Psychology and philosophy have long reflected on the role of perspective in vision. Since the dawn of modern vision science—roughly, since Helmholtz in the late 1800s—scientific explanations in vision have focused on understanding the computations that transform the sensed retinal image into percepts of the three-dimensional environment. The standard view in the science is that distal properties—viewpoint-independent properties of the environment (object shape) and viewpoint-dependent relational properties (3D orientation relative to the viewer)–are perceptually represented and that properties of the proximal (...) stimulus (in vision, the retinal image) are not. This view is woven into the nature of scientific explanation in perceptual psychology, and has guided impressive advances over the past 150 years. A recently published article suggests that in shape-perception, the standard view must be revised. It argues, on the basis of new empirical data, that a new entity—perspectival shape—should be introduced into scientific explanations of shape perception. Specifically, the article’s centrally advertised claim is that, in addition to distal shape, perspectival shape is perceived. We argue that this claim rests on a series of mistakes. Problems in experimental design entail that the article provides no empirical support for any claims regarding either perspective or the perception of shape. There are further problems in scientific reasoning and conceptual development. Detailing these criticisms and explaining how science treats these issues is meant to clarify method and theory, and to improve exchanges between the science and philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Jon Elster worries about the explanatory power of the social sciences. His main concern is that they have so few well-established laws. Elster develops an interesting substitute: a special kind of mechanism designed to fill the explanatory gap between laws and mere description. However, his mechanisms suffer from a characteristic problem that I will explore in this article. As our causal knowledge of a specific problem grows we might come to know too much to make use of an Elsterian mechanism (...) but still lack a law. We might then find ourselves in the paradoxical position of knowing more relevant causal truths about the phenomenon we are interested in than we did before, but being able to explain less. If this possibility is realized in social science settings, as I argue it might well be, Elster?s mechanistic account is threatened. Moreover, even if the possibility is rarely realized in that way, it raises, simply as a possibility, a conceptual problem with Elster?s mechanistic framework. (shrink)

The ongoing debate on the ethics of self-driving cars typically focuses on two approaches to answering such questions: moral philosophy and social science. I argue that these two approaches are both lacking. We should neither deduce answers from individual moral theories nor should we expect social science to give us complete answers. To supplement these approaches, we should turn to political philosophy. The issues we face are collective decisions that we make together rather than individual decisions we make in light (...) of what we each have reason to value. Political philosophy adds three basic concerns to our conceptual toolkit: reasonable pluralism, human agency, and legitimacy. These three concerns have so far been largely overlooked in the debate on the ethics of self-driving cars. (shrink)

The question of what it means to be aware of others as subjects of mental states is often construed as the question of how we are epistemically justified in attributing mental states to others. The dominant answer to this latter question is that we are so justified in virtue of grasping the role of mental states in explaining observed behaviour. This chapter challenges this picture and formulates an alternative by reflecting on the interpretation of early joint attention interactions. It argues (...) that the standard picture is committed to an implausible account of children's awareness of the co-attender's focus of attention. On a more natural interpretation, children engaged in joint attention perceptually recognize the co-attender's attitude to some object, as something like the (correct) answer to the question of what the object is like. The developmentally basic case is not that of attributing mental states as the causes of observed behaviour but of understanding perceived attitudes and actions as appropriate responses to the shared world. The chapter concludes by exploring how this developmental claim bears on mature adult knowledge of other minds. (shrink)

During the last decades, social mechanisms have been broadly discussed in general sociology, but, in family sociology, they seem to be non-existent. Therefore, the first aim of this paper is to show that., although the term can hardly be found, prominent theoretical ideas use more or less explicitly mechanistic explanations. Focusing on the determinants of separation can show that all arguments connect (structural) input with (social) outcome and search for theoretical explanations in the sense of social mechanisms. We will demonstrate (...) how macro-structural traits are mechanistically connected with individual variables and how they lead to a stable or fragile partnership. As often mentioned, “mechanism-based storytelling” (Hedström/Ylikoski 2010, 64) should be accompanied by empirical research. Therefore, in a simple statistical model in the second part, we will show the results of our testing of some examples of well-known variables for the explanation of separations. It will show how correlations can be mechanistically explained and not simply statistically described. (shrink)

This paper is a concluding speech of the Collegium Logicum that was held in Wittenberg from 20th October 1608 until 12th January 1609.

This paper is an attempt to further our understanding of mechanisms conceived of as ontologically separable from laws. What opportunities are there for a mechanistic perspective to be independent of, or even more fundamental than, a law perspective? Advocates of the mechanistic view often play with the possibility of internal and external reliability, or with the paralleling possibilities of enforcing, counteracting, redirecting, etc., the mechanisms’ power to produce To further this discussion I adopt a trope ontology. It is independent of (...) the notion of law, and can easily be adapted to account for such characteristics of mechanisms. The idea of tropes as mechanisms is worked out in some detail. According to the resulting picture, there is still an opportunity to link mechanisms and laws. But while the predominant law view conceives of mechanistic approaches as special kinds of law accounts, this study indicates that the converse may be true. Law accounts are special cases of mechanistic accounts, and they work only in those worlds where the mechanisms are of the right kind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Max Nordau, Madison Grant, and Racialized Theories of IdeologyJohannes Hendrikus BurgersRecently, Jonathan Spiro has undertaken the Herculean task of recovering the ghost of the conservationist and anti-immigrant racist Madison Grant from a very limited archival record. Spiro’s biography is an invaluable resource that covers, in as much detail as possible, Grant’s life and thought. Although largely forgotten now, in the first half of the twentieth century Grant was a (...) leading figure in the eugenics movement that sterilized thousands of people deemed unfit to reproduce. He was also a prominent advocate of immigration restriction, and he helped southern racists ban miscegenation.1 Like other scholars before him, Spiro argues that Grant arrived at many of his views through the work of such racial scientists as Arthur de Gobineau, Francis Galton, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.2 While he and other scholars are certainly correct in drawing such a lineage, one unlikely and hitherto unexplored parallel to Grant’s thought specifically, and American eugenics in general, was that of Hungarian cultural critic and later Zionist leader, Max Nordau. By elucidating their intellectual kinship, this paper seeks to reveal the extent to which early twentieth-century transatlantic racial discourse involved widely different actors who were at times unknowingly espousing quite similar racial views for entirely different ends. [End Page 119]The reasons why Nordau’s name has not appeared in relation to Grant are several. First, there is a lack of biographical material on Madison Grant: much of his personal correspondence was purloined or destroyed.3 Consequently, evidence that Grant had been influenced by or even read Nordau is largely circumstantial and inferential, and cannot be verified through archival documentation. Secondly, despite a recent Nordau renaissance,4 and notwithstanding certain key publications, he still remains a somewhat marginal figure in the narrative of late nineteenth century history, especially in the American context.5 Thirdly, and more importantly, after the death of Theodore Herzl, Nordau became the most prominent leader of the Zionist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Certainly, someone as committed to Jewish advancement and Jewish emigration to America as Nordau, was hardly likely to share similar racial views with a white supremacist, anti-immigration propagandist, and vicious anti-Semite like Grant. In fact, the only indirect textual connection between the two thinkers is the verbatim use of one of Nordau’s articles by Grant’s racist disciple Lothrop Stoddard; a connection that has only been explored very briefly in a footnote by Nordau biographer Meir Ben-Horin.6 Otherwise, there has been no attempt to see these two thinkers in the same context. Hence, contrary to current scholarly opinion about both writers, this paper will show that they both operated within the same racial framework. While making no claim here of a direct causal relationship between Nordau and Grant, I do contend that during this period there is enough intellectual crosspollination of racial theories to create a significant, not merely coincidental, overlap of ideas. Simplifying early twentieth-century racial thinking into two distinct camps of non-racists and racists is conceptually flawed, even if, as in this case, the ostensible disparities could not be greater.The idea Nordau helped introduce to America, and the idea Grant used later, was that there was a hereditary link between race and ideology. Both believed a person’s racial makeup directly influenced their political ideology. Grant and other anti-immigration nativists used this logic to justify the [End Page 120] exclusion of non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners. Unhealthy, degenerate, foreign bodies presented a danger to the body politic, not just because they were not as productive as the white “Nordics” and therefore caused a drain on the system, but, more significantly, because their inferior type made them susceptible to radical anti-American ideologies like socialism and anarchism. Accordingly, their degeneracy was both an economic strain and a political danger to post-World War I America. The tragic irony is that Nordau’s contribution to the late nineteenth-century racial science was intended to combat increasingly virulent European anti-Semitism. Instead, it ended up in the hands of anti-Semitic propagandists. In fact, at the time that Nordau was urging Jews... (shrink)

Language (śabda) occupied a central yet often unacknowledged place in classical Indian philosophical thought. Foundational thinkers considered topics such as the nature of language, its relationship to reality, the nature and existence of linguistic units and their capacity to convey meaning, and the role of language in the interpretation of sacred writings. The first reader on language in--and the language of--classical Indian philosophy, A Śabda Reader offers a comprehensive and pedagogically valuable treatment of this topic and its importance to Indian (...) philosophical thought. A Śabda Reader brings together newly translated passages by authors from a variety of traditions--Brahmin, Buddhist, Jaina--representing a number of schools of thought. It illuminates issues such as how Brahmanical thinkers understood the Veda and conceived of Sanskrit; how Buddhist thinkers came to assign importance to language's link to phenomenal reality; how Jains saw language as strictly material; the possibility of self-contradictory sentences; and how words affect thought. Throughout, the volume shows that linguistic presuppositions and implicit notions about language often play as significant a role as explicit ideas and formal theories. Including an introduction that places the texts and ideas in their historical and cultural context, A Śabda Reader sheds light on a crucial aspect of classical Indian thought and in so doing deepens our understanding of the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Spatial, physical, and semantic magnitude dimensions can influence action decisions in human cognitive processing and interact with each other. For example, in the SNARC effect, semantic numerical magnitude facilitates left-hand or right-hand responding dependent on the small or large magnitude of number symbols. SNARC-like interactions of numerical magnitudes with the radial spatial dimension (depth) were postulated from early on. Usually, the SNARC effect in any direction is investigated using fronto-parallel computer monitors for presentation of stimuli. In such 2D setups, however, (...) the metaphorical and literal interpretation of the radial depth axis with seemingly close / far stimuli or responses are not distinct. Hence, it is difficult to draw clear conclusions with respect to the contribution of different spatial mappings to the SNARC effect. In order to disentangle the different mappings in a natural way, we studied parametrical interactions between semantic numerical magnitude, horizontal directional responses, and perceptual distance by means of stereoscopic depth in an immersive virtual reality (VR). Two VR experiments show horizontal SNARC effects across all spatial displacements in traditional latency measures and kinematic response parameters. No indications of a SNARC effect along the depth axis, as it would be predicted by a direct mapping account, were observed, but the results show a non-linear relationship between horizontal SNARC slopes and physical distance. Steepest SNARC slopes were observed for digits presented close to the hands. We conclude that spatial-numerical processing is susceptible to effector-based processes but relatively resilient to task-irrelevant variations of radial-spatial magnitudes. (shrink)

The scientific and practical fields—especially high-performance sports—increasingly request a stronger focus be placed on individual athletes in human movement science research. Machine learning methods have shown efficacy in this context by identifying the unique movement patterns of individuals and distinguishing their intra-individual changes over time. The objective of this investigation is to analyze biomechanically described movement patterns during the fatigue-related accumulation process within a single training session of a high number of repeated executions of a ballistic sports movement—specifically, the frontal (...) foot kick (mae-geri) in karate—in expert athletes. The two leading research questions presented for consideration are (1) Can characteristics of individual movement patterns be observed throughout the entire training session despite continuous changes, i.e., even as fatigue-related processes increase? and (2) How do intra-individual movement patterns change as fatigue-related processes increase throughout a training session? Sixteen expert karatekas performed 606 frontal foot kicks directed toward an imaginary target. The kicks were performed in nine sets at 80% (K-80) of the self-experienced maximal intensity. In addition, six kicks at maximal intensity (K-100) were performed after each of the nine sets. Between the sets, the participants took a 90-s break. Three-dimensional full-body kinematic data of all kicks were recorded with 10 infrared cameras. The normalized waveforms of nine upper- and lower-body joint angles were classified using a supervised machine learning method (support vector machine). The results of the classification revealed a disjunct distinction between the kinematic movement patterns of individual athletes. The identification of unique movement patterns of individual athletes was independent of the intensity and the degree of fatigue-related processes. In other words, even with the accumulation of fatigue-related processes, the unique movement patterns of an individual athlete can be clearly identified. During the training session, changes in intra-individual movement patterns could also be detected, indicating the occurrence of adaptations in individual movement patterns throughout the fatigue-related accumulation process. The results suggest that these adaptations can be modeled in terms of changes in patterns rather than increasing variance. Practical consequences are critically discussed. (shrink)

Der Beitrag diskutiert die unterschiedlichen Kritiken, die an meiner in „Kontroverse Themen im Unterricht. Konstruktiv streiten lernen“ vorgelegten Position vorgebracht wurden. Im Durchgang durch diese Kritiken werde ich jeweils meine eigene Position klären und aufzeigen, wo Konkretisierungs- und Revisionsbedarf besteht und wo nicht. Ich schließe mit drei Forschungsdesideraten, die Möglichkeiten der konstruktiven Fortführung und Weiterentwicklung der philosophischen und wissenschaftlichen Debatte über kontroverse Themen im Unterricht skizzieren.

The mechanistic approach in the cognitive and biological sciences emphasizes that scientific explanations succeed by analyzing the mechanisms underlying phenomena across multiple levels. In this paper, we propose a formal strategy to establish such multi-level mechanistic models, which are foundational to mechanistic explanations. Our objectives are twofold: First, we introduce the novel "mLCA" (multi-Level Coincidence Analysis) script, which transforms binary data tables from tests on mechanistic systems into mechanistic models consistent with those tables. Second, we provide several philosophical insights derived (...) from the outcomes generated by this script and its underlying algorithm. Using illustrative examples, we defend the following claims: 1. Inference methods for generating mechanistic models generally require information on how causal factors are assigned to different levels within data tables generated by multi-level structures. 2. The mLCA script successfully produces appropriate mechanistic models from binary data tables, demonstrating the practical application of the philosophical mechanistic approach in the sciences. 3. The number of solutions generated by mLCA increases significantly as the number of relevant factors grows, reflecting adaptations in causal inference methods to meet the demands of multi-level mechanistic modeling. 4. Any further reduction of solutions, if possible, involves pragmatic considerations, a point that carries profound implications for the broader ambitions of the mechanistic approach. By addressing these points, our paper contributes both to the development of practical algorithmic tools and to a deeper philosophical understanding of multi-level mechanistic modeling. (shrink)

In this article, the question in focus is the church and Christianity’s prophetic responsibility towards society, and how in the specific case of the South African-born theologian Gerald John Pillay, his prophetic voice should be characterised. The question is addressed as to whether he was an activist at the barricades or a soft-spoken intellectual in his views on society. After a brief discussion on his bio, the focus is on the phenomenon of being a prophet towards society. Then, the focus, (...) largely based on a literature study, moves to Pillay’s perspectives on the South African and New Zealand contexts, and then a discussion of some of Pillay’s writings on being a prophetic voice follows. Finally, in the conclusion, his specific style and model of being a prophetic voice are analysed. (shrink)

Bhartṛhari was not only a clever and well-informed philosopher but also a conservative Brahmin who maintained his own tradition's superiority against the philosophies developed in his time. He exploited a problem that occupied all his philosophical contemporaries to promote his own ideas, in which the Veda played a central role. Bhartṛhari and his thought are situated in their intellectual context. As it turns out, he dealt with issues that others had dealt with before him in India and suggested solutions to (...) existing problems. Indeed, it becomes clear that he was both a philosopher who dealt with current problems and challenges and a traditionalist who used the philosophical debate of his time to try to gain respectability for his own Vedic tradition. (shrink)