Apparent Truism Research Articles

Face masks facilitate discrimination of genuine and fake smiles – But people believe the opposite

It seems a foregone conclusion that face mask-wearing hinders the interpretation of facial expressions, increasing the risk of interpersonal miscommunication. This research identifies a notable counter-case to this apparent truism. In multiple experiments, perceivers were more accurate distinguishing between genuine and fake smiles when the mouth region was concealed under a mask versus exposed. Masks improved accuracy by shielding perceivers from the undue influence of non-diagnostic cues hidden behind masks. However, perceivers were unaware of the advantage bestowed by masks, holding, instead, the misbelief that masks severely obscure the distinction between genuine and fake smiles. Furthermore, these patterns proved to be culturally invariant rather than culturally contingent, holding true for both Westerners and Easterners.

The Value of Biased Information

In this article, I cast doubt on an apparent truism, namely, that if evidence is available for gathering and use at a negligible cost, then it’s always instrumentally rational for us to gather that evidence and use it for making decisions. Call this ‘value of information’ (VOI). I show that VOI conflicts with two other plausible theses. The first is the view that an agent’s evidence can entail non-trivial propositions about the external world. The second is the view that epistemic rationality requires us to update our credences by conditionalization. These two theses, given some plausible assumptions, make room for rationally biased inquiries where VOI fails. I go on to argue that this is bad news for defenders of VOI.

IV—Wittgenstein, Anscombe and the Need for Metaphysical Thinking

AbstractMetaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims—claims about how things must, or could or could not be. Wittgenstein’s opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical’ uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make a case for rejecting that apparent truism. My thesis is that it is illuminating to characterize what Wittgenstein and Anscombe are doing in their philosophical writing as metaphysics without manufactured necessities. Doing so helps to articulate a sharper, more interesting, critique of contemporary metaphysical practices than therapeutic or linguistic framings of Wittgenstein’s method make possible. It also allows us to place Anscombe in the context of a tradition of British metaphysics that emerged in the 1940s in an attempt to reverse the devastating impact on ethics of the new ‘analytical’ philosophy.

Punitive Damages and the Place of Punishment in Private Law

AbstractIt has long been orthodoxy that punitive damages, because they are awarded in order to punish, are an anomalous remedy. So entrenched is this understanding that it has never been seriously challenged. However, even apparent truisms about the law should be questioned and, accordingly, this article offers a rival account. It contends that the deeply ingrained view that punitive damages are an aberration is a half‐truth because several other remedial rules are also aimed, at least in certain circumstances, at punishment. We concentrate in this regard on the doctrine of remoteness and its attenuation where the defendant has intentionally injured the claimant, aggravated damages, the account of profits remedy and general damages. Overthrowing the orthodox understanding regarding punitive damages has important prescriptive implications. In particular, it follows that the belief that punitive damages are an alien presence in private law supplies no basis for confining the jurisdiction to award them.

How to see invisible objects

AbstractIt is an apparent truism about visual perception that we can see only what is visible to us. It is also frequently accepted that visual perception is dynamic: our visual experiences are extended through, and can evolve over time. I argue that taking the dynamism of visual experience seriously renders certain simplistic interpretations of the first claim, that a subject at a given time can see only what is visible to her at that time, false: we can be meaningfully said to see invisible objects. This counterintuitive result in turn focuses our attention on the relationship between perception and memory. I show that it is difficult to draw a clear or simple distinction between the two. Memory and perception rely on, and blend with, one another. Together, these claims point us away from understanding visual perception as a simple reflection of the environment, and instead as closer to a process of dynamic modelling that draws together occurrent stimulation and stored information.

Yesterday once more: Hong Kong-China coproductions and the myth of mainlandization

Since Ackbar Abbas theorized Hong Kong as a space of cultural ‘disappearance’ in the mid-1990s, critics have debated the extent to which local cultural forms have continued to recede, particularly as a corollary of Hong Kong’s increasing subjection to mainlandization. For several critics, the region’s cinema has already vanished from view, only to re-emerge in a brand new, distinctly Sinicized guise – that of ‘post-Hong Kong cinema,’ a mode of predominantly coproduced filmmaking that effaces traditional Hong Kong aesthetics and routines of film practice. So thoroughly has Hong Kong cinema been subsumed to China that its once ‘unique’ and ‘singular’ identity is no longer discernible. The shackles of PRC censorship now stifle free expression; Hong Kong’s classic genres have become obsolete; and the PRC’s vogue for ‘main melody’ films and the dapian (‘big film’) has straitened Hong Kong cinema’s range of storytelling options. Today, critics contend, Hong Kong filmmakers are severely constrained by Mainland bureaucracy and the exigencies of the China market. This article seeks to challenge these assumptions, contesting a set of apparent truisms concerning Mainland censorship, Hong Kong-China coproductions, and the dissipation or disappearance of Hong Kong’s local cinema and identity. The theory of mainlandization, I submit, denies the durability of Hong Kong’s standardized craft practices; its aesthetic traditions; and the facile ingenuity of its filmmakers.

Self‐Control as a Normative Capacity

AbstractRecently, two apparent truisms about self‐control have been questioned in both the philosophical and the psychological literature: the idea that exercising self‐control involves an agent doing something, and the idea that self‐control is a good thing. Both assumptions have come under threat because self‐control is increasingly understood as a mental mechanism, and mechanisms cannot possibly be good or active in the required sense. However, I will argue that it is not evident that self‐control should be understood as a mechanism, suggesting that we might also argue the other way around: if we have independent reason to hold onto the idea that self‐control is inherently good and active, the conclusion might be that self‐control cannot be a mechanism. I will show that Aristotle's original analysis of self‐control actually offers grounds for both assumptions: he took there to be conceptual connections between self‐control and goodness/activity. By examining these connections, I argue that an Aristotelian approach could offer promising leads for a contemporary non‐mechanistic understanding of self‐control as a normative capacity.

Can the straw man speak? An engagement with postcolonial critiques of ‘global cities research’

This paper engages with postcolonial critiques of global cities research (GCR). We argue that such criticisms tend to be hampered by their tendency to be polemical rather than engaging, as evidenced by both the quasi-systematic misrepresentation of the core objectives of GCR and the skating over of its internal diversity. We present a genealogy of postcolonial critiques starting from Robinson’s (2002) agenda-setting discussion of GCR, followed by an analysis of how her legitimate concerns have subsequently morphed into a set of apparent truisms. These misrepresentations are then contrasted with the purposes, diversity, and critical character of GCR as actually practiced. We interpret this discrepancy to be part of a gradually routinized straw man rhetoric that emerged as an unfortunate rallying point for postcolonial urban scholars. The consequence is that GCR tends to be casually invoked to distinguish one’s own position. We conclude by advocating practices of ‘engaged pluralism’ rather than ‘polemical pluralism’ when doing global urban research and propose that critical realism can provide an important epistemological bridge to make different positions communicate.

Why an Aristotelian Account of Truth Is (More or Less) All We Need

This paper advances an account of truth that has as its starting point Aristotle’s comments about truth at Metaphysics 1011b1. It argues that there are two key ideas in the Aristotelian account: that truth belongs to ‘sayings that’; and that truth involves both what is said and what is. Beginning with the second of these apparent truisms, the paper argues for the crucial role of the distinction between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is’ in the understanding of truth, on the grounds that it is essential to the distinction between truth and falsity and, indeed, to the very possibility of any critical assessment of statements. However, this distinction cannot be used to ground any account of truth in terms that refer to anything other than truth—there is thus no relation that underlies truth even though truth may be construed (in a certain limited sense) relationally. Returning to the first point, it is argued that while truth should indeed be understood as belonging to statements, it should not be construed as attaching to ‘propositions’, but to uttered sentences. The account of truth advanced is minimalist, and yet not deflationist; objectivist, and yet not independent of actual linguistic practice.

Normal and abnormal coding of somatosensory stimuli causing pain

Noxious stimuli usually cause pain and pain usually arises from noxious stimuli, but exceptions to these apparent truisms are the basis for clinically important problems and provide valuable insight into the neural code for pain. In this Review, we discuss how painful sensations arise. We argue that, although primary somatosensory afferents are tuned to specific stimulus features, natural stimuli often activate more than one type of afferent. Manipulating coactivation patterns can alter perception in ways that argue against each type of afferent acting independently (as expected for strictly labeled lines), suggesting instead that signals conveyed by different types of afferents interact. Deciphering the central circuits that mediate those interactions is critical for explaining the generation and modulation of neural signals that ultimately elicit pain. The advent of genetic and optical dissection techniques promise to dramatically accelerate progress toward this goal, which will facilitate the rational design of future pain therapeutics.

WEIGHING IN ON BIRD BONES

Although the list of things I know about bird biology is short, one thing I felt confident about was that bird skeletons are lightweight. I've seen for myself the thin-walled, hollow bones found in many bird species, and this always made intuitive sense: flying is certainly easier if you're lighter. Betsy Dumont at the University of Massachusetts recently decided to look more deeply into this apparent truism by asking just how lightweight bird bones are.Using museum specimens, Dumont measured bone density across a wide variety of perching birds, rodents and bats. She chose to focus on the cranium, humerus and femur, which represent the largest components of the feeding and locomotor systems of these animals. Rodents were chosen for comparison as they are of a similar size to birds and also maintain relatively high metabolic rates. Bats were studied because outside birds they are the only vertebrates capable of generating powered flight, and bats too are purported to have lightweight skeletons. To measure bone density, Dumont weighed the bones to find their mass and measured the bone volume using helium displacement, which is like using water displacement, except that helium molecules are considerably smaller than water molecules and so can infiltrate much smaller spaces in bone, leading to better density estimates.It turns out that humeral density is not distinguishable among the groups, averaging just above 2.0 g cm–3 in birds, rodents and bats. Femoral density is lowest in birds, near 1.8 g cm–3; however, cranium density is highest in birds, averaging nearly 2.2 g cm–3 (for comparison, rodent crania have densities averaging below 1.8 g cm–3). In short, different bones within and across major vertebrate clades vary with respect to density, a fact that may not raise many eyebrows. What is surprising though is that average bone density, which accounts for femora, humeri and crania and is weighted to reflect the relative contribution each bone makes to the total mass of its respective skeleton, is highest in birds and lowest in rodents. Flying animals appear to have denser bones than terrestrial counterparts of similar size.In bones, differences in density generally mean differences in mineral content. Higher mineral contents are linked to greater stiffness and strength. Dumont thinks that such material properties may be central to understanding why bone density is relatively high in birds and bats. Along with flight, birds and bats have also evolved small body size, and one way to design a small skeleton while preserving its strength is to make its bones more dense. Investigating links between the material properties of bone and the evolution of flight and small body size in birds and bats is going to require much more work – if only we could get bone density measurements from transitional forms in the fossil record like Archaeopteryx. In any case, the next time you happen to handle a bird skull, don't worry so much about it breaking. What may appear to be a fragile, lightweight structure, is likely both heavier and stronger than you think!

IS THERE A CONSERVATIVE SOLUTION TO THE MANY THINKERS PROBLEM?

AbstractOn a widely shared assumption, our mental states supervene on our microphysical properties – that is, microphysical supervenience is true. When this thesis is combined with the apparent truism that human persons have proper parts, a grave difficulty arises: what prevents some of these proper parts from being themselves thinkers as well? How can I know that I am a human person and not a smaller thinker enclosed in a human person? Most solutions to this puzzle make radical, if not absurd, claims. Recently, however, Michael Burke and Howard Robinson proposed conservative solutions that, according to them, do not have such undesired consequences. This paper argues that the conservative solutions tacitly assume at least one of the radical ones, and therefore they provide no alternative to the extreme solutions.

Branching onsets and syncope in English

English abounds in lexical consonant clusters, and morpheme-internal consonant clusters can also be created postlexically, by syncope (the deletion of a schwa within a word). In theories that do not recognize empty nuclei, the consonant clusters thus created are usually analysed as coda-onset clusters. This article argues that such syncope-created consonant clusters in English bear a much closer resemblance to so-called branching onsets. I argue that these two categories are not entirely distinct; rather, branching onsets are a special type of the set that includes all syncope-created clusters. I consider the three types of consonant cluster that are often distinguished in English, which I label ‘onset clusters’, ‘medial clusters’ and ‘coda clusters’, and argue, instead, for an alternative system of cluster types which has only two types, each with two subtypes; the main aim of this article is thus to question long-accepted, apparent truisms about consonant clusters.

Expressive Truth: An Argument for Literary Philosophy

At present, philosophy appears to be consigned to the role of critic: its skeptical task is to cast doubt on any apparent truism by exposing its vulnerable underbelly. Whether we clarify concepts to excise a purer kernel of truth or deconstruct texts to expose a chasm of complexities, we are experts in the skill of intellectual dis section. While this critical stance is of undoubted value, both in exposing our hidden prejudices and in opening our minds to alternative possibilities, the question remains whether this is all that our field has to offer. Certainly metaphysics and logic have proven to be troublesome bedfellows, but in our efforts to be precise, have we too narrowly drawn the parameters of our discourse? Philosophy is, or should be, the love of wisdom, an ongoing consideration of life's most profound mysteries; and yet we have reason to suspect our ability to address these broader questions. By what methods, then, can we affirm truths about the meaning of life in the wake of our skepticism of the possibility of such truths? It is my claim that philosophy has become trapped by the belief that preci sion is our surest path to knowledge. In our despair of knowing things in them selves, we confine our discourse to subjects that lie within empirical confines. We hope that where we failed to capture the bigger picture we can still master objects closer to hand, or at least be precise about why we cannot master them. I aim to challenge this limitative assumption and to affirm in its place a variety of means by which we may speak philosophically on a wider variety of topics. In doing so, I will reconsider the purported disjunction between poetry and literature,1 on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, as when Plato aligned poetry with the passions and philosophy with reason (Plato 1992, 522 a-b), or when Carnap distinguished meaningful analysis of philosophical fact from the merely expres sive?read meaningless?poetics of metaphysics.2 In both cases, philosophy's method of securing knowledge depends on distinguishing rational arguments from expressive utterances without a meaningful referent, and poetry is decidedly placed into the latter camp, its role being to arouse our emotions, not to illuminate our intellect. However, we need to turn from Plato's condemnation of the poets and instead investigate poetry's potential for veridical philosophical communication.

On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics

It has often been claimed that adequate aesthetic judgements must be grounded in the appreciator's first-hand experience of the item judged. Yet this apparent truism is misleading if adequate aesthetic judgements can instead be based on descriptions of the item or on acquaintance with some surrogate for it. In a survey of responses to such challenges to the apparent truism, 1 identify several contentions presented in its favour, including stipulative definitions of 'aesthetic judgement', assertions about conceptual gaps between determinate aesthetic properties and even the most perfect descriptions, and claims about the holistic and sensibility-relative character of aesthetic qualities and values. With reference to considerations advanced by Frank Sibley, Alan H. Goldman, and particularists and anti-particularists in meta-ethics, I contend that strong versions of the apparent truism lack sufficient warrant. Two successors are proposed, however. One reframes the thesis in terms of our contingently limited descriptive and theoretical capacities with regard to a subset of the aesthetic qualities of extraordinary works; the second involves a shift front epistemic to axiological matters: what even the most perfect descriptions cannot provide. and in some cases spoil, is our gauging of an item's inherent, experiential value.

Media policy after regulation?

An apparent truism holds that the Internet and, more broadly, interoperable digital media represent the end of media policy history. This consensus rests on an erroneous reduction of media policy to broadcasting policy. Even as this reductionism makes the rounds, a new prototype for media policy is taking shape, which here is called the ‘promotional state’. The promotional state emerges at the intersection of infrastructure regulation and the new forms of intervention created to act upon media content in a space of global flows. How do governments cope with media policy when media actively reconfigure national jurisdictions? To what extent do the media and cultural industries cohere when symbolic and material economies collide? How does the promotional state modulate media policy as a way of building the media and cultural industries into its project of reshaping public spaces as particular topographies? These questions describe a particular context in which the promotional state has taken form. The article addresses those questions in describing that context.

Theorizing Otherness, the War on Drugs and Incarceration

The notion of `black drug couriers' in prison suggests that theories of penology, criminology and victimology should move beyond their preoccupation with the individual offender. This is (not just because of the plural sense of `couriers' but more importantly) because some of what is conceptualized as punishment goes beyond individual offenders to affect whole groups and categories who could be innocent. The article theorizes victimization as mere punishment by looking at institutional practices that are deliberately designed to exclude, marginalize, control, alienate or even victimize the imprisoned Other. The crime-centredness of criminology is almost unavoidable with reference to illicit drugs and black immigrants because spatial mobility is expected to imply anomie, social disorganization or, at least, culture shock with all the predictable incidence of deviance that could be associated with exposure to a different culture. This article will critically review this apparent truism with a view to highlighting possible `drugs war crimes' of unjustifiable stereotypes and victimization as mere punishment mainly against innocent people in prison.

Metabolic basis of renal-stone disease.

URINARY calculi form when the concentration of the crystal-forming substances of which they are composed exceeds solubility. That even this apparent truism generates discussion and requires clarification highlights the state of ferment in the study of metabolic urinary-stone disease. Certainly, crystals precipitate when solubility is exceeded, but since "solubility" in a simple aqueous solution is frequently exceeded in urine without stone formation, the definition of solubility is obviously complex. Solubility is a function of the ionic strength of stone-forming substances, of the salt content of the urine, of the pH of the urine and of the presence of inhibitors of . . .

Employment and the Meeting of Human Needs

In the CBI document entitled “The Road to Recovery”, the second “key message” was “wealth has to be created before it can be distributed”. My contention is that this apparent truism and the model on which it is based is inadequate if not totally false. This has important consequences for management strategy.

ORBITAL GROWTH AFTER UNILATERAL ENUCLEATION IN CHILDHOOD.

Among the apparent truisms in ophthalmology, there is one, at least, which requires close scrutiny. This is the belief that orbital growth is checked following enucleation in childhood, resulting in more or less maldevelopment and facial asymmetry depending upon the age at which enucleation was performed.^1-3In an attempt to test this hypothesis, a follow-up study was carried out upon adults who had had one eye removed in early life. <h3>Historical Note</h3> In 1898, a Committee of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom reported that one of the disadvantages of simple excision of the eyeball was "faulty development of the orbit and face on the side from which the eye has been removed when the operation has been performed in early life."⁴Thomson, in 1901, reported the results of a study in which he had enucleated one eye of several 21-day-old rabbits.⁵Autopsy upon six of