Ernest Gellner was a multilingual polymath who set the agenda in the study of nationalism and the sociology of Islam for an entire generation of academics and students. This definitive biography follows his trajectory from his early years in Prague, Paris and England to international success as a philosopher and public intellectual. Known both for his highly integrated philosophy of modernity and for combining a respect for nationalism with an appreciation for science, Gellner was passionate in his defence of reason (...) against every for of relativism. (shrink)

This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism, all of which have traditionally been associated with (...) substance ontology. We illustrate the consequences of embracing an ontology of processes in biology by considering some of its implications for physiology, genetics, evolution, and medicine. And we attempt to locate the subsequent chapters of the book in relation to the position we defend. (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of generalizations, (...) not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

This book offers geographical perspectives on the condition of the United States at the outset of the twenty-first century. It compares the American ideals of liberty, equality, individual opportunity, and social improvement with the contemporary condition of the regions, states and localities - the ideal American space with its reality as a place. It uses the public standard provided by the official ideology of the United States to see how well things are really going. The authors consider the contrast between (...) ideal and reality at local, state, and national levels in education, health, and welfare, in community, race, gender, and class relations, in economic and industrial development, and in the use and exploitation of America's landscape. Each chapter addresses the issues through evidence of long-term and recent trends, and grounds its arguments in information. American Space/American Place provides a series of compelling insights into the current condition of American society, its natural environment, and its place within the world. (shrink)

Broad in scope and edited by two massive names in geography, this is a critical exploration of how the field has emerged and fared over the course of its modern institutionalization.

Analysing film. Distinguishing the filmic contribution to meaning -- Examples of filmic "textual organisation" -- Redrawing boundaries -- Organisation of the book -- Semiotics and documents. Semiotics and its relations to film -- The nature of discourse semantics -- The film as cinematographic document -- A combined view: filmic documents for filmic discourse -- Constructing the semiotic mode of film. Semiotic multimodality -- The internal organisation of semiotic strata -- Composing and combining semiotic modes -- Materiality and "epistemological commitment" -- (...) Christian Metz and the grande syntagmatique of the image track. The original model -- Two examples of analysis with the grande syntagmatique -- Revisions and rebuttals -- Foundations for analysis: filmic units. The basic units of film: preliminaries -- Audiovisual iconic representations -- Perception, perceptual realism and reliable measurement -- Multiplicity: from perception to discourse -- Filmic units revisited: discourse-motivated definitions -- The paradigmatic organisation of film. Beyond Metz: towards a grande paradigmatique -- Capturing discourse dependency structures in film -- The paradigmatic dimensions of projection, taxis and plane -- Two examples of paradigmatic analysis -- Summary and conclusions. (shrink)

This volume is a state-of-the-art review of the evidence and theory supporting the existence and significance of automatic processes in our daily lives, with chapters by the leading researchers in this field today.

"The world's leading expert on the unconscious mind reveals the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior. For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has been conducting revolutionary research into the unconscious mind--not Freud's dark, malevolent unconscious but the new unconscious, a helpful and powerful part of the mind that we can access and understand through experimental science. Now Dr. Bargh presents an engaging and enlightening tour of the influential psychological forces that are at (...) work as we go about our daily lives--checking a dating app, holding a cup of hot coffee, or getting a flu shot. Dr. Bargh takes you into his labs at New York University and Yale where his ingenious experiments have shown how the unconscious guides our actions, goals and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction. He reveals the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind on who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more. Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as tricks to help you remember to-do items, shop smarter, and sleep better. Before You Know It will profoundly change the way you understand yourself by introducing you to a fascinating world only recently discovered, the world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving."--Jacket. (shrink)

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...) its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 4, Page 971-985, August 2021.

Schumaker (philosophy, science and technology department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) examines how the terms of posture encompass all the major disciplines and investigates a variety of philosophical topics: abstract thought, ...

Our experience of the physical world around us, and of the social environments in which we function, is increasingly mediated by information and communication technology, which is itself evolving ever more rapidly and pervasively. This book presents a coherent and detailed account of why we experience feelings of being present in the physical world and in computer-mediated environments, why we often don't, and why it matters - for design, psychotherapy, tool use and social creativity amongst other practical applications. Since the (...) extent to which presence is experienced in a technology-mediated interactive context can be manipulated by design, and in almost unlimited ways, we can use explorations with mediated presence to provide new insights into the psychology of presence in both the physical and technology-mediated worlds. (shrink)

Word Order Universals is a detailed account of word order universals and their role in theories of historical change. The starting point is the Greenberg data set, which is comprised of a sample of 142 languages for certain limited co-occurrences of basic word orders, and a 30-language sample for more detailed information. In the Language Index, the 142 have been expanded to some 350 languages. Using the original Greenberg samples and the Expanded Sample, an alternative set of descriptive word order (...) statements is provided. Comprised of eight chapters, this book begins with an introduction to the theory of word order universals, encompassing topics such as word order variation across languages and theories of universal grammar. The reader is then introduced to the work of Joseph Greenberg and Theo Vennemann on word order universals; implicational universals in Greenberg's data and the Expanded Sample; and the predictions made by implicational and distributional universals for word order change. Reformulated universals for historical reconstruction are also discussed, along with some laws of reconstruction derived from synchronic universals. The final chapter is devoted to the Expanded Sample, with particular reference to its quantities as well as its typological and genetic classification. This monograph will be a useful resource for specialists in grammar and linguistics. (shrink)

This article examines the role of emotion experience in both rational action and self-knowledge. A key distinction is made between emotion experiences of which we are unaware, and those of which we are aware. The former motivate action and color our view of the world, but they do not do so in a rational way, and their nonreflective nature obscures self-understanding. The article provides arguments and evidence to support the view that emotion experiences contribute to rational action only if one (...) is appropriately aware of them (because only then does one have the capacity to inhibit one's emotional reactions). Furthermore, it is argued that awareness of emotion increases self-knowledge because it is a source of information about our biases. (shrink)

Paraphrase is ubiquitous in philosophy, especially in discussions about ontological commitment. But should it be? Paraphrases are seldom accompanied by evidence that would convince, say, a linguist that the paraphrase and the paraphrased sentence have the same meaning. Indeed, from the perspective of linguistics, many paraphrases would seem to be nothing but bad jokes. For this reason, many philosophers have become deeply suspicious about paraphrase. I ague in this paper that this worry is misguided--that successful paraphrases do not need to (...) preserve semantic content, and that the way that paraphrase has been used in Quinean meta-ontology, and philosophical inquiry more generally, corresponds, at least roughly, to the way it should be used. (shrink)

It is inevitable that some inmates in large state prison systems will suffer from terminal conditions and die while incarcerated. But how those inmates experience that event is primarily controlled by correctional policies and by the prison medical and correctional staff assigned to their care. Compassion for inmates who are dying cannot be legislated or mandated, but humane and compassionate care for the dying can be facilitated or thwarted by legislative and correctional policies, and by the manner in which correctional (...) personnel interpret those policies.Death in New York State prisons is a frequent event, occurring at a rate substantially higher than that in most other states. With a prison population that has risen to 70,000 inmates and with the nation’s highest rate of human immunodeficiency virus infection, more than 2,817 inmates died in New York prisons during the period 1990-1998. In April 1992, in the face of an ever-increasing death rate in its prisons, the New York State legislature passed the Medical Parole Law, a measure designed to permit dying inmates to be released on parole prior to their normal release eligibility date. (shrink)

It is inevitable that some inmates in large state prison systems will suffer from terminal conditions and die while incarcerated. But how those inmates experience that event is primarily controlled by correctional policies and by the prison medical and correctional staff assigned to their care. Compassion for inmates who are dying cannot be legislated or mandated, but humane and compassionate care for the dying can be facilitated or thwarted by legislative and correctional policies, and by the manner in which correctional (...) personnel interpret those policies.Death in New York State prisons is a frequent event, occurring at a rate substantially higher than that in most other states. With a prison population that has risen to 70,000 inmates and with the nation’s highest rate of human immunodeficiency virus infection, more than 2,817 inmates died in New York prisons during the period 1990-1998. In April 1992, in the face of an ever-increasing death rate in its prisons, the New York State legislature passed the Medical Parole Law, a measure designed to permit dying inmates to be released on parole prior to their normal release eligibility date. (shrink)

As genomic science has evolved, so have policy and practice debates about how to describe and evaluate the ways in which genomic information is treated for individuals, institutions, and society. The term genetic exceptionalism, describing the concept that genetic information is special or unique, and specifically different from other kinds of medical information, has been utilized widely, but often counterproductively in these debates. We offer genomic contextualism as a new term to frame the characteristics of genomic science in the debates. (...) Using stasis theory to draw out the important connection between definitional issues and resulting policies, we argue that the framework of genomic contextualism is better suited to evaluating genomics and its policy-relevant features to arrive at more productive discussion and resolve policy debates. (shrink)

This new and revised edition provides a comprehensive dictionary of Indian philosophical terms. Terms are provided in both devanagari and roman transliteration along with their English translations.

The notion of Simulative Reasoning in the study of propositional attitudes within Artificial Intelligence (AI) is strongly related to the Simulation Theory of mental ascription in Philosophy. Roughly speaking, when an AI system engages in Simulative Reasoning about a target agent, it reasons with that agent’s beliefs as temporary hypotheses of its own, thereby coming to conclusions about what the agent might conclude or might have concluded. The contrast is with non-simulative meta-reasoning, where the AI system reasons within a detailed (...) theory about the agent’s (conjectured) reasoning acts. The motive within AI for preferring Simulative Reasoning is that it is more convenient and efficient, because of a simplification of the representations and reasoning processes. The chapter discusses this advantage in detail. It also sketches the use of Simulative Reasoning in an AI natural language processing system, ATT-Meta, that is currently being implemented. This system is directed at the understanding of propositional attitude reports. In ATT-Meta, Simulative Reasoning is yoked to a somewhat independent set of ideas about how attitude reports should be treated. Central here are the claims that (a) speakers often employ commonsense (and largely metaphorical) models of mind in describing agents’ attitudes, (b) the listener accordingly needs often to reason within the terms of such models, rather than on the basis of any objectively justifiable characterization of the mind, and (c) the commonsense models filter the suggestions that Simulative Reasoning comes up with concerning target agents’ reasoning conclusions. There is a yet tighter connection between the commonsense models and the Simulative Reasoning. It turns out that Simulative Reasoning can be rationally reconstructed in terms of a more general type of reasoning about the possibly-counterfactual “world” that the target agent believes in, together with an assumption that that agent has a faithful representation of the world. In the ATT-Meta approach, the reasoner adopts that assumption when it views the target agent through a particular commonsense model (called IDEAS-AS-MODELS). (shrink)