In this paper, we introduce an ecological account of communication according to which acts of communication are active inferences achieved by affecting the behavior of a target organism via the modification of its field of affordances. Constraining a target organism’s behavior constitutes a mechanism of socially extended active inference, allowing organisms to proactively regulate their inner states through the behavior of other organisms. In this general conception of communication, the type of cooperative communication characteristic of human communicative interaction is a (...) way of constraining interaction dynamics toward the goals of a given joint action by constructing and altering shared fields of affordances. This account embraces a pragmatist view according to which communication is a form of action aiming to influence the behavior of a target, and stands against the traditional transmission view according to which communication fundamentally serves to convey information. Understanding acts of communication as active inference under an ecological interpretation allows us to link communicative and ultimately linguistic behavior to the biological imperative of minimizing free energy and to emphasize the action-oriented nature of communicative interaction. (shrink)

Ensuring fairness is a capital issue in any sporting competition. However, fairness is a complex concept. We seek here to offer an analysis of the construction and upholding of fairness within comp...

Publication date: 16 April 2018 Source: Author: Remi Chukwudi Okeke, Desmond Okechukwu Nnamani This study interrogates the notion of an envisaged age of wisdom whereby, the current information / knowledge worker era will be succeeded by a new order, in which information and knowledge will be impregnated with purpose and principles. The study thus examines the issue of worker commitment and organizational citizenship behaviour in the assumed age of wisdom. The analytical framework of the study is the rational choice theory. (...) Precedent to the envisioned age of wisdom is the condition of putting service before self. We argued in the study that the age of wisdom-position contextually discountenances with a fundamentally contentious issue in human affairs, which has to do with whether the individual in the society is an inherently self-interested or an innately altruistic being. In the study’s re-imaginations, worker commitment and organizational citizenship behaviours will continue to be influenced by the intrinsic tendencies, in the regards of subjective rationality. In contrast to the assumed precedent-condition of putting service before self in the imminent age of wisdom, this study sees general continuity in subjective rationalities but with massive increases in universal productivity, arising from enduring human inventiveness and sundry efforts. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the enduring relevance of Heinrich Wölfflin’s approach to style, in light of the renewed interest in it among “postformalist” art historians. By delving into the theoretical foundations of the Principles of Art History, I explore Wölfflin’s Goethean interpretation of Kantian epistemology, revealing a conception of style characterized by its dynamic and symbolic “inner form” rather than mere static formalism. This analysis not only highlights affinities with Max Weber’s thought but also uncovers a previously overlooked connection (...) to Wilhelm von Humboldt, offering valuable insights for current discussions on style. (shrink)

The philosophy of “ human dignity” remains a young, piecemeal endeavor with only a small, dedicated literature. And what dedicated literature exists makes for a rather slapdash mix of substantive and formal metatheory. Worse, ironically we seem compelled to treat this existing theory both charitably and casually. For how can we definitively assess any of it? Existing suggestions about the general features of dignity are necessarily contentious in virtue of being more or less blissfully uncritical of themselves. Because none of (...) the suggested features are conscientiously situated in their own right, their justification is taken to rest solely on whether each is borne out by some substantive account. But absent the sort of second-order considerations that would make for a proper metatheory, what can we do with their substantive suggestions? Of course, the concept of dignity has other forums. It figures prominently into insular analyses of either Kantian or Biblical ethics, and, to various degrees, an array of subsidiary fields of practical philosophy including human rights, bioethics, law, theories of respect, race theory, Judaic studies, feminism, care ethics, war, technology, and political philosophy. Each of these areas has an established literature. Each contributes interesting observations to the nature of dignity. But, again, ultimately, without a proper metatheory, it is unclear what to do with any of them. My goal is to remedy this, or at least reverse the trend. In doing so I will have in view one particular subfield, namely, the ever-pressing subject of human rights. (shrink)

This paper examines the question of why consumers engage in ethical consumption. The authors draw on self-affirmation theory to propose that the choice of an ethical product serves a self-restorative function. Four experiments provide support for this assertion: a self-threat increases consumers’ choice of an ethical option, even when the alternative choice is objectively superior in quantity (Study 1) and product quality (Study 2). Further, restoring self-esteem through positive feedback eliminates this increase in ethical choice (Studies 2 and 3). As (...) an additional test of the robustness of our results, a final study examined the effect of self-threat on choice in a field setting (Study 4). The findings indicate that ethical purchases are not just altruistic. They hold purposeful individual value and can help in the self-restorative process. Implications for managers making decisions regarding investment in ethical product features are discussed. (shrink)

Unlike the majority of philosophers, Hannah Arendt was not inclined to look down on common sense. She became convinced of common sense’s invaluable significance for our common world, especially when she came to understand that totalitarianism consists of its undermining. No matter how important the role of the concept in her thought, however, its meaning remains ambiguous insofar as it refers to two related, yet different ‘faculties’, common sense as a cognitive faculty on the one hand and common sense as (...) a faculty of judgment on the other. The aim of this two-part paper is to clarify this complicated relation.The first part sketches the development of the concept and demonstrates how the polemic created by Eichmann in Jerusalem sharpened Arendt’s understanding of the difference between truth and opinion, knowing and judging. Subsequently, it focuses on Arendt’s analysis of common sense as a cognitive faculty, i.e. as a ‘sixth sense’ that enables us to grasp the common and worldly context of our experiences and therefore also enables us to tell truth from falsehood. It is not thinking, with its search for meaning, but our common sense that warrants the revelation of truth and with it the possibility of knowledge . Because truth compels the mind and precludes debate, Arendt distinguishes it sharply from opinion, which is never self-evident.Nevertheless, this distinction does not end, as in Plato, in the hierarchical subordination of opinion to truth . At the same time, Arendt was aware of the powerlessness and vulnerability of truth in the public forum, in spite of its compelling character. This paradox calls for a discussion of Arendt’s view on the possibilities and limitations of modern mass-manipulation. (shrink)

Source: Author: Remi Chukwudi Okeke, Sylvia Uchenna Agu Local governments in many parts of Africa are yet to be fully accepted as important levels of government. This gives rise to the contradictory scenario whereby such political actors at the central and sub-central levels remain the apostles of centralization on one hand and exponents of democracy as a model of national government on the other hand. Nigeria is the most populous African country. And this marginalization of the local government in the (...) democratic process is prevalent in Nigeria. Invariably, the pervasive effect of this condition, as it negatively affects the availability of dividends of democracy to the African citizen, is worrisome. In the meantime, the continent of Europe is perceived in the study as having possibly taken local government understanding to a model level of local self-governance, through its European Charter of Local Self-Government. Europe is thus, seen in this study as a region in the lead in situating the local government paradigm, within its proper democratic context. The theoretical framework of deliberative democracy is adopted in the study to engage African states to embrace local self-governance as a critical component of democratization. ]]>. (shrink)

Publication date: 21 March 2019 Source: Author: Remi Chukwudi Okeke The impact of music on politics in Africa has seemingly remained dominant. But the overall sway of the African political processes has also become bewildering. The panacea to the disconcerting results of these political procedures in Africa is the adequate levels of social mobilization, while music ostensibly mobilizes massively. This chapter thus examines the linkages among politics, music and social mobilization in Nigeria. Framed on the hypothesis that the relationship among (...) politics, music and social mobilization in Nigeria is now downbeat and using the elite theoretical and the political economy frameworks of analyses, the authors study the intervening factors responsible for the observed gloom in what had amounted to progressive relationships among politics, music and social mobilization in Nigeria and the wider continent. The research setting is qualitative. The chapter delves into its premises through the historical and descriptive research methodologies and logical argumentation. (shrink)

solvers are a quite recent method to uniformly describe algorithms in a rigorous formal way via graphs. Compared to traditional methods like pseudo-code descriptions, abstract solvers have...

Samuel Cottereau Du Clos (1598–1685) paraît être le premier Français à marier dans une chimie, pour lui science des substances, physique des qualités, une démonstration légale – suivant les lois du mouvement – et une démonstration causale – suivant les interprétations principielles –, en ramenant les phénomènes naturels à deux ordres de raisons différents et complémentaires. Les considérations mécanistes représentent pour lui une première approche, une étape vers la connaissance de la « vérité des choses » en chimie. Cette proposition (...) originale qui vise à introduire en chimie des considérations mécanistes tout en conservant les explications principielles est développée au sein de l’ancienne Académie des Sciences, en particulier à travers sa critique de 1668/1669 des Certain Physiological Essays de Boyle. (shrink)

Les Actes apocryphes des apôtres sont souvent considérés comme des avatars des Actes des apôtres canoniques. En guise de preuve, on invoque généralement le fait que ces récits apocryphes narrent la destinée d'apôtres, qu'ils font voyager leurs héros, qu'ils contiennent des passages en " nous " et qu'ils s'intitulent " Actes ". Ces arguments sont particulièrement problématiques pour les six Actes anciens . The apocryphal Acts of the Apostles are often considered as avatars of the canonical Acts. By way of (...) proof, one generally refers to the fact that the apocryphal stories relate the fate of the apostles, deal with the journeys of their hero's, have passages with " we ", and are entitled " Acts ". These arguments are particularly problematic as far as the six ancient Acts are concerned. (shrink)

L’article analyse les agendas d’élus en France (élus locaux, maires, parlementaires) et leur rapport aux temps. L’agenda plonge l’élu dans les dilemmes de l’emploi du temps, qui est à la fois un ensemble de ressources (le capital temps est un capital politique) et un ensemble de contraintes (le temps est compté et défini par des contraintes exogènes)… On met l’accent sur deux points saillants. D’abord la fabrique de l’agenda n’est pas une entreprise individuelle, mais un travail politique collectif dans lequel (...) les entourages et équipes jouent un rôle essentiel. Ensuite cette fabrication suppose un ensemble d’arbitrages liés aux contraintes de rôles, les ressources et la position des élus que les agendas doivent concilier. On s’attache à l’agenda contenant puis à l’agenda contenu. Les élus cherchent à rationaliser leur temps mais ce travail se heurte à de nombreuses limites. (shrink)

In everything from philosophical ethics to legal argument to public activism, it has become commonplace to appeal to the idea of human dignity. In such contexts, the concept of dignity typically signifies something like the fundamental moral status belonging to all humans. Remarkably, however, it is only in the last century that this meaning of the term has become standardized. Before this, dignity was instead a concept associated with social status. Unfortunately, this transformation remains something of a mystery in existing (...) scholarship. Exactly when and why did "dignity" change its meaning? And before this change, was it truly the case that we lacked a conception of human worth akin to the one that "dignity" now represents? In this volume, leading scholars across a range of disciplines attempt to answer such questions by clarifying the presently murky history of "dignity," from classical Greek thought through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment to the present day. (shrink)

Considering the urgency of addressing grand challenges that affect human health and achieving the ambitious health targets set by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, the role of business in improving health has become critical. Yet, our systematic review of the business–health literature reveals that business research focuses primarily on occupational health and safety, health care organizations, and health regulations. To embrace the health externalities generated by business activities, we propose that future research should investigate the conditions under which business (...) articulates and participates in health challenges, engages in multilevel actions toward tackling health challenges, and improves health outcomes and its impact on the health of external stakeholders, including customers and local communities. We also urge business scholars to engage with the public health research community to increase impact. (shrink)

The recent discovery of so-called “mirror-neurons” in monkeys and a corresponding mirroring “system” in humans has provoked wide endorsement of the claim that humans understand a variety of observed actions, somatic sensations, and emotions via a kind of direct representation of those actions, sensations, and emotions. Philosophical efforts to assess the import of such “mirrored understanding” have typically focused on how that understanding might be brought to bear on theories of mindreading, and usually in cases of action. By contrast, this (...) paper assesses mirrored understanding in cases of emotion and its import for theories of empathy and especially empathy in ethical contexts. In particular, this paper argues that the mirrored understanding claim is ambiguous and ultimately misleading when applied to emotion, partly because mirroring proponents fail to appreciate the way in which empathy might serve a distinct normative function in our judgments of what other people feel. The paper thus concludes with a call to revise the mirrored understanding claim, whether in neuroscience, psychology, or philosophy. (shrink)

This essay centralizes and explores Ernst Cassirer’s concept of style. Although it does not emerge as much as the concept of form or symbol in Cassirer’s corpus, style plays a major—if intrinsic—role throughout the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. I shall examine how Cassirer’s conception of style is derived from Goethe’s theory of art and why it is fundamental to Cassirer’s theory of knowledge. Style is considered the defining feature of the cultural sciences, as well as the sign of the anthropological (...) character of the natural sciences, and, more generally, as the creative principle underlying all objectivity. I argue that it is therefore justified to read style as the fundamental yet variable expression of our symbolic relation to reality. Indeed, style refers neither to an abstract principle nor to a predetermined truth: it is a formative force actualizing itself in the incessant diversification of its forms. In so doing, Cassirer’s underexamined concept of style proves highly relevant in our times of epistemic and cultural pluralism. (shrink)

Rémi Tison Dans cet article, je traite de la nature des processus cognitifs sous-tendant nos attributions d’états mentaux aux animaux non humains. Selon la conception traditionnelle, nous n’avons qu’un accès indirect aux états mentaux d’autrui, qui doivent être inférés sur la base du comportement. Cette conception traditionnelle influence autant les débats conceptuels concernant l’esprit des animaux que les recherches empiriques sur la cognition animale. Or de récents travaux sur la cognition sociale humaine avancent plutôt une conception « interactionniste », (...) selon laquelle les états mentaux peuvent parfois être directement perçus dans le comportement. J’applique dans cet article la conception interactionniste à l’attribution d’états mentaux aux animaux. Je conclus que celle-ci rend mieux compte des attitudes du sens commun à l’égard des états mentaux des animaux et est plus féconde pour la recherche empirique sur la cognition animale que la conception traditionnelle. (shrink)

Imagine that in entering a café, you are struck by the absence of Pierre, with whom you have an appointment. Or imagine that you realize that your keys are missing because they are not hanging from the usual ring-holder. What is the nature of these absence experiences? In this article, we discuss a recent view defended by Farennikova (2012) according to which we literally perceive absences of things in much the same way as we perceive present things. We criticize and (...) reject the perceptual interpretation of absence experiences but we also reject the cognitive view which reduces them to beliefs. We propose an intermediary, metacognitive account according to which absence experiences belong to a specific kind of affective experience, involving the feeling of surprise. (shrink)

We present and contrast two accounts of cooperative communication, both based on Active Inference, a framework that unifies biological and cognitive processes. The mental alignment account, defended in Vasil et al., takes the function of cooperative communication to be the alignment of the interlocutor's mental states, and cooperative communicative behavior to be driven by an evolutionarily selected adaptive prior belief favoring the selection of action policies that promote such an alignment. We argue that the mental alignment account should be rejected (...) because it neglects the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication, which skews its view of the dynamics of communicative interaction. We introduce our own conception of cooperative communication, inspired by a more radical ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. Cooperative communication, on our ecological conception, serves to guide and constrain the dynamics of the cooperative interaction via the construction and restructuring of shared fields of affordances, in order to reach the local goals of the joint actions in which episodes of cooperative communication are embedded. We argue that our ecological conception provides a better theoretical standpoint to account for the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication in the active inference framework. (shrink)

The philosophy of emotion has long been divided over the cognitive nature of emotion. In this paper I argue that this debate suffers from deep confusion over the meaning of “cognition” itself. This confusion has in turn obscured critical substantive agreement between the debate’s principal opponents. Capturing this agreement and remedying this confusion requires re-conceptualizing “the cognitive” as it functions in first-order theories of emotion. Correspondingly, a sketch for a new account of cognitivity is offered. However, I also argue that (...) this new account, despite tacit acceptance by all major theories of emotion, in fact rules out some of the most fundamental and controversial claims of one side of the nature-of-emotion debate, emotional cognitivism. (shrink)

Consumer-based datasets are the products of data brokerage firms that agglomerate millions of personal records on the adult US population. This big data commodity is purchased by both companies and individual clients for purposes such as marketing, risk prevention, and identity searches. The sheer magnitude and population coverage of available consumer-based datasets and the opacity of the business practices that create these datasets pose emergent ethical challenges within the computational social sciences that have begun to incorporate consumer-based datasets into empirical (...) research. To directly engage with the core ethical debates around the use of consumer-based datasets within social science research, I first consider two case study applications of consumer-based dataset-based scholarship. I then focus on three primary ethical dilemmas within consumer-based datasets regarding human subject research, participant privacy, and informed consent in conversation with the principles of the seminal Belmont Report. (shrink)

I will assume that the plot of the Hayy ibn Yaqzan is already known: Ibn Tufayl supposes that his hero, a philosophical Robinson Crusoe, grew up alone on a desert island, which protected him from any possible corruption, but deprived him at the same time of the benefits of education. Without external help, and thanks to the force of his unaided raison, Hayy reaches the highest peaks of metaphysical insight. He first acquires a perfect knowledge of the physical world. He (...) then deduces from its structure that it was created, in time or together with time, by a Being whom or which he calls, in the wake of Avicenna, the “necessary Being” and that I will call, for the sake of brevity, by the name of God. Hayy discovers that he is called to imitate God, nay to assimilate himself to Him. Now, the last stage but one in Hayy’s progress implies an imitation of the heavenly bodies. (shrink)

To formalize the human judgment of rhythm complexity, we used five measures from information theory and algorithmic complexity to measure the complexity of 48 artificially generated rhythmic sequences. We compared these measurements to human prediction accuracy and easiness judgments obtained from a listening experiment, in which 32 participants guessed the last beat of each sequence. We also investigated the modulating effects of musical expertise and general pattern identification ability. Entropy rate and Kolmogorov complexity were correlated with prediction accuracy, and highly (...) correlated with easiness judgments. A logistic regression showed main effects of musical training, entropy rate, and Kolmogorov complexity, and an interaction between musical training and both entropy rate and Kolmogorov complexity. These results indicate that information-theoretic concepts capture some salient features of the human judgment of rhythm complexity, and they confirm the influence of musical expertise on complexity judgments. (shrink)