The acquaintance debate in aesthetics has been traditionally divided between pessimists, who argue that testimony does not provide others with aesthetic knowledge of artworks, and optimists, who hold that acquaintance with an artwork is not a necessary precondition for acquiring aesthetic knowledge. In this paper I propose a reconciliationist solution to the acquaintance debate: while aesthetic knowledge can be had via testimony, aesthetic judgment requires acquaintance with the artwork. I develop this solution by situating it within a virtue aesthetics framework (...) based on Ernest Sosa's virtue epistemology. I go on to apply the solution to the debates on moral testimony and expert testimony. An interesting variant on Gettier cases emerges: cases in which subjects have knowledge, but it has been formed by the wrong competence. (shrink)

The present study of sense and reference in the logic of Frege represents the first fruits of several years of dealing with the work of this great German logician. In the preparation of this work, which was presented as a dissertation to the Faculty of Philosophy of the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen/Nuremberg, assistance came from many quarters. lowe most to Professor R. Zocher, who directed this dissertation with understanding counsel and unflagging interest. I must also thank Professor P. Lorenzen, whose (...) courses and seminars provided more inspiration than might be immediately apparent in the book. Professor W. Britzelmayr of Munich was so kind as to provide copies of important fragments of Frege's works. These texts are reproduced with the permission of Professor H. Hermes, Director of the 'Institut fUr mathematische Logik und Grund lagenforschung' in Munster, where Frege's works and letters are being prepared for publication. The preparation of this work was greatly facilitated by a two-year grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. CHRISTIAN THIEL Nuremberg, February 1965 v TRANSLATOR'S NOTE In the difficult matter of Fregean terminology we have taken Ignacio Angelelli's translation of Two Soviet Studies on Frege as the model. Both Professor Angelelli and Dr. Thiel have been so kind as to read over the translation before publication. (shrink)

How do institutions respond to expert contests over epistemologies of sex and gender? In this article, I consider how epistemological ascendancy in debates over the regulation of women athletes with high testosterone is established within a legal setting. Approaching regulation as an institutional act that defines forms of embodied difference, the legitimacy of which may be called into question, I show how sexed bodies are enacted through and as part of determinations of expertise. I focus on proceedings from 2015 when (...) the Court of Arbitration for Sport was asked to decide whether an Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, could compete as a female athlete. Despite acknowledging that sexed bodies are unruly, the court ultimately endorsed the use of testosterone as seemingly essential to women’s athletic performance, thereby reasserting a two-category model of biological difference. The legitimacy of these regulatory efforts was established through the concurrent narrowing of expertise and the body, a process that is also revealed to be gendered. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to (...) favour the hypothesis that what experts learn is simply to better direct their attention to elements of the stimulus relevant to making post-perceptual categorizations. Here I argue against this hypothesis. Attentional weighting is an integral component of the process that allows experts to come to represent high-level properties in perceptual experience. (shrink)

It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several attention-related phenomena. We claim that it cannot account for all of them, since there are certain forms of voluntary attention that it cannot accommodate. (...) We therefore suggest that, although the theory of Bayesian prediction error minimization introduces some powerful tools for the explanation of mental phenomena, its advocates have been wrong to claim that Bayesian prediction error minimization is ‘all the brain ever does’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This is a guest editorial introducing a special issue on ‘Exemplars and Emulation in Moral Education’ which contains contributions from 10 multidisciplinary authors. Representing the state of the art in the discourse, this editorial elucidates several new themes pertaining to it, before outlining each contribution in relation to said themes. In light of David Carr’s recent objections to role modelling, it is then argued that these contributions provide a possible collective response.

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with (...) tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark’s (2018) embodied inference; Seth’s (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli’s (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain ‘s cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. (shrink)

While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...) second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear to require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle. (shrink)

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

Between Wolff and Kant: Merian's Theory of Apperception UDO THIEL IT IS WELL KNOWN that the nodon of apperception or self-consciousness is central to Kant's theoretical philosophy. Kant introduces the notion in one of the crucial parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, and assigns it an important role in his critique of traditional metaphysics of the soul in the Transcendental Dialectic.' It is also well known that Kant did not invent the term "apperception." (...) Leibniz had introduced the French 'Tapperception" into philosophical terminology early in the eigh- teenth century. Kant scholars generally stress, rightly, that Kant's notion of apperception differs significandy from that of his predecessors. However, the precise relation between Kant's concept of apperception and earlier accounts has not been considered in any detail. Wolfgang Carl, for example, simply states that the main difference is that, prior to Kant, apperception was under- stood as relating only to mental acts and their contents, and not to the subject that thinks and has ideas, whereas in Kant apperception relates essentially to the thinking subject. 2 This very general thesis is questionable even in regard to some of the philosophers that Carl cites in this context . It is clearly not true of some other pre-Kantian philoso- phers who deal with self-consciousness. ' References to the Critique of Pure.. (shrink)

Explores the understanding of self-consciousness and personal identity - two fundamendtal features of human subjectivity - as it developed in early modern philosophy. Udo Thiel presents a critical evaluation of these features as they were conceived in the sevententh and eighteenth centuries. He explains the arguments of thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume, as well as their early critics, followers, and other philosophical contemporaries, and situates them within their historical contexts. Interest in the issues of self-consciousness and (...) personal identity is in many ways characteristic [of] and even central to early modern thought, but Thiel argues here that this is also an interest that continues to this day, in a form still strongly influenced by the conceptual frameworks of early modern thought. In this book he attempts to broaden the scope of the treatment of these issues considerably, covering more than a hundred years of philosophical debate in France, Britain, and Germany while remaining attentive to the details of the arguments under scrutiny and discussing alternative interpretations in many cases"--Publisher's description, p. [4] of dust jacket. (shrink)

The first decade of the twenty-first century introduced a cultural shift where terrorism is concerned by making new technologies such as computers and networks available as both tools and targets for exploitation. The current rise in the number of attempts at launching a cyber attack may represent a new generation of “terrorists” and their discontent with governments, private companies, or with other non-governmental groups. Using cyber technologies has many benefits for the user and the potential of causing more damage by (...) a keystroke than a bomb is increasing daily. Despite much recent scholarship on cyber terrorism, however, there continue to be problems not only in defining what cyber terrorism means but in identifying both who are the actors and the panoply of choices actors confront. In this essay, I attempt to clarify these problems by defining key terms and by analyzing the recent escalation in cyber use in the European context. (shrink)

PurposeThis paper aims to explore poverty issues in South Africa, to investigate some of the key contributions that knowledge management can make in the eradication of poverty and to suggest a strategy of knowledge management for poverty eradication in South Africa.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper. Secondary data sources, in the form of journal articles, policy documents, newspaper articles and the internet, were consulted.FindingsThis paper contributes to the debates on moving towards an integrated poverty strategy that goes beyond reducing poverty by (...) simply raising national income. The paper advocates for a contextualised knowledge management strategy tailored to specific poverty intervention projects and communities. It also suggests that a knowledge management strategy will result in permanent investment in knowledge and the human development of people.Research limitations/implicationsGiven that this is a conceptual paper, the paper recommends empirical future studies that will implement this strategy within specific poverty-stricken communities in the country.Practical/implicationsThe paper raises awareness among policy and decision-makers of the importance of knowledge management as a tool for poverty eradication. In the knowledge economy, knowledge assets – other than the tangible assets of financial capital and local infrastructure – are the prime creator of wealth. It adds to the body of knowledge on knowledge management for poverty eradication by the World Bank and other international organisations.Social implicationsA knowledge management strategy will create an environment in which human development is attained and the minds of the poor are transformed. It will enhance policy formulation and implementation, empower the poor and create a learning organisation.Originality/valueThe paper presents a proposed strategy for knowledge management for poverty eradication in South Africa. (shrink)

Higher order cognitive processes, including ethical decision making (EDM), are influenced by the experiencing of discrete emotions. Recent research highlights the negative influence one such emotion, anger, has on EDM and its underlying processes. The mechanism, however, by which anger disrupts the EDM has not been investigated. The current study sought to discover whether cognitive appraisals of an emotion-evoking event are the driving mechanisms behind the influence of anger on EDM. One primary (goal obstacle) and one secondary (certainty) appraisal of (...) anger were examined. Study results suggest that appraisals of certainty are the driving mechanism behind the negative relationship between anger and EDM. Certainty appraisals led to less application of EDM-promoting strategies and more unethical social motives. Findings further highlight the value of investigating appraisals of emotional events, given their cognitive nature, for their potential effects on cognitive operations, such as EDM. Future directions and implications are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, our concern is to describe how body(ies) and self are performed in women’s birth narratives through the mediation of a number of significant elements, including technical devices. We will show how, in these narratives, (1) action is distributed among a series of actants, including professionals and technology; (2) that dichotomies appear which cannot be reduced to one of body/mind, but are more adequately described in terms of ‘body-in-labour’/’embodied self’, each of them being locally performed through the mediation (...) of medical practices, knowledge and technologies, the definition of these elements and of their relations being specific to each obstetrical configuration; (3) that part of professionals’ activities is devoted to the detailed management of the articulation between the body-in-labour and the embodied self, and to monitoring their joint transformations. (shrink)

Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...) perceiving an artwork as belonging to a (correct) category of art requires no art-historical knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, contextualist attempts to incorporate art-historical knowledge via the mechanism of cognitive penetration are incompatible with Walton’s claim that categories of art must be perceptually distinguishable. Here I propose a way of elaborating Walton’s view that avoids this difficulty and reconciles contextualism with aesthetic perception, the view that we perceive aesthetic properties. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is commonly understood as conferring some benefit to the learner, such as allowing for the extraction of more information from the environment. However, perceptual learning can be biased in several different ways, some of which do not appear to provide such a benefit. Here we outline a systematic framework for thinking about bias in perceptual learning and discuss how several cases fit into this framework. We argue these biases are compatible with an understanding in which perceptual learning is (...) beneficial, but that its benefits are tied to both a person's narrow interests and the training environment or domain, and so if there are changes to either of these, then benefits can turn into liabilities, though these are often temporary. (shrink)

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

This article explores the often-disparate commitments the chaplain has made to both the institutional church as well as the hospital system through the lens of the baptismal rite. As baptism is primarily a religious act meant to initiate new members into the Christian faith and a specific community, the chaplain must grapple with the meaning of baptism in the hospital system, a place of crisis and transient community. It is the numinous presence that binds the chaplain’s disparate commitments together in (...) the liminal space between the clinical and ecclesial within which the chaplain exists. The numinous expands the boundaries of institutions often at odds. The chaplain finds meaning and purpose by bearing witness and remaining committed to this numinous presence that binds. (shrink)

What would political thought look like without the foundation of ethics? Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Madeleine Fagan puts forward a radical and far-reaching refusal of foundational ethics. She proposes that politics isn't built on ethics, where the two are separate things: politics and ethics are actually inseparable. The 'ethical' should not be understood as a label; it does not mean 'good' or it is not an evaluation or guide. Rather, both the (...) ethical and the political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves. Fagan shows us how it has become necessary to rethink the relationship between ethics and politics, based on how we practice both. In doing so, she overturns a series of common assumptions about poststructuralist ethics. It brings together an exploration of the ethical and political thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy for the first time. It provides an advanced introduction to poststructuralist ethical thought in politics and international relations. It focuses on the practical political implications of poststructuralist thought. (shrink)

This article addresses dilemmas of agency for feminism through reflections on social psychological research on the role of representations in the construction of identity by Muslim women. Engaging first with Saba Mahmood’s account of religious subjectivities in Politics of Piety, the author argues that feminist research requires a social conception of agency that addresses dialogical dynamics of representation and identity. Drawing on research concerning veiling and identity among Muslim women in the UK and Denmark, the author shows how a social (...) conception of agency may be elaborated through the analysis of how competing representations of gender are negotiated in the self–other encounter. The author argues that a dialogical approach to researching identity in context defies blunt political judgement while shedding light on the intersecting socio-cultural forces and relations of power that engage processes of resistance and re-presentation. (shrink)

This article examines motifs of falling, recoiling, and turning across Chester Himes’ oeuvre as figurations of Black susceptibility to racial violence. These images reference and reconstruct an event from Himes’ early adulthood: his catastrophic fall down an elevator shaft. Taking a psychoanalytically oriented approach, I analyze the metonymic connections between these motifs, rather than reading them in their chronological order, using Jean Laplanche’s theory of après-coup. I argue that the recursive quality of these images in Himes’ work is not merely (...) an unconscious repetition or conscious working through of a traumatic biographical event but part of an endeavor to imagine different ways to inhabit and survive the structural trauma of Jim Crow America. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between farmland investment and environmental uncertainty. It examines how farmland investors seek to “render land investible” in spite of drought, groundwater depletion, and changing regulations. To do so, we analyze a single case study: the purchase of 8000 acres of dry rangeland in California’s Cuyama Valley by the Harvard University endowment for use in creating an irrigated vineyard. Drawing from interviews with Cuyama Valley farmers and community members, participant observation at community meetings, and public document (...) analysis, we make two primary contributions to understandings of uncertain resource materiality in farmland investment. First, this case reveals that investors can turn environmental uncertainty into an advantage, exploiting both the temporal uncertainties associated with resource management under climate change and the spatial uncertainties inherent to all subsurface resources. We argue that the material and legal uncertainties of groundwater access provide investors with a potentially lucrative opening to assert their preferred land imaginaries and improve their property values. In the Cuyama Valley they did so through both participation in groundwater governance and the establishment of water-related infrastructure on their property. Second, this case highlights that the asset-making processes involved in farmland investment may be as much vertical as they are horizontal. The need to map and measure the uncertain vertical dimension of land creates an outsized role for scientific expertise in farmland assetization. (shrink)

In the course of a note on Aen. VIII. 86 sq. by Dr. J. W. Mackail , the Servian interpretation of line 96 is supported with the observation that 'note should be taken of Virgil's distinctive use of the ablative. “Placidoaequore siluas” in his language is practically equivalent to “placidas aequoreas siluas” just as “pictas abiete puppes” is to “pictas abiegnas puppes” or “uasta uoragine gurges” to “uastus uoraginosus gurges.”’.

This paper extends previous attempts at understanding the nature of organizational integrity and its increasingly important role for companies which, after all, bear a moral and societal responsibility. Interpretations of organizational integrity in business ethics literature incorporate aspects ranging from the behavior of managers and employees to corporate structures and incentive systems. We argue that virtue ethics builds an indispensable framework for understanding the origin of the concept of integrity and transfer these findings to an organizational level. Hence, we first (...) define organizational integrity, and second operationalize it in a closed three-step process, consisting of morally sound corporate commitments, their transparent institutionalization within the company, and their implementation into actions. We consider the main goal of organizational integrity to be of a preventative investment nature. Organizational integrity is a company investment that translates into avoiding fines for potential violations of the law or ethical missteps, as well as an investment in the company’s reputation. In turn, organizational integrity can protect a company from disruptions that can threaten its existence. Defining and operationalizing the concept of organizational integrity provides the foundation for future scientific research and the basis for developing practical guidance for organizations and managers. (shrink)