This article analyses how normative decision theory is understood by economists. The paradigmatic example of normative decision theory, discussed in the article, is the expected utility theory. It...

Graciela De Pierris presents a novel interpretation of the relationship between skepticism and naturalism in Hume's epistemology, and a new appraisal of Hume's place within early modern thought. Contrary to dominant readings, she argues that Hume does offer skeptical arguments concerning causation and induction in Book I, Part III of the Treatise, and presents a detailed reading of the skeptical argument she finds there and how this argument initiates a train of skeptical reasoning that begins in Part III and culminates (...) in Part IV. She goes on to demonstrate that Hume was committed to the Newtonian inductive method while rejecting the place of the supernatural in our understanding of nature. (shrink)

Time and Memory throws new light on fundamental aspects of human cognition and consciousness by bringing together, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches dealing with the connection between the capacity to represent and think about time, and the capacity to recollect the past. Fifteen specially written essays offer insights into current theories of memory processes and of the mechanisms and cognitive abilities underlying temporal judgements, and draw out key issues concerning the phenomenology and epistemology of memory and its (...) role in our understanding of time. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to question the epistemic presuppositions of applying behavioural science in public policymaking. Philosophers of science who have examined the recent applications of the behavioural sciences to policy have contributed to discussions on causation, evidence, and randomised controlled trials. These have focused on epistemological and methodological questions about the reliability of scientific evidence and the conditions under which we can predict that a policy informed by behavioural research will achieve the policymakers’ goals. This paper argues (...) that the philosophical work of Helen Longino can also help us to have a better and fuller understanding of the knowledge which the behavioural sciences provide. The paper advances an analysis of the knowledge claims that are made in the context of policy applications of behavioural science and compares them with the behavioural research on which they are based. This allows us to show that behavioural policy and the debates accompanying it are based on an oversimplified understanding of what knowledge behavioural science actually provides. Recognising this problem is important as arguments that justify reliance on the behavioural sciences in policy typically presume this simplification. (shrink)

This book is a call to expand and diversify our approach to the study of the human mind in relation to the Theory of Mind. It proposes that it is necessary to combine cross-disciplinary methods to arrive at a more complete understanding of how our minds work. Seeking to expand the discussion surrounding the Theory of Mind beyond the field of psychology, and its focus on our capacity to ascribe mental states to other people, this volume collects evidence and research (...) to point to a more holistic understanding of our own minds, the minds of others, behavior, language, and reasoning. This book therefore illuminates the conceptual intricacy underlying the Theory of Mind. It posits that a wide scope is necessary to make a breakthrough in scientific research towards a full understanding of the nature, function, and development of our capacity to converge on biological processes of the brain towards consciousness, emotion, awareness, and cognition. The volume presents methods, results, critiques, and models intended to provoke debates in various academic disciplines. It is of interest to scholars working in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of the historical and philosophical context from which originated G. Bachelard's concept of "phenomenotechnique". It analyzes why phenomenotechnique is crucial for science studies. By incorporating the concept of phenomenotechnique into Hacking's and Galison's models of science, I argue that we can avoid the radicalism of both while also preventing the analysis of scientific practices from collapsing into the interpretive frames mandated by social constructivists.

Some people live to work, others work to live, while still others prefer to live lives of leisure. Since the Puritans, American culture and literature have been dominated by individuals who have valued hard work. However, shortly after its founding, America managed to produce the leisurely Rip Van Winkle, who, over time, has been followed by kindred spirits such as, for instance, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Twain’s Huck Finn, Melville’s Bartleby, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, the Hippies, and Christopher (...) McCandless. With the rise of the Indie Film movement of the 1990s, so came the rise of the slacker film. Films such as Slacker, Singles, Wayne’s World, Reality Bites, Clerks, Kicking and Screaming, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, The Big Lebowski, and Office Space filled theatres over the decade with characters who take an unorthodox view of work and stress the importance of leisure in life. This essay discusses two slacker films, Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Kevin Smith’s Clerks, which defined the slacker phenomenon in the 1990s and constituted two important landmarks in American independent film. While many of us may find the slacker pathetic and annoying, this essay argues that there is much value to be found in this healthy counterculture. By offering their perspectives on issues such as the Puritan work ethic, work-incited self-importance, leisure versus idleness and human relationships, Linklater and Smith join the preceding generations of slackers, providing a much needed balance to the American obsession with work and success. (shrink)

Since Blood Simple, the first film they wrote and directed together, the Coen Brothers have been working their way up in the film world and, in spite of their outside-the-mainstream taste for the noir and the surreal, have earned a number of prestigious prizes. After Fargo, one of their most critically acclaimed films, expectations were high, and when the Brothers released their next bizarre venture, most critics rushed to measure it against Fargo’s success. Consequently, The Big Lebowski, the Coens’ 1998 (...) neo-noir detective comedy, was considered an incoherent, “unsatisfactory” medley of genres and styles and a box office bomb, and nothing hinted that this unorthodox story of mistaken identity, featuring a pot-smoking, unemployed character named the Dude as its “hee-ro,” would gain a following. Yet, since its 1998 DVD release, The Big Lebowski has been hailed as the first cult film of the Internet, continuously inspiring versatile cultural phenomena as nonconformist in their nature as the movie itself. This essay examines particular factors which initially might have been responsible for alienating the audience only to help The BigLebowski become a peculiar cultural event in later years. It looks at TheBig Lebowski’s characters, the historical time and place of the film’s action as well as at various external historical events, phenomena, places and people such as, for example, the Port Huron Statement, the Reagan-Bush era, Los Angeles and its immigration issues, racial minorities, civil rights activists, the Western genre and, last but not least, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Reflecting the film’s oddities, this bag of cultural idiosyncrasies appears to provide some plausible explanations for The Big Lebowski’s unexpected, against-all-odds rise from the marginal position of a critical and commercial failure to the status of a cult classic and cultural landmark. (shrink)

This article signals at a dearth of critical engagement with Thomas Carlyle's Presbyterian heritage resulting from the received whiggish narrative of his Calvinism as unenlightened, anachronistic, and backward-looking. It proceeds to challenge this view by examining closely Carlyle's creative use of key Calvinist concepts in his cosmopolitan and enlightened dialogue with the contemporary periodical press over British and European cultures. Carlyle is shown to be an adept purveyor both of the Edinburgh Magazine's enlightened idiom and of Blackwood's morally conservative and (...) artistically cosmopolitan agendas, while also making creative capital of the Anti-Jacobin's powerful Gothic imagery and of the critical verve of the Westminster Review. The main addressees of Carlyle's reading of the signs of the times, I argue, are contemporary Whigs. Carlyle's depiction of Macaulay as a ‘spiritual hippopotamus’ spells Carlyle's broader critique of the modern lack of imagination of the spiritual which sponsors deterministic religious and secular readings of reality. Carlyle displays his enlightened Calvinist perspective in discussing the French Revolution through such key Scottish Enlightenment concepts as free will, conscience, civilisational and moral progress, and divine providence. Insightful and creative use of his inherited Scottish Calvinist heritage characterises Carlyle's open, cosmopolitan reading of the signs of the times. (shrink)

The present essay analyzes an eighteenth-century phase of the querelle des monstres and highlights two main points. 1) As the cases of Lémery and Winslow demonstrate, in the period when preformation was the dominant view, the dispute over the origin of monsters carried into the very field of preformation the contrast which had originally opposed it to the now defeated model of epigenesis, namely the alternative between mechanical genesis and pre-existence of the monstrous form itself. 2) One of the most (...) important episodes in the shift of teratology from a primarily theological or metaphysical issue to a purely natural one was due to Albrecht von Haller. Haller shifted the dispute from anatomy to embryology; and it is on an embryological base and not on metaphysics that he built his own demonstration of the original nature of the monster. He was furthermore the only scientist of authority who dealt with teratology from an epigenetic standpoint. His numerous changes of view in the field of embryology did in fact never affect his early adherence to the thesis of original monstrosity. (shrink)

ObjectiveEfforts to understand why some marriages thrive while others falter are not well integrated conceptually and rely heavily on data collected from White middle-class samples. The Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation Model is used here to integrate prior efforts and is tested using data collected from couples living with low incomes.BackgroundThe VSA Model assumes that enduring vulnerabilities, stress, and couple communication account for unique variance in relationship satisfaction, that communication mediates the effects of vulnerabilities and stress on satisfaction, and that the predictors of satisfaction (...) generalize across socioeconomic levels. To date, these assumptions remain untested.Materials and methodsWith 388 couples from diverse backgrounds, we used latent variable structural equation models to examine enduring vulnerabilities, chronic stress, and observed communication as predictors of 4-wave, 27-month satisfaction trajectories, first as main effects and then interacting with a validated 10-item index of sociodemographic risk.Results The three variable sets independently predict satisfaction trajectories; couple communication does not mediate the effects of enduring vulnerabilities or stress on satisfaction; and in 19% of tests, effects were stronger among couples with higher sociodemographic risk.ConclusionEffects of established predictor domains on satisfaction replicate in a diverse sample of newlywed couples, and most findings generalize across levels of sociodemographic risk. The failure of couple communication to mediate effects of enduring personal vulnerabilities and stress raises new questions about how these two domains undermine committed partnerships. (shrink)

Increasing emphasis on patient self-management, including having patients advocate for their needs and priorities, is generally a good thing, but it is not always wanted or attainable by patients. The aim of this critical ethical review is to deepen the current discourse in patient self-advocacy by exposing various situations in which patients struggle to self-advocate. Using examples from oncology patient populations, we disambiguate different notions of self-advocacy and then present limits to the more demanding varieties (i.e., health-related, trust-based, and psychological); (...) we argue that these limits create ethical dilemmas with respect to whether it is always desirable to encourage patients to self-advocate. We conclude that self-advocacy can be both under and overrated with respect to how much it benefits the patient with cancer, with many instances being indeterminate. Ultimately, providers must understand the patient's perspective relative to the challenges they are experiencing and work with them to meet their needs. (shrink)

In open scenarios, agents willing to cooperate must impact the communication barrier between them and their unknown partners. If agents are not relying on any agreement about the meaning they ascribe to the symbols used in the conversation, semantic misalignments will arise on the discourse domain as well, thus making the communication impossible. In wide and heterogeneous scenarios offered by the Web (and its newborn semantic incarnation), traditional and meaning-safe methodologies for communication need to keep abreast of new dynamic communicative (...) interaction modalities. The uncertainties arising from communication between actors which base their behavior on different and heterogeneous knowledge models have to be taken into account, wisely balancing the extent of “reachable knowledge” with the trustworthiness of its information. Main objective of this work is to augment the FIPA Ontology Service Specification with linguistically-aware methodologies for communication, describing a wide-scope framework for multi-agent systems design, semantic integration and coordination. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar en “Nocturno de San Ildefonso” (1974) las diversas “escenografías autoriales”, como denomina José-Luis Diaz al dispositivo en el que se inscribe el “escritor imaginario” para asumir una postura o identidad literaria y estructurar su desempeño público. En este poema de evocación autobiográfica el poeta ya sexagenario rememora y reconstruye fragmentariamente su pasado juvenil, sus primeras inquietudes estéticas e ideológicas, así como su iniciación poética. De clara raigambre romántica, las escenografías autoriales presentes en Nocturno (...) de San Ildefonso constituyen el marco para su autofiguración madura como poeta vidente y su autorrepresentación juvenil como ideólogo y polemista en ciernes, al tiempo que define, mediante poderosas imágenes, su concepción poética. (shrink)

Se describen algunos personajes carrasquillescos y sus formas de pensamiento y expresión de acuerdo con sus diferentes entornos y relación con la palabra. Para hablar de los personajes orales, se hace referencia a ciertos prototipos como el campesino, el negro, el anciano, el niño y el contador de historias. Y en cuanto a los personajes letrados, se destacan algunos, como Magdalena Samudio, José Bermúdez, Beatriz Solsona y Bárbara Caballero, resaltando la figura del cura como el letrado del pueblo, y asociando (...) a Ligia Cruz y a Martín Gala con don Quijote por su relación participante con los libros. (shrink)

A pergunta pelo ser do homem é a origem da antropologia tanto filosófica quanto pedagógica. Neste horizonte, pode-se resumir a resposta à pergunta dizendo: o ser humano não só é efeito do diálogo, mas humaniza e se humaniza por meio do diálogo. Quando se planeja ambientes orientados a desenvolver as potências anímicas do diálogo em todos, e em cada um dos participantes da cena pedagógica, igualmente se está tanto em meio a uma antropologia pedagógica quanto a uma didática antropológica. Esta (...) foi a tradição que Christoph Wulf, na segunda metade do século XX e no começo do século XXI, sistematizou. Dentro desta corrente de pensamento se enquadra a investigação intitulada Diálogo: condição de formação. Assim, pode-se afirmar que este projeto se baseia na tradição alemã que põe a Bildung no centro, como uma categoria que, ao mesmo tempo, tem uma fundamentação filosófica e alguns efeitos tanto na concepção quanto na ação pedagógica. Palavras-chave: Diálogo. Antropologia pedagógica. Christoph Wulf. Gadamer. (shrink)

For this study, I especially have centred myself on the work of the doctor in psychiatry and professor of the University of Tehran, Javad Nurbakhsh. He was a Master of the Order of Sufi Shah Nematollah Wali and died a year ago. This work, which appeared in 1999, is titled ‘Sufi Women’ and in it, the author compiled the brief biographies, which were sometimes only slight glimpses of existence, of 136 women. I will focus on three principle questions: the women (...) themselves, their relationships with their surroundings, and their relationships with God. I conclude that female Sufi Mystics’ bodies were soaked in tears and their souls in flames. They shed tears because of their distance from God and for being stuck in bodies and because of their desire for transcendence, to drown in Oneness. Since their bodies impeded this desire, they mortified them impiously with fasts and vigils and became unsightly to all who saw them. They did not take care of others, and they did not take care of themselves, they renounced all care. (shrink)

El envejecimiento de la población es resultado de la disminución de las tasas de mortalidad al tiempo que disminuyen las tasas de natalidad. Es un hecho sin precedentes y una consecuencia de la extensión a la población de los beneficios del progreso en el ámbito económico, científico, tecnológico y social. En la tabla 1 se observa que la esperanza de vida al nacimiento de las mujeres españolas es la más alta entre los quince países de la Unión Europea. Entre las (...) de 60 y más años sólo en Francia es algo superior. Un rasgo fundamental de la vejez por las consecuencias que conlleva es que es esencialmente femenina.…. (shrink)

Moving Spaces and Places is a cross-disciplinary collection about movement as a transformative experience, showing how movement changes affect and percept of spaces and place and solidifies space into meaningful places.

The scientific study of lucid sleep, defined as the ability to retain critical self-awareness during ongoing sleep, has traditionally focused on lucid dreaming and induction techniques that specifically target REM sleep. Recently, interest has grown to include other forms of lucid sleep, such as out-of-body experiences, sleep paralysis, and “witnessing-sleep” episodes described in Indian philosophical traditions. Empirical data on these states remain limited, primarily due to the lack of specific induction techniques designed for their study. In this case series study, (...) we examine four individuals who reported lucid sleep episodes in a controlled laboratory setting, using a novel induction method combining pre-sleep meditation and visual stimulation. While this method requires future validation, we captured five lucid sleep episodes, including one instance of lucid dreamless sleep, one out-of-body-like experience, and three different types of lucid dreams. Sleep was monitored using wearable EEGs and submental EMGs. A detailed phenomenological analysis provided further context for these experiences, which were reported during both REM and non-REM sleep. Together, the induction protocol and findings described here may inform future research on lucid sleep and altered states of consciousness during sleep. (shrink)

Offering an original contribution to the field of luxury and fashion studies, this edited collection takes a philosophical perspective, addressing the idea that humans need luxury. From this framework it delves deep into two particular dimensions of luxury, emotions and society, and concludes with cases of brand building in order to illustrate the two dimensions at work. Comparative analysis between countries is brought together with an emphasis on China. Chapters address the ongoing growth in the market, as well as the (...) significant changes in the sector brought about by fast international expansion and an increased focus on ethical supply and sustainability, making the book an insightful read for scholars of fashion business, luxury and branding. (shrink)

What counts as scientific ideology for Canguilhem and Kuhn is functionally distinct. However, in this article I argue that metaphysical and other non-scientificbeliefs brought about by scientists into their research traditions and that Kuhn sees as generating scientific change coincide closely with Canguilhem’s conception of scientific ideology. Kuhn failed to describe clearly those ideological and metaphysical elements influencing the work of science. He chose to focus on psychological factors intrinsic to paradigms and present in paradigm shifts and in scientific revolutions (...) and also in the internal mechanisms of science itself such as the discovery process. Canguilhem triangulated scientific ideologies with the traditional demarcation criterion between science and non-science and with the intertwining of practice, theory, and external (social) beliefs in scientific thought while distancing himself from the psychological dynamic in science characteristic in Kuhn’s work. Their views are complementary. (shrink)

Las Relaciones Geográficas son textos escritos en español con el fin de obtener descripciones fiables del dominio colonial. Investigaciones anteriores con repertorios muy diferentes han establecido que la heterogeneidad léxica es una tendencia común a toda la producción escrita colonial. El objetivo de esta investigación es comprobar si un repertorio más concreto como las relaciones de la gobernación de Yucatán representa un conjunto homogéneo o heterogéneo en la incorporación del préstamo indígena. Con una metodología cuantitativa y cualitativa se analiza la (...) potencial pluralidad léxica de estos textos asociada a determinados factores. Las conclusiones corroboran la heterogeneidad léxica a pesar de ser un corpus uniforme y muestran tres tendencias a la hora de incluir los prehispanismos en los documentos españoles. Relaciones Geográficas are texts in Spanish that aim at obtaining reliable descriptions from the colonialism period. Previous research with very different repertoires have established that lexical heterogeneity is a common trend in the entire colonial written production. The objective of this research is to check whether a particular repertoire, such as relations of the Government of Yucatán represents a homogeneous or heterogeneous body of indigenous loans incorporation. Quantitative and qualitative methodologies are used to analyse the potential lexical plurality of these texts which are associated with certain specific factors. The findings corroborate that lexical heterogeneity is present, despite being a uniform corpus, and show three different trends when including prehispanic concepts in Spanish documents. (shrink)

This article analyzes the institutional patterns of eight young democracies in Asia. The analysis originates from Lijphart's majoritarian-consensus framework. It illustrates that neither Lijphart's two-dimensional democracy pattern, nor an alternative pattern exists in Asia. Instead, the review of possible causes for the lack of conformity between Lijphart's patterns of democracy and the reality of the situation in Asia support the criticism in existing research literature regarding some of Lijphart's main assumptions and major conclusions. Furthermore, Asian realities provide only partial support (...) for Lijphart's advice that the consensus option is the more attractive option for countries that designed their first democratic constitutions. (shrink)