Commonsense Categories Research Articles

Vowel alternation with final i offers an easy-to-learn morphological option for a sex-blind grammatical gender in French.

Like all modern Romance languages, French has a sex-based grammatical gender with two genders, feminine and masculine, and a lexicon that is highly sex-differentiated. These characteristics give rise to a number of issues, including the problematic generic use of the masculine grammatical gender, coupled with the challenge of sex categorization itself, and the epistemological difficulty of an adequate sociological description and analysis of what gender commonsense categories really are about. To remedy these concerns, several authors have proposed the creation of an additional, epicene grammatical gender. We have identified three such systematic proposals, or solutions, which specify various morphological options for new epicene nouns and gender markers on their satellite elements. These options include the use of non-standard or rarely used characters, the merging of feminine and masculine gender markers, as well as consonantal and vowel changes. In the simplest proposal, referred to as "solution I," new epicene forms are mostly derived from feminine forms by systematically replacing with an i the final e that generally differentiates feminines from their masculine counterparts in written French. Although these solutions are used in some communities, their learnability has not been addressed so far, even though it could be a determining factor in their popularity and their eventual integration into standard French. In the present study, we provide a first assessment of this aspect by means of an online translation test. For each solution, French-speaking participants were instructed that they would be trained to learn an "alien" language that does not mark sex/gender categories (these alien languages correspond to standard French where only gendered words referring to people are replaced by the new epicene forms recommended by each solution). After a short learning-by-example phase, participants were required to translate into the alien language a set of 16 standard French sentences. The translations were analyzed as a function of several variables including the participants' self-reported age and sex, the word categories and the solutions themselves. While all solutions proved quickly learnable, participants' responses with solution I achieved the highest accuracy score, in particular with regard to the production of non-standard epicene forms.

The diversity of French society

The barometer method for observing French society is based on the observation of programs and the indexing of people who speak on air. It is carried out per person and per broadcast. Consequently, a person is indexed once, and once only, when he or she speaks. The indexing of each criterion is carried out taking into account the supposed common sense categories, that is to say, according to the perception that most viewers would have. This perception is formed throughout the program, based on numerous elements that can be visible on the screen, said, written or even induced. Seven criteria are currently retained: Perceived origin (perceived as “white”, perceived as “black”, perceived as “Arab”, perceived as “Asian”, “other”) gender (“masculine”, “feminine”) Socio-professional category (“CSP+”, “CSP–”, “inactive” and “marginal or illegal activities”) Disability (“yes”, “no”) age (“under 20 years”, “20 - 34 years”, “35 – 49 years”, “50 – 64 years” and “65 years and over”) The precarious situation (“yes”, “no”) The place of residence (“city center”, “peripheral neighborhoods of houses and small buildings”, “large groups of popular suburbs”, “villages”, “DOM-TOM”). (Sources: https://www.csa.fr/Informer/Collections-du-CSA/Observatoire-de-la-diversite/Barometre-de-la-representation-de-la-societe-francaise-resultats-de-la -wave-2020) French society is thus multicultural, multi-religious, and multi-cultural; this diversity must be considered as strength if we want to build a society of equality, understanding and acceptance of the Other as different, certainly, but as being having the same rights, the same duties and the same obligations. Certain groups or associations campaign for this type of society and for interbelief. We will simply cite the G3i group (International, Intercultural and Interconvictional); this group is currently chaired by Professor F. Becker; it brings together Muslims, Buddhists, people of the Jewish tradition, and even atheists.

Rediscovering the cash nexus, again: Subsumption and the labour–capital relation in platform work

This article proposes a re-theorisation of the main social relations of platform work, based on two concepts drawn from Marx: subsumption of labour and the cash nexus. Platform work research to date is heavily empirical in character, with little theoretical development. As a result, the social relations of platform work are treated descriptively, using ad hoc or common-sense categories, or platforms’ own terminology. This under-theorisation leads to over-estimation of platform work’s novelty, decentring of capital in accounts of its development, incipient technological determinism and problematic generalisation from emergent trends. In place of the commonly assumed ‘triangle’ of platform work relations, this article argues that platform work is best understood in terms of an emerging labour–capital relation, which establishes a cash nexus between platform and worker as a result of a process of subsumption. This re-theorisation, in turn, helps to understand the rapid emergence of platform worker organisation and resistance, and the similarity of its demands with worker resistance in other, more established areas of paid work under capitalist relations of production.

Ethnicity in Dutch health research: situating scientific practice

ABSTRACTObjective: A growing body of work is examining the role health research itself plays in the construction of ‘ethnicity.’ We discuss the results of our investigation as to how the political, social, and institutional dynamics of the context in which health research takes place affect the manner in which knowledge about ethnicity and health is produced.Design: Qualitative content analysis of academic publications, interviews with biomedical and health researchers, and participant observation at various conferences and scientific events.Results: We identified four aspects related to the context in which Dutch research takes place that we have found relevant to biomedical and health-research practices. Firstly, the ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ policies of the major funding institution; secondly, the official Dutch national ethnic registration system; a third factor was the size of the Netherlands and the problem of small sample sizes; and lastly, the need for researchers to use meaningful ethnic categories when publishing in English-language journals.Conclusions: Our analysis facilitates the understanding of how specific ethnicities are constructed in this field and provides fruitful insight into the socio-scientific co-production of ethnicity, and specifically into the manner in which common-sense ethnic categories and hierarchies are granted scientific validity through academic publication and, are subsequently, used in clinical guidelines and policy.

Térhasználat és szimbolikus szuverenitás

A tanulmány politikai antropológus szerzője elméleti kutatásnak veti alá a hazai térbeli identitások elméleti fogalmait, szimbolizációs és narratív viszonyrendszerét. A politikai cselekvések, projektek és önreprezentációs törekvések térbeliségének leképezése számos utat kínál az egyes szubkultúrák, értelmező közösségek politikai megjelenése számára. A szervezett politikai közélet és ennek kommunikációs univerzuma Magyarországon több időszakra bontható kapcsolatot mutat a diktatorikus, demokratikus, illetve a haladó és jelképekbe öltöztetett periódusokban, hasonlóképpen a tér antropológiáját politikai kontextusban vizsgálók tapasztalataihoz. A hatalom (hatalmi rendszer) megannyi térbeli megjelenítődése, az állam mindenhatóságának új nemzeti víziója ugyanakkor napjainkban is magába foglalja a haladásfogalom politikusok formálta térkiterjesztési eszközének szimbolikus politikai használatát

Residency redesign: much to do.

Residency redesign: much to do.

Umwelt or Umwelten? How should shared representation be understood given such diversity?

It is a truism among ethologists that one must not forget that animals perceive and represent the world differently from humans. Sometimes this caution is phrased in terms of von Uexküll's Umwelt concept. Yet it seems possible (perhaps even unavoidable) to adopt a common ontological framework when comparing different species of mind. For some purposes it seems sufficient to anchor comparative cognition in common-sense categories; bats echolocate insects (or a subset of them) after all. But for other purposes it seems necessary to find out more about how organisms organize their perceptions into biologically significant and perhaps cognitively meaningful states. Complex animals have high bandwidth sensory channels that feed into large nerve networks with very complex dynamics. Even for relatively simple animals belonging to species believed to have a small, fixed number of neurons, the odds are very much against any two animals of the same species, let alone different species, having exactly the same couplings to the environment, the same dimensionality in their nervous systems, or the same dynamics. Given such diversity (which von Uexküll himself recognized), how should we think about shared representation, shared meaning, and cognitive similarity between individuals and species?

Constructing at-risk target groups

This article explores the political legitimatization of intervention toward at-risk target groups in Danish preventive policy. Here, the overall intention is to detect social problems before they occur. Part of these preventive policies is the emergence of at-risk target groups identified as potential deviants among ‘the normal population’ of children, families and youth. We explore policy documents and find relations between political categories, social categories, perceptions of normality and risk, policy legitimization and policy tools, which we argue constitute the discursive setting for why, how and who should be objects of preventive intervention. Through a comparative analysis of preventive policy in health care, daycare and primary education, we conclude that social labeling and common sense categories play an important role in the construction of at-risk target groups. These categories function as the designators of at-risk target groups as deterministic interpretations of risk factors. We discuss why we think this might lead to unintended stereotyping and even discrimination of what was recently not part of the state's worrisome gaze.

Faith and the Scientific Mind / Faith in the Scientific Mind

Consultation at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, 11-12 February 2008. “Social Values in a secular age: what sort of religion do they imply?” Modern sciences share a number of characteristics concerning the kind of knowledge they produce, the communities of scientists who produce such knowledge, and the relation of the motivation behind the research to the discoveries made. From the social scientific point of view, the interesting question is how the discoveries of science are recaptured by the categories of common sense, and put to work in moral descriptions of the world, mappings that are very selective regarding which characteristics of scientific practices they choose to notice. These “moral” employments of science fall under two broad heads. First, there are hybrids of various moral authorities—scientific and religious—that allow us to offer a description of the historical development of “non-standard” religious forms (Fundamentalisms, New Religious Movements, New Age…) in the last century. And second, there is a spectrum of literature, from Fantasy and Science Fiction to popular science, which plays on the same materials and issues, again in a strictly time- and context-bound fashion. This latter material (which includes, among others, Dawkins’ discussions of faith and science) may be said to represent an urban folklore, and is both diffuse and influential. The project of critical thinking is, then, less a matter of relating science and faith, and more a matter of comparing the relations of orthodox to popular faith with those of orthodox to popular science.

The parietal cortex and the representation of time, space, number and other magnitudes.

The development of sub-disciplines within cognitive neuroscience follows common sense categories such as language, audition, action, memory, emotion and perception among others. There are also well-established research programmes into temporal perception, spatial perception and mathematical cognition that also reflect the subjective impression of how experience is constructed. There is of course no reason why the brain should respect these common sense, text book divisions and, here, we discuss the contention that generalized magnitude processing is a more accurate conceptual description of how the brain deals with information about time, space, number and other dimensions. The roots of the case for linking magnitudes are based on the use to which magnitude information is put (action), the way in which we learn about magnitudes (ontogeny), shared properties and locations of magnitude processing neurons, the effects of brain lesions and behavioural interference studies. Here, we assess this idea in the context of a theory of magnitude, which proposed common processing mechanisms of time, space, number and other dimensions.

Kinesis and Energeia—and What Follows. Outline of a Typology of Human Actions

This paper presents a typology of human actions, based on Aristotle’s kinesis–energeia dichotomy and on a formal elaboration (with some refinement) of the Vendler–Kenny classificatory schemes for action types (or action verbs). The types introduced are defined throughout by inferential criteria, in terms of what here are referred to as “modal-temporal expressions” (‘MT-terms’). Examples of familiar categories analysed in this way are production and maintenance, but the procedure is meant to offer a basis for defining various other commonsense categories. Among the more theoretical categories introduced are “Aristotelian projects”, i.e. actions defined in terms of Aristotle’s conceptions of movement/change, as well as “abstract projects”, in which the agent ensures that something changes from not being a fact to being a fact, and “conditional agency”, which involves actions that are to be performed when/if certain conditions come to be fulfilled. A category like “starting an action” is itself inferentially defined here in MT-terms, and so, inter alia, are proceeding with, finishing, stopping and interrupting an action. There is also a demonstration of how actions of one type may be converted into those of other types, where this is a matter of the way they are “seen” or described. There is also an implication to the effect that some of these distinctions may be useful for formulating certain critical insights regarding modern life.

Clipart images as commonsense categories

Clipart is the visual representation of commonsense categories and stereotypes of social representations, as defined by Moscovici. Indexed and displayed online for downloading on Microsoft's Design Gallery and Art Today's clipart.com, the clips exhibit strong threads of continuity with earlier popular illustration and rhetorical manuals of gesture. At the same time, they also register differences in the social representations of different eras, as well as divisions and complexities in the representation of controversial categories such as sexual harassment. Though it is questionable how and in what way the theories popular at a particular time can be critiqued by citing the clipart of the era, these large archives provide powerful new tools for seeing, displaying, and investigating social representations - more powerful and useful than directly accessing Google's hundreds of millions of online `images'.

Logics of delusion

Delusion represents an exceptional test case for the principal categories of common sense and philosophical thought, such as 'reason', 'truth' and 'reality'. Via an engagement with the legacy of Freud and the most discussed results of twentieth-century psychiatry, my aim will be to analyse its paradoxical forms and to shed light on the logics that underlie and orient its specific modalities of temporalization, conceptualization and argumentation. Delusion, then, has traditionally been presented as synonymous with irrationality (absurdity, groundlessness, error, chaos), whereas by contrast its mirror image, reason, has been defined in terms of evidence, demonstrability, truth and order. I will analyse and contrast their paradoxical definitions.

On the Logics of Delusion

Delusion is an exceptional test case for the principal categories of common sense and philosophical thought such as ‘reason’, ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. Via an engagement with the legacy of Freud and the most remarkable results of 20th-century psychiatry, my aim will be to analyse its paradoxical forms and to shed light on the logics that underlie and orient its specific modalities of temporalization, conceptualization and argumentation.

Free Process Theory: Towards a Typology of Occurrings

The paper presents some essential heuristic and constructional elements of Free Process Theory (FPT), a non-Whiteheadian, monocategoreal framework. I begin with an analysis of our common sense concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a free process. I argue that an activity is not a type but a mode of occurrence, defined in terms of a network of inferences. The inferential space characterizing our concept of an activity entails that anything which is conceived of as occurring in the activity mode is a concrete,dynamic, non-particular individual. Such individuals, which I call ‘free processes’, may be used for the interpretation of much more than just common sense activities. I introduce the formal theory FPT, a mereology with anon-transitive part-relation, which contains a typology of processes based on the following five parameters relating to: (a) patterns of possible spatial and temporal recurrence (automerity); (b) kinds of components (participant structure); (c) kinds of dynamic composition; (d) kinds of dynamic flow (dynamic shape); and (e) dynamic context. I show how these five evaluative dimensions for free processes can be used to define ontological correlates for various common sense categories,and to draw distinctions between various forms of agency(distributed, collective, reciprocal, entangled) and emergence (weak, strong,as ‘autonomous system’ (Bickhard/Christensen)).

科学的理論化をめぐって

This paper focuses on the problem of foundation in science. In order to approach this topic, Michael Lynch's criticism of Alfred Schutz's demarcation between common-sense rationality and scientific rationality is cited. From this, it is claimed that the demarcation to be examined is between science as working and scientific theorizing. Regarding the former, laboratory practices are discussed based on findings of laboratory studies. Regarding the latter, a theorizing in sociology is analyzed. By these double demonstrations, it is recognized that there is no such demarcation and no need for scientific foundation, and that we should study common-sense categories and ‘scientific’ practice in their own rights.

Representing Law in Partial Information Structures

This paper presents a new language for isomorphic representations of legalknowledge in feature structures. The language includes predefinedstructures based on situation theory for common-sense categories, andpredefined structures based on Van Kralingen`s (1995) frame-based conceptualmodelling language for legal rules. It is shown that the flexibility of thefeature-structure formalism can exploited to allow for structure-preservingrepresentations of non-primitive concepts, and to enable various types ofinteraction and cross-reference between language elements. A fragment of theDutch Opium Act is used to illustrate how modelling and reasoning proceed in practice.

Interdiscourse or supervenience relations: The primacy of the manifest image

Amidst the progress being made in the various (sub-)disciplines of the behavioural and brain sciences a somewhat neglected subject is the problem of how everything fits into one world and, derivatively, how the relation between different levels of discourse should be understood and to what extent different levels, domains, approaches, or disciplines are autonomous or dependent. In this paper I critically review the most recent proposals to specify the nature of interdiscourse relations, focusing on the concept of supervenience. Ideally supervenience is a relation between different discourses which has all the advantages of reduction, but without its disadvantages. I apply the more abstract considerations to two concrete cases: schizophrenia and colour. Usually an interlevel or interdiscourse relation is seen as asymmetrical: the overlaying discourse depends on the underlying discourse (and not vice versa), where the out- or un-spoken assumption is that the ultimate underlying discourse is physical. Instead I argue that scientific categories referred to in interdiscourse relations are, ultimately, dependent on common sense categories and common sense normative criteria. It is the manifest categories and common sense ideas about what is reasonable and what is right that determine the relevant categorisations at the deeper, underlying levels. I suggest that the implications of this are not merely methodological or epistemological.

The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity

What is the relationship between common sense categories of experience and analytical concepts developed in order to understand the processes that produce such categories and effect their taken-for-grantedness? This question is crucial for those working on nationalism, ethnicity, and state formation. Much of the misplaced concreteness that bedevils this scholarship results from an uncritical reproduction of common sense that poses intellectual as well as political problems_

Witches and Thieves: Deviant Motivations in Gisu Society

In Gisu society neither theft nor witchcraft can be interpreted from the perspective of commonsense Western categories. In this article I examine Gisu concepts of the person and deviant motivations. The construction of deviance relates to the fundamental Gisu value of male autonomy which has a necessary material counterpart. In a situation of land shortage this places stress on the positions of the young and the old, making the achievement of a respectable adulthood difficult for the former, who are vulnerable to accusations of theft, just as it denies the possibility of an honourable retirement to the latter, who gain reputations for witchcraft. The significance of dispositional versus situational evaluation of action is discussed in the context of attribution theory.