The paper focuses on studying public attitudes toward science in Bulgaria and the role of political discourse in shaping public expectations and perceptions. The study's methodology includes an analysis of theoretical concepts and their empirical verification with data from a quantitative Eurobarometer survey (Special Eurobarometer 516) and a discourse analysis of the representation of the scientific sphere in the public debate. The Bulgarian social reality clearly shows a blurring of the role, nature, and participation of science in societal development, the (...) imposition of populist societal expectations towards it, as well as political statements that abuse the reputation of the scientific sphere and its representatives. (shrink)

Thick concepts, namely those concepts that describe and evaluate simultaneously, present a challenge to science. Since science does not have a monopoly on value judgments, what is responsible research involving such concepts? Using measurement of wellbeing as an example, we first present the options open to researchers wishing to study phenomena denoted by such concepts. We argue that while it is possible to treat these concepts as technical terms, or to make the relevant value judgment in-house, the responsible thing to (...) do, especially in the context of public policy, is to make this value judgment through a legitimate political process that includes all the stakeholders of this research. We then develop a participatory model of measurement based on the ideal of co-production. To show that this model is feasible and realistic, we illustrate it with a case study of co-production of a concept of thriving conducted by the authors in collaboration with a UK anti-poverty charity Turn2us. (shrink)

What sort of claims do scientific models make and how do these claims then underwrite empirical successes such as explanations and reliable policy interventions? In this paper I propose answers to these questions for the class of models used throughout the social and biological sciences, namely idealized deductive ones with a causal interpretation. I argue that the two main existing accounts misrepresent how these models are actually used, and propose a new account. *Received July 2006; revised August 2008. †To contact (...) the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri, St. Louis, 599 Lucas Hall (MC 73), One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63121-4400; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Do the new sciences of well-being provide knowledge that respects the nature of well-being? This book written from the perspective of philosophy of science articulates how this field can speak to well-being proper and can do so in a way that respects the demands of objectivity and measurement.

Anna Alexandrova on value judgements and the measurement of well-being.

The 1994 US spectrum auction is now a paradigmatic case of the successful use of microeconomic theory for policy-making. We use a detailed analysis of it to review standard accounts in philosophy of science of how idealized models are connected to messy reality. We show that in order to understand what made the design of the spectrum auction successful, a new such account is required, and we present it here. Of especial interest is the light this sheds on the issue (...) of progress in economics. In particular, it enables us to get clear on exactly what has been progressing, and on exactly what theory has – and has not – contributed to that. This in turn has important implications for just what it is about economic theory that we should value. (shrink)

Well–being, health and freedom are some of the many phenomena of interest to science whose definitions rely on a normative standard. Empirical generalizations about them thus present a special case of value-ladenness. I propose the notion of a ‘mixed claim’ to denote such generalizations. Against the prevailing wisdom, I argue that we should not seek to eliminate them from science. Rather, we need to develop principles for their legitimate use. Philosophers of science have already reconciled values with objectivity in several (...) ways, but none of the existing proposals are suitable for mixed claims. Using the example of the science of well-being, I articulate a conception of objectivity for this science and for mixed claims in general. _1_ Introduction _2_ What Are Mixed Claims? _3_ Mixed Claims Are Different _3.1_ Values as reasons to pursue science _3.2_ Values as agenda-setters _3.3_ Values as ethical constraints on research protocols _3.4_ Values as arbiters between underdetermined theories _3.5_ Values as determinants of standards of confirmation _3.6_ Values as sources of wishful thinking and fraud _4_ Mixed Claims Should Stay _4.1_ Against Nagel _5_ The Dangers of Mixed Claims _6_ The Existing Accounts of Objectivity _6.1_ The perils of impartiality _7_ Objectivity for Mixed Claims _8_ Three Rules _8.1_ Unearth the value presuppositions in methods and measures _8.2_ Check if value presuppositions are invariant to disagreements _8.3_ Consult the relevant parties _9_ Conclusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 23-34 [Access article in PDF] Mind Ahead of the Tone:Integration of Technique and Imagination in Vocal Training at Tanglewood Summer Institute Svetlana Nikitina The use of the body and the mind at the same time is one of the most fascinating things and magic things about music. 1The purpose, indeed the sole purpose, of training for the profession of singing is (...) to improve the connection between the imagination and the sounds that eventually issue from the singer's mouth. 2The utmost goal of art is achieving unity between form and content, the subjective idea and the medium, technique and imagination. Success and livelihood of dancers, actors, and musicians depends on their ability to translate mental ideas into bodily actions and, at its height, merge technical bodily and mental wisdom so seamlessly that we would forget the path that led to it.What is this path? How do individual singers mesh, melt, and marry the technical rigor coming from years of musical training and their ability to imagine and express themselves with those tools? How is the unity betweentechnique and imagination achieved and experienced? And, what is the pedagogy that could support the connection? These are the core questions that guided the study.The goal here is not to propose a conclusive theory of connection, biological or psychological. My hope is to open the curtain for discussion of what is generally considered an "undiscussable" topic in art and music education books because it deals with what is thought of as implicit knowledge that no one could or should teach. Through my observation of Phyllis Curtin's classroom and conversations with her students, some general thoughts and principles of building unity between the technical and artistic selves of a singer emerged. I would like to share those insights and strategies.While this essay does not offer simplistic how-to strategies of fostering creative synergy, it also does not suggest that the connection just happens, [End Page 23] regardless of whether we think or teach about it. What it aspires to do is create a space for thinking about the complexity of integrative experienceand ways in which bridge-building could be facilitated. As such, it could offer insights to both beginning vocalists and voice teachers, as well as be of interest to a broader range of educators and public concerned with core issues on the integrative nature of arts education. Method To serve the goal of presenting complex experiences of creative artists, Ichose to combine analytical and descriptive elements in my research method. Building an analytical argument about the ways integration between imagination and technique could be achieved and supported, I tried to stay close to student stories of connection and disconnection, employing a qualitative rather than a quantitative method of inquiry. This takes the form of large amounts of direct interview data and personal vignettes, from which I traced general patterns of meaning. Research Context A very brief and in no way exhaustive survey of literature on voice education points to a large volume of text spent on training vocal technique. Breath control, charts depicting the larynx and the thyro-arytenoid muscle at work far outnumber chapters on interpretation or "The Work of Imagination" in musical education literature. 3There are precious few books, however, that do not keep the technical and the mental concerns separate, and give the work of imagination an explicit and central role in training of performing artists. Two of those books, Thomas Hemsley's Singing and Imagination and Michael Chekhov's On the Technique of Acting, have not fallen in my lap by chance. 4 Curtin referred to them several times in her classes as books of "singular" resonance to her own singing and teaching.Chekhov's book conceptualizes the basic processes that are involved in the actor's work on character development. These processes include extensive work on the text and its interpretation (understanding, living the text, and essentializing it in performance), in parallel with developing the body... (shrink)

Can social phenomena be understood by analyzing their parts? Contemporary economic theory often assumes that they can. The methodology of constructing models which trace the behavior of perfectly rational agents in idealized environments rests on the premise that such models, while restricted, help us isolate tendencies, that is, the stable separate effects of economic causes that can be used to explain and predict economic phenomena. In this paper, I question both the claim that models in economics supply claims about tendencies (...) and also the view that economics, when successful, necessarily follows this method. When economics licenses successful policy interventions, as it did in the case of the Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions, its method is not to study tendencies but rather to study the phenomenon as a whole. Key Words: economic models • tendencies • economic experiments • policy making • John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

What makes a measure of well-being valid? The dominant approach today, construct validation, uses psychometrics to ensure that questionnaires behave in accordance with background knowledge. Our first claim is interpretive—construct validation obeys a coherentist logic that seeks to balance diverse sources of evidence about the construct in question. Our second claim is critical—while in theory this logic is defensible, in practice it does not secure valid measures. We argue that the practice of construct validation in well-being research is theory avoidant, (...) favoring a narrow focus on statistical tests while largely ignoring relevant philosophical considerations. (shrink)

First-person reports are central to the study of subjective well-being in contemporary psychology, but there is much disagreement about exactly what sort of first-person reports should be used. This paper examines an influential proposal to replace all first-person reports of life satisfaction with introspective reports of affect. I argue against the reasoning behind this proposal, and propose instead a new strategy for deciding what measure is appropriate.

The burgeoning science of well-being makes no secret of being value laden: improvement of well-being is its explicit goal. But in order to achieve this goal its concepts and claims need to be value adequate; that is, they need, among other things, to adequately capture well-being. In this article I consider two ways of securing this adequacy—first, by relying on philosophical theory of prudential value and, second, by the psychometric approach. I argue that neither is fully adequate and explore an (...) alternative. This alternative requires thorough changes in the way philosophers theorize about well-being. (shrink)

In Valuing Health, Dan Hausman argues that well-being is not measurable, at least not in the way that science and policy would require. His argument depends on a demanding conception of well-being and on a pessimistic verdict upon the existing measures of subjective well-being. Neither of these reasons, I argue, warrant as much skepticism as Hausman professes.

Julian Reiss correctly identified a trilemma about economic models: we cannot maintain that they are false, but nevertheless explain and that only true accounts explain. In this reply we give reasons to reject the second premise ? that economic models explain. Intuitions to the contrary should be distrusted.

We distinguish between two different strategies in methodology of economics. The big picture strategy, dominant in the twentieth century, ascribed to economics a unified method and evaluated this m...

I interpret Dostoevskij’s religious concepts in terms of mythogenesis and mythopoesis. Dostoevskij’s religious concepts arose on the basis both of his personal emotional experience and of the discourse of popular Orthodoxy. They demonstrate the antinomial nature of Russian spirituality, and are typified by his conception of the family, which illustrates the communal basis of the individual personality. The antimomial idea of the family is most fully developed in Dostoevskij’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, in which the four models of fatherhood correspond (...) to Isaac the Syrian’s concepts of physical, spiritual, mental and divine fatherhood. (shrink)

Cet article interroge l’espace thérapeutique mouvant expérimenté dans une téléconsultation avec un couple. Il décrit les frontières polytopiques d’une séance online. Désormais, l’espace thérapeutique réunit trois lieux qui se superposent : chez le thérapeute, chez le patient et l’interface de rencontre, la plateforme numérique. L’auteure constate l’émergence d’une illusion partagée entre le thérapeute et son patient, favorisée par la superposition de deux mondes : virtuel et réel, dans l’écran et hors de l’écran. Le passage à une thérapie conjugale à distance (...) déplace les symptômes sur l’aspect territorial du cadre, tout en permettant de déployer un nouveau processus thérapeutique. Puisque les patients font entrer le regard du thérapeute dans leur habitat intérieur, la question du privé et de l’intime se pose : qu’est-ce qui est dévoilé? Le couple peut jouer avec la création de la mise en scène jusqu’à la « profanation rituelle », la transgression du cadre. L’article apporte une illustration clinique d’une « séance à l’envers ». (shrink)

We can observe self-organization properties in various systems. However, modern networked dynamical sociotechnical systems have some features that allow for realizing the benefits of self-organization in a wide range of systems in economic and social areas. The review examines the general principles of self-organized systems, as well as the features of the implementation of self-organization in sociotechnical systems. We also delve into the production systems, in which the technical component is decisive, and social networks, in which the social component dominates; (...) we analyze models used for modeling self-organizing networked dynamical systems. It is shown that discrete models prevail at the micro level. Furthermore, the review deals with the features of using continuous models for modeling at the macro level. (shrink)

Andrei Platonov’s novel Chevengur does not only describe the concrete model of building communism that was being realized in real life; it also discusses the problem of creating a new human being w...

The article is the first exploration of Mārganāṭyam, a new tradition in the performing arts of modern India, created from the beginning of the XXI century by an outstanding researcher of musical, theatrical and dance culture, Kalamandalam Piyal Bhattacharya and his students. It is based on the many years of the author’s personal observations, interaction, interviews and discussions with the participants of “Chidakash Kalalay. Centre of Art and Divinity”, an artistic community based on the direct transfer of knowledge and skills (...) from teacher to students, which has developed around Piyal. The features of the method of reconstruction of the ancient Indian theater, the flexible application of the legacy of the past in modern conditions are under study. Particular attention is paid to the artistic interpretation and comprehension of the Indian philosophical heritage, and above all the concepts and worldview of Nyaya and Vedanta systems, transferring them to the space of scenic images. The presented material demonstrates that an integrated approach to the artistic heritage, a metatheater, combined with individual pedagogical unfold of the personality of the artists, creates the possibility of recreating the long-vanished tradition and complex philosophical issues in a way that is well understood today, relevant and reflects the essential needs of modern creators and viewers of the Indian theater at large. (shrink)

Clustering is one of the most fundamental and essential data analysis tasks with broad applications. It has been studied in various research fields: data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition and in engineering, economics and biomedical data analysis. Headache is not a disease that typically shortens one’s life, but it can be a serious social as well as a health problem. Approximately 27 billion euros per year are lost through reduced work productivity in the European community. This paper is focused on (...) a new strategy based on a hybrid model for combining fuzzy partition method and maximum likelihood estimation clustering algorithm for diagnosing primary headache disorder. The proposed hybrid system is tested on two data sets for diagnosing headache disorder collected from Clinical Centre of Vojvodina in Serbia. (shrink)

Judgments of well-being across different circumstances and spheres of life exhibit a staggering diversity. Depending on the situation, we use different standards of well-being and even treat it as being constituted by different things. This is true of scientific studies as well as of everyday life. How should we interpret this diversity? I consider three ways of doing so: first, denying the legitimacy of this diversity, second, treating well-being as semantically invariant but differentially realizable, and, third, adopting contextualist semantics for (...) well-being expressions. I reject the first option on the grounds that it is unable to make sense of much of everyday and scientific linguistic practices, and also because it makes the category of well-being insignificant or even otiose for practical purposes. We should thus pick between the second and the third options. I argue that contextualism about well-being is more plausible and faces fewer objections than the differential realization view. I conclude with a discussion of other features of contextualism: it does not imply that well-being is relative to individual taste, it need not result in eliminativism about well-being, nor in scepticism about a general theory of well-being. It does not commit us to an “anything goes” approach, nor does it threaten anarchy and miscommunication. (shrink)

The word “freedom” is so overly used—and frequently abused—that it is always in danger of becoming nothing but a cliché. In Another Freedom, Svetlana Boym offers us a refreshing new portrait of the age-old concept.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 54-63 [Access article in PDF] Movement Class as an Integrative Experience:Academic, Cognitive, and Social Effects Svetlana Nikitina I believe the benefits of this type of course reach beyond the obvious possibilities of professional and academic achievement. The degree of personal discovery, creativity, self-development and insight are immeasurable. I am particularly referring to my experience here at Harvard. Claire Mallardi, from course (...) syllabus Performing arts courses at research institutions such as Harvard University are often seen as extracurricular with only tangential or imperceptible effect on students' academic interests. Yet, when I interviewed biology, math, or neuroscience concentrators who took Claire Mallardi's Movement for Actors and Directors course at Harvard in the spring of 2000, most of them told me that it was one of the most meaningful experiences in their academic development, and, according to one psychology concentrator, "the best psychology course" she ever took. In spite of boundaries separating the arts courses from hard and soft sciences, in students' experience the connections run deep. What were those connections that students made from their dance class experience to their academic and social development? And, what in the teaching and nature of the course supported this highly integrative experience that allowed students to reach beyond mastering an artistic medium and become better learners in general? These were the two major questions that guided this study.Why am I interested in the integrative quality of arts education? I am highlighting the academic importance of performing arts programs to suggest to university administrators and instructors in other disciplines the "immeasurable" personal and academic value of such courses whose place is often seen as marginal. Perhaps also, pedagogy used for integration in this course into the academic fabric of the institution could provide models for other courses and curricula that are trying to be integrative or interdisciplinary in a more self-conscious way. And, there are more and more such [End Page 54] courses on every college campus these days. Moriel Blaisdell in Preparing Faculty for the New Conceptions of Scholarship for example, cites "integrative studies" programs among most important trends in higher education today with their goal "to synthesize, to look for new relationships between the parts and the whole, to relate the past and future to the present, and to ferret out patterns of meaning that cannot be seen through traditional disciplinary lenses." 1One of the most daring experiments in universities now, and the one to which the integrative dance course could speak directly, is interdisciplinary teaching in neuroscience, for example. Neuroscience proceeds from the belief in the inherent unity of mind and body and attempts to discover the nature of the relationship between them. In a different way and with a different goal than arts courses, neurosciences also try to cross the boundary of subjective and objective experience, mind and body, physical technique and personal interpretation, which are at the heart of teaching and learning in the performing arts. While not being prescriptive, I would like to suggest that perhaps close attention to the pedagogy and integrative experiences of students in the performing arts courses could provide some insights for pioneering bridge-making in other academic areas as well.I would like to propose that what lies at the core of integrative capacity of a performing arts course, like the one Claire Mallardi teaches at Harvard, is the inherent tendency of the arts to transcend the boundary of body with the mind, and to seek unity of self as both the subject and the object. In a dance, in the words of Margaret H'Doubler, the body is seen "as the outer aspect of personality, for it is the agent through which we receive impressions from the external world and by which we communicate our meaning." 2 This basic translation between body and mind, mental and physical, artistic and academic that went on in Mallardi's class, resulted in integrative and transformational experiences for her students. "I never until this class — comments one student — equated emotions with movement or... (shrink)

This article is a mutual introduction of the science of well-being to philosophy of science and an explanation of how the two disciplines can benefit each other. In the process, I argue that the science of well-being is not helpfully viewed as a social or a natural, but rather as a mixed, science. Hence, its methodology will have to attend to its specific features. I discuss two of its methodological problems: justifying the role of values, and validating measures. I suggest (...) that tackling them calls for developing mid-level rather than high theories of well-being. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article intends to reconsider the epistemological status of delusional beliefs on the basis of Wittgenstein’s conception of certainty. Several works over the last two decades have compared delusional beliefs with so-called hinge propositions, which – according to Wittgenstein – function as expressions of objective certainty. This gives rise to a paradox. On the one hand, delusions are compatible to Wittgensteinian certainties in some respects; on the other hand, they contradict beliefs shared by other members of the community, which makes (...) them different from ‘normal’ certainties. In order to address this issue, I use Moyal-Sharrock’s taxonomy of hinge propositions. This taxonomy allows one to distinguish between different types of hinge propositions; all types share the same features, but these features are manifested in a variety of ways. Thus, delusional beliefs might also be regarded as constituting a specific type of hinge propositions. This move makes it possible to resolve the paradox and to identify the special epistemic features of delusional beliefs. (shrink)

Rational choice modeling originating in economics is sweeping across many areas of social science. This paper examines a popular methodological proposal for integrating formal models from game theory with more traditional narrative explanations of historical phenomena, known as “analytic narratives”. Under what conditions are we justified in thinking that an analytic narrative provides a good explanation? In this paper I criticize the existing criteria and provide a set of my own. Along the way, I address the critique of analytic narratives (...) by Jon Elster. (shrink)

This study examines discursive representations of judicial power in Russian print media. The data are drawn from governmental and oppositional newspapers and cover a six-month period during 2013. Using an approach that is informed by Critical Discourse Analysis and a pragma-dialectical perspective on argumentation, the authors distinguish strategies and specific linguistic means as well as argumentation fallacies that journalists employ in the articles to construct the representation which is consistent with a newspaper’s ideology.

It is a commonly expressed sentiment that the science and philosophy of well-being would do well to learn from each other. Typically such calls identify mistakes and bad practices on both sides that would be remedied if scientists picked the right bit of philosophy and philosophers picked the right bit of science. We argue that the differences between philosophers and scientists thinking about well-being are more difficult to reconcile than such calls suggest, and that pluralism is central to this task. (...) Pluralism is a stance that explicitly drives towards accommodating and nurturing the richness and diversity of well-being, both as a concept and as an object of inquiry. We show that well-being science manifests a contingent pluralism at the level of methodology, whereas philosophy of well-being has largely rejected pluralism at the conceptual level. Recently, things have begun to change. Within philosophy, conceptual monism is under attack. But so is methodological pluralism within science. We welcome the first development, and bemoan the second. We argue that a joined-up philosophy and science of well-being should recognise the virtues of both conceptual and methodological pluralism. Philosophers should embrace the methodological justification of pluralism that can be found in the well-being sciences, and scientists should embrace the conceptual reasons to be pluralist that can be found in philosophical debate. (shrink)

The article analyzes the main world problems and prospects for the development of teaching philosophy to children, substantiates the relevance of introducing philosophical practices, its teaching methods into the education system. The author carries out a theoretical reconstruction of the main provisions, problems and prospects for develop- ing the “Philosophy for Children” (p4c) movement, which is of particular interest due to its greatest informativeness in covering the current state of teaching philosophy to children. Introduction. Modern studies of teaching philoso- phy (...) to children are of great importance because of their relevance in solving a whole range of modern educational problems. The search for new priority areas for teaching philosophy to children is aimed at finding the best ways to correct the modern edu- cation system by demonstrating and justifying the effectiveness of using p4c methods and ap- proaches. The purpose of the study is to explicate the main problems and prospects, as well as the relevance of teaching philosophy to children in the current conditions of the society development. Methods. The author uses both general scien- tific methods of analysis and synthesis, as well as methods of comparative analysis and theoretical reconstruction. Scientific novelty of the research. The article carries out a theoretical reconstruction and analysis of the main problems of teaching philosophy to children, substantiates the relevance of introducing the ideas and methods of p4c into the system of pre- and school education in order to compensate for the shortcomings of informational approaches to teaching and the formation of demanded skills and abilities in children. Results. The author substantiates the relevance of applying ideas and methods of p4c in pre-school and school education, and demonstrates the ad- vantages of its approaches in solving a number of educational and upbringing problems, the effective- ness of using philosophical tools in the develop- ment and education of children. Conclusions. Emphasizing the issue of teaching philosophy to children makes it possible to estab- lish a number of legitimate questions of pedagogi- cal, methodological, ethical, political, and other nature, the solution of which determines the choice of priority directions for developing and transform- ing the modern education system, the solution of urgent problems, without correcting of which most of the children may lose a significant cultural and intellectual experience. (shrink)

The article analyzes the concept formation of civil society, effective interaction of an individual and society as a guaranty for the development of civil society, determines factors of its effectiveness: the formation of social capital, the person on the basis of dialogue, partnership and national consolidation; attempts are made to analyze theoretical generalization of civil society in the developed countries of the West and the initial stages of the civil society in Ukraine. It is noted that the state and civil (...) society within the democratic system are interested in dialogue, partnership and efficiency of their interaction improvement. (shrink)

This article analyzes the main trends in the search for new philosophical foundations in Russian philosophy of law, the need for which arose due to the loss of Marxism’s former Soviet-era monopoly...