We discuss how transgenerational communitarianism deals with public decisions involving tradeoffs between different generations’ wellbeing and having global consequences. Policies for tackling climate change are an example. Although there is a natural, evolutionary, basis for intergenerational altruism, most people lack the competencies for constituting a transgenerational community. Moreover, greater attention to future generations’ wellbeing need not substitute for collective action: a lower discount rate reflecting a stronger concern for future generations may even worsen their wellbeing. Finally, in a world of (...) irreducible value pluralism, there is no community of persons sharing moral values that can legitimize common policies for addressing global problems: only the common interest of avoiding destructive consequences may motivate collective action to face problems like climate change. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected not only the health of populations but also their everyday social practices, transformed by orienting to risks of contagion and to health prevention discourses. This paper emanates from a project investigating the impact of Covid-19 on human sociality and more particularly the situated and embodied organization of social interactions. It discusses how Covid-19 impacts the design of ordinary actions in social interaction, how this is made publicly accountable by the participants orienting to the pandemic in (...) formatting their actions and in responding to the actions of others. Adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, the analyses focus on a particular social activity: paying. The organization of payments in shops and services has been affected by the pandemic, not only by official regulations, favoring some modes of payment over others, but also in how sellers and customers situatedly adapt their practices to imperatives of prevention. On the basis of a rich corpus of video-recorded data, which spans from the pandemic’s prodromes to and after its peak, we show how money transfer is methodically achieved – imposed, negotiated, and readjusted – while variously taking into account possible risks of contagion. Thus, we show not only how pandemics affect social interaction, and how prevention is incarnated in social actions, but also how, in turn, situated solutions implemented by people during the pandemic reveal fundamental features of human action. (shrink)

Current debates in food aesthetics are moving away from a focus on whether food is art, and worries about the subjectivity and objectivity of taste, and towards questions about food's aesthetic properties, the cultural and social significance of food, our modes of aesthetic engagement with food, and issues involving cultural appropriation and the authenticity of dishes.

In his seminal work After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Willie Jennings defines a concept he calls ‘whiteness’ and states that this plays the role of the ‘Paterfamilias’, a term born within the Greco-Roman period, which refers to the social system of rule and governance that was centred around the father-master archetype. During slavery, Jennings states that it was on the plantation that the life, logic, and social order of whiteness transpired. The more I engaged with Jennings’ work, the more (...) I began to realize the extent to which the religious education curriculum, and by extension the English education system curriculum, further perpetuated whiteness. Inspired by the works of Jennings and the activism of Black Lives Matter (BLM) following the murder of George Floyd, I was motivated to create and teach a unit in the religious education (RE) curriculum, ‘Black Religion and Protest’. As well as examining the teaching and reception of this unit, this paper seeks to unpack the ways in which Britain’s colonial legacy maintains epistemological inequity and hierarchical knowledge. (shrink)

A standard view in philosophy is that knowledge entails justification. Yet recent research suggests otherwise. We argue that this admirable and striking research suffers from an important limitation: participants were asked about knowledge but not justification. Thus it is possible that people attributed knowledge partly because they thought the belief was justified. Perhaps though, if given the opportunity, people would deny justification while still attributing knowledge. It is also possible that earlier findings were due to perspective taking. This paper reports (...) further research that directly addresses these questions. Our findings support the hypothesis that knowledge entails justification on the ordinary view. (shrink)

Although self‐testing apps, a form of mobile health (mHealth) apps, are often marketed as empowering, it is not obvious how exactly they can empower their users—and in which sense of the word. In this article, I discuss two conceptualisations of empowerment as polar opposites—one in health promotion/mHealth and one in feminist theory—and demonstrate how both their applications to individually used self‐testing apps run into problems. The first, prevalent in health promotion and mHealth, focuses on internal states and understands empowerment as (...) an individual process. However, this version of empowerment has been accused of paternalism and responsibilisation. The second, feminist version considers structural conditions and foregrounds collective, political change, whose realisation is not obviously attainable for an individually used app. By pointing out the flaws of the positions that focus on either internal states or external conditions, and by engaging with theory from critical phenomenology, I argue that the interplay between them is where empowerment can take place. I propose to formulate empowerment in phenomenological terms as a shift in being‐in‐the‐world and discuss how this conceptualisation of empowerment would avoid the criticism of previous empowerment narratives while being realisable by self‐testing apps. (shrink)

This paper focusses on colour terminology as a tool for achieving ἐνάργεια in the Latin poetry of the first century c.e. After briefly outlining the developments in the concept of ἐνάργεια from Aristotle to Quintilian, the paper considers the use of Latin terms for black in three descriptive passages from Statius’ epic poem, the Thebaid. It is observed that the poet privileges the juxtaposition of the two adjectives ater and niger in a pattern of uariatio, where ater often carries a (...) figurative meaning and repeats established poetic clichés, while niger is part of unparalleled collocations that evoke a material notion of blackness. Further analysis of the uariatio in the context of each passage reveals that the juxtaposition of the two-colour terms enhances the vividness of the objects described not only by increasing their chromatic impact but also by establishing connections with other parts of the poem, and by inviting a reflection on the competing practices of imitation and transgression of poetic models. The analysis of one stylistic feature shows that this stylistic feature is used by Statius for achieving ἐνάργεια as an artistic effect, for reflecting on ἐνάργεια as an instrument through which poetic models are challenged, and for tying his own poetic practice to contemporary rhetorical discussions. (shrink)

I consider a problem for functional reductionism, based on the following tension. Say that b is functionally reduced to a. On the one hand, a and b turn out to be identical, and identity is a symmetric relation. On the other hand, functional reductionism implies that a and b are asymmetrically related: if b is functionally reduced to a, then a is not functionally reduced to b. Thus, we ask: how can a and b be asymmetrically related if they are (...) the same thing? I propose a solution to this tension, by distinguishing between ontological levels and levels of description. (shrink)

The article investigates a multimodal practice for self-selecting observed in a video-taped corpus of work meetings: the use of pointing gestures predicting possible turn completions and projecting the emergence of possible next speakers. This practice is analyzed in various sequential positions, namely at turn beginnings and at pre-beginnings. It displays recipients' practical online turn parsing, and their orientation to transition spaces, and to TCU, completions in a visible, recognizable, public way. It shows the emergent and progressive establishment of speakership, exploiting (...) both systematic features of turn-taking and specific features of the interactional space. The article explores the emic, locally situated and contingent definition of speakership by considering not only where pointing gestures begin but also where they end: pointing does not only end in pre-completion positions, projecting turn end, but can also persist through sequences, showing speaker's orientations to her turn's sequential implicativeness. Thus, by observing a particular multimodal practice within a specific interactional setting, the article explores participants' orientations to the rights and obligations associated with talk-related categories such as `non current speaker', `possible next speaker', `incipient speaker' and `current speaker'. (shrink)

Spontaneous collapse theories of quantum mechanics turn the usual Schrödinger equation into a stochastic dynamical law. In particular, in this paper, I will focus on the GRW theory. Two philosophical issues that can be raised about GRW concern (i) the ontology of the theory, in particular the nature of the wave function and its role within the theory, and (ii) the interpretation of the objective probabilities involved in the dynamics of the theory. During the last years, it has been claimed (...) that we can take advantage of dispositional properties in order to develop an ontology for GRW theory, and also in order to ground the objective probabilities which are postulated by it. However, in this paper, I will argue that the dispositional interpretations which have been discussed in the literature so far are either flawed or – at best – incomplete. If we want to endorse a dispositional interpretation of GRW theory we thus need an extended account that specifies the precise nature of those properties and which makes also clear how they can correctly ground all the probabilities postulated by the theory. Thus, after having introduced several different kinds of probabilistic dispositions, I will try to fill the gap in the literature by proposing a novel and complete dispositional account of GRW, based on what I call spontaneous weighted multi-track propensities. I claim that such an account can satisfy both of our desiderata. (shrink)

According to a consensus view in philosophy, “deciding” and “intending” are synonymous expressions. Researchers have recently challenged this view with the discovery of a counterexample in which ordinary speakers attribute deciding without intending. The aim of this paper is to investigate the strengths and limits of this discovery. The result of this investigation revealed that the evidence challenging the consensus view is strong. We replicate the initial finding against consensus and extend it by utilizing several new measures, materials, and procedures. (...) Together this evidence strongly suggests that “deciding” is not synonymous with “intending” in ordinary language and that the consensus view should be rejected. (shrink)

It is uncontroversial that something goes wrong with the blaming practices of hypocrites. However, it is more difficult to pinpoint exactly what is objectionable about their blaming practices. I contend that, just as epistemologists have recently done with blame, we can constructively treat hypocrisy as admitting of an epistemic species. This paper has two objectives: first, to identify the epistemic fault in epistemically hypocritical blame, and second, to explain why epistemically hypocritical blamers lose their standing to epistemically blame. I tackle (...) the first problem by appealing to an epistemic norm of consistency. I address the second by arguing that the epistemically hypocritical blamer commits to an opting-out of the set of shared epistemic standards that importantly underlies our standing to epistemically blame. I argue further that being epistemically hypocritical undermines a blamer’s standing even to judge epistemically blameworthy. (shrink)

The article analyses the chapter on dreams of the Specchio di vera penitenza by Iacopo Passavanti, a Dominican friar who lived in 14th century Florence, focusing on the philosophical sources employed by the preacher. This section of the Specchio is in fact peculiar, since Iacopo discusses here the value of dreams for human knowledge by means of Aristotelian concepts and doctrines, but it does not mention them explicitly. Moreover, while discussing on dreams, Iacopo lingers on the myth of the magnetic (...) mountain following the pseudo-Aristotelian De lapidibus and the treatise On Minerals by Albert the Great. The article studies also Passavanti’s other sources concerning this passage, such as the De lapidibus by Marbodus of Rennes and the Speculum historiale by Vincent of Beauvais. (shrink)

This article contributes to ongoing studies in conversation analysis dealing with the way in which epistemic authority is displayed, claimed, contested and negotiated in social interaction. More particularly, it focuses on the articulation between action format, sequential organization, membership categorization and epistemic authority. The article offers an empirical analysis of the way in which knowledge is distributed and recognized in social gatherings, with a special focus on guided visits. Guided visits are a perspicuous setting for this analysis, since it is (...) an activity in which the guide displays knowledge in comments and explanations and the guided seeks for knowledge in questions. However, this distribution of knowledge is regularly challenged. The article offers a systematic study of a collection of sequences initiated by turns beginning with ‘et là’ and locating a new referent in the environment, either in informings or in questions. While the former are frequently produced by the guide, assuming a knowing status, and the latter by the guided, assuming a not knowing, it is possible to observe informings initiated by the guided, who, by so doing, claims a revision of his or her epistemic authority. Likewise, in second position, questions are generally answered by the guide, but can also be answered by another person, claiming alternative epistemic rights. By examining the details of turn and action design in these environments, the article shows how they either reproduce and confirm the current epistemic status of the participants or challenge, negotiate and transform them. The latter case is particularly revealing of the fact that epistemic status and stance are constantly reflexively elaborated by the participants in social interaction. (shrink)

Taste is a central sense for humans and animals, and it has been largely studied either from physiological and neurological approaches or from socio-cultural ones. This paper adopts another view, focused on the activity of tasting rather than on the sense of taste, approached within the perspective of ethnomethodology and multimodal conversation analysis. This view addresses the activity of tasting as it is interactionally organized in specific social settings, observed in a naturalistic way, on the basis of video recordings. Focusing (...) on video recorded improvised tastings of cheese in gourmet shop encounters, the paper offers a systematic analysis of the way in which tasting is orderly achieved in an intersubjective way. It follows the various steps characterizing tasting, from the invitation to taste, to the grasping of a bit to taste, which is put in the mouth, chewed, and swallowed; it details how an interactional moment offering the taster a priviledged, individual, focused space in which to devote exclusive attention to the object tasted is actively tailored by all parties. By contrast, the completion of tasting is marked by a return to mutual gaze, the animation of facial expressions and nods, and the final production of a judgment of taste. By offering a systematic reconstruction of how these tasting moments are organized, the paper invites to a multimodal approach of sensoriality in social interaction. (shrink)

This article deals with surgical practice as it is locally organized within the course of the operation; it focuses on the way in which surgical action shaping the body for the local purposes of the operation is organized in a timely, situated, interactive manner. In order to do that, I offer a systematic analysis of the instructions addressed by a chief surgeon to his assistant in the form of directives during a surgical operation, as well as of instructed actions of (...) the assistant following the directives of the surgeon. In this way, I aim to show how surgery is a methodic collaborative achievement, relying on finely tuned coordination between staff members. More generally, the article sketches a systematic and detailed analysis of instructions as situated accomplishments in time, and of instructed action as resulting from an embodied and indexical understanding of directives and requests as they are produced in time and in context. (shrink)

In _The Cosmic Perils of Qadi Ḥusayn Maybudī in Fifteenth-Century Iran_ Alexandra Dunietz explores the life and works of a provincial judge whose life exemplifies the intellectual, spiritual and political tensions of the Timurid, Ak Koyunlu and Safavid spheres.

Functionalism is the view that being x is to play the role of x. This paper defends a functionalist account of three-dimensional entities in the context of Wave Function Realism (WFR), that can explain in detail how we can recover three-dimensional entities out of the wavefunction. In particular, the essay advocates for a novel version of WFR in terms of a functional reductionist approach in the style of David Lewis. This account entails reduction of the upper entities to the bottom (...) ones, when the latter behave appropriately. As applied to WFR, it shows how the wavefunction can turn out to be identical to three-dimensional objects, provided certain conditions. The first major goal of the paper is thus to put forward an improved and more rigorous version of WFR, which dissolves several extant issues about the theory, and can serve as a starting point for future literature on the topic. Moreover, the second major goal of the article is to take WFR as a case study to demonstrate the pros of functional reductionism, especially in the form defended here, thereby helping to bring this view back in the philosophy of science debate. The positive upshots of this paper suggest a possible application of functional reductionism also to other contexts. (shrink)

Aristocles of Messene is a first century AD Aristotelian philosopher who discusses the thought of ancient Greek philosophers, including Plato, Zeno, Pyrrho, and Epicurus, as well as Eleatic and Cyrenaic philosophies. His main contribution is his testimony on Pyrrhonism, and his political verve makes his On Philosophy an interesting and amusing read for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Buddhism has captured the imagination of many in the modern (Western) world. Recently, scientists have seemed eager to discover whether claims about Buddhist meditation can be verified experimentally. Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence that mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow practitioners to achieve different levels of awareness, as measurable for instance in reaction times to stimuli. The goal of this section of articles in Zygon is to address recent developments (...) in this area. The contributions address a wide array of questions, although they certainly do not cover the whole ground of what one may consider “problems” of meditation. Yet, we believe that the issues addressed here have widespread implications and that they constitute a strong argument for the richness of the meditation domain. (shrink)

A professora Pórcia Guimarães Alves teve formação educacional diferenciada e, concluindo o ensino superior, continuou sua formação com cursos e encontros científicos no Brasil e em outros países. Durante as viagens, trocava missivas com seus familiares, que foram mantidas em arquivo pessoal em plástico denominado “Cartas enviadas ao meu pai”. Procurou-se analisar: qual a escrita de si de Pórcia contida nas cartas trocadas com seus familiares entre 1946 e 1958? Listaram-se os objetivos específicos: mapear os familiares mencionados nas cartas; analisar (...) a materialidade do suporte epistolar procurando aspectos subjetivos em seus registros autobiográficos; e identificar temas narrados nessa escrita. (shrink)

O presente artigo analisa a relação que ocorre entre as duas potências superiores da alma - intelecto e vontade - no momento em que se realiza uma qualquer acção, seja positiva ou negativa. Seguindo a análise que S. Tomás de Aquino faz nas Quaestiones disputatae de maio, o artigo mostra o interesse e a profundidade do tratamento que o Aquinate dá à questão, passando em revista, particularmente nas questões 3, 4 e 6, todos os elementos que contribuem para a realização (...) de um acto e evidenciando, nomeadamente de modo diferente a como o faz na Summa theologiae, o papel específico da vontade. /// The article examines the link between the higher powers of the soul (intellect and will) in the process of making an action, being it positive or negative. The author shows the special interest and profundity of Aquinas's analysis in the Quaestiones disputatae de malo (especially qq. III, IV and VI), thereby reviewing all the elements that are involved in the process of making an action and emphasizing, in a way that is slightly different from the Summa Theologiae, the peculiar role of the will. (shrink)

Three accounts of effective realism (ER) have been advanced to solve three problems for scientific realism: Fraser and Vickers (forthcoming) develop a version of ER about non-relativistic quantum mechanics that they argue is compatible with all the main realist versions (‘interpretations’) of quantum mechanics avoiding the problem of underdetermination among them; Williams (2019) and Fraser (2020b) propose ER about quantum field theory as a response to the problems facing realist interpretations; Robertson and Wilson (forthcoming) propose ER to deal with the (...) dubious ontological status of the entities belonging to superseded theories. This paper argues for the unification of these proposals based on realism about modal structure and the idea of scale relativity of ontology developed by ontic structural realists. This solves problems some or all the accounts of ER face, especially that of making explicit in what way they are realist. Furthermore, we respond to a recent critique that has been raised against the ontic structural realist account of quantum mechanics that we employ. (shrink)

Empirical studies indicate that business compliance with the UK Modern Slavery Act is disappointing, but they struggle to make sense of this phenomenon. This article offers a novel framework to understand how business organizations construct the meaning of compliance with the UK Modern Slavery Act. Our analysis builds on the endogeneity of law theory developed by Edelman. Empirically, our study is based on the analysis of the modern slavery statements of 10 FTSE 100 (Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index) companies (...) in the food and tobacco sector, backed by interviews with business, civil society, and public officers. We offer a dynamic model that draws attention to the role of compliance professionals in framing ambiguous rules and devising a variety of organizational responses to modern slavery law. Contrary to extant research that tends to praise organizations for going “beyond compliance”, our study underlines the risks of managerialization of modern slavery law, whereby merely symbolic structures come to be associated with legal compliance, even when they are ineffective at tackling modern slavery. (shrink)

The article argues that there are different ways of justifying suspension of judgement. We suspend judgement not only privatively, that is, because we lack evidence, but also positively, that is, because there is evidence that provides reasons for suspending judgement: suspension is more than the rational fallback position in cases of insufficient evidence. The article applies the distinction to recent discussions about the role of suspension for inquiry, Turri's puzzle about withholding, and formal representations of suspension.

Temporal discounting is the tendency to devalue temporally distant rewards. Past studies have examined the k-value, the indifference point, and the area under the curve as dependent measures on this task. The current study included these three measures and a fourth measure, called the interest rate total score. The interest rate total score was based on scoring only those items in which the delayed choice should be preferred given the expected return based on simple interest rates. In addition, associations with (...) several individual difference measures were examined including intelligence, executive functions (inhibition, working memory, and set-shifting), thinking dispositions (Need for Cognition and Consideration of Future Consequences) and engagement in substance use and gambling behavior. A staircase temporal discounting task was examined in a sample of 99 university students. Replicating previous studies, temporal discounting increased with longer delays to reward and decreased with higher reward magnitudes. A hyperbolic function accounted for variance in temporal discounting better than an exponential function. Reaction time at the indifference point was significantly longer than at the other choice points. The four dependent measures of temporal discounting were all significantly correlated and were also significantly associated with our individual difference measures. That is, the tendency to wait for a larger delayed reward on all of the temporal discounting measures was associated with higher intelligence, higher executive functions and more consideration of future consequences. Associations between our measures of temporal discounting and outcomes related to substance use and gambling behavior were modest in our university sample. (shrink)

Each time we take a turn in conversation we indicate what we know and what we think others know. However, knowledge is neither static nor absolute. It is shaped by those we interact with and governed by social norms - we monitor one another for whether we are fulfilling our rights and responsibilities with respect to knowledge, and for who has relatively more rights to assert knowledge over some state of affairs. This book brings together an international team of leading (...) linguists, sociologists and anthropologists working across a range of European and Asian languages to document some of the ways in which speakers manage the moral domain of knowledge in conversation. The volume demonstrates that if we are to understand how speakers manage issues of agreement, affiliation and alignment - something clearly at the heart of human sociality - we must understand the social norms surrounding epistemic access, primacy and responsibilities. (shrink)

In this paper, I deal with video data not as a transparent window on social interaction but as a situated product of video practices. This perspective invites an analysis of the practices of video-making, considering them as having a configuring impact on both on the way in which social interaction is documented and the way in which it is locally interpreted by video-makers. These situated interpretations and online analyses reflexively shape not only the record they produce but also the interactional (...) order itself as it is documented. Dealing with practices of video-making not as a resource but as a topic, I explore a particular editing practice, the use of the split-screen technique, consisting in combining various camera views within the same image. This technique is now widely used in cinema, professional settings, TV, and social research. I focus on its uses in TV talk shows and debates: through a systematic sequential analysis of the positions where split screen is introduced, I show that directors do orient to the sequential features of interaction in using this technique and that, conversely, their uses of split screen reveal their local understanding—and configuring—of what the interactional dimension of debates and interviews consist of, for all practical purposes. (shrink)

Studies of talk-and-bodily-conduct-in-interaction have inspired new insights into the way in which language, interaction and cognition might be articulated. More particularly, they have shown that participants mutually orient to the finely tuned multimodal details by which talk and action in interaction are sequentially organized. This article deals with this form of ‘participants’ multimodal online analysis’ by focusing on a particular phenomenon - the methodical practices and resources by which the end of a turn and of an activity phase is projected (...) and collectively achieved - in a specific videorecorded setting - a meeting in an architect’s office. It aims at questioning both how these local orientations are systematically displayed and exploited by the participants for the sequential organization of their activity and how they can be demonstrably observed by the analyst. (shrink)

In this commentary, I consider variability as an ordinary and irremediable feature related to the indexicality not only of transcripts but first of all of transcribing. In this sense, it is not just a characteristic of transcripts as texts, which can be assessed in a kind of philological comparison comparing formal features of autonomous and fixed textual objects, but a characteristic of transcribing as a situated practice. Practices are irremediably indexical, reflexively tied to the context of their production and to (...) the practical purposes of their accomplishment. Thus, a transcript is an evolving flexible object; it changes as the transcriber engages in listening and looking again at the tape, endlessly checking, revising, reformatting it. Transcribing relies in a fundamental way not only on the possibility of fixing the relevant details in a complex multilayered representation but also on the possibility of manipulating them, playing them again and again, at different paces, positions, fragments, while transcribing their finely tuned coordination, their synchronization, the fine articulation between different projections and sequential implicativenesses. These manipulations are one of the ways in which transcribing is accomplished as a situated practice. (shrink)