Drawing on John Dewey and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book employs philosophy as a conceptual resource to develop new methodological and analytical tools for conducting in situ empirical investigations. Chapter one explores the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Dewey. Chapter two exposits Deweyan ideas of embodiment, the primacy of the aesthetic encounter, and aesthetically expressive meaning underdeveloped in Wittgenstein. Chapter three introduces the method of practical epistemological analysis and a model of situated epistemic relations to investigate the learning of body (...) techniques in dinghy sailing. The concluding chapter introduces a model of situated artistic relations to investigate the learning of artistic techniques of self-expression in the Swedish sloyd classroom. (shrink)

The recent alleged doping case of the figure skater Kamila Valieva at the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing 2022 dramatically raised the issue of the protection of minors in anti-doping policy. We firstly present the literature on doping in relation to minors. Secondly, we present WADA’s Protected Person (PP) concept and its implications. Thirdly, we analyse the WADA Code’s purpose and the vulnerability of minors under the Code, and fourthly, we identify the real threats from which minors should be protected (...) by analysing the ineffective PP concept, and showing how it cannot be a real protection. We explain how preventing one threat can generate another, thus converting minor athletes from victims into suspects. We conclude by stressing the necessity for further research, and we indicate our future research direction, towards the development of a much wider concept of protection, and its application into sporting contexts. (shrink)

This co-authored chapter offers a reconstruction of Bergson's conception of the relationship between the political and religion focusing on "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion". Bergson's claims and arguments are related to those of Nietzsche with a focus on the themes of critique, immanence and affirmation.

On 26 March 20091, I introduced in the U.S. Senate a piece of legislation designed to establish a National Criminal Justice Commission. The Presidential level blue-ribbon commission would be charge...

The purpose of this paper is to argue that however impressive and useful its results, neuroscience alone does not provide a complete theory of mind. We specifically enlist John Dewey to help dispel the notion that the mind is the brain. In doing so, we explore functionalism to clarify Dewey’s modified functionalist stance and argue for avoiding “the mereological fallacy.” Mereology is the study of part-whole relations. The mereological fallacy arises from confusing the properties of a necessary subfunction with the (...) properties that derive from the unity of the whole functional coordination. We conclude that the mind is a complex distributed biologicalsociocultural function that is not simply located anywhere and, therefore, is not completely in the possession of any one : it occurs wherever it has consequences. (shrink)

This book provides an inter-disciplinary examination of the relationship between sport, spirituality and religion.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.

In this, the first of two ground-breaking volumes on the nature of language in the light of the way it evolved, James Hurford looks at how the world first came ...

The current approach for dealing with the global AIDS pandemic focuses on technology, particularly pharmaceuticals. However, most of the world’s PLWHA (people living with HIV/AIDS) have little or no access to these expensive treatments. Additionally, such technologies have not proven themselves adequate in addressing AIDS in global terms. When the health of communities is prioritised, rather than the interests of pharmaceutical companies and biomedicine, alternative strategies and policies can be considered. These strategies include seriously investigating traditional medicines in other cultures, (...) rather than adopting an uncritical assumption that the biomedical approach is preferable. The limited research available suggests that some alternative treatments could indeed turn out to be useful in treating HIV/AIDS. However, without Western support for rigorous evaluation and development of local alternative therapies, the potential of these treatments for HIV/AIDS will continue to be dismissed. Additionally, the rights of communities to self-determination, and PLWHA to the best possible primary health care, whether in rich or poorer nations, will also be diminished. (shrink)

The second in James Hurford's acclaimed two-volume exploration of the biological evolution of language explores the evolutionary and cultural preconditions and consequences of humanity's great leap into language.

The paper considers whether the British Government could make receiving a COVID-19 vaccine effectively legally mandatory. After considering the position in English law, it considers the ethical pos...

Neural correlates exist for a basic component of logical formulae, PREDICATE(x). Vision and audition research in primates and humans shows two independent neural pathways; one locates objects in body-centered space, the other attributes properties, such as colour, to objects. In vision these are the dorsal and ventral pathways. In audition, similarly separable “where” and “what” pathways exist. PREDICATE(x) is a schematic representation of the brain's integration of the two processes of delivery by the senses of the location of an arbitrary (...) referent object, mapped in parietal cortex, and analysis of the properties of the referent by perceptual subsystems. The brain computes actions using a few “deictic” variables pointing to objects. Parallels exist between such nonlinguistic variables and linguistic deictic devices. Indexicality and reference have linguistic and nonlinguistic (e.g., visual) versions, sharing the concept of attention. The individual variables of logical formulae are interpreted as corresponding to these mental variables. In computing action, the deictic variables are linked with “semantic” information about the objects, corresponding to logical predicates. Mental scene descriptions are necessary for practical tasks of primates, and preexist language phylogenetically. The type of scene descriptions used by nonhuman primates would be reused for more complex cognitive, ultimately linguistic, purposes. The provision by the brain's sensory/perceptual systems of about four variables for temporary assignment to objects, and the separate processes of perceptual categorization of the objects so identified, constitute a pre-adaptive platform on which an early system for the linguistic description of scenes developed. Key Words: argument; attention; deictic; dorsal; logic; neural; object; predicate; reference; ventral. (shrink)

This book collects the work of leading scholars on Alain Badiou and G.W.F. Hegel, creating a dialogue between, and a critical appraisal of, these two central figures in European philosophy.

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for (...) material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism. (shrink)

A startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers, the book chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

Representation must be prior to communication in evolution. Wilkins & Wakefield's target article gives the impression that communicative pressures play a secondary role. We suggest that their evolutionary precursor is compatible with protolanguage rather than language itself. The difference between these two communicative systems should not be underestimated: only the former can be trivially reappropriated from a representational system.

Machamer, Darden, and Craver argue that causal explanations explain effects by describing the operations of the mechanisms which produce them. One of this paper’s aims is to take advantage of neglected resources of Mechanism to rethink the traditional idea that actual or counterfactual natural regularities are essential to the distinction between causal and non-causal co-occurrences, and that generalizations describing natural regularities are essential components of causal explanations. I think that causal productivity and regularity are by no means the same thing, (...) and that the Regularists are mistaken about the roles generalizations play in causal explanation. Humean, logical empiricist, and other Regularist accounts of causal explanation have had the unfortunate effect of distracting philosophers’ from important non-explanatory scientific uses of laws and lesser generalizations which purport to describe natural regularities. My second aim is to characterize some of these uses, illustrating them with examples from neuroscientific research. (shrink)

This paper presents a counterfactual account of what a mechanism is. Mechanisms consist of parts, the behavior of which conforms to generalizations that are invariant under interventions, and which are modular in the sense that it is possible in principle to change the behavior of one part independently of the others. Each of these features can be captured by the truth of certain counterfactuals.

"We become what we love," states Jim Garrison in Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. This provocative book represents a major new interpretation of Dewey's education philosophy. It is also an examination of what motivates us to teach and to learn, and begins with the idea of education of eros (i.e., passionate desire)-"the supreme aim of education" as the author puts it-and how that desire results in a practical philosophy that guides us in recognizing what (...) is essentially good or valuable. Garrison weaves these threads of ancient wisdom into a critical analysis of John Dewey's writings that reveal an implicit theory of eros in reasoning, and the central importance of educating eros to seek "the Good." Chapters: Plato's Symposium: Eros, the Beautiful, and the Good • Care, Sympathy, and Community in Classroom Teaching: Feminist Reflections on the Expansive Self • Play-Doh, Poetry, and "Ethereal Things" • The Aesthetic Context of Inquiry and the Teachable Moment • The Education of Eros: Critical and Creative Value Appraisal • Teaching and the Logic of Moral Perception This book can be used in graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, philosophy of education, qualitative research, arts and education, language and literacy, and women and education. Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. He is pastpresident of the John Dewey Society and a winner of the Society's Outstanding Achievement Award. (shrink)

Recent developments in ethics and postmodemist epistemology have set the stage for a reconceptualization of environmental ethics. In this paper, I sketch a path for postmodemism which makes use of certain notions current in contemporary environmentalism. At the center of my thought is the idea of place: (1) place as the context of our lives and the setting in which ethical deliberation takes place; and (2)the epistemological function of place in the construction of our understandings of self, community, and world. (...) Central to these themes, in tum, are the related notions of myth, narrative, storied residence, and ethical vernacular. (shrink)

This paper examines the Court of Protection decision in Briggs v Briggs. It considers whether the approach of the Court, which gave effective decisive weight to a patient’s previously expressed wis...

This paper suggests and discusses an answer to the following question: What distinguishes causal from non-causal or coincidental co-occurrences? The answer derives from Elizabeth Anscombe’s idea that causality is a highly abstract concept whose meaning derives from our understanding of specific causally productive activities, and from her rejection of the assumption that causality can be informatively understood in terms of actual or counterfactual regularities.Keywords: Elizabeth Anscombe; Causality; Explanation; Inhibition.

Species evolve, very slowly, through selection of genes which give rise to phenotypes well adapted to their environments. The cultures, including the languages, of human communities evolve, much faster, maintaining at least a minimum level of adaptedness to the external, non- cultural environment. In the phylogenetic evolution of species, the transmission of information across generations is via copying of molecules, and innovation is by mutation and sexual recombination. In cultural evolution, the transmission of information across generations is by learning, and (...) innovation is by sporadic invention or borrowing from other cultures. This much is the foundational bedrock of evolutionary theory. But things get more complicated; there can be gene-culture co-evolution. Prior to the rise of culture, the physical environment is the only force shaping biological evolution from outside the organism, and cultures themselves are clearly constrained by the evolved biological characteristics of their members. But cultures become part of the external environment, and influence the course of biological evolution. For example, altruistic cultures with developed medical knowledge reduce the cost to the individual of carrying genes disposing to certain pathologies (such as diabetes); and such genes become more widespread in the populations maintaining such cultures. Assortative mating can affect biological evolution, and particular cultures may influence the factors which are sorted for in mating. (For a careful discussion of the effects of cultural evolution on natural selection, see Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer, 1971:774- 804). This paper examines mechanisms involved in the co-evolution of a biological trait, the critical period for language acquisition, and a property of human cultures, the size of their languages. A gene/culture interaction will be shown that can be described as a kind of symbiosis, but perhaps more aptly as an `arms race'. In this introduction, we will sketch the basic mechanics of the interaction in very broad terms; the rest of the paper will explain and justify the details. The implications of our model for second language acquisition are given toward the end of the paper. (shrink)

There is evidence for increase, followed by decline, in synaptic numbers during development. Dendrites do not function in isolation. A constructive neuronal process may underpin a selectionist cognitive process. The environment shapes both ontogeny and phylogeny. Phylogenetic natural selection and neural selection are compatible. Natural selection can yield both constructivist and selectionist solution to adaptuive problems.

Postulating a variety of mutually isolated thought domains for prelinguistic creatures is both unparsimonious and implausible, requiring unexplained parallel evolution of each separate module. Furthermore, the proposal that domain-general concepts are not accessible without prior exposure to phonetically realized human language utterances cannot be implemented by any concept-acquisition mechanism.

Two extreme and contrasting positions held currently by various researchers in language evolution are compared. Each position comprises five ideas which contradict the corresponding ideas in the other position. In Extreme Position A, there was a single biological mutation, creating a new unique cognitive domain, Language, immediately enabling unlimited command of complex structures via Merge, used primarily for advanced private thought, and only derivatively for public communication, not promoted by natural selection. By contrast, in Extreme Position B, there were many (...) cumulative biological mutations, allowing expanded interaction of pre-existing cognitive domains — no new domain was created, gradually enabling command of successively more complex structures, used primarily for public communication, and derivatively for advanced private thought, promoted by natural selection. These extreme positions are not hypothetical ‘straw men’, insofar as prominent researchers exist who adopt each of them. At the end of this paper I will present a ‘scorecard’ summarizing which parts of the two extreme positions are justified by available evidence. (shrink)

This commentary is in two sections. The first presents some specifically linguistic evidence regarding Dehaene’s statement that, in animals and prelinguistic humans, only very small numbers can be represented accurately 1. The second section contains some more general reflections on Dehaene’s work.

This commentary is in two sections. The first presents some specifically linguistic evidence regarding Dehaene’s statement that, in animals and prelinguistic humans, only very small numbers (up to about 3) can be represented accurately 1. The second section contains some more general reflections on Dehaene’s work.

The conclusion of this paper will be that e-sports are not sports. I begin by offering a stipulation and a definition. I stipulate that what I have in mind, when thinking about the concept of sport, is ‘Olympic’ sport. And I define an Olympic Sport as an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill. The justification for the stipulation lies partly in that it is uncontroversial. Whatever else people might think of as sport, no-one denies that Olympic Sport is sport. (...) This seeks to ensure that those who might wish to dispute my conclusion might stay with the argument at least for as long as possible. Secondly, the justification for the stipulation lies partly in its normativity—I have chosen an Olympic conception of sport just because it seems to me to offer some kind of desirable version of what sport is and might become. Thirdly, I give examples which show how prominent promoters of e-sports agree with my stipulation, as evidenced by their strenuous attempts to comply with it i... (shrink)

The main concepts of the free energy (FE) neuroscience developed by Karl Friston and colleagues parallel those of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Hobson et al. ( 2014 ) these include an innate virtual reality generator that produces the fictive prior beliefs that Freud described as the primary process. This enables Friston's account to encompass a unified treatment—a complexity theory—of the role of virtual reality in both dreaming and mental disorder. In both accounts the brain operates to minimize (...) FE aroused by sensory impingements—including interoceptive impingements that report compliance with biological imperatives—and constructs a representation/model of the causes of impingement that enables this minimization. In Friston's account (variational) FE equals complexity minus accuracy, and is minimized by increasing accuracy and decreasing complexity. Roughly the brain (or model) increases accuracy together with complexity in waking. This is mediated by consciousness-creating active inference—by which it explains sensory impingements in terms of perceptual experiences of their causes. In sleep it reduces complexity by processes that include both synaptic pruning and consciousness/virtual reality/dreaming in REM. The consciousness-creating active inference that effects complexity-reduction in REM dreaming must operate on FE-arousing data distinct from sensory impingement. The most relevant source is remembered arousals of emotion, both recent and remote, as processed in SWS and REM on “active systems” accounts of memory consolidation/reconsolidation. Freud describes these remembered arousals as condensed in the dreamwork for use in the conscious contents of dreams, and similar condensation can be seen in symptoms. Complexity partly reflects emotional conflict and trauma. This indicates that dreams and symptoms are both produced to reduce complexity in the form of potentially adverse (traumatic or conflicting) arousals of amygdala-related emotions. Mental disorder is thus caused by computational complexity together with mechanisms like synaptic pruning that have evolved for complexity-reduction; and important features of disorder can be understood in these terms. Details of the consilience among Freudian, systems consolidation, and complexity-reduction accounts appear clearly in the analysis of a single fragment of a dream, indicating also how complexity reduction proceeds by a process resembling Bayesian model selection. (shrink)

Nurses working in outreach capacities frequently encounter disaffiliated or ‘hard to reach’ populations, such as those experiencing homelessness, those who use substances, and those with mental health concerns. Despite best efforts, nurses regularly fail to find meaningful engagement with these populations. Mobilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper will critically examine conventional outreach nursing practices as rooted in the royal science of psychiatry, which many ‘survivors’ of psychiatric interventions reject. The field of Mad Studies offers an understanding of (...) patient resistance to outreach nursing interventions. Delueze and Guattari's concepts of packs and sorcerers provide a framework to envision alternative nursing practices as a form of resistance and creativity, where new alliances may be formed outside the coercive confines of traditional practices. In response to patient resistance, outreach nurses themselves must assemble packs and engage in acts of sorcery. (shrink)

One of the most dramatic techniques for constructing accounts of "undiscovery" or incompetence in science involves the manipulative deception—in some accounts, the "hoaxing"—of the putatively incompetent researcher, ostensibly as an experiment to evaluate his or her methodology and the soundness of his or her knowledge claims. In this article, the author examines five cases in which such deceptions have been employed, noting the patterns of argument that typically follow these deceptions and the factors that seem to determine the power of (...) these arguments. The author suggests that the "hoaxer" in such cases is most likely to be successful when his or her views about the targeted researcher's methodology and knowledge claims are orthodox with respect to his or her intended audience. (shrink)