Commonsense View Research Articles

Bias, Knowledge, Skepticism, and Disagreement: Précis of Part iii of Bias: A Philosophical Study

Abstract The third and final part of Bias: A Philosophical Study explores the connections between bias and some of the central topics of epistemology, including knowledge, skepticism, and disagreement. It defends the possibility of biased knowing: biased believers can sometimes know, even when they believe in accordance with their biases, and even if those biases guarantee that they would believe as they do even if the truth were otherwise. It argues that the possibility of biased knowing has significant implications for both philosophical methodology and traditional forms of skepticism. Extended consideration is given to the question of whether those of us who robustly favor our ordinary commonsense views over the possibilities that the skeptic calls to our attention are biased against skepticism in any objectionable sense. Finally, it critically examines our tendency to attribute bias to others in response to interpersonal disagreement and the epistemological significance of “the bias blind spot.”

REQUEST FOR CHANGES: PUBLIC EXPECTATIONS AND MODALITY OF PRESENTATION

The article analyzes the results of long-term sociological studies of the peculiarities of the transformation of Russian society associated with the growing public demand for change, the modality of which has not decreased for a long time. It is shown that this is due to increased social activism associated with “helping behavior”, mutual assistance and cooperation. This allowed us to understand that the administrative and bureaucratic class has built convenient “capsules” for itself, blocking the development of a natural, from the point of view of common sense, business and civic initiative of society, allowing its members to participate in making socially significant decisions. The society is set up to improve the institutional infrastructure of social development, first of all, to reduce the degree of corruption, alienation of the population from power, unblocking channels for promoting and realizing public interests. In addition, the problem of people’s dissatisfaction with the growing polarization of social incomes is being raised, which reduces the quality of social policy in terms of improving demographic indicators, increasing social upward mobility based on meritocratic principles, and improving the structure of social and labor motivation. This exacerbates the sense of social justice, which, when blocked, can lead to negative social consequences, forming “combustible material” and, accordingly, the risks of unconventional social actions associated with social explosions and revolutionary consequences of expressing discontent. It is shown that at the moment the majority of the population is set up in a reformist way, since they are only getting rid of the neurotic syndrome after the coronavirus pandemic and the onset of SMO. A certain energy impulse for change is also set by consolidated public opinion associated with the “rewiring” of Russian society along the line of differentiation from Western universalist approaches, the search for its own civilizational and cultural code of development, the revival of neotraditionalist narratives of the formation of a value-symbolic framework of public consciousness.

Flipping Sensemaking on its Head: From common sense to sensus communis

Sensemaking provides a compelling account of how meaning emerges by theorizing the organizational enactment of order. In this paper we question the underlying assumption that making sense is equivalent to ordering. We draw from Hannah Arendt’s work to argue that restricting sense to ordering as a means of addressing practical concerns is limiting, and even dehumanizing, and that the most profound forms of sense may emerge from disrupting rather than restoring order. In questioning the intimacy between sense and order, we also question the commonsense view that organization seeks practical settlements, certainty and reliability. Following Arendt, we pursue the question of what it means to organize for plural opinion-making, a condition she conceptualizes as sensus communis. The upshot is to flip sensemaking on its head: rather than meaning being generated through organizing, and certain types of disruption merely triggering it, sense is made through disruption, with certain types of organizing enabling it.

Thou Shalt Not Create; But If Thou Dost, Thou Shalt Kill? A Comment on Belshaw

In his article “Anti-Natalism and the Asymmetry” in this issue, Christopher Belshaw defends the common-sense view that, while there is a reason not to cause individuals to exist whose lives would not be worth living, there is no reason to cause individuals to exist just because their lives would be worth living. But the reasons why these claims are true, he argues, also imply that it is wrong to cause individuals to exist even if their lives would be worth living. I argue that the moral asymmetry between intrinsic goods and intrinsic evils that is the basis of his view is too strong, and that a more defensible view includes a recognition that there is a moral reason to cause well-off individuals to exist, though it is less strong than the reason not to cause an equivalently badly-off individual to exist, and that this weaker asymmetry supports the view that procreation is generally permissible.

Are subtitles useful for language learners?

Despite the seemingly commonsensical view that captions or subtitles aid comprehension, empirical research is less certain about their recommendation for all language learners. This review article introduces some of the theoretical foundations of multimedia learning before examining recent studies investigating the facilitative effect of L2 captions, L1 subtitles and dual-language subtitles. Qualitative insights from research are then presented, with implications for both research and teaching practice further discussed. The article concludes by underlining the importance of learner perspectives due to the complexity of factors affecting the pedagogical value of captions and subtitles.

Recognition and inequalities in older adults' sexuality in Chile.

This paper explores older adults' perceptions on sexuality and affectivity in Chile, according to class and sex. The study is based on computer-assisted telephonic interviews with people aged 60 and over, men and women (n = 481). Data were analyzed using chi-squared tests and binary logistic regressions. Maintaining an active sex life is important for older adults of both sexes, contradicting the commonsense view according to which the relevance allocated to sex decreases significantly with age. However, the data show significant differences in perceptions by sex, suggesting that gendered conceptions regarding sexuality are influential along the entire life cycle. There are also relevant differences according to class, revealing the inequalities present in the expression of sexuality in Chile.

John Ruskin on Reading

Abstract Victorians read a lot, and they reflected on reading: Why read? What to read? Reading to what goal? After some stage setting, this article discusses four of John Ruskin’s thoughts on reading as expounded in Sesame and Lilies (1865) and that have never received much attention. (1) There are two species of books, “books of the hour” and “books of all time.” (2) The selection of which books to read is an ethical matter. (3) The norm for reading that readers should aim to comply with is the author’s meaning. (4) Readers should love the authors they are reading in order to understand them truly. This article discusses these claims and argues for a qualified endorsement of (1) in favor of (2), argues that (3) constitutes the commonsense view of reading, and defends it against various criticisms. The article finally argues against (4).

Multi-view semantic enhancement model for few-shot knowledge graph completion

In recent years, few-shot knowledge graph completion (FKGC) has gained popularity as a solution to the long-tail distribution problem of real-world knowledge graphs (KGs). The previous knowledge graph completion (KGC) models obtain triple representation merely relying on the structure view, ignoring the valuable semantic knowledge. In this paper, we propose a multi-view framework for few-shot relation learning to address the issue. Specifically, based the structural information of the graph obtained using the structure view, we add the text view and the commonsense view. The text view employs text descriptions of entities and relations to obtain a richer semantic representation. The commonsense view performs high-quality negative sampling based on complex relations. Moreover, commonsense semantic constraints are invoked to suppress the overfitting caused by the complexity of the relation matrix. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art FKGC methods on the frequently-used benchmark datasets FB15k237-One and NELL-One.

Moralnost bez kategoričnosti

This paper argues that an agent’s moral obligations are necessarily connected to her desires. In doing so I will demonstrate that such a view is less revisionary—and more in line with our common-sense views on morality—than philosophers have previously taken it to be. You can hold a desire-based view of moral normativity, I argue, without being (e.g.) a moral relativist or error theorist about morality. I’ll make this argument by showing how two important features of an objective morality are compatible with such a desire-based account: 1) morality’s authoritative nature, 2) our ability to condemn immoral agents.

Explaining the Insufficient Relationship between Affective Empathy and Physical Aggression Based on a Double-edged Sword Model.

Affective empathy is generally considered an important inhibitor of aggression. However, the meta-analysis studies on the relationship between affective empathy and aggression have challenged this common-sense view and found no substantial correlation between the two variables. We proposed a double-edged sword model to explain this counterintuitive phenomenon and tested this model by establishing an inconsistent mediation model. A total of 663 college students in China (59.1% female; Mage = 20.69 years) completed questionnaires measuring affective empathy, sympathy, personal distress, anger proneness, and physical aggression. The results showed that on the one hand, affective empathy can indirectly inhibit physical aggression by increasing sympathy; on the other hand, affective empathy can indirectly promote physical aggression through the serial mediation of personal distress and anger proneness. Such two pathways offset each other, leading to an insignificant relation observation between affective empathy and physical aggression. The findings revealed the complexity of the relationship between affective empathy and aggression, which suggested that more efforts to reduce aggression should be made to develop individuals' sympathy, while affective empathy training should be moderate to avoid excessive empathic emotional arousal.

Free time as a central issue of tourism studies: a genealogy of leisure/idleness based on the indigenous cosmovisions of Latin America

ABSTRACT The dominance of the neoliberal ideology over tourism praxis in the last decades have undermined the possibilities for tourism to be seen as a social transformative force. This article considers that the richest part of the tourist experience belongs to the realm of ‘free time’. There is evidence of the importance of free time and leisure in indigenous societies, and to justify that the common-sense view of leisure activities should be confronted. Most literature on indigenous voices in tourism studies identifies the potential of indigenous ideas to contribute to Western/European values of resilience, sustainability and environmental justice. However, such values are employed in the name of modernization and neoliberalism which are taken for granted as values of civilization, but are not so in reality. Thus, this article explores anthropological and indigenous bibliographic productions from Latin America and interviews with indigenous people located in Northeast Brazil to produce a genealogy of leisure, based on 'cultural anthropophagy'. Violence, racism and fear emerged as structural elements of the Western development choice. Tourism studies could further examine leisure as a means to inform contemporary development policies and contribute toward a better life in society, relatively free from such structural ills.

Doubling Down on Double Standards

This article takes as its starting point the claim that the sociopolitical common-sense view according to which the European welfare state is an arrangement of institutionalized solidarity draws its support from a one-sided scientific-political narrative. My reflections boil down to the claim that this, as it were, semiofficial narrative is completely right—and yet at the same time completely wrong. Its ambiguity is characteristic of a politics of solidarity that will be defined in greater detail here. This ambiguity is by no means exhausted in the discursive dimension, but has a variety of material implications, namely, in the shape of structures of social closure whose historical dynamics have proven to be remarkably stable but are conspicuously absent from the self-description of the European welfare state. However, since the welfare state in its European manifestation, as an arrangement of solidarity, is invariably at the same time invested with a pronounced moral meaning by its proponents as well as its critics, the politics of the welfare state is a prototypical example of the social double standard that can be regarded as the cultural signature of what I call the externalization society.

Being grateful and feeling grateful: reconsidering the phenomenology of gratitude to God

ABSTRACT This paper examines the claim that feelings of gratitude to God are the proper measure for the authenticity and depth of gratitude to God. I want to illuminate what makes that claim seem obvious and then argue that it is false. I hope to show that feeling grateful to God, although not insignificant, is, from the Christian perspective at least, by no means the best barometer of gratitude to God. To those ends, first, I sketch out the structure of gratitude. Next, I explain four ways that gratitude to God stretches or breaks with the paradigmatic structure of standard interpersonal gratitude. I then show how current empirical studies of gratitude to God haven’t been sufficiently attentive to the disanalogy between standard interpersonal gratitude and gratitude to God. Finally, I turn to the Bible to consider how we should rethink gratitude to God if we reject the commonsense view.

How Reasons Guide Us (in Reasoning and Rationalisation)

Abstract The common-sense view that reasons guide us in thought and action and that humans are essentially reason-responsive animals is increasingly under attack by defenders of what one can call the Rationalisation View, which emphasises that we typically rationalise actions and judgements that are based on intuition rather than reasoning. This article defends the former view of human Reason, partly by replying to prominent advocates of the latter, partly by proposing accounts of reflective reasoning and rationalisation that bring to light a common, underappreciated feature: they both involve the capacity to see considerations as reasons. This capacity, the author conjectures, should be the starting point for investigating the faculty we call ‘Reason’, its evolutionary origin, and the (ir)rationality of different kinds of thought associated with it.

The calculated management of life and all that jazz: gaming quality assurance practices in English further education

ABSTRACT This paper examines emerging discourses and practices of quality assurance in English Further Education (FE), a sector currently undergoing significant change. Using a broadly ethnographic approach and Foucauldian theories of power, we discuss how ‘documentisation’ contributes to governance techniques in a specific institutional context. Documentisation, the transformation of concrete practice into discourse, reverses a common-sense view of the role of policy documentation and exemplifies a wide range of practices in both FE and the wider post-16 sector and includes the gamification of quality systems. Our analysis of the conditions and practices out of which the phenomenon appears identifies processes that are shaping present-day experiences and redefining the discourse of quality itself. Moreover, rather than situating compliance and/or resistance in practice per se, we argue that it is within the conditions of possibility expressed by such processes that the intertwining of compliance and resistance can best be appreciated.

An Active Externalism about Personality

People display recognizably characteristic behavioral patterns across time and situations, with a given degree of regularity. These patterns may justify the attribution of personality traits. It is arguably the commonsense view that the proper explanation of these behavioral regularities is given by intrinsic properties of the agent’s psychology. In this paper, I argue for an externalistic view of the causal basis of personality-characteristic behaviors. According to the externalistic view, the relevant behavioral regularities are better understood as the result of a systematic interaction between features internal to the agent and environmental-situational factors. Moreover, if the premise is granted that people are typically able to exercise a certain degree of control over the environmental-situational conditions they find themselves in, the resulting picture is of active sort of externalism, as people may at times engage in selection and manipulation of environmental-situational conditions as a way of managing their own behavioral tendencies.

Consciousness and the Ethics of Human Brain Organoid Research.

The possibility of consciousness in human brain organoids is sometimes viewed as determinative in terms of the moral status such entities possess, and, in turn, in terms of the research protections such entities are due. This commonsense view aligns with a prominent stance in neurology and neuroscience that consciousness admits of degrees. My paper outlines these views and provides an argument for why this picture of correlating degrees of consciousness with moral status and research protections is mistaken. I then provide an alternative account of the correlation between moral status and consciousness, and consider the epistemic ramifications for research protections of this account.

Kostićeva kritika Tri hajduka Jovana Jovanovića Zmaja u kontekstu Spomena na Ruvarca

In this paper, we have analyzed the similarities between the poems Tri hajduka / The Three Giaours by Jovan Jovanović Zmaj and Spomen na Ruvarca / In Memory of Ruvarac by Laza Kostić, which share a certain number of common motifs. At the center of our interpretation were the statements of Laza Kostić from the part Knjiga o Zmaju in which he analyzes Tri hajduka. Kostić breaks down Zmaj's poem into structural elements and examines each from the point of view of logic and common sense, but also established literary tradition. Speaking about Zmaj's treatment of the representatives of the world of the dead, Kostić makes the following poetics claims: 1) the mediator should speak clearly and succinctly; 2) the mediator should have the form he had during his lifetime; 3) the atmosphere must not be humorous but scary. These demands, together with Kostić's remark about how Feruz pasha resembles a doll, have allowed us to offer innovative readings of these two poems, where the automated Feruz pasha is positioned as the opposite of the diabolical figure in Kostić's poem. This contrast represents a shift in the anthropological development continuum which led to the birth of a modern understanding of death, which leads us to the conclusion that Kostić's objections primarily stem from a significantly different philosophy of death, and not from the objective shortcomings of Zmaj's poetry.

The Epistemological Side of Ontology

Is it possible to draw a border line between ontology and epistemology? A positive answer to this question looks attractive, mainly because it reflects convictions deeply entrenched in our common sense view of the world. However, anyone wishing to clarify the distinction between the ontological and the epistemological dimensions meets problems. This is due to the fact that the separation between factual and conceptual is not clean, but rather fuzzy. It is certainly correct to state that science means to offer correct information about the world, but the extent to which it succeeds in accomplishing this task is always questionable. We cannot claim that the picture provided by today science - our current scientific image of the world - is absolutely correct, because the history of science itself shows us that any such statement is likely to be rejected by future generations. While it may be recognized that science purports to offer a correct description of the real world, the past experience should also prompt us to accept its claims sub condicione, and to view them as merely provisional.

Poverty and Hunger in India: What is Needed to Eliminate Them

There is a widespread impression among the Indian intelligentsia, foreign scholars, and residents of developed/rich countries that India’s economic growth has not reduced poverty, that globalisation has worsened poverty and/or income distribution, and that there are hundreds of millions of hungry people in India. These arguments are buttressed by recourse to India’s ranking on several social indicators. Esoteric debates about the comparability of survey data and gaps between NSS and NAS add to the confusion and allow ideologues to believe and assert whatever information suits the argument. What are the basic facts about poverty, income distributions, and hunger at an aggregate level? This paper reviews the available data and debates on this subject and comes to a commonsense view. It then tries to link some of the outcomes to the policy framework and programmes of the government. The paper finds that India’s poverty ratio of around 22 percent in 1999-2000 is in line with that observed in countries at similar levels of per capita income. The ratio is relatively high because India is a relatively poor/ low-income country, i.e., with low average income. 90 percent of the countries in the world have a higher per capita (average) income than India. The number of the poor is very high because India’s population is very large, the secondhighest in the world. India’s income distribution as measured by the Gini co-efficient is better than three-fourths of the countries of the world. The consumption share of the poorest 10 percent of the population is the sixth best in the world. Where India has failed as a nation is in improving its basic social indicators like literacy and mortality rates. Much of the failure is a legacy of the three decades of Indian socialism (till 1979-80). The rate of improvement of most indicators has accelerated during the market period (starting in 1980-81). The gap between its level and that of global benchmarks is still wide and its global ranking on most of these social parameters remains very poor. This is the result of government failure. The improvement in social indicators has not kept pace with economic growth and poverty decline, and this has led to increasing interstate disparities in growth and poverty. JEL classification: I3, I32, I38 Keywords: Hunger, Poverty, Public Goods, Public and Quasi-Public Goods and Services, Basic Education, Public Health, Sanitation