In the U.S. there has been considerable interest in connecting low-income households to alternative food networks like Community Supported Agriculture. To learn more about this possibility we conducted a statewide survey of CSA members in California. A total of 1149 members from 41 CSAs responded. Here we answer the research question: How do CSA members’ socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, household conditions potentially interfering with membership, and CSA membership experiences vary between lower-income households and higher-income households? We divided members into LIHHs (...) and HIHHs. We present comparisons of LIHHs’ and HIHHs’ employment, race/ethnicity, household composition and education, use of food support, and enjoyment of food-related activities; conditions interfering with membership and major life events; and sources of information influencing decision to join, reasons for joining, ratings of importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, gaps between importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, valuing of the share and willingness to pay more, and impacts of membership. We find that LIHHs are committed CSA members, often more so than HIHHs, and that CSA members in California are disproportionately white, but that racial disproportionality decreases as incomes increase. We conclude by considering: the economic risks that LIHHs face in CSA membership, the intersection of economic risks with race/ethnicity and cultural coding in CSA; and the possibilities of increasing participation of LIHH in CSA. (shrink)

Despite the challenges associated with virtually mediated communication, remote collaboration is a defining characteristic of online multiplayer gaming communities. Inspired by the teamwork exhibited by players in first-person shooter games, this study investigated the verbal and behavioral coordination of four-player teams playing a cooperative online video game. The game, Desert Herding, involved teams consisting of three ground players and one drone operator tasked to locate, corral, and contain evasive robot agents scattered across a large desert environment. Ground players could move (...) throughout the environment, while the drone operator’s role was akin to that of a “spectator” with a bird’s-eye view, with access to veridical information of the locations of teammates and the to-be-corralled agents. Categorical recurrence quantification analysis was used to measure the communication dynamics of teams as they completed the task. Demands on coordination were manipulated by varying the ground players’ ability to observe the environment with the use of game “fog.” Results show that catRQA was sensitive to changes to task visibility, with reductions in task visibility reorganizing how participants conversed during the game to maintain team situation awareness. The results are discussed in the context of future work that can address how team coordination can be augmented with the inclusion of artificial agents, as synthetic teammates. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 10, October 2022.

Using a feminist hermeneutic, Autumn Reinhardt-Simpson attempts to set out in this article how a third- or fourth-wave intersectional reading of the stories of Hagar and Sarah and Leah, Rachel, and their maids can become a source of both truth and healing within feminist activist communities today, particularly those working for reproductive justice. Reinhardt-Simpson identifies several issues within the stories such as societal acceptance of women who seek power only within patriarchal constructs or to benefit the aims (...) of patriarchy, as well as issues that divide women both then and today such as class, race, and status and the way that women relate to each other within a patriarchal structure. Reinhardt-Simpson concludes that a liberatory reading of these stories can point us toward reconciliation with our sisters. (shrink)

In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to (...) establish that such feminists are wrong to worry about a threat of male violence in relation to trans women. In Section 1 we argue that ‘TERF’ is not a merely descriptive term; that to the extent that McKinnon offers considerations in support of the claim that ‘TERF’ is not a slur, these considerations fail; and that ‘TERF’ is a slur according to several prominent accounts in the contemporary literature. In Section 2, we argue that McKinnon misrepresents the position of gender critical feminists, and in doing so fails to establish the claim that the ideology behind these positions is flawed. In Section 3 we argue that McKinnon’s criticism of Stanley fails, and one implication of this is that those she characterizes as ‘positively privileged’ cannot rely on the standpoint-relative knowledge of those she characterizes as ‘negatively privileged’. We also emphasize in this section McKinnon’s failure to understand and account for multiple axes of oppression, of which the cis/trans axis is only one. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Greek Athletics and the Olympics by Alan Beale, and: Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games ed. by Barbara Goff, Michael SimpsonJacques A. BrombergAlan Beale. Greek Athletics and the Olympics. Greece & Rome: Texts and Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. iv + 196 pp. Numerous color figs. Paper, $26.Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson, eds. Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern (...) Games. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2011. xi + 227 pp. 23 black-and-white figs. Paper, $40.The quadrennial cycle of modern Olympiads has always assured a steady interest in the history of ancient athletics, as participants of all kinds (athletes, officials, and spectators alike) are reminded of the Games’ debts to the ancient Greeks. With the proliferation of undergraduate courses in Classical athletics, sports, and festivals in recent years, however, a growing number of undergraduates are also getting their first glimpses of Greco-Roman antiquity through the stadium door and quickly discovering how different the modern Olympics are from the ancient. The persistent conservatism of the modern Olympics thus presents instructors of undergraduate surveys with the challenge of introducing the festival to an audience that has come to accept the modern as a continuation of the ancient. In two popular histories of the Olympics, for instance, both published in 2004, one may contrast Nigel Spivey’s (The Ancient Olympics [Oxford 2004]: xix) proposed “journey to the strangeness” of Olympia with David Young’s claim (A Brief History of the Olympic Games [Malden, Mass. 2004]: 140) that “our Olympic Games are not so much a revival of the ancient Greek games as a genuine continuation of them.” Although intended for different audiences, the titles under review share the goal of de-familiarizing the Olympics both by emphasizing differences between ancient and modern athletics and by illuminating how an idealized, ancient Greek model has been used to establish and perpetuate the modern Games.There is no shortage of sourcebooks and histories of ancient athletics: Steven G. Miller, Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources (Berkeley, Calif. 2004); Rachel Sargent Robinson, Sources for the History of Greek Athletics (Chicago, Ill. 1955); Waldo E. Sweet, Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook with Translations (Oxford 1987); and William Blake Tyrell, The Smell of Sweat: Greek Athletics, Olympics, and Culture (Wauconda, Ill. 2004), who includes on a companion CD a wider assortment of sources than any printed edition. In keeping with the goals of Cambridge’s Greece and Rome: Texts and Contexts series, Alan Beale’s Greek Athletics and the Olympics offers a combination of texts and illustrations. One need only consider the nature of the evidence to understand [End Page 703] why this approach is not simply valuable, but obligatory: the literary sources are often fragmentary, belated, or anecdotal (or all three), and the material evidence requires detailed and careful exegesis. The challenge of the evidence is compounded by the instinct to read into the modern Olympics continuity rather than innovation. Beale sets out to overcome the “superficial similarities” and re-mystify ancient athletics as something “substantially different from anything in the modern world” (1). In his brief introductions to each source or object, Beale provides the cultural framework into which students may situate texts and images, and he offers questions (many contrasting ancient with modern) aimed at stirring curiosity and facilitating discussion.The opening chapters treat athletics in the Bronze Age and the Homeric epics (chap. 1), outline the ritual origins and growth of competitive athletics at Olympia (chap. 2), and trace the development of the sanctuary and the festival site (chap. 3). Beale is cautious with the examples of Minoan and Mycenaean art (9–12) and quotes generously from both the Iliad (13–19) and Odyssey (19–22), allowing room to observe discrepancies with later athletic practice. Like Robinson (34–35), he supplements Pausanias and Strabo on the first competitions at Olympia with a sample from Pindar, Olympian 10.24–77 (25–26), and instructors who wish to discuss this early history will not find better treatments of these passages elsewhere. Chapter 3 presents the site at Olympia and the administration of the festival, and Beale is to be commended for his... (shrink)

Rachel Cohon offers an original interpretation of the moral philosophy of David Hume, focusing on two areas.

This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contemporary debate primarily carried out in epistemology and philosophy of language. Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, “4 p.m.” I’ve just asserted that the meeting starts at 4 p.m. Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. The central question here is whether we need to know what we say, and, relatedly, whether what we (...) assert must be true. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms. And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted. -/- Various philosophers have typically focused their views of the norms of assertion on articulating the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm. Here’s what it looks like: -/- One may assert that p only if: One has supportive reasons for p, The relevant conventional and pragmatic elements of the context are present, and One asserts that p at least in part because the assertion that p satisfies and. -/- In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate. This also means that truth, knowledge, and even belief aren’t necessary conditions for warrantedly asserting. (shrink)

Identity Economics provides an important and compelling new way to understand human behavior, revealing how our identities--and not just economic incentives--influence our decisions. In 1995, economist Rachel Kranton wrote future Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof a letter insisting that his most recent paper was wrong. Identity, she argued, was the missing element that would help to explain why people--facing the same economic circumstances--would make different choices. This was the beginning of a fourteen-year collaboration--and of Identity Economics. The authors explain how (...) our conception of who we are and who we want to be may shape our economic lives more than any other factor, affecting how hard we work, and how we learn, spend, and save. Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions--at work, at school, and at home. With it, we can better appreciate why incentives like stock options work or don't; why some schools succeed and others don't; why some cities and towns don't invest in their futures--and much, much more. Identity Economics bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People's notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people's identity--their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be--may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives. And the limits placed by society on people's identity can also be crucial determinants of their economic well-being. (shrink)

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to the speaker's pragmatic competence. In a series of eye‐tracking experiments, we explore the nature of the evidence necessary for the modulation of pragmatic inferences in (...) language comprehension, focusing on the complementary roles of top–down information ‐ (knowledge about the particular speaker's pragmatic competence) and bottom‐up cues (distributional information about the use of scalar adjectives in the environment). We find that bottom‐up evidence alone (e.g., the speaker says “the big dog” in a context with one dog), in large quantities, can be sufficient to trigger modulation of the listener's contrastive inferences, with or without top‐down cues to support this adaptation. Further, these findings suggest that listeners track and flexibly combine multiple sources of information in service of efficient pragmatic communication. (shrink)

Much recent philosophical work argues that power constrains speech—pornography silences women, testimonial injustice thwarts a speaker’s transmission of knowledge, bias distorts the performative force of subordinated speech. Though the constraints that power places on speech are serious, power also enables some speech. Power doesn’t just keep us from speaking—it also makes us speak. In this paper I explore how power produces, rather than constrains, speech. I discuss a kind of speech I call extracted speech: speech that is unjustly elicited from (...) an agent. I discuss examples of coerced confession, intimidated “consent,” and mandatory self-disclosure as instances of extracted speech, and theorize a bit about what significance this speech has more generally for philosophy of language and political philosophy. (shrink)

This study offers a ckomprehensive new interpretation of one of Plato's dialogues, the _Cratylus_. Throughout, the book combines analysis of Plato's arguments with attentiveness to his philosophical method.

In this study, we examine investor and firm response to the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010. The CTSCA requires large retail and manufacturing firms to disclose efforts to eradicate slavery and human trafficking from their supply chains and is a rare example of mandated corporate social responsibility disclosure. Based on a sample of 105 retail companies subject to the CTSCA, we find a significant negative market reaction to the passing of the CTSCA. Furthermore, we find that the (...) reaction is significantly more negative for larger firms and companies facing greater supply chain risks, suggesting that investors place a negative value on exposure to legitimacy threats in the social domain. With respect to company disclosure response, we document relatively high compliance with the legislation, although we also find that the disclosure response appeared to be more symbolic than substantive in nature. Finally, our analysis indicates that both disclosure choice and disclosure extensiveness were significantly higher for the high-supply chain risk companies, suggesting that the response was influenced by concerns with strategic legitimation. Overall, the limited quality of disclosure suggests that, without additional rules and guidance, mandates alone may not lead to meaningful social disclosure. (shrink)

Plato's account of the tripartite soul is a memorable feature of dialogues like the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus: it is one of his most famous and influential yet least understood theories. It presents human nature as both essentially multiple and diverse - and yet somehow also one - divided into a fully human 'rational' part, a lion-like 'spirited part' and an 'appetitive' part likened to a many-headed beast. How these parts interact, how exactly each shapes our agency and how they (...) are affected by phenomena like erôs and education is complicated and controversial. The essays in this book investigate how the theory evolves over the whole of Plato's work, including the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus, and how it was developed further by important Platonists such as Galen, Plutarch and Plotinus. They will be of interest to a wide audience in philosophy and classics. (shrink)

Kant is often considered a key figure in a modern transition from social and political systems based on honour to those based on dignity, where “honour” is understood as a hierarchical measure of social value, and “dignity” is understood as the inherent and equal worth of every individual. The essay provides a richer account of Kant’s contribution to the “politics of equal dignity” by examining his understanding of dignity and honour, and the interaction between these concepts. The essay argues that (...) Kant appeals to multiple varieties of dignity and honour, that he does not reject honour in favour of dignity, and that he sees some versions of honour as conducive to respect for dignity. Furthermore, the complexity of Kant’s views on dignity and honour has implications for the theory and practice of human rights in the current day. (shrink)

What consciousness exactly is remains an unsettled issue among both philosophers and biologists. Three aspects of consciousness are generally recognized: awareness consciousness (through connection...

This book derives from Annas’s 1997 Townsend Lectures at Cornell University, and it retains the invigorating clarity and fast pace of a first-rate lecture series. In it Annas discusses assorted topics in Plato’s ethics and their ancient interpretation: her unifying theme is that we have much to learn from ancient readings of Plato, and those of the Middle Platonists in particular.

Smith's university studies at Glasgow are described: in Greek, introducing him to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus; Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, including Locke's empiricism; and Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics, which had seminal lessons for him in methodology. Above all, the inspiration of the teaching of Francis Hutcheson is assessed, who seized Smith's imagination with his teaching of ethics and economics as part of his jurisprudence course. Hutcheson's development of moral sense and benevolence theory is highlighted, as providing a kind of (...) moral Newtonianism, offering answers in ‘new light’ or liberal theology to the ‘old light’ Calvinist stress on human depravity, and in moral philosophy to the egoistic theory of Hobbes and Mandeville. Clearly, Smith received great intellectual stimulation at Glasgow, and his ability was recognized with the award of a scholarship to Oxford in 1740. (shrink)

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations.The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a “context space.” Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially, a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces.As (...) a conversation proceeds, each conversant builds a discourse model that includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. Conversational coherency depends upon a lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by speakers following high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify their discourse models. These rules, given in the study, are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here—a hierarchy of related context spaces. (shrink)

Amidst the climate of crisis surrounding the rise in opioid-related overdose in the USA, early in 2019, Google and Deloitte launched ‘Opioid360’. Here came a platform combining browser histories, credit, insurance, social media, and traditional survey data to sell the service of risk calculation in population health. Opioid360's approach to automating risk calculation not only promised to identify persons ‘at risk’ of opioid dependence, but also paved the way for broader applications anticipating common chronic diseases and coordinating logistical operations involved (...) in pandemic response. Beginning with this experimental platform, this paper develops an analysis of the Big Data mode of risk calculation - an epistemological and political shift that involves technology companies, investors, insurers, governments, and public health institutions. The analysis focuses on the re-emergence of ‘social determinants of health’ in the rhetoric accompanying novel analytic platforms that estimate, calculate, and compute individual health risks. While the treatment of SDOH has always been a site of political contestation within the discipline of public health, powerful interests are crystallising around the concept and instrumentalising it in platforms that sell algorithmic prediction. Silicon Valley's breed of asset-oriented technoscience appears not only to be amplifying the behaviouralist elements of public health. Among the stakes of the Big Data mode is the paradoxical retreat from changing social conditions that contribute to the prevalence of health and illness in populations; and instead, the promotion of an apparatus for pricing and exchanging individual risk or excluding from services those who bear risk most acutely. (shrink)

This book considers the arguments for and against the implementation of in vitro meat technology. Rachel Robison-Greene argues that in light of emerging technology, we should rethink the ethical dimensions of what makes something “edible.”.

This article describes a new prenatal genetic test that is painless, early, and increasingly available. State legislatures have reacted by prohibiting abortion for reason of fetal sex or of fetal diagnosis and managing genetic counseling. This article explores these legislative responses and considers how physicians and genetic counselors currently communicate post-testing options. The article then examines the challenges ahead for genetic counseling, particularly in light of the troubling grip of abortion politics on conversations about prenatal diagnosis.

This paper explores ways in which experiential learning theories, in particular transformative learning theory, can inform farmer participatory research and extension (PR&E). I identify and discuss three key elements of experiential learning theory – second-order experiences, reflection, and dialogue – that are particularly pertinent to PR&E practice. I then turn to one experiential learning theorist – Mezirow, and examine his theory of transformative learning to assess how it may inform the PR&E process. I outline the basic components and stages of (...) transformative learning and summarize the main criticisms of the theory. Following this, parallels are drawn between transformative learning and what actually takes place in PR&E, and examples are given of the ways in which scientists and rural people may undergo transformative learning through the PR&E process. Ways in which transformative learning can be encouraged within the PR&E context are discussed. I conclude that Mezirow’s work can provide PR&E practitioners and theorists with additional insights into how adults learn and especially how they – researchers, extensionists and rural people – can transform their ways of thinking to accommodate a shift from conventional research and extension to PR&E. (shrink)

This article examines how federal law enforcement has responded to the opioid epidemic nationally and in a variety of locales. We focus in depth on two initiatives, including prosecution in opioid-death cases, undertaken by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Connecticut.

Serial issues closely marry the major anthropological questions that a society asks itself… or is about to ask itself; here unfolds “the infinite possibility of possibilities”, and we will see that the theme of the extended human gradually increases in power, often from the angle of a transhumanism gone mad. Anchoring the theme of technological increase in the sexual imagination makes it possible to immediately focus on the intimate fantasy of each reader/viewer; this “situated” motif also singles out the subject, (...) who is nevertheless doomed to the stereotypy of the gender product, post-fordist but necessarily subject to identifiable patterns. The dissensus between the obscure desirability of the process and the horror of the underlying ideologies will therefore form the framework of this statement; the dystopian colouring in fact affects the essence of the device, but without the absence of a form of shameful fascination for this technological, or even epistemocratic, « immortality » that science seems to promise—to the wealthiest in any case. (shrink)

We argue that dominant white cultural views and public health co-produce race as a technology that charts the path of viral transmission away from the white bodies to form a trajectory for an otherwise aimless disease. This epistemological project is one enmeshed in popular culture, medical practice, and biopolitics. COVID-19 and the related Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement work together to make visible the narrative technologies. This project contributes to understanding race and public health as co-constituted in ways that shape (...) imaginative possibilities, material and agential realties, and health outcomes in light of COVID-19. Our argument is novel in naming race a technology of American public health and taking up Coeckelbergh and Reijers’ call for a normative theory of narrative technology. We extend Coeckelbergh and Reijers’ narrative technologies to include race, a narrative artifact, co-produced by biology, public health, and individual actors. (shrink)

This study identified a range of pedagogies developed to promote global citizenship within a university Latin American dance unit. It implemented changes to teaching and learning approaches in the...

This essay considers how an “intimacy contract,” as a conceptual tool and a political reality, extends existing critiques of the social contract tradition by accounting for the privatized nature of the post-9/11 US empire. Examining critiques by Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, I argue that an intimacy contract uncovers the coercive power relations underlying neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurial freedom. Focusing on migrant labor on US military bases, I provide an overview of the racial, sexual, and settler contracts and the need (...) to extend Mills’s and Pateman’s critiques of embodiment and spatiality. Next, I suggest how the intimacy contract generates a transnational, embodied account of the labors upholding US empire; a lens into the shifting significance of these labors under neoliberal imperialism; and a chronicling of desire and workers’ interests. In conclusion, I suggest how the intimacy contract exposes multiple resistances to US empire and neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

Debates continue to surround the system in the United States for allocating transplantable cadaveric organs, due in large part to the scarcity of such organs in relation to the number of individuals waiting to undergo transplantation. Candidates awaiting transplantation gain access to cadaveric organs by being placed by individual transplant programs on the national list of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, overseen by the United Network for Organ Sharing. In recent years, the UNOS board has visited the issue of (...) multiple listing, that is, allowing one candidate to be registered on the waiting lists of two or more transplant programs, and has continued to permit multiple listing. (shrink)

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, "Foreigner Question" and "Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality," derive from a series of seminars on "hospitality" conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his thought in a remarkable combination of thoroughly mapped-out positions, sketches of new material, and exchanges with students and interlocutors. As has become a pattern in Derrida's recent (...) work, the form of this presentation is a self-conscious enactment of its content. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. "Invitation" by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left, clarifying and inflecting Derrida's "response" on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the "hospitality" under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching. The volume also characteristically combines careful readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using "hospitality" as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. "Hospitality" is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; _Oedipus at Colonus_ is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of François Mitterrand. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Pacific Islander population is the second fasting growing population in the United States and Arkansas is home to the largest Marshallese population in the continental US. The Marshal...

Individual differences and polysemy have rich literatures in cognitive linguistics, but little is said about the prospect of individual differences in polysemy. This article reports an investigation that sought to establish whether people vary in the senses of a polysemous word that they find meaningful, and to develop a novel methodology to study polysemy. The methodology combined established tools: sentence-sorting tasks, a rarely used statistical model of inter-participant agreement, and network visualisation. Two hundred and five English-speaking participants completed one of (...) twelve sentence-sorting tasks on two occasions, separated by a delay of two months. Participants varied in how similarly they sorted the sentences as compared to other participants, and mean agreement across all 24 tasks did not meet an established threshold of acceptable agreement. Between the two test phases, inter-participant agreement varied to a significant but trivial degree. Networks generated for each dataset varied in the degree to which they captured all participants’ responses. This variation correlated with inter-participant agreement. The data collectively suggest that word senses may be subject to individual differences, as is the case in other linguistic phenomena. The methodology proved replicable and has a promise as a useful tool for studying polysemy. (shrink)

If your philosophical edifice rests on the idea of the Good, and you believe that wisdom consists in knowing and doing the Good, then it is incumbent upon you at some point to explain what it means to know the Good. In order to do that, you probably need to explain what it means to know anything at all. You need to answer the question, "what is knowledge?". Plato asks that question in the Theaetetus. If answering it requires giving a (...) definition of knowledge in general, he fails to give an answer. Worse, the dialogue suggests that it is impossible to define knowledge. The result is a failure not only for epistemology, but for any politics or ethics based on knowledge of the Forms. The pursuit of wisdom falls by the wayside, unmasked as quixotry. ;I argue that there are several long and important passages in the Theaetetus which are centrally concerned with the question of how the pursuit of wisdom can be rescued from the failure of epistemology. To that end, I focus on the definition of knowledge as perception, and argue that Plato means its failure to reveal problems which will plague any attempt to define knowledge. I then analyse two passages which make wisdom their central concern, namely the "Apology of Protagoras" and the "Digression" . Finally, I suggest that Plato provides a model for understanding the rationally inaccessible nature of knowledge and its relation to wisdom. The model is given in Theaetetus' definition of irrational square roots, which is offered at the outset of the discussion as a paradigm for defining knowledge. Theaetetus defines irrational roots in terms of their productive powers; this provides a model for wisdom, insofar as wisdom is a kind of knowledge which produces practical activity, i.e., insofar as to know the Good is to do the Good. If the knowledge contained in wisdom cannot be defined in itself, it can be defined through its productive power. (shrink)