The paper discusses the role of systemic means of persuasion in argument evaluation. The core class of systemic means of persuasion is regress stoppers, whose fundamental function is to halt the infinite regress of justification by making claims, premises, or overall position expressed in a persuasive message more acceptable to a recipient. The paper explores how systemic means of persuasion contribute to the structure of arguments in the Toulmin model and serve (...) as cues for heuristic processing of persuasive messages. It also presents the results of the stylometric analysis and statistical data on the usage of systemic means of persuasion in three corpora which suggest that systemic means of persuasion constitute strategies independent of the strategy based on explicit argumentation marked by inference indicators. (shrink)

The paper discusses the role of systemic means of persuasion in argument evaluation. The core class of systemic means of persuasion is regress stoppers, whose fundamental function is to halt the infinite regress of justification by making claims, premises, or overall position expressed in a persuasive message more acceptable to a recipient. The paper explores how systemic means of persuasion contribute to the structure of arguments in the Toulmin model and serve (...) as cues for heuristic processing of persuasive messages. It also presents the results of the stylometric analysis and statistical data on the usage of systemic means of persuasion in three corpora which suggest that systemic means of persuasion constitute strategies independent of the strategy based on explicit argumentation marked by inference indicators. (shrink)

Use of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech (...) by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements with a third that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context. (shrink)

In his Posterior Analytics Aristotle confronted a problem that threatened his vision of scientific knowledge as an axiomatic system: if scientific knowledge is demonstrative in character, and if the axioms of a science cannot themselves be demonstrated, then the most basic of all scientific principles will remain unknown. In the famous concluding chapter of this work (II 19), he claimed to solve this problem by distinguishing two kinds of knowledge: we cannot have epistêmê of the first principles, but we can (...) have nous of them. This ‘solution’ has struck many students of his thought as hopelessly ad hoc and unpersuasive. And nowhere is Aristotle less persuasive than when he appeals to a faculty of intuition or a priori insight which arrives on the scene precisely when it is most needed. I defend Aristotle’s account by showing how nous is not properly characterized as a faculty of intuition which operates independently of sense experience. Rather, nous is a kind of knowledge that is available to us whenever our mind advances from the perception of particular individuals to grasp the relevant universal concept or general principle. (shrink)

As a part of religious discourse, Christian sermons are a “…persuasive discourse par excellence”. This is more pronounced in the Christian Prosperity Gospel, a system of thought and belief in which preachers The word preacher and speaker are used interchangeably in this paper. attempt to convince audiences to donate to their churches with the expectation that God will reward them with health and wealth. Previous research shows that the use of metaphors and metonymies pervade CPG sermons but an explanation on (...) the mechanisms through which they persuade is rarer. With this in mind and viewing CPG sermons from their persuasive angle; this paper sets out to investigate how metaphors and metonymies are used for persuasion purposes in televised sermons presented in the Gĩkũyũ language Gĩkũyũ is the language of the Agĩkũyũ who are largely found in central Kenya as well as in some other parts of the country. It is a Bantu language classified as a Zone E language by Guthrie. According to the 2019, Population and Housing Census, the gĩkũyũ is the largest tribe in Kenya at 8,148,668 individuals. The community has dominated in televangelism but the position is changing due to the proliferation of many vernacular television stations.. The data is drawn from authentic televised sermons. The findings indicate that metaphors and metonymies engender persuasion in sermons by affecting the perceived altruism and trustworthiness of a speaker in a sermon. This is done by means of manipulating various forms of distance suggested in the Media Proximization Approach. Metaphor is found to affect the axiological, epistemic, temporal and emotional distances while metonymy affects the axiological and spatial distances to activate certain pragmatic presuppositions which make them persuasive in a covert way. (shrink)

As the quality movement in health care now enters its fourth decade, the language of quality is ubiquitous. Practitioners, organizations, and government agencies alike vociferously testify their commitments to quality and accept numerous forms of governance aimed at improving quality of care. Remarkably, the powerful phrase ‘‘quality of care’’ is rarely defined in the health care literature. Instead it operates as an accepted and assumed goal worth pursuing. The status of evidence-based medicine, for instance, hinges on its ability to improve (...) quality of care, and efforts are made by both proponents and detractors to unpack the contents and outcomes of evidence-based practice while the contents of ‘‘quality of care’’ are presumed to be understood. Because the goals of medicine are far from obvious, this paper investigates the neglected term, ‘‘quality of care,’’ in an effort to understand what it is that health care practices are so uncritically assumed to be striving for. Finding lack of consensus on the terminology in the quality literature, I propose that the term operates rhetorically by way of persuasive appeal (and lack of descriptive meaning). Unsatisfied that ‘‘quality of care’’ operates as a mere buzzword in morally contentious debates over resource allocation and duties of care, I implore health care communities to go beyond mere commitments to quality and, instead, to focus attention on the difficult task of specifying what counts as quality care within an economically constrained health care system. (shrink)

This book present interdisciplinary research in the social sciences and humanities by connecting seemingly disparate sources through a sensitivity to endangered human values. It links reflections on the contemporary relationship between art and technology in a post-modern context, seeing art in terms of crossing boundaries and exploring virtuality. It deals with the consequences of economics colonising other disciplines, in terms of the processes by which the social becomes the economic. Using Jantsch''s evolutionary paradigm, the concept of self-transcendence is seen as (...) crucial for the understanding of human beings and their social systems. Incorporating recent thinking from the natural sciences, the learning process can be conceived as the life and activity of all complex systems, including those once conceived as organisms, machines, cultures or economies. Without the societal embrace of scientific and technological development no collective or individual meaning can be assigned to the production of new knowledge. The book seeks to recognise the point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity, and where the shift from the hegemony of material labour to immaterial labour becomes fundamental. The author brings new understandings of art, the social, and technology together, based on the idea that history is not a story told in separate physical, social and spiritual spaces and that the most fundamental problem of today is how to find some shared meaning in a fractured world. The author analyses, at a global level, the process of the co-production of scientific and social order, of culture and technology, of life sciences and economic and political regimes. It rightly identifies the rise of the role of knowledge and the move of capital into life sciences as a new stage in the history of capitalism: what we can qualify as cognitive capitalism or biocapitalism. In this new era of capitalism, what is being manufactured and sold are not just tangible and non-tangible goods, whose increasing importance, as the author shows, poses unsurmountable theoretical problems to the theoretical apparatus of economic science. The increasing mercantilisation of the world appears at the same time as a bio-power, i.e. a set of instruments creating and controlling different forms of life, forms of communication, standards of socialisation, education, the individual and collective imaginary, etc. More fundamentally, the encounter of life sciences and the information technology integrates and subjects the most essential mechanisms of biological and social reproduction to the logic of capital valorization. To understand the complexity of these changes and the ethical and philosophical questions that the development of technology and sciences poses to the future of mankind one must break through the disciplinary barriers delineating different disciplines in social sciences and those separating social sciences from natural sciences. Professor Matko Mestrovic manages to tackle this challenge not only because of his impressive and masterful knowledge of different disciplines in the social and natural sciences, but he does it also owing to his capacity for theoretical elaboration that allows him to lay the foundations of a new transdisciplinary paradigm. This is why his work can raise the awareness of the general public on two issues: on a global and profound vision of the challenges posed by the new millennium; and on the need for a radical theoretical innovation bringing into question the disciplinary certitudes in develop a social science able to better understand the movement and the ambiguity of history. - Carlo Vercellone, Universite de Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne Mestrovic provides a unique insight into the often forgotten relation between economics on the one hand and arts and culture on the other, demonstrating that these adomains function as a total social facticity and not as separate, entirely independent elements thereof. In doing so he is dispelling the illusions about the disciplinary self-containdness of individual forms of knowledge and is relying on those paradigms of contemporary scientific thought whose aepistemiological programs are based on close cooperation and aopening up and not on the persuasion about one''s own positions and dispositions. - Prof. dr. Rade Kalanj, Redovni profesor na Odjelu za sociologiju. (shrink)

This paper proposes to analyse the process that makes paths of action meaningful. It argues that this process is one of ‘figuration’. The term ‘figuration’ intends to outline how the experience of moral meaning is one that already positively marks out a field and to identify and analyse the mechanisms used for such marking and selection. It is my contention that these mechanisms predate the persuasion to a moral path; they are the process through which this path is constructed (...) as meaningful. This thesis is elucidated through an analysis of the tactics of meaning in Kant’s moral theory. Kant turns to aesthetics as a means of corroboration for his moral theory, but he also attempts to limit the scope of the interactions between his aesthetic and moral theory. For instance, when he writes on the topic of form in aesthetic taste or outlines the technical specifications of aesthetic judgment, it is arguably the arcane peculiarities of his system that are met. For this reason, Kant insists on the merely analogical relations between beauty and morality. However, it is also possible to see how certain aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory execute wider, and potentially more important, functions for his practical philosophy, such as providing meaningful orientation for the ascetic moral attitude of his duty-ethics. In this respect, certain figures of Kant’s aesthetic theory may well be viewed as complementing the dependence in his moral philosophy, in the important sections on moral pedagogy and methodology, on appeals to heroic models and stories as ways of shaping and inculcating the moral disposition. This paper considers these aspects of interaction between Kant’s aesthetic and moral philosophies as both 1) a problem for the consistency of his philosophy given his avowed exclusion of aesthetic and religious elements of meaning in his duty-ethics; and 2) as a case study for the new, schematic analysis of ‘moral figuration’ outlined in the paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 119-134 [Access article in PDF] The Constitution of Rhetoric's Tradition Maurice Charland Rhetoric is not a discipline. That is to say, as a domain of theoretical and practical knowledge, rhetoric is weakly institutionalized, lacking a centralized arbiter and standardized set of procedures for establishing truth claims. It also lacks the basic characteristics that Michel Foucault defines as disciplinary, for while we can identify "groups (...) of objects, methods, their corpus of properties considered to be true, the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools," these are neither universally admitted, nor do they "constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available to whoever wishes, or whoever is able to make use of them, without their being any question of their meaning" (1972, 222). On the contrary, despite the fact that rhetoric is usually figured as offering practical and, indeed, positive knowledge, the meaning of its terms is always being questioned and at stake. While we might, by considering terms loosely, seek to identify rhetoric in terms of objects such as "persuasion," or "discourse," these are not exclusively its province. Furthermore, the ends of rhetoric are themselves unclear. Is rhetoric really the art of discovering the available means of persuasion? Or is it an art of citizenship? Or a method of enquiry? It has at times been defined as each. Consequently, none of these methods can fix its identity. At most, we can say that "rhetoric," as a domain of knowledge, signals a commitment to the idea of agency in discourse.Rhetoric, while not disciplinary, nevertheless "hangs together" as a domain of knowledge even though it does not cohere conceptually. It is, or comes close to being, a "discursive formation." That is to say, we can identify a field that produces statements concerning discourse and its operations, which is characterized by certain regularities that articulate with the term rhetoric itself. The first such regularity is the gesture of negation. Rhetoric refuses philosophy (or acts out having been refused by philosophy). [End Page 119] Rhetoric further is defined against other intellectual genres: rhetoric is not poetics, is not political science, is not ethics, though it may "speak" to them. Ultimately, though, this tells us very little about the nature of rhetoric's difference, for while refusal is effective in positing the existence of a boundary between rhetoric and other domains, the location of that boundary and what it contains remains unspecified. Rhetoric must also be attributed an at least provisional sense. This is accomplished by rhetoric's second gesture, which initially appears more substantial. Rhetoric is framed in terms of the positivity of a foundational "tradition." Indeed, the gesture toward tradition is ubiquitous. Consider, for example, both the title and principles of organization of Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg's (1990) anthology, George Kennedy's (1998) recursion to the idea of "tradition" even as he attempts to present rhetoric as a natural and cross-cultural phenomenon, recent feminist works that explicitly address "the tradition," 1 the routine citation of Classical authorities and examples, the recurrence of "new" rhetorics, including Burke's dramatism, Perelman's theory of argumentation, as well as Barthes' semiotics, which are offered as supplements to tradition's lacks, and, finally, the energy devoted to the study of the history of rhetoric. The rhetorical tradition, as something bequeathed or put in play by ancient teachers, appears to offer rhetoric a substance, a literature, and a set of problems, particularly through variants of two other principles of discursive formation identified by Foucault, commentary and the author-function. Even so, the gesture toward tradition does not imply the existence of a historically rooted and fixed corpus or model: "Tradition" is a vague term, there is no unproblematic canon of texts to be commented upon, and tradition itself, rather than Aristotle, Plato, or Cicero, stands as "author." What we debate is the meaning of the "tradition," the uneasy relationship between Socrates and Sophists, Plato and Aristotle, but as positions rather than personae. Furthermore, in the name of rhetoric, ancient and modern texts are often read against the grain, and what is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Proof and Persuasion in Black Athena:: The Case of K. O. MüllerJosine H. BlokNon tali auxilio.Virgil, Aeneid II, 521When in 1824 the German classical scholar Karl Otfried Müller (1797–1840) set down to write a review of Champollion’s first Letter to M. Dacier (1822), he was profoundly interested. 1 For several years he had been working on Egypt, and as he told his parents in 1820, “I have come (...) to love Egyptian antiquity so much, that, if I were not constricted by the schedule of my classes, I would have set myself to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs, which I would not deem impossible by the clues I have found.” 2 During the same years (1820–25) that he wrote his early books on ancient Greece, he [End Page 705] reviewed sixteen studies on Egypt alone. 3 In his review of the Letter, then, he wanted to draw “the attention of [the] readers to this, certainly not unfounded, discovery,” 4 though he feared the author was inclined to jump to conclusions. But in August 1824 he reviewed Champollion’s more complete publication of his findings of the same year and, recalling his previous anxiety, commented:Now, however, the reading of the present work has totally convinced me, that the usage of hieroglyphs to indicate sounds is as ancient as this writing system itself. [... This discovery should also mean that...] the history of Egyptian religion and state will be reconstructed and expanded. 5From that moment he sided unequivocally with Champollion, politely but clearly reminding German colleagues who still stumbled on with decipherments of their own, that this would not do. 6With these facts in mind, Martin Bernal’s rendering in his Black Athena, volume I, is bound to surprise: “[U]nlike Humboldt, Niebuhr and Bunsen [Müller] disregarded the sensational scholarly developments between 1815 and 1830. There is no indication that he paid any attention to Champollion’s decipherment” (316). The contradiction between Bernal’s statements and the sources on Müller’s life and work turns out not to be an incidental error but part of a larger pattern. To understand this pattern and its objectives, let me first summarize Bernal’s argument and my own.In his challenging book Bernal argues that the ancient Greek world was founded on the colonization of Greece by Phoenicians and Egyptians in the second millennium bc. 7 The material which is to prove his thesis is offered in volume II, though volume I includes a summary. In this first volume Bernal observes that from late antiquity until the eighteenth century, awareness of the Afroasiatic roots of ancient civilization had been retained as the heritage of ancient Greece itself. Hence Bernal labels this perception underlying Western classical scholarship of the early modern period the “Ancient Model.” By or soon after the 1820s, however, it was replaced by the “Aryan Model,” which took Greek civilization to be partly autochthonous and partly [End Page 706] shaped by invasions coming from the North. To reveal that the fall of the Ancient Model was not the result of internal developments in classical scholarship but of externalist influences, notably the belief in progress, the defense of Christianity, Romanticism, and most importantly racism, is the core theme of volume I. Bernal sustains his argument by contending that historical source criticism was not really or entirely an internal development but created to serve the external ends, and by presenting Müller as the embodiment of Romanticist racism, who was responsible for overthrowing the Ancient Model and inaugurating its Aryan successor. Hence, by thus designating Müller as the axis around which the overall turn of classical scholarship revolved, he wants to prove that the fall of the Ancient Model was unjustified in terms of scholarship but only occurred due to dishonorable ideologies.Through a limited number of representative issues I want to argue that Bernal’s rendering of Müller and the context of his work is untenable in the light of the source material and that Bernal’s explanation of the fall of the Ancient Model is untenable as well. My aim is not just to clear Müller’s name... (shrink)

This paper aims to show that propaganda and persuasion are underlined by two forms of communication, one aiming at a monologue, and the other aiming at a dialogue, which in practice do often coexist, with one or the other prevailing at a particular time. In order to understand propaganda or persuasion, we need to study them as part of the systems (e.g. institutions, organizations, communication) to which they belong, rather than treat them as decontextualized phenomena. Both propaganda and (...) persuasion involve conscious and unconscious communicative processes. Nevertheless, the majority of social psychology experiments still assume that the experimenter should deal with phenomena only at a conscious level. In dialogical communication, however, latent and unconscious thought, inner dialogue, and ‘the depth of consciousness’, are presupposed to be unavoidable aspects of communication, whether it is concerned with influence processes, persuasion or social representations. They all are established through cultural-historical processes and determine symbolic meanings of social communication of the present and future. (shrink)

Seeing, Doing, and Knowing is an original and comprehensive philosophical treatment of sense perception as it is currently investigated by cognitive neuroscientists. Its central theme is the task-oriented specialization of sensory systems across the biological domain. Sensory systems are automatic sorting machines; they engage in a process of classification. Human vision sorts and orders external objects in terms of a specialized, proprietary scheme of categories - colours, shapes, speeds and directions of movement, etc. This 'Sensory Classification Thesis' implies that sensation (...) is not a naturally caused image from which an organism must infer the state of the world beyond; it is more like an internal communication, a signal concerning the state of the world issued by a sensory system, in accordance with internal conventions, for the use of an organism's other systems. This is why sensory states are both easily understood and persuasive.Sensory classification schemes are purpose-built to serve the knowledge-gathering and pragmatic needs of particular types of organisms. They are specialized: a bee or a bird does not see exactly what a human does. The Sensory Classification Thesis helps clarify this specialization in perceptual content and supports a new form of realism about the deliverances of sensation: 'Pluralistic Realism' is based on the idea that sensory systems coevolve with an organism's other systems; they are not simply moulded to the external world. The last part of the book deals with reference in vision. Cognitive scientists now believe that vision guides the limbs by means of a subsystem that links up with the objects of physical manipulation in ways that bypass sensory categories. In a novel extension of this theory, Matthen argues that 'motion-guiding vision' is integrated with sensory classification in conscious vision. This accounts for the quasi-demonstrative form of visual states: 'This particular object is red', and so on. He uses this idea to cast new light on the nature of perceptual objects, pictorial representation, and the visual representation of space. (shrink)

How would it be assessed from an ethical point of view if human wage work were replaced by artificially intelligent systems (AI) in the course of an automation process? An answer to this question has been discussed above all under the aspects of individual well-being and social justice. Although these perspectives are important, in this article, we approach the question from a different perspective: that of leading a meaningful life, as understood in analytical ethics on the basis of the so-called (...) meaning-in-life debate. Our thesis here is that a life without wage work loses specific sources of meaning, but can still be sufficiently meaningful in certain other ways. Our starting point is John Danaher’s claim that ubiquitous automation inevitably leads to an achievement gap. Although we share this diagnosis, we reject his provocative solution according to which game-like virtual realities could be an adequate substitute source of meaning. Subsequently, we outline our own systematic alternative which we regard as a decidedly humanistic perspective. It focuses both on different kinds of social work and on rather passive forms of being related to meaningful contents. Finally, we go into the limits and unresolved points of our argumentation as part of an outlook, but we also try to defend its fundamental persuasiveness against a potential objection. (shrink)

Felony disenfranchisement is best understood as a means of vote suppression. Quite apart from its significance as a form of criminal stigma, disenfranchisement is most properly characterized as one of the ways in which the American voting system reserves political participation for a privileged social and intellectual class. Thus understood, felony disenfranchisement reveals the theoretical underpinnings of an exclusionary version of American democracy in which more or less widespread disenfranchisement is an acceptable or necessary political tactic. Felony disenfranchisement should (...) not be characterized as a sanction for criminal conduct: It fits none of the usual justifications for punishment. Most commentators agree that felony disenfranchisement as a collateral sanction for criminal conduct stigmatizes alike a disparate collection of individuals convicted of crimes carrying a penalty of one year or more - everything from drug possession to murder - and extends, in many instances, long after former felons have completed their sentences. Justifications for refusing the vote to felons, and to former felons who are no longer incarcerated, are surprisingly weak and clearly related to larger issues of democratic participation. Accordingly, it is under the framework of democratic participation that the most persuasive justifications of disenfranchisement might be found. Under the framework of democratic participation, the disenfranchisement debate implicates competing theories of democracy, each of which has profound consequences for the constitution of the American polity. I contend that there are currently three models for the right to vote in American society: (1) a membership model premised upon popular participation in the democratic process as an expression of citizenship; (2) a deliberative model in which popular participation is conditioned upon the duty to be an informed and reflective citizen; and (3) an elite model entrenching political office in a political class that competes for votes among the electoral masses. The continuing vitality of these three models at the level of political debate and constitutional doctrine unsettles the dominant history of the franchise as one of progress from an exclusionary to an inclusionary extension of the mandate, and requires us to acknowledge felony disenfranchisement as part of a larger process of voter exclusion and suppression. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hegelian RhetoricThora Ilin BayerIntroduction: Rhetoric and DialecticAristotle in the famous first line of his Rhetoric defines the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic: "Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic" (1354a). Both rhetoric and dialectic belong to no definitive science. They treat those things that come within the purview of all human beings. As an antistrophes to dialectic, rhetoric concerns particular cases and "may be defined as the faculty [dynamis] of (...) observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (1355b). Dialectic concerns reasoning on general issues and in its generality it is like deduction. But unlike deductive demonstration, dialectic, as Aristotle says in Topics, "reasons from reputable opinions," rather than from premises that are true and primitive (100a).Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason takes a more extreme view of dialectic than Aristotle. Kant regards dialectic as a logic of illusion (Schein) that occurs when reason takes its powers beyond experience to make claims concerning the nature of the soul, world, and God. When reason attempts to determine the nature of what the soul is in itself, its assertions end in paralogisms; when it does so about the world its claims end in antinomies; and when it does so about God its efforts end in the impossibilities of the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments. Kant regards rhetoric as having no role in the philosophical pursuit of truth. In the Critique of Judgment Kant classifies rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) as belonging [End Page 203] to fine art. He regards ars oratoria as an art of manipulation and deception that achieves its end by a beautiful show (Schein) of speech that plays upon human weaknesses. He says oratory deserves no respect whatsoever—"ist gar keiner Achtung würdig" (1951, 172n50; 1974, 185n).1 Kant's exclusion of rhetoric from Kritik (with which he identifies philosophy) establishes the general exclusion of rhetoric in the development of philosophical idealism.Hegel interpretation for a century and a half presumed that rhetoric was irrelevant to understanding Hegel's thought. It considered Hegel's dialectic as a method independent of any connection to rhetoric. The first book on Hegel in English, James Hutchinson Stirling's The Secret of Hegel, published in 1863, regards the key to Hegel's system as his formulation of the concrete universal (Begriff). He makes no reference to rhetoric as an element in Hegel's thought (1887, xxii). In his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel mentions Plato's Parmenides as "surely the greatest artistic achievement of the ancient dialectic," but he makes no mention of rhetoric (1952, 57; 1977, 44). A ground for ignoring rhetoric as important for Hegel's philosophy is the fact that Hegel himself ignores it. There is no discussion of rhetoric (Redekunst) in his whole corpus beyond a few pages concerning the differences between poetry and prose in his Lectures on Fine Art (1986, 15:257–68; 1998, 2:986–95).All of the approaches to Hegel in nonrhetorical terms changed with the appearance of Donald Phillip Verene's Hegel's Recollection: A Study of Images in the "Phenomenology of Spirit" (1985) followed by John H. Smith's The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of "Bildung" (1988).2 Verene's work showed that there is a dialectic between image (Bild) and concept (Begriff) within Hegel's mode of expression that provides the reader with a necessary means of access to the work. Smith's study showed not only that Hegel employs rhetorical principles in the composition of the Phenomenology but that Hegel in his early years studied rhetoric closely and was concerned to master it. Smith's work, although developed independently of Verene's, joined with it to present a new reading of Hegel. This poetical and rhetorical grasp of Hegel's thought has been recently restated in Verene's Hegel's Absolute (2007).My views that follow begin where Verene's and Smith's accounts leave off. I wish to consider two questions that extend what has been broached in their readings of Hegel. (1) In what sense does Hegel's Phenomenology embody a transformation of the Aristotelian conception of rhetoric as an antistrophes to dialectic? (2) To... (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

The ‘mind-made body’ is seen as a subtle body attained by a Buddhist adept during meditative practice. Previous research has elucidated this concept as having important doctrinal significance in the Buddhist cosmological system. The P?li canonical evidence shows that the manomaya-k?ya is not merely a spiritual byproduct of meditative training, but also a specific existential mode of being in the system of the three realms. Studies of the manomaya-k?ya to date, however, have focused mostly on early P?li materials, and thus (...) do not encompass theoretical development and soteriological significance of this notion in later tradition. As a beginning step to fill this gap, this article explores the meanings of the manomaya-k?ya represented in the?r?m?l?dev? S?tra and the two treatises of the Ratnagotravibh?ga??stra and the Foxing lun, which are doctrinally based on the?r?m?l?dev? S?tra in their discussion of the manomaya-k?ya. Through the observation of the manomaya-k?ya in these Mah?y?na texts, this article seeks to demonstrate how the concept is used in the broader cosmological and soteriological system of Mah?y?na tradition. For this purpose, I first review the meanings of the manomaya-k?ya in early Buddhist texts and then observe the cosmological and soteriological meaning of the notion by analyzing the theoretical connection between the three Mah?y?na texts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History ed. by Rudolf A. Makkreel, Frithjof RodiCharles BambachRudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, editors. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 409. Cloth, $59.50.Contemporary hermeneutics has been dominated by the work of Heidegger and Gadamer. Their phenomenological approach to the human world has (...) exerted such a powerful influence in recent years that one can hardly enter a discussion about the philosophical meaning of hermeneutics that is not already framed in the terms of their discourse. At the same time, there is less familiarity with the origins and sources of the hermeneutic method or with the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey. The editors of Dilthey’s Selected Works, Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, have set about trying to rectify this situation. They have sought to provide a richer context for the study of hermeneutics by bringing out a six-volume collection of writings from one of the major hermeneutical philosophers in the Western tradition. The publication of Volume Four in this series helps to accomplish this task by offering new translations of important Dilthey texts covering both the history and genesis of hermeneutics and a genealogical account of Dilthey’s own hermeneutical approach to history. Only one short essay in this volume, “The Rise of Hermeneutics” (1900), has been published before, and even this older translation has been revised and supplemented by material from the Nachlass. But what is the significance of this material and how does it help to achieve a fuller understanding of hermeneutics and its history?The selections in Volume Four cover the period from 1860 to 1903 with a heavy emphasis on the period from 1860 to 1868 (over two-thirds of the book focuses on Dilthey’s 1860 Preisschrift on “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics,” notes from his 1867–68 lectures “On Understanding and Hermeneutics,” and three reviews from 1862 on historical literature from Buckle, Burckhardt, and F.C. Schlosser). The remaining essays from 1900–1903 provide a sense of Dilthey’s later reflections on hermeneutics and on the meaning of the eighteenth century for historiography and as a philosophical approach to history. The editors of this collection have chosen these texts carefully; the selections in Volume Four are organized around a specific theme. By culling significant early texts about hermeneutics and history and juxtaposing them with a number of later texts on the same topics, they hope to show the genesis of Dilthey’s own path of thought. What emerges from an attentive reading of these sources—especially when carried out within the context of the editors’ own principle of selection—is a highly persuasive view of Dilthey and his work. In the texts themselves we see Dilthey moving from his earlier role as the chronicler and historian of Protestant thought (who conceives of hermeneutics as an ancillary method of textual exegesis) to his later position as the philosopher of the historical world (who views hermeneutics as the epistemological method for the grounding of the human sciences). What we see here is a developmental account of Dilthey’s thought path: from the traditional scholar who conceives of hermeneutics as a method for interpreting texts to the philosopher who understands it as the fundamental science for interpreting historical life. This shift within Dilthey’s work from a hermeneutics of textuality to a hermeneutics of historicity marks an important turning point in the history of the hermeneutical [End Page 641] tradition, a turning point that helped to form the basis of all later philosophical hermeneutics.The five essays from Part Two—“Interpretations of History”—offer a smattering of Dilthey’s own writings on historiography, the theory of history, and the role of the eighteenth-century German tradition in forging an historicist understanding of “human affairs” (373) whose “organic nexus” and “inner purposiveness as a whole” opened up a radically new conception of historical being. Most contemporary continental philosophers will get lost in the textured details of Dilthey’s analyses because what passes for “philosophy” in our epoch pales by comparison with the rich... (shrink)

Every ten years United States congressional districts are drawn, physically constructing political representation based on domicile. Why do we do it this way? Is territorial representation consistent with the broader normative ends of political representation). ;In section one I argue that territorial constituencies were never intended to represent local "communities of interest." Instead, physical proximity between voters was necessary to achieve the normative aims of representative government in a large nation. I begin in 13 th century England, and proceed through (...) the political theory of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, the Federalists and their critics. I also provide a novel interpretation of Federalist 10. ;In sum, territory was a habit of mind for the founders of the United States, and thus there were no explicit reasons given for using territory. The silence of territory as a definer of electoral constituencies has continued to the present day. I argue that the continued silence about territorial constituencies constitutes a substantial breech of legitimacy. ;In the second section , I argue that "constituency definition" is a normatively rich institution and how constituencies are defined ought not to be determined by interested third parties. I argue that Hanna Pitkin incorrectly conflated "political representation" and "legitimacy." I argue that citizen consent to constituency definition is a central part of legitimating any representative government. Finally, I argue that there are no persuasive normative arguments for territorial constituencies today. Justifying territorial constituencies on the normative claim that "communities of interest" ought to define constituencies for political representation is simply unpersuasive. If one believes such particularity ought to be represented in one branch of the national legislature, then other kinds of particularity---race, ideology, class, et al---simply dominate. ;In section three I argue against "particularity" for electoral constituencies. I conclude with a thought experiment: randomly assign voters into 435 national, electoral constituencies for life. Having established that the concept of "constituency" is itself normatively robust and separable from "electoral systems," I argue that important considerations of "voice," can be introduced through novel means of reform. (shrink)

In Purchase, Power, and Persuasion: Essays on Political Philosophy, Gary Jason brings together his articles on political and economic philosophy between 2004 and 2018. These articles touch on issues surrounding two contrasting political systems: a completely totalitarian system—the paradigm case of which was Nazi Germany—versus a classically liberal system. In Part One of the anthology, the essay topics include the breadth of the Nazi Regime’s propaganda machine, as well as the nature and ethics of propaganda. In Part Two, the (...) essay topics include the nature and variety of genocides, as well as how the Nazi Regime bought the support of the German citizens, and whether National Socialism was indeed a form of socialism. In Part Three, the essay topics include: what ‘classical liberalism’ means; common myths about the nature of capitalism; the nature of ‘happiness economics’; the basic ideas of Public Choice economics; Adam Smith’s life and work; the legitimacy of secession in America today; and how the American economy compares to European ones. In Part Four, the topics include the ethics of a nation restricting the emigration of trained professionals, Gary Becker’s proposals for immigration reform, and my own proposals for immigration reform. Finally, in Part Five, the topics include business ethics; the nature of American charity today; the economic contributions of Smith, Marx, and Keynes; the spread and value of liberal think-tanks; and the anti-Malthusian economics of Julian Simon. (shrink)

Balāgha, which consists of three main branches today, has benefited from various channels in the process of completing its formation. Before the formation of systematic balāgha, it is assumed that there were two main currents, one represented by poets and lite-rati, and the other represented by scholars. This article aims to determine the place of Abū ʿUthmān al-Jāḥiẓ (255/869), one of the main names who wrote in the field of balāgha, in the pre-formation period of balāgha science. The documentary analysis (...) method will be used mainly in the research. The determinations of al-Jāḥiẓ on balāgha will be analysed in accord-ance with the parameters, categories and concepts of systematic balāgha. By examining al-Jāḥiẓ’s rhetorical understanding through the filter of systematic balāgha, the share of pre-for-mation period balāgha within systematic balāgha will be revealed. Another contribution of the study would be to reveal the balāgha understanding of al-Jāḥiẓ with its main frames. Ex-amining al-Jāḥiẓ’s concept of balāgha, on the other hand, will facilitate understanding of his unique concepts of balāgha and bayān. Because al-Jāḥiẓ designed a broad communication framework, which he calls bayān, and considered balāgha as a sub-category within this de-sign. Balāgha is the subject of verbal communication in this design.Summary: The formation of a discipline called balāgha passed through several stages. Balāgha as a term, which was in circulation as a qualification of beautiful and convincing words, has attracted the attention of some circles, had been dealt with it in various occasions and some thoughts had been recorded on the subject. These accumulations and records contained a number of basics and principles that formed the core of balāgha science which would later be systematized. Since these recorded cumulative basics and principles cannot be called balāgha science, it is possible to name them as the idea of balāgha. The independent works that emerged during this period were written by poets and literary writers. Religious scholars and linguists also had mentioned rhetorical issues in their works even though they did not write specific books on the topic. It is possible to say that there are two channels from which balāgha science is nourished: The literary criticism channel represented by poets and writers and the other channel which is held by various branches of science, the majority of which are religious sciences.The literary criticism channel is the product of some social and scientific developments in Arab history. When Jāhiliyya (pre-Islamic) poetry became a data source to serve the emerging grammar, an intensive movement of collecting Jāhiliyya poetry has begun. Compiled Jāhiliyya poetry was not only a source for linguists, but also a literary legacy that poets sang and used as a model for their new styles in poetry. Innovations in poetry led to a comparison between the old and the new, and these developments have also brought about the need for certain criteria to be used in literary criticism. Eventually, these critical activities circulated many terms, including the word balāgha.When it comes to religious sciences, balāgha has been a concept used mostly in iʿjāzu’l-Qurʿān issue. The discussions of the miraculous feature of the Qurʿān, which continued on theological grounds, must have aroused the desire to explain the eloquence of verses in concrete exam-ples. Because the scholars of these fields shifted their interest towards the use of linguistic tools. The balāgha channel shaped by the pressures of religious sciences such as kalām, fiqh and tafsīr could be called the balāgha developed by grammar; and the channel that began to take shape with the work of poets and writers can be called the balāgha developed by litera-ture.In the period after the formation of grammar and before the formation of balāgha, although there was not a balāgha science in the present-day sense, it is clear that there was a thought of balāgha. One of the scholars who reflects the idea of balāgha of the pre-establishment pe-riod is Abū ʿUthmān al-Jāḥiẓ. Al-Jāḥiẓ did not address the issue of persuasive and beautiful speech only in his book al-Bayān wa al-tabyīn. In various articles, he talks about the qualities of beautiful and impressive speeches, sometimes under different topics and sometimes under a special title. In his al-Bayān wa al-tabyīn, al-Jāḥiẓ establishes a communication theory called bayān that takes into account all the means of conveying meaning. He divides the means of communication into five, which are word, sign, number, text and posture. The book puts spe-cial emphasis on balāgha, which is one of the means of bayān, and its conditions of conveying meanings. Although the issues discussed in the work do not conform to the norms of the later systematic balāgha, it continues to be an important source in theoretical balāgha studies. Sys-tematic balāgha and al-Jāḥiẓ’s bayān project are different in terms of frame, but they have overlapping points and a piece-whole relationship between them. Bayān, developed by al-Jāḥiẓ’s, addresses the wide range of communication that takes into account including the ges-tures and signs; while balāgha is used to refer to the verbal communications only, which is part of the broader field of communication.In systematic balāgha, it is important to distinguish between balāgha and faṣāḥa terms; the former used to signify the word, the speech and the speaker, and the latter to signify only the word and the speaker. We have noticed that al-Jāḥiẓ uses them interchangeably. Nonetheless, the emphasis on the factor of transmitting messages, when he talks about the clarity of mean-ing on several occasions, shows that he considers the combined words rather than the indi-vidual words, which is the same assertion of systematic balāgha. According to him, the fact that a misarranged sentence is understood by the interlocutor should not mean that the sen-tence itself is capable of transmitting the meaning.The context factor, which is the determinant of systematic balāgha, is also taken into consid-eration in al-Jāḥiẓ’s understanding of balāgha. However, al-Jāḥiẓ generally considered the context together with the length and shortness of the speeches and did not mention the as-pects reflected in the sentence sequence. Although the major concern of al-Jāḥiẓ was the transmission ability of the speech, he also dealt with the expression forms. There are some other terms that he used less frequently like ījāz, iṭnāb, ishāb and kināya. Although some of these words are used in contexts similar to the meanings of today's term, most of them are used in such a context to meet more than one meaning. Ījāz, which is one of these concepts, is the name of expressing the meanings with little word in al-Jāḥiẓ’s usage. The use of terms reflects the types of narrative and figurative usages could not reach a stable point in al-Bayān wa al-tabyīn, because it was not written for the purpose of systematically analysing them. The author, who aims to examine the persuasive and beautiful words in many dimensions, under-took the issue with a view that takes into consideration the orator, and this caused his work to be designed in a way that serves speech making rather than analysing. This consideration prevented the emergence of an analysis system. Al-Jāḥiẓ mostly used balāgha in the context of oral performance. According to him, the written texts and performed sermons are different in style and therefore the balāgha criteria of these two species should be different as well. (shrink)

Within the second book of his Rhetoric, intent upon the art of persuasion, Aristotle sets forth theearliest known methodical explication of human emotions. This placement seems rather peculiar,given the importance of emotional dispositions in both Aristotle’s theory of moral virtues and in hismoral psychology. One would expect to find a full account of the emotions in his extensivetreatment of virtues as it appears in his ethical treatises, or as part of his psychological system in DeAnima. In none of these (...) places, however, does a systematic treatment of this part of Aristotle’spsychology emerge as it does in the Rhetoric. Such is a surprising, seemingly unusual phenomenonin consideration of Aristotle’s extreme care for and obsession with organization and categorization.Earnest analysis, however, reveals the intricate ingeniousness of Aristotle’s innovative project.Emotion, based upon the interplay between what Aristotle deems to be the ‘uniquely human’rational and irrational parts of the human soul, involves Being and Being’s cognition of itself, andits dialectical encounter with the faculty of pure reason. Within this encounter is born humanemotion.According to this formula, emotion is a phenomenon that is linked to concrete human existencewhile at the same time being fundamentally involved with cognition. Emotion bridges the gapbetween the this-worldliness of the human and his keen logic as a rational being. Such anunderstanding allows Aristotle to assert that emotional appeal, which often stands at the core ofrhetoric, is not necessarily a way of tricking people or avoiding critical response, but can be used topersuade by bringing facts to people’s awareness. Through his novel rhetoric of emotion, Aristotlenot only sheds light on the human condition, he brings rhetoric itself into the realm of the rationaland the valid as a suitable means of human discourse. (shrink)

The very existence of society depends on the ability of its members to influence formatively the beliefs, desires, and actions of their fellows. In every sphere of social life, powerful human agents (whether individuals or institutions) tend to use coercion as a favorite shortcut to achieving their aims without taking into consideration the non-violent alternatives or the negative (unintended) consequences of their actions. This propensity for coercion is manifested in the doxastic sphere by attempts to shape people’s beliefs (and doubts) (...) while ignoring the essential characteristics of these doxastic states. I argue that evidential persuasion is a better route to influence people’s beliefs than doxastic coercion. Doxastic coercion perverts the belief-forming mechanism and undermines the epistemic and moral faculties both of coercers and coercees. It succeeds sporadically and on short-term. Moreover, its pseudo doxastic effects tend to disappear once the use of force ceases. In contrast to doxastic coercion, evidential persuasion produces lasting correct beliefs in accordance with proper standards of evidence. It helps people to reach the highest possible standards of rationality and morality. Evidential persuasion is based on the principles of symmetry and reciprocity in that it asks all persuaders to use for changing the beliefs of others only those means they used in forming their own beliefs respecting the freedom of will and assuming the standard of rationality. The arguments in favor of evidential persuasion have a firm theoretical basis that includes a conceptual clarification of the essential traits of beliefs. Belief is treated as a hypercomplex system governed by Leibniz’s law of continuity and the principle of self-organization. It appears to be a mixture consisting of a personal propositional attitude and physical objects and processes. The conceptual framework also includes a typology of believers according to the standards of evidence they assume. In this context, I present a weak version of Clifford’ ethical imperative. In the section dedicated to the prerequisites for changing beliefs, I show how doxastic agents can infuse premeditated or planned changes in the flow of endogenous changes in order to shape certain beliefs in certain desired forms. The possibility of changing some beliefs in a planned manner is correlated with a feedback doxastic (macro-mechanism) that produces a reaction when it is triggered by a stimulus. In relation with the two routes to influence beliefs, a response mechanism is worth taking into consideration – a mechanism governed to a significant extent by human conscience and human will, that appears to be complex, acquired, relatively detached from visceral or autonomic information processing, and highly variable in reactions. Knowing increasingly better this doxastic mechanism, we increase our chances to use evidential persuasion as an effective (although not time-efficient) method to mold people’s beliefs. (shrink)

Chapter 1 First Person Access to Mental States. Mind Science and Subjective Qualities -/- Abstract. The philosophy of mind as we know it today starts with Ryle. What defines and at the same time differentiates it from the previous tradition of study on mind is the persuasion that any rigorous approach to mental phenomena must conform to the criteria of scientificity applied by the natural sciences, i.e. its investigations and results must be intersubjectively and publicly controllable. In Ryle’s view, (...) philosophy of mind needs to adopt an antimentalist stance to achieve this aim. Antimentalism not only definitively rejects the idea that mind is a substance separated from the body, it also denies that mental phenomena radically differ from physical phenomena by virtue of several unique features. Most problematically, mental phenomena have a conscious character (mental states are related to specific qualitative feelings) and are accessible only to the first-person (only the subject knows directly what s/he is experiencing inside his/her mind). Ryle takes a strong stance on antimentalism going so far as to maintain that an approach to mind which aims to meet the criteria of scientificity set by the natural sciences must avoid any reference to internal, unobservable mental states. In his view (which is considered a specifically philosophical version of psychological behaviorism and also addresses questions put forward in psychological research), mental states can be redescribed in terms of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, we address the historical roots of the antimentalist view and analyze its relation to the later tradition of research on mind. We show that, compared to the antimentalist stance, functionalism and cognitivism take a step back when they maintain that direct reference to mental states is necessary since mental states cause and therefore explain human behavior. This step backwards is often interpreted as a return to mentalism. However, this is only partially true. Indeed, we suggest that these later traditions retain one important element of Ryle’s antimentalism, i.e. the idea that mental states must be uniquely identified using external and publicly observable criteria, while excluding any reference to introspection and those qualitative dimensions of a mental state, which are accessible only to the first-person. According to the perspective we put forward, this epistemological stance has continued to influence contemporary research on mind and current philosophical and psychological theories which both tend to exclude the subjective qualities of human experience from their accounts of how the mind works. The issue we raise here is whether this is legitimate or whether subjective qualities do play a role with respect to the way our mind works. The conclusion of this chapter anticipates the argument the book makes in in favor of this latter position, starting from a particular angle, i.e. the problem of how we categorize concepts related to our internal states. -/- Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information -/- Abstract. After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that – unlike computers – in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes. -/- Chapter 3 Semantic Competence from the Inside: Conceptual Architecture and Composition -/- Abstract. Concepts are essential constituents of thought: they are the instruments we use to categorize our experience, i.e. to classify things and group them together in homogeneous sets. Here we define concepts as the internal mental information (representations) that allows us, among other things, to master words in natural language. By analyzing the way in which individuals master word meanings we explore a number of hypotheses regarding the nature of concepts. Following Diego Marconi’s research, we differentiate between two kind of abilities that underpin lexical competence – so-called ‘referential’ and ‘inferential competence’ – and we suggest that, in order to support these abilities, concepts must also include two corresponding kinds of information, i.e. inferential and referential information. We point out that the most widely used and acknowledged theories of concepts do not make this distinction, instead broadly characterizing the information used for categorization in terms of propositionally described feature lists. However, we show that while feature lists can explain inferential competence, they do not account for referential competence. To address the issue of referential competence we examine Ray Jackendoff’s hypothesis that to account for the possibility of linking perceptual and conceptual information we need to assume the existence of a (visual) representation that encodes the geometric and topological properties of objects and bridges the gap between the percept and the concept. Furthermore, we analyze the extension of this work by Jesse Prinz who introduced the notion of a proxytype, a perceptual representation of a class of objects that incorporates structural and parametric information related to their appearance. However, as we point out, proxytypes can only explain the relationship between perception and concepts with respect to instances that can be perceived through the senses and that belong to the same class by virtue of their physical similarity. We suggest that this notion be extended to include larger conceptual classes. To accomplish this, we further develop Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Jean Mandler’s idea of a schematic image and argue that conceptual representations include a perceptual schema. Perceptual schemata are non-linguistic, structured experiential gestalts (patterns or maps) that make use of information taken from all sensory modalities, including body perception. They accomplish a quasi-conceptual function: they allow us to recognize and to classify different instances. In this work, we hypothesize that perceptual schemata are an essential component of concepts, but not identical to them. Instead, we suggest that concepts include both perceptual and propositional information with perceptual schemata providing the ‘perceptual core concept’ that grounds related propositional information. -/- Chapter 4 In the Beginning There Were Categories. The Bodily Origin of Prelinguistic Categorical Organization: The Example of Folkbiological Taxonomies -/- Abstract. Studies of categorization in psychology and the cognitive sciences have made use of the notions of ‘category’ and ‘concept’ without precisely defining what is meant by either; in fact, often these terms have been used as synonyms, making it difficult to address specific issues related to conceptual development. This chapter begins by discussing the definitions of, as well as the distinctions between, ‘categories’ and ‘concepts’ in the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant and Husserl). We introduce our view of categories with reference to Husserl. Categorization is defined as the way in which our experience is originally (pre-linguistically) organized in a passive and fully unconscious manner on the basis of universal structuring principles. Conceptualization is explained as a later process in which the earlier categorical macro-classes are further subdivided into more specific and detailed sets; this later process also relies on linguistic learning and exposure to culture. On the basis of Ray Jackendoff, Jean Mandler, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, we hypothesize that categorization is a two-step process that begins with the formation of homogeneous sets of entities partitioned into regions that describe the ontological boundaries of the objects that humans perceive (categories) and continues at a later stage with the development of more specific classifications (concepts). In this chapter, we mainly address three related issues: Why should we assume that there is categorical organization which precedes the development of a conceptual system? How do categories and concepts relate to each other? Shall we hypothesize that categories are innate or that they are formed before concepts on the basis of information and organizational structure available at a very early developmental stage? We show that categorical partitions are necessary for categorization and, following Mandler, that the general categories we form at an early age do not match our adult superordinate concepts. As for the third issue, we argue that there might be no need to assume that categories are innately present in the human mind, since their formation can be explained – at least in certain cases – by basic mechanisms that work on body (propriosensitive) information. This hypothesis will not be discussed in general, but in relation to a particularly relevant example of categorical partition, i.e. the folk-biological dichotomy between ANIMATE/INANIMATE. This is compared with other dichotomies that derive from it, but are not directly categorical such as LIVING/NON-LIVING and BIOLOGICAL/NON-BIOLOGICAL. -/- Chapter 5 Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery -/- Abstract. Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chapter 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that – even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world – they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, their co-occurrence with other signals and above all their specific qualitative sensations. Emotions are addressed in the second part of the chapter. We suggest that there is a continuity between bodily experiences and emotions. In particular, we argue for a perceptual theory of emotions in line with that proposed by James and Lange at the end of the 19th century and developed more recently by authors such as Damasio (see also chap. 2§5, §6). The hypothesis we put forward is that the referential information that supports the categorization of emotions and therefore also our mastery of terms referring to emotions consists in the perception (i.e. the ‘proprioception’) of those bodily states and changes in bodily states which constitute our emotional experience. In the context of this discussion we examine some objections to this line of reasoning that arise from a cognitivist perspective and following authors such as Oatley, Johnson-Laird and Frijda, we distinguish between basic emotions that can be identified and classified solely on the basis on how they feel and complex emotions whose identification and classification additionally depends on cognitive factors. To describe how emotions are identified and classified on the basis of how they feel, we rely on Marcel and Lambie’s distinction between an ‘emotion state’ and an ‘emotion experience’. Both notions indicate kinds of feelings that we consciously experience. However, they describe first-order and second order emotion awareness respectively. The emotion state is the feeling we have of the bodily states and changes that occur when we are experiencing an emotion, while the emotion experience is the fully developed and integrated emotion we both experience and are, with reflection, aware of experiencing. On the basis of this differentiation, we also show that the same characteristics that aid in the identification and classification of bodily experiences (specific qualitative sensations; somatic localization; specific intensity; presence/absence of specific concomitant sensations) can also be used for the identification and classification of emotions – at least basic emotions. In the last two sections of the chapter we present some clinical evidence on the semantic competence of people who suffer from Alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder which supports the conclusions of our preceding analyses. -/- Chapter 6 The ‘Proprioceptive’ Component of Abstract Concepts -/- Abstract. In this chapter, we address the issue of whether the mastery of abstract words requires only inferential knowledge and thus, if the concepts that support the mastery of abstract words include only linguistic information. We start by differentiating the notions of ‘abstract’ and ‘general’ which are often erroneously confused. We then identify a strict definition of abstract, as contrasted with ‘concrete’, that applies to words or concepts whose referent cannot be experienced by the senses. We argue that abstract words/concepts would be better described as theoretical, because they are usually conceived as structured sets of inferential knowledge expressed linguistically; that is, as small theories. Pointing out parallels with Carnap’s analysis of this issue in philosophy of science, we hypothesize that words/concepts denoting non-observable entities are not all ‘equally theoretical’, because their link to sensory experience can be stronger or weaker. We revive the distinction, inspired by Quine, between theoretical and intertheoretical concepts/words. This distinction relies on the fact that the former – unlike the latter – retains a strong, although indirect, connection with perception. In Quine’s discussion, perception is understood uniquely in terms of observability, i.e. of external sensory experience. Here we argue, however, that bodily, ‘proprioceptive’ (i.e. propriosensitive) experience can also serve to referentially ground theoretical (i.e. abstract) concepts/words. We frame this issue using the example of the theoretical concept ‘freedom’ and Lakoff’s hypothesis that this concept is developed on the basis of bodily information. We contrast this with the example of ‘democracy’ which more closely resembles an intertheoretical concept/word. Furthermore, we show that one of the classical views put forward in psycholinguistic research to explain how abstract concepts are mentally represented – i.e. Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory – points in the same direction as our analysis. The same is true of Barsalou’s work suggesting that we use internal information to understand at least some abstract words. To sustain this position, we put forward two lines of evidence: the first comes from psycholinguistic studies while the second examines deficits of semantic competence exhibited by people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On the basis of our analysis, we put forward a classification that distinguishes between different kinds of concreteness and different degrees of abstraction: concepts/words referring to body experiences and basic emotions are described as analogous to concrete concepts/words because they are grounded in perceptual (i.e. propriosensitive) experience, while abstract concepts/words are considered more or less abstract depending on whether they are intratheoretical (and rely entirely on inferential information) or theoretical (and are partially grounded in perceptual – or more often in propriosensitive perceptual – information). In the last section of the chapter we consider two scales that have been used in psycholinguistic research to measure the degree of concreteness vs. abstractness of words and we show that – used conjointly – they can provide a measure of the internal vs. external grounding of specific words. (shrink)

This study provides a critical discourse analysis of letters of complaint by Jordanian university students. It aims to investigate the rhetorical pattern in these letters and explore the main strategies students use to express their dissatisfaction about certain issues and persuade the addressee to take action. To this end, permissions were obtained to collect data from two universities in Jordan: Jordan University of Science and Technology and World University of Islamic Studies and Education. The data were analyzed both qualitatively and (...) quantitatively through two analytic frameworks within critical discourse analysis : genre analysis to investigate the rhetorical pattern of complaint letters, and discursive analysis to investigate the main strategies of persuasion. These strategies were then categorized according to Aristotle’s means of persuasion: ‘ethos’, ‘logos’ and ‘pathos’. The analysis showed that written complaint was a distinctive genre with distinctive moves. It also revealed that persuasion by means of pathos was more prevalent than the other two types. Socio-cultural values have been shown to be so powerful in Jordanian society even in neutral situations such as academic context. This study will hopefully contribute to the fields of genre analysis and CDA in cross-cultural communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WHAT PERSUASION REALLY MEANS IN PERSUASION: A MIMETIC READING OF JANE AUSTEN v¡ Matthew Taylor Kinjo Gakuin University ".

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE ROLE OF AN ULTIMATE AUTHORITY IN RESTORATIVE JUSTICE: A GIRARDIAN ANALYSIS Sara Osborne I. Restorative or Retributive Justice South African Episcopal Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu's account of the gritty practicality of reconciliation versus retribution in his book, No Future Without Forgiveness, focuses long overdue attention on Restorative Justice, a law reform movement probably better known in international than in American legal circles. A persuasive assertion of Restorative Justice (...) advocates in their critique of increasingly retributive practices such as mandatory minimum sentencing, mandatory arrest, death penalty, juvenile incarceration, "three strikes" legislation, no parole, diminished prisoner services, to name a few, is that reintegrating offenders back into a community is a much more effective deterrence to anti-social violence than punishment alone. They have also observed that communitarian ideals and practices, more visible in traditional cultures1 are more conducive to Restorative goals ofreconciliation and reintegration than are practices of retributive justice rooted in ideals of individual rights. Therefore, such adjudicatory practices should serve as models for preferable alternatives. 1An examination ofrestorative justice under code-based systems of law (European, Roman Law) might also reveal more affinities since the focus ofthese systems is to define the permissible, rather than the impermissible. Code-based law begins with the commons; rightsbased law begins with the individual. 80Sara Osborne However, Western-style retributive justice remains the primary model for international law and Restorative Justice is the prophetic "outsider" voice. So, it is appropriate to ask to what extent and under what conditions are Western retributive justice systems able to incorporate or accommodate adjudicatory practices ofnon-Western or traditional cultures? How critical a factor is religion? These questions will appear wherever Western Law struggles to bring more cultural diversity under a unifying umbrella and they deserve close scrutiny. René Girard's insights into the relationship between law, religion, culture and violence are helpful in identifying practical implications ofthe restorative vision and systemic weaknesses ofretribution, and perhaps illuminating a third way. The metaphor of an organ transplant may be useful: without a genetic match between host and donor both risk destruction. It is the thesis of this paper that that genetic material is a very inclusive conceptualization of "religion" which I have named "Ultimate Authority," drawing on Girard's mimetic theory for the theoretical analysis. In other words, "religion" is indeed, always and everywhere, a critical factor in culture-specific institutions ofjustice. A Girardian understanding ofthe relationship between Ultimate Authority and criminaljustice systems indicates that while there are valuable lessons to be learned from trans-cultural dialogue, wholesale transplants may not be possible, or even advisable because conditions essential for comparable success do not exist in Western legal culture. This paper first presents some background about Restorative Justice, followed by an outline ofRené Girard's mimetic theory to define "Ultimate Authority." The second half of the paper describes alternative adjudicatory processes which have attracted the attention of Restorative Justice advocates and concludes with suggestions about future directions for criminal justice policy discussion. Restorative Justice is a movement which drew its initial energy from Civil Rights era non-violent social action. It has found avid supporters among those whose activism for socialjustice is faith-based as well as those whose activism is rooted in more secular communitarian ideologies. Perhaps because of its international following, a significant contribution ofthe movement has been to initiate trans-cultural dialogue about criminal justice, fostering an increased use of alternative dispute resolution techniques, primarily mediation. Restorative Justice doctrine insists that all crime is personal, evidence ofa broken relationship between victim, offender, and community. Restoring "right relationship" between all parties is both a moral and legal obligation; "justice" to be just must go well beyond addressing the specifics of the act which effected the break. In contrast, the focus of The Role ofAn Ultimate Authority81 retributive justice appears abstract, procedural, and narrow in pursuit of impartiality or neutrality, the ideal of Blind Justice.2 Howard Zehr, a consultant on criminal justice and a Canadian Mennonite who wrote the classic Restorative Justice primer, Changing Lenses: A New Focusfor Crime andJustice, describes the retributive criminaljustice process as "a drama between two abstractions," meaning a criminal and a victim, where the "victim" is even further abstracted... (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to propose a framework for the structure of persuasive communica-tion based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model by Petty and Cacioppo, the Inference Anchoring Theory by Budzynska and Reed and the Interpersonal Argumentation Model by Budzynska. The ELM suggests that there are two routes to persuasion: central and peripheral. IAT assumes that com-munication acts generate their contents and inferences by means of illocutionary connections. The model of IP-argumentation provides the general representation of arguments (...) in which the proponent refers to com-munication acts of some participant of communication. The paper discusses where exactly means of the central and peripheral routes operate in the structure of persuasive communication and argumentation. (shrink)

Our usual view of the Renaissance poetic, as we derive it from the explicit statements which we normally cite, sees it primarily as a rhetorical theory which is essentially Platonic in the universal meanings behind individual words, images, or fictions. Accordingly, poetic words, images, or fictions are taken to be purely allegorical, functioning as arbitrary or at most as conventional signs: each word, image, or fiction is seen as thoroughly dispensable, indeed interchangeable with others, to be used just so long (...) as we can get beyond it to the ultimate meaning which it presumably signifies. This rather simple—if not simplistic—semiology leaves the body of poetry as empty as modern post-Saussurean linguistics often leaves the body of language. By treating all poetic devices as transparent elements through which various universal "truths" are revealed, the rhetorical/allegorical theory converts all the poet's dispositions of words into devices of persuasion on the service of a function higher than that of poetry. Such is the way that, for example, a conservative, widely influential theorist like Scaliger clearly formulated the principle. And for as careful a commentator on Renaissance imagery as Rosemund Tuve, these are the farthest reaches of the Renaissance poetic; she argues that any more subtle a claim is merely the consequence of the modern mind trying anachronistically to sophisticate an older tradition. Her examination of explicit statements by major Renaissance writers on poetics finds reinforcement in the logic of Petrus Ramus as she extends it to a total stylistics, or even to a linguistics.1 · 1. Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics . Murray Krieger, University Professor of English and director of The Irvine School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of, among other works, The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, and, most recently, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System. The present essay is part of his book, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory. "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

In order for a state to rightfully exercise self-determination by means of setting policies concerning migrants and migration, they must be legitimate, Gillian Brock argues in _Justice for People on the Move_. Legitimacy, in Brock’s view, requires that states satisfy three (jointly sufficient) conditions: they must respect their own citizens’ human rights; they must be a part of a legitimate state system; and they must adequately contribute to the maintenance of this state system. In her new book, Brock also (...) argues persuasively for a variety of migration-related policies that states ought to adopt (concerning, for example, addressing the needs of refugees, regularization of undocumented migrants, and protections for temporary labor migrants). In previous work (Brock, _Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account_, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009; Brock and Blake, _Debating Brain Drain: May Governments Restrict Emigration?_, Oxford University Press, New York, 2015), Brock has compellingly defended the justice of policies designed to allay the harmful effects of brain drain. In this commentary, I wish to argue that the legitimacy standard Brock defends in _Justice for People on the Move_ is an obstacle to the justified adoption of the migration-related policies Brock demonstrates here and in previous work to be substantively morally justified, if not required by justice. If a state is not legitimate, then it lacks the moral standing to adopt migration policies that are otherwise morally justified. I do not intend to question the importance of the concept of state legitimacy for political philosophy generally. However, I wish to argue that that in the context of migration justice, considerations of state legitimacy may be contrary to the goal of defending a view on what policies a state ought to adopt. It may be more useful simply to consider whether or not there is moral justification for a particular state to adopt a particular policy. (shrink)

With the ternary relationship of influence and cooperation between sign, object, and its interpreter in the semiotic rapport as a starting point, the present study aims to capture the “productive tension” of semiotics and communication in the Japanese advertising discourse. The advertisement, considered a semiotic system which ranks the fundamental functions of language in a particular manner, searches for new methods of communication, of message production, directing the sign towards the symbolic space of communication. In trying to measure this symbolic (...) fund of mass communication, the following text wishes to argue, from the perspective of rhetoric and cultural semiotics, that in the Japanese advertising message which is not transmitted mechanically between speaker and listener, one may recognise a model of impressiveness alongside a model of stimulation or of insertion . Also, calling on “syncretic” semiotics, this research devoted to the Japanese advertising discourse wishes to probe the way in which meaning is constructed through the act of signification resulted from the interaction of the verbal sentence with procedures and strategies that manifest themselves in several types of language, such as the visual, auditory, gestural, etc. (shrink)

The meaning of 'most' can be described in many ways. We offer a framework for distinguishing semantic descriptions, interpreted as psychological hypotheses that go beyond claims about sentential truth conditions, and an experiment that tells against an attractive idea: 'most' is understood in terms of one-to-one correspondence. Adults evaluated 'Most of the dots are yellow', as true or false, on many trials in which yellow dots and blue dots were displayed for 200 ms. Displays manipulated the ease of using a (...) 'one-to-one with remainder' strategy, and a strategy of using the Approximate Number System to compare of (approximations of) cardinalities. Interpreting such data requires care in thinking about how meaning is related to verification. But the results suggest that 'most' is understood in terms of cardinality comparison, even when counting is impossible. (shrink)

Standard adaptive control is the preferred approach for stabilization and synchronization of chaotic systems when the structure of such systems is a priori known but the parameters are unknown. However, in the presence of unmodeled dynamics and/or disturbance, this approach is not effective anymore due to the drift of the parameter estimations, which eventually causes the instability of the closed-loop system. In this paper, a robustifying term, which consists of a saturation function, is used to avoid this problem. The robustifying (...) term is added to the adaptive control law. Consequently, the learning law is also modified. The boundedness of the states and the parameter estimations is rigorously and thoroughly proven by means of Lyapunov like analysis based on Barbalat’s lemma. On these new conditions, the convergence to zero cannot be achieved due to the presence of unmodeled dynamics and/or disturbance. However, it is still possible to guarantee the asymptotic convergence to a bounded zone around zero. The width of this zone can be adjusted by the designer. The performance of this robust approach is verified by numerical simulations. Although, for simplicity, this strategy is only applied to the stabilization and synchronization of Zhang system, the procedure can easily be generalized to a broad class of chaotic systems. (shrink)

Émile Meyerson (1859–1933) is an epistemologist, in the French meaning of the term: he himself introduced the word in French as a synonymous for “philo- sophy of science” in his major book of 1908 Identity and Reality. First educated as a chemist, Meyerson discovered philosophy while reading Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. However, he strongly rejected Comte’s positivism: metaphysics, he said, penetrates science and even common sense; men, whether they are scien- tists or not, are interested in finding a (...) cause behind the stream of phenomena. This anti-positivism is justified in so far as Meyerson used the same method and pursued the same goal as Comte: the philosopher must practice an “a posteriori analysis of the products of thought”, so as to determine the laws of human mind. Consequently, Meyerson’s work is not a mere philosophy of science, it is more than an “épistémolo- gie” in the French sense. Its ambition is to reach the intellectual basis of all thought. The philosopher can resort to the resources of metaphysics to reach the psychologi- cal foundations of humanity, when he reflects on the historical products of thought. He establishes the transcendent or metaphysical logic involved in the process of thought. Meyerson’s work consequently deserves the name its author eventually gave to it in his posthumous Essais: a “philosophy of intellect”. But is such a philoso- phy wide enough to embrace the meaning of all the products of human thought? It seems that Meyerson was embarrassed and limited by his very starting point, namely Comte’s system. I argue that scientific or common conceptions may need more than the anti-positivist claim of the preservation of one substance behind phenomena. Truth to tell, men generally tend to identify a large and rich configuration of causes or substances. Only such architectonics can give an idea of what people mean by invoking their “vision of the world”. (shrink)

In 2012, we published a computational automaton, based on the most comprehensive gene regulatory network (GRN) model yet available (Peter, Faure, and Davidson 2012). This model had been synthesized over the previous years from extensive experimental studies on specification mechanisms in the endomesodermal territories of the sea urchin embryo. The GRN model explicitly indicated the dynamically changing interactions occurring at the cis-regulatory control sequences of almost 50 genes, mostly encoding transcription factors (the proteins that specifically recognize cis-regulatory DNA sequence and (...) cause expression or inactivity of the genes these sequences control). The GRN model encompasses all regulatory genes .. (shrink)

It’s often claimed that some people—fundamentalists or fanatics—are indeed sealed off from rational criticism. And every month new pop psychology books appear, describing the dumb ways ordinary people make decisions, as revealed by psychological experiments. The conclusion is that all or most people are fundamentally irrational. -/- Ray Scott Percival sets out to demolish the whole notion of the closed mind and of human irrationality. There is a difference between making mistakes and being irrational. Though humans are prone to mistakes, (...) they remain rational. In fact, making mistakes is a sign of rationality: a totally non-rational entity could not make a mistake. -/- Rationality does not mean absence of error; it means the possibility of correcting error in the light of criticism. In this sense, all human beliefs are rational: they are all vulnerable to being abandoned when shown to be faulty. -/- Percival agrees that people cling stubbornly to their beliefs, but he maintains, first, that not being too ready to abandon one’s beliefs is rational, and second, that people do not cling to their beliefs indefinitely or “come what may.” The illusion that they do can be dispelled by examining what really goes on in the formation and abandonment of beliefs, and here we need to observe the high rate of turnover in membership of ideological movements, as well as their numerous splits and schisms. -/- Percival examines and refutes the arguments of writers who have upheld the Irrationality or Closed Mind thesis, including Raymond Boudon, Serge Chakotin, Richard Dawkins, Jon Elster, Ernest Gellner, Adolf Hitler, Leszek Kolakowski, Walter Laqueur, Gustav Le Bon, Karl Popper, and Max Weber. -/- A key aspect of Percival’s approach is to identify “the persuader’s predicament,” the situational logic of the propagandist. Percival contends that a propagandist is faced with a trade-off between his message being closed to criticism and the message reaching and converting as many people as possible. It is possible to make a belief system more closed to criticism, but only by limiting the wide dissemination of the system. Percival illustrates the way belief systems adapt to criticism by an examination of two ideologies, Marxism and Freudianism, and by various examples drawn from the history of religion. (shrink)

This paper proposes a model for implementation of intrinsic natural language sentence meaning in a physical language understanding system, where 'intrinsic' is understood as 'independent of meaning ascription by system-external observers'. The proposal is that intrinsic meaning can be implemented as a point attractor in the state space of a nonlinear dynamical system with feedback which is generated by temporally sequenced inputs. It is motivated by John Searle's well known (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3: 417–57, 1980) critique of the then-standard (...) and currently still influential computational theory of mind (CTM), the essence of which was that CTM representations lack intrinsic meaning because that meaning is dependent on ascription by an observer_._ The proposed dynamical model comprises a collection of interacting artificial neural networks, and constitutes a radical simplification of the principle of compositional phrase structure which is at the heart of the current standard view of sentence semantics because it is computationally interpretable as a finite state machine. (shrink)

One of the main characteristics of this phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the resort by Palestinian groups to suicidal terror. This paper focuses on the unique nature of suicidal terror, since, I believe, it is this kind of terror that presents the most immanent threat to the foundations of politics and law in the free world. The article begins with a phenomenological exploration of the effect of suicidal terror on politics in Israel, inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt. (...) It presents the various manifestations of the suicidal terror as a new Paradigm of Violence. This new paradigm poses a great threat on politics: as the terrorists waive their effort to stay alive, deterrence becomes useless; the Israeli politics, in response, redraws the boundaries of the collective according to demographic lines; the feelings of helplessness reduces politics to personal tragedies giving up on normative arguments and long term policies. Compassion replaces persuasion. The attempt of an organized army to respond effectively to suicidal terror is ridden by the dilemma of effectiveness-legitimacy, that is, the more the response is effective, the more difficult it becomes to retain the distinction between the actions of the army and the actions of the terrorist. Moreover, during the attempt to bring the actions of the army to the review of the court, the legal system itself is infected by the same dilemma. The article examines the response of the Israeli Supreme Court to several petitions that questioned the legality of the means employed by the IDF in its fight against terror. These cases provide a unique opportunity to examine the way in which terror infiltrates into the very legal system that is called upon to respond to it, mainly by changing the legal language. The question that guides my discussion is what effect terror exerts on politics and law, and can law provide a way to resist the destructive influence of terror on the political system. (shrink)

BackgroundThe pharmaceutical market in Bangladesh is highly concentrated. Due to high competition aggressive marketing strategies are adopted for greater market share, which sometimes cross limit. There is lack of data on this aspect in Bangladesh. This exploratory study aimed to fill this gap by investigating current promotional practices of the pharmaceutical companies including the role of their medical representatives.MethodsThis qualitative study was conducted as part of a larger study to explore the status of governance in health sector in 2009. Data (...) were collected from Dhaka, Chittagong and Bogra districts through in-depth interview, observation, and round table discussion.ResultsFindings reveal a highly structured system geared to generate prescriptions and ensure market share instituted by the pharmaceuticals. A comprehensive training curriculum for the MRs prepares the newly recruited science graduates for generating enough prescriptions by catering to the identified needs and demands of the physicians expressed or otherwise, and thus grab higher market-share for the companies they represent. Approaches such as inducements, persuasion, emotional blackmail, serving family members, etc. are used. The type, quantity and quality of inducements offered to the physicians depend upon his/her capacity to produce prescriptions. The popular physicians are cultivated meticulously by the MRs to establish brand loyalty and fulfill individual and company targets. The physicians, willingly or unwillingly, become part of the system with few exceptions. Neither the regulatory authority nor the professional or consumer rights bodies has any role to control or ractify the process.ConclusionsThe aggressive marketing of the pharmaceutical companies compel their MRs, programmed to maximize market share, to adopt unethical means if and when necessary. When medicines are prescribed and dispensed more for financial interests than for needs of the patients, it reflects system’s failed ability to hold individuals and entities accountable for adhering to basic professional ethics, code of conduct, and statutory laws. (shrink)

Mediating the meaning of evidence through epistemological diversityNursing's disciplinary recognition of ‘multiple ways of knowing’ reflects an epistemological diversity that supports nursing praxis. Nursing as praxis offers a conceptual way to explore what it is about the interface of practice, knowledge and evidence in nursing that distinguishes us as a discipline. I suggest that the relationship between evidence and knowledge is defined and mediated by the same epistemological diversity that supports nursing as praxis. Just as the meaning and truth‐value of (...) evidence is evaluated from within the body of existing disciplinary knowledge, new evidence may prompt an evaluation of the meaning and truth‐value of extant nursing knowledge. Nursing practice that relies on scientific evidence as a singular basis of practice knowledge is susceptible to exploitation by the diverse agendas operating within an ideology of evidence‐based practice and the healthcare system. Mediating the meaning of evidence for nursing practice through acknowledgement of the diverse epistemologies that underpin nursing knowledge will contribute to a disciplinary‐specific definition of what constitutes evidence for nursing, and will better direct how evidence is integrated into a disciplinary body of knowledge. (shrink)

Background: Troubled conscience among nurses and other healthcare workers represents a significant contributor to healthcare worker moral distress, burnout and attrition. While research in this area has examined critical care in hospitals, less knowledge has been obtained from long-term care contexts such as nursing homes, despite widely recognised challenges with regard to vulnerable patients, increasing workload and maintaining workforce sustainability among nurses. Objective: The aim of this study was to illuminate and interpret the meaning of the lived experience of troubled (...) conscience among registered nurses (RNs) working in nursing homes. Research design: This qualitative research employed narrative interviews with eight nurses to obtain essential meanings of their lived experiences of troubled conscience. The interview texts were analysed using a phenomenological hermeneutic approach. Ethical considerations: Participation was voluntary, informed and was conducted with written consent. The Norwegian Centre for Research Data approved the data processing of personal data. Findings: The analysis uncovered two themes: (1) troubled conscience means abandoning ideals, with the subthemes: failing dependent patients; being disloyal to colleagues; being inadequate in the performance of work tasks and (2) troubled conscience means facing realities, with the subthemes: accepting being part of the system; responding to barriers. Discussion: Troubled conscience meant experiencing continuous and simmering tension between one’s ideals and realities and feeling a drive to preserve accountability and one’s moral integrity. Endangered ideals were often under cross-pressure and included humanistic values, professional values, working life values and the values of the organisation. Conclusion: Nurses’ troubled conscience refers to a struggle, but also a force that plays out at various levels and arenas in long-term care. Openness and dialogue about how professional values and the welfare state’s intentions can be realised within the given framework are important for individual nurses’ occupational health as well as the quality of care provided to patients. (shrink)

Recently a new attempt to go beyond QM was performed in the form of so-called prequantum classical statistical field theory (PCSFT). In this approach quantum systems are described by classical random fields, e.g., the electron field or the neutron field. Averages of quantum observables arise as approximations of averages of classical variables (functionals of “prequantum fields”) with respect to fluctuations of fields. For classical variables given by quadratic functionals of fields, quantum and prequantum averages simply coincide. In this paper we (...) generalize PCSFT to the composite quantum system. The main discovery is that, opposite to a rather common opinion, a composite system can be described by the Cartesian product of state spaces (like in classical physics) and not by the tensor product of them (like in conventional QM). A natural interpretation of the quantum pure state for a composite system is proposed: it is the nondiagonal block in the covariance matrix of the random field describing a composite system. The interpretation of a pure state due to Dirac and von Neumann seems to be an artifact of the conventional mathematical description of micro-systems. PCSFT provides a new possibility for interpretation of entanglement. (shrink)

The paper explores how several commissions of inquiry established in Quebec, Canada, have, over time, contributed in redefining the meaning of quality in health-care and its management. Adopting an interpretive analysis of commissions’ reports, the paper examines the particular ‘conceptual boxes’ used by their members to tackle quality and the embedded nature of their work. It is shown that although quality was always considered, this was generally done by bringing into focus specific quality domains and issues, some new, others not (...) so new. In addition, the various management approaches to quality featured in the reports were informed by evolving templates; although this evolution was not as straight and unwavering as some retrospective studies of quality in health-care seem to indicate. A common thread to all commissions is the fact that, beyond the definition of general principles, responsibility for quality oversight was not clearly assigned and criteria on whether quality initiatives should be voluntary or compulsory were often left unspecified. Further, quality was never regarded by the commissions as a strategic aspect of health-care. It is speculated that these failings on the part of commissions may partly explain the unassertive course of action taken by the provincial government in the area. (shrink)