Der kürzlich verstorbene US-amerikanische Soziologe Robert K. Merton war der prominenteste und einflußreichste Anomie-Theoretiker nach Emile Durkheim. Seine Typologie der Arten individueller Anpassung an anomische gesellschaftliche Situationen bietet heute noch eine wertvolle Grundlage zur Analyse von Gesellschaften. Dieser Beitrag konzentriert sich auf einen dieser Anpassungstypen, den Ritualismus, der Merton zufolge beinhaltet, daß einerseits die kulturellen Ziele, allen voran das des wirtschaftlichen Wohlstands, heruntergeschraubt oder aufgegeben und andererseits die institutionellen Normen zur Erreichung dieser Ziele beinahe zwanghaft befolgt werden. Diese Definition überdenkend (...) versucht der vorliegende Beitrag herauszuarbeiten, daß innerhalb des Systems der Anpassungsformen das Herunterschrauben der kulturellen Ziele nicht das Hauptcharakteristikum ritualistischen, sondern konformen Verhaltens darstellt. Ritualisten haben den Prozeß des Herunterschraubens vielmehr bereits beendet, indem sie jegliche kulturellen Ziele aufgegeben haben, bis auf den einen Wert an sich, nämlich die institutionellen Regeln einzuhalten.Ritualistische Anpassung ist aus Merton`s Sicht für die Soziologie abweichenden Verhaltens, ganz zu schweigen von den Kriminalwissenschaften, nicht von Interesse. Im Gegensatz zu dieser Einschätzung versucht dieser Artikel die verschiedenen soziologischen und sogar kriminologischen Implikationen ritualistischen Verhaltens darzustellen, mit dem Ergebnis, daß Ritualismus sehr wohl ein soziales Problem darstellt. Der Ritualist unterwirft sich nicht nur selbst den institutionellen Normen, sondern fühlt sich auch dazu berufen, andere ständig an die Einhaltung der Regeln zu gemahnen und sie zu überwachen. Deshalb gibt es viele typisch ritualistische Formen abweichenden Verhaltens, wie Denunziation, erzieherischer Tadel oder Mobbing, die sogar in kriminelles Verhalten wie falsche Verdächtigung, Nötigung oder Beleidigung kulminieren können.Am schillerndsten ist die Rolle des Ritualisten in der Kriminalpolitik, nicht zuletzt heute in der Bundesrepublik. Repression jeglicher Art ist seine Antwort auf Regelverstöße und die Kriminalpolitik macht zunehmend Zugeständnisse an ritualistische Forderungen nach härterer und schnellerer Bestrafung oder umfassender Überwachung des öffentlichen Raumes. Ritualisten dominieren den sozialen Diskurs und die allgemeine Wahrnehmung von Kriminalität nicht nur, weil sie wichtige Nutzer und damit Zielgruppe gewisser Massenmedien sind und gerne Leserbriefe schreiben. Sie sind so dominant, weil ihre Art der Anpassung bei zunehmender wirtschaftlicher Krise die Konformität der Wirtschaftswunderzeit zurückgedrängt hat und heute die am weitesten verbreitete in der deutschen Gesellschaft ist. Daher ist auch die schon seit Jahrzehnten zu beobachtende Verschiebung der theoretischen Strafzweckbegründung hin zur Positiven Generalprävention alles andere als ein Zufall. The recently deceased US-sociologist Robert K. Merton has been the most prominent and influential anomie theorist since Emile Durkheim. His typology of modes of adaptation to anomic social situations still constitutes a valuable basis for analyzing society. This contribution focuses on one of these types of adaptation, ritualism, which according to Merton, involves the scaling down or abandoning of the cultural goals, above all economic wealth, on the one hand and to abide almost compulsively by institutional norms to attain these goals on the other. In reconsidering this definition, this contribution attempts to elaborate that within the system of adaptive modes scaling down does not describe the main characteristic of ritualistic behaviour, but first of all characterizes conformity. Ritualists, on the contrary, have already completed the process of scaling down by finally abandoning any cultural goal except the one end-in-itself, that is to comply with the institutional rules.Ritualistic adaptation, in Merton`s view, is of no interest to the sociology of deviant behaviour, not to mention criminal sciences. In contrast to this evaluation this contribution tries to delineate the various sociological and even criminological implications of ritualistic behaviour, leading to the conclusion that Ritualism does indeed present a social problem. The ritualist does not only surrender himself to the institutional means but feels competent to constantly reminding others of abiding by the institutional norms and supervising them. Hence there are many typically ritualistic forms of deviant behaviour like denunciation, disciplinary reproof or mobbing that may even culminate in criminal behaviour like false suspicion, duress or insult.Most ambiguous is the ritualist`s part in criminal policy, not at least in contemporary Germany. Repression of any kind is his answer to breaches of the rules and criminal policy more and more concedes to ritualistic demands for more severe and rapid punishment or extensive supervision of public facilities. Ritualists dominate the social discourse and general perception of criminality, not only because they are important users and therefore the target group of certain mass media, and like to write letters to the editor. They do dominate because in times of increasing economic crisis their mode of adaptation has forced back the conformity of the German economic miracle era and is now the most common one in contemporary German society. Thus, the shift in the theoretical justification of punishment towards a theory of positive general prevention, noticeable for decades, is anything but accidental. (shrink)

In a time which it is not amiss to term “the Dark Ages of logic”, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause stayed not only true to logic but actually did something for its advancement. Besides making systematic use of Venn-diagrams long before Venn, Krause — once more taking his inspiration from Leibniz — propounded what appears to be the first completely symbolic systematic representation of logical forms, strongly suggestive of the powerful symbolic languages that have become the mainstay of logic since the (...) beginning of the 20th century. However, Krause’s limits in logic are also clearly visible: Krause’s method in logic is, in the main, not axiomatic; it is combinatorial. More importantly, Krause remained entirely within the confines of traditional syllogistics, neglecting propositional logic and, of course, first-order relational terms. (shrink)

David K. Chan wants to save the DDE from the considerable criticism levelled against it, by making the moral distinction it refers to rest on a difference in desire instead of in intention. I argue that the revised version, too, is counter-intuitive and confuses the blameworthiness of an actor with the wrongness of the act. It also invites abuse instead of preventing it. Besides, Chan's DDE omits three of the four criteria of the traditional DDE, and it is couched in (...) terms of lesser objectionability, while the traditional DDE is couched in terms of permission. Therefore, Chan's DDE has so little in common with the traditional DDE that it should not even count as a revised version of it. (shrink)

Contents: K. Ludeking, The Body and the Letters Albrecht Durer s self-portrait from 1500; E. Osterkamp, Spartacus under the Germans on the history of a literary legacy; F. Forster-Hahn, German, Modern and Jewish Max Liebermann s 1906 exhibitions in Berlin and London; U. Haselstein, A Genealogy of Modernity Flaubert, Cezanne, and Gertrude Stein; C. Asendurf, Bodies in Force Fields Art War and Spatial Theory in Classical Modernity.".

The idea that all human beings have equal moral worth has been challenged by insisting that this is utterly counter-intuitive in the case of individuals like, for instance, Hitler on the one hand and Schweitzer on the other. This seems to be confirmed by a hypothetical in which one can only save one of the two: intuitively, one clearly should save Schweitzer, not Hitler, even if Hitler does not pose a threat anymore. The most natural interpretation of this intuition appeals (...) to unequal moral worth. Jeremy Waldron has recently tried to meet this challenge by giving a different interpretation, thereby trying to explain away the counter-intuitive implications of the basic equality doctrine in this case, and by suggesting that the rejection of basic equality comes with counter-intuitive implications of its own. I shall argue that Waldron’s response to the challenge fails on both counts. (shrink)

This article looks at the positioning of the aesthetic in microscopy to understand how it can be both side-lined and deployed. It considers the boundary between the pictorial and the notational in current microscopy practice and speculates on a space of mutual relation. Microscopy’s dual threads of capture for data analysis and capture for publication reveal complicated relationships and conflicted stances, reflective of a broader iconoclastic tendency in microscopy where the image as enacted perception is erased while the notation generated (...) and carried by these images is preserved. This article seeks to suggest a space in which phenomena are situated, materially embedded and emergent through imaging practices. I ground my position on experimental imaging of bacterial iridescence to consider the entanglement of microscopy’s living image with its processes of making-seen. Microscopy is instrumental in supporting descriptive-explanatory claims on biological life yet is also implicated in the generation of novel, hybrid phenomena and sensibilities. Exploring both tendencies exposes a microscopy of permeable membranes and suggests alternative orientations through microscopy practice and its images. (shrink)

Many ethical frameworks require artificial intelligence (AI) systems to be explainable. Explainable AI (XAI) models are frequently tested for their adequacy in user studies. Since different people may have different explanatory needs, it is important that participant samples in user studies are large enough to represent the target population to enable generalizations. However, it is unclear to what extent XAI researchers reflect on and justify their sample sizes or avoid broad generalizations across people. We analyzed XAI user studies (N = (...) 220) published between 2012 and 2022. Most studies did not offer rationales for their sample sizes. Moreover, most papers generalized their conclusions beyond their target population, and there was no evidence that broader conclusions in quantitative studies were correlated with larger samples. These methodological problems can impede evaluations of whether XAI systems implement the explainability called for in ethical frameworks. We outline principles for more inclusive XAI user studies. (shrink)

Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’. According to the account, confirmation (...) bias evolved because it helps us influence people and social structures so that they come to match our beliefs about them. This can result in significant developmental and epistemic benefits for us and other people, ensuring that over time we don’t become epistemically disconnected from social reality but can navigate it more easily. While that might not be the only evolved function of confirmation bias, it is an important one that has so far been neglected in the theorizing on the bias. (shrink)

abstract Can torture be morally justified? I shall criticise arguments that have been adduced against torture and demonstrate that torture can be justified more easily than most philosophers dealing with the question are prepared to admit. It can be justified not only in ticking nuclear bomb cases but also in less spectacular ticking bomb cases and even in the so‐called Dirty Harry cases. There is no morally relevant difference between self‐defensive killing of a culpable aggressor and torturing someone who is (...) culpable of a deadly threat that can be averted only by torturing him. Nevertheless, I shall argue that torture should not be institutionalised, for example by torture warrants. (shrink)

Scientists may sometimes generalize from their samples to broader populations when they have not yet sufficiently supported this generalization. Do such hasty generalizations also occur in experimental philosophy? To check, we analyzed 171 experimental philosophy studies published between 2017 and 2023. We found that most studies tested only Western populations but generalized beyond them without justification. There was also no evidence that studies with broader conclusions had larger, more diverse samples, but they nonetheless had higher citation impact. Our analyses reveal (...) important methodological limitations of many experimental philosophy studies and suggest that philosophical training may not protect against hasty generalizations. (shrink)

When scientists or science reporters communicate research results to the public, this often involves ethical and epistemic risks. One such risk arises when scientific claims cause cognitive or behavioural changes in the audience that contribute to the self-fulfilment of these claims. I argue that the ethical and epistemic problems that such self-fulfilment effects may pose are much broader and more common than hitherto appreciated. Moreover, these problems are often due to a specific psychological phenomenon that has been neglected in the (...) research on science communication: many people tend to conform to ‘descriptive norms’, that is, norms capturing (perceptions of) what others commonly do, think, or feel. Because of this tendency, science communication may frequently produce significant social harm. I contend that scientists have a responsibility to assess the risk of this potential harm and consider adopting strategies to mitigate it. I introduce one such strategy and argue that its implementation is independently well motivated by the fact that it helps improve scientific accuracy. (shrink)

The phenomenological approach to the philosophy of mind, as worked out by Husserl, has been severely criticized by philosophers within the Wittgensteinian tradition and, implicitly, by Wittgenstein himself. This book examines this criticism in detail, looking at the writings of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Hacker, Dennett, and others. In defending Husserl against his critics, it offers a comprehensive fresh view of phenomenology as a philosophy of mind.

Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems currently used for decision-making are opaque, i.e., the internal factors that determine their decisions are not fully known to people due to the systems’ computational complexity. In response to this problem, several researchers have argued that human decision-making is equally opaque and since simplifying, reason-giving explanations (rather than exhaustive causal accounts) of a decision are typically viewed as sufficient in the human case, the same should hold for algorithmic decision-making. Here, I contend that this argument (...) overlooks that human decision-making is sometimes significantly more transparent and trustworthy than algorithmic decision-making. This is because when people explain their decisions by giving reasons for them, this frequently prompts those giving the reasons to govern or regulate themselves so as to think and act in ways that confirm their reason reports. AI explanation systems lack this self-regulative feature. Overlooking it when comparing algorithmic and human decision-making can result in underestimations of the transparency of human decision-making and in the development of explainable AI that may mislead people by activating generally warranted beliefs about the regulative dimension of reason-giving. (shrink)

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to (...) very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline. (shrink)

In the philosophy of science, it is a common proposal that values are illegitimate in science and should be counteracted whenever they drive inquiry to the confirmation of predetermined conclusions. Drawing on recent cognitive scientific research on human reasoning and confirmation bias, I argue that this view should be rejected. Advocates of it have overlooked that values that drive inquiry to the confirmation of predetermined conclusions can contribute to the reliability of scientific inquiry at the group level even when they (...) negatively affect an individual’s cognition. This casts doubt on the proposal that such values should always be illegitimate in science. It also suggests that advocates of that proposal assume a narrow, individualistic account of science that threatens to undermine their own project of ensuring reliable belief formation in science. (shrink)

Some artificial intelligence systems can display algorithmic bias, i.e. they may produce outputs that unfairly discriminate against people based on their social identity. Much research on this topic focuses on algorithmic bias that disadvantages people based on their gender or racial identity. The related ethical problems are significant and well known. Algorithmic bias against other aspects of people’s social identity, for instance, their political orientation, remains largely unexplored. This paper argues that algorithmic bias against people’s political orientation can arise in (...) some of the same ways in which algorithmic gender and racial biases emerge. However, it differs importantly from them because there are strong social norms against gender and racial biases. This does not hold to the same extent for political biases. Political biases can thus more powerfully influence people, which increases the chances that these biases become embedded in algorithms and makes algorithmic political biases harder to detect and eradicate than gender and racial biases even though they all can produce similar harm. Since some algorithms can now also easily identify people’s political orientations against their will, these problems are exacerbated. Algorithmic political bias thus raises substantial and distinctive risks that the AI community should be aware of and examine. (shrink)

In an article entitled "Is BAD a semantic primitive?", John Myhill suggested that the concept 'bad' should be removed from the list of semantic primitives put forward by Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard. Myhill argued that 'bad' is semantically decomposable, that there is no word in Biblical Hebrew that corresponds to the English word bad and, thus, no linguistic form that represents the primitive BAD in this language, and that 'bad' is dispensable in the semantic analysis and can be replaced (...) with other components without any loss or change of meaning. Discussing and illustrating some fundamental questions in the search for universal semantic primitives, the present author reconsiders these findings and finds a different answer to John Myhill's question. (shrink)

It has been argued that implicit biases are operative in philosophy and lead to significant epistemic costs in the field. Philosophers working on this issue have focussed mainly on implicit gender and race biases. They have overlooked ideological bias, which targets political orientations. Psychologists have found ideological bias in their field and have argued that it has negative epistemic effects on scientific research. I relate this debate to the field of philosophy and argue that if, as some studies suggest, the (...) same bias also exists in philosophy then it will lead to hitherto unrecognised epistemic hazards in the field. Furthermore, the bias is epistemically different from the more familiar biases in respects that are important for epistemology, ethics, and metaphilosophy. (shrink)

Many scientists routinely generalize from study samples to larger populations. It is commonly assumed that this cognitive process of scientific induction is a voluntary inference in which researchers assess the generalizability of their data and then draw conclusions accordingly. We challenge this view and argue for a novel account. The account describes scientific induction as involving by default a generalization bias that operates automatically and frequently leads researchers to unintentionally generalize their findings without sufficient evidence. The result is unwarranted, overgeneralized (...) conclusions. We support this account of scientific induction by integrating a range of disparate findings from across the cognitive sciences that have until now not been connected to research on the nature of scientific induction. The view that scientific induction involves by default a generalization bias calls for a revision of the current thinking about scientific induction and highlights an overlooked cause of the replication crisis in the sciences. Commonly proposed interventions to tackle scientific overgeneralizations that may feed into this crisis need to be supplemented with cognitive debiasing strategies against generalization bias to most effectively improve science. (shrink)

Mitos ve Logos kavramları Antik Yunan uygarlığında söz kavramına karşılık gelen sözcükleri karşılamak için kullanılmıştır. Felsefe tarihinin başlangıcı için yapılan tanımlamalarda ise mitos kavramının yerine logos kavramının tercih edilmesi iki kavram arasında bir farklılığı ortaya koymak için yapılmaktadır. Bu ayrımın nedeni ise mitos’un daha çok dinsel içerikle anılması logos’un ise içerisinde bir tür akılsallık barındırması şeklindeki yorumlarda kendini göstermektedir. Ancak söz konusu ayrımın ilk doğa filozofu/ilk felsefeci olarak nitelendirilen Thales için geçerli olup olmadığı geçmişte olduğu gibi günümüzde de halen tartışılmaktadır. (...) Felsefe tarihi yazımlarında ilk sıraya konan Thales’in anılan kavramları gerçekten farklı şekilde yorumlayıp yorumlamadığı bizce de tartışmaya açık bir husustur. Bu açıdan bakıldığında Thales, söz konusu kavramları iki farklı problemler alanı olarak mı görmüştür? Onun düşüncelerinde kendinden önceki mitolojik mirasın izleri bulunabilir mi? O, katışıksız bir rasyonel midir, yoksa henüz felsefenin yeni filizlendiği bir toplumda bir ara basamağı mı temsil etmektedir? Bu makalenin içerisinde tartışacağımız bu sorular, felsefe tarihinin başlangıcına ilişkin kavramsal arka planın ne olduğu hakkında bize katkı sağlayacaktır. (shrink)

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at an (...) opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)

Throughout the post-World War II decades, the United States has wrestled in its own unique style with a problem that is shared by all modern societies: how to achieve a reasonably equitable distribution of health care, without losing control of total spending on health care, and without suffocating the delivery system with controls and regulations that inhibit technical progress.Because an equitable distribution of health care inevitably requires at least some government regulation, and because government regulations tend to impose rigidity on (...) any system, it is widely believed in the United States that a trade-off actually exists between fairness in the distribution of care and the health system’s ability to innovate. This troublesome trade-off bedevils American policy makers to this day. (shrink)

Throughout the post-World War II decades, the United States has wrestled in its own unique style with a problem that is shared by all modern societies: how to achieve a reasonably equitable distribution of health care, without losing control of total spending on health care, and without suffocating the delivery system with controls and regulations that inhibit technical progress.Because an equitable distribution of health care inevitably requires at least some government regulation, and because government regulations tend to impose rigidity on (...) any system, it is widely believed in the United States that a trade-off actually exists between fairness in the distribution of care and the health system’s ability to innovate. This troublesome trade-off bedevils American policy makers to this day. (shrink)

The Art of War application to education is about solving problems to improve student and school success. The Art of War describes the significance of a leader and his knowledge and prudent application of the strategies. At the core of theses strategies is the non-negotiable moral purpose of the leader to be reinforced by other fine qualities as wisdom, commitment, discipline, and courage.

This paper proposes a method for computing the temporal aspects of the interpretations of a variety of Germa sentences. The method is strictly modular in the sense that it allows each meaning-bearing sentence constituent to make its own, separate, contribution to the semantic representation of any sentence containing it. The semantic representation of a sentence is reached in several stages. First, an ‘initial semantic representation’ is constructed, using a syntactic analysis of the sentence as input. This initial representation is then (...) transformed into the definitive representation by a series of transformations which reflect the ways in which the contributions from different constituents of the sentence interact. Since the different constituents which make their respective contributions to the meaning of the sentence are in most instances ambiguous, the initial representations are typically of a high degree of underspecification. (shrink)

Axiomatic Formal Ontology is a fairly comprehensive systematic treatise on general metaphysics. The axiomatic method is applied throughout the book. Its main theme is the construction of a general non-set-theoretical theory of intensional entities. Other important matters discussed are the metaphysics of modality, the nature of actual existence, mereology and the taxonomy of entities.