data, and a large scope of cross-linguistic evidence, I argue that front-end implementations of orthographic processing that do not stem from a comprehensive theory of the complex information conveyed by writing systems do not present a viable approach for understanding reading. The common principles by which writing systems have evolved to represent orthographic, phonological, and semantic information in a language reveal the critical distributional characteristics of orthographic structure that govern reading behavior. Models of reading should thus be learning models, primarily constrained by cross-linguistic developmental evidence that describes how the statistical properties of writing systems shape the characteristics of orthographic processing. When this approach is adopted, a universal model of reading is possible. (shrink)

"In a complex world where competing groups claim to be speaking on behalf of incommensurate versions of 'humanity, ' the authors represented in "In the Name of ...

In Brazil, the epicenter of the Zika crisis, brown, black, and indigenous poor women living in municipalities with scarce resources were disproportionally affected. The gendered consequences of the epidemic exposed how intersectional lenses are central to understand the impact of public health emergencies in the lives of women and girls. The demand for Zika-affected children and women to be research participants is relevant for an ethical analysis of participant protection procedures during a crisis. We investigated how women experienced research participation (...) by analyzing their narratives. Two-year-long longitudinal qualitative study in Brazilian sites located in the epidemic's epicenter was performed using mixed methods: ethnography with women from two distinct states and individual semi-structured interviews with five women in different Zika-affected states, four of which were community leaders. All women in the study were mothers or grandmothers of Zika-affected children. Thematic analysis was used for data evaluation. Women perceived being pressured to participate in research and a lack of benefit sharing. Structural determinants of gender inequality, such as its effect on power distribution, were found to impact research participant protection. Formal procedures for research protocols approvals were insufficient in protecting participants because these instruments were unable to account for structural aspects. Communitarian mobilization, through WhatsApp groups, was found to be an important mechanism to create conditions to challenge oppressive structures. Strengthening public health, effective community-based participation in research planning and implantation of ethical strategies that promotes gender equality can have transformative effect on unequal power structures and promote participant protection. (shrink)

Doctors Pratt and de Vries propose a well-structured and courageous approach to analyse and repair an insufficiently recognised discussion about epistemologies and knowledge production in bioethics.1 The authors invite researchers, scholars, public health experts and bioethicists from the global North to reflect about their lack of imagination regarding different sources of narratives produced by the global South. There is a critical analysis of injustices and an urgent call for global bioethicists to reorient their field and focus on the analysis and (...) development of ethical interventions to achieve a comprehensive epistemic justice for global health ethics. Feminist bioethicists from the global South already argued about the importance of the voices and biographies of the people and groups in the communities to reframe the bioethical reasoning regarding the meaning of individual’s needs during public health and humanitarian emergencies.2 Over a decade ago, Diniz and Guilhem described the role and goal of feminist bioethics in Latin America, shaped in an oppressive context promoted and created by …. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 487-498, September 2022.

(NEG) is widely accepted both by internalist and by externalists. In fact, there have been very few opponents of (NEG). Timothy Williamson (e.g., 2000) rejects (NEG), for reasons that have by now received a great deal of scrutiny.2 John McDowell also rejects (NEG), but his reasons have not received the scrutiny they deserve. This is in large part because those reasons have not been well understood. We believe that McDowell’s challenge to (NEG) is important, worthy of fair assessment, and maybe (...) even correct. In this paper, we explain McDowell’s challenge to (NEG), and also explain how McDowell can address a seemingly fatal objection to his view. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept a “privileged access” thesis concerning our own present mental states and mental events. According to these philosophers, if I am in mental state (or undergoing mental event) M, then – at least in many cases – I have privileged access to the fact that I am in (or undergoing) M. For instance, if I now believe that my cat is sitting on my lap, then (in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that I now (...) believe that my cat is sitting on my lap. Similarly, if I now imagine a parade coming down Main Street, then (again, in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that I am now imagining a parade coming down Main Street. And again, if it now visually appears to me as if there is a cloud in the sky, then (again, in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that it now visually appears to me as if there is a cloud in the sky. In each of these aforementioned cases, if circumstances are normal, then, these philosophers say, I have a distinctive kind of privileged epistemic access to facts about my own mental states or events. Of course, I don’t have privileged epistemic access to all facts about my own mental states or events. For instance, I don’t have privileged epistemic access to facts about which unconscious mental states or events I have. But I do have privileged epistemic access to many facts about my own mental states or events, and in particular to the various facts listed above. (shrink)

Chater & Loewenstein argue for a shift in focus from individual- to structural-level approaches to societal ills. This is valid and important but overlooks the barriers inherent in the current US partisan context. Psychology can be applied to help people of mixed allyship join together, to effectively and quickly force institutions and corporations to accept structural change.

This article examines the ways in which 1970s French feminists who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de libération des femmes – MLF) wielded the spectre of lesbianism as an American idiosyncrasy to counteract the politicisation of lesbianism in France. It argues that the erasure of lesbian difference from the domain of French feminism was a necessary condition for making ‘woman’ an amenable subject for incorporation into the abstract unity of the French nation, wherein heterosexuality is conceived as a (...) democratic crucible where men and women harmoniously come together and differences are deemed divisive. Looking at the history of feminism from the standpoint of a lesbian perspective reveals unforeseen continuities between French ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ genealogies insofar as they rest on common heterosexual and racial foundations. Finally, the article demonstrates that the alleged un-Frenchness ascribed to the word ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s feminist movement spectrally returned in the 1990s when the word ‘gender’ was, in its turn, deemed radically foreign to the French culture by feminist researchers. Fiercely reactionary constituencies against the legalisation of same-sex marriage have more recently taken up this rhetorical weapon against sexual and racial minorities. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is sometimes read as providing a response to the skeptical puzzle from closure, according to which our commitment to the trustworthiness of our evidence is not itself evidentially grounded. In this paper, I argue both that this standard reading of Wittgenstein is incorrect, and that a more accurate reading of Wittgenstein provides us with a more plausible solution to the Closure Puzzle.

Age at marriage is one of the factors that influence the fertility behaviour of women, particularly in a society like Nepal where contraceptive use is low. Socioeconomic and cultural factors, particularly religion and ethnicity, are important variables in determining age at marriage in Nepal. Fertility was negatively related with age at marriage. Marriage duration had a greater influence on fertility than age at marriage, although these were strongly correlated.

Exhaustive study of Sankhya philosophy with reference to various Sanskrit text; includes passages of Sanskrit text with English translation.