Commonsense Concepts Research Articles

Revolution in the everyday: using Gramsci to inspire hope and change with social workers

This article is a discussion about using the work of Antonio Gramsci in social work supervision. Gramsci can offer a challenge to the political ideology of the neoliberal era. Through focusing on his concepts of hegemony and common sense, an understanding of social work practice in the neoliberal era can start to be discerned and can provide a platform for developing practice that centers on people’s actual lived experience. Gramsci’s theory can also provide social workers with a way of challenging neoliberal common sense views and can, consequently, have the potential to inspire optimism and hope.

Scientific claims are constitutive of common sense about health

AbstractEndorsing the view that commonsense conceptions are shaped by scientific claims provides an explanation for why microbiota-gut-brain (MGB) research might become incorporated into commonsense notions of health. But scientific claims also shape notions of personal identity, which accounts for why they can become entrenched in common sense even after they have been refuted by science.

Health Educational Practices on Alcohol, Drugs, Sexuality, Gender and Human Rights – An Experience Report

This paper presents itself as an experience report. Its objective was to provide the academic community with mechanisms that enable the habit of critical reflection on the information provided with scientific basis, in the perspective of deconstructing common sense concepts and building new ones, focusing on reducing prejudice and exclusion and encouraging respect for others. The choice of the students being all specifically from the psychology degree occurred during the supervision of the care provided at the school clinic, where difficulties were reported in dealing with the demands related to the themes addressed in the workshops. This is the experience of psychology students of all semesters, in the morning and evening shifts of a private university in the city of Manaus, Brazil, where workshops were held, divided into two themes: Alcohol and other drugs, and Sexuality, Gender and Human Rights, from October 27 to November 11. There were 10 meetings, each lasting approximately 2h30m, conducted by three professional psychologists. The instruments used during the workshops were videos and images, along with dynamics and conversation wheels to raise discussions¸ providing, through the conversation wheel, a space for interaction and exchange of experiences on each theme.

Knowledge graph embedding with concepts

Knowledge graph embedding aims to embed the entities and relationships of a knowledge graph in low-dimensional vector spaces, which can be widely applied to many tasks. Existing models for knowledge graph embedding primarily concentrate on entity–relation–entitytriplets, or interact with the text corpus. However, triplets are less informative, and the in-domain text corpus is not always available, making the embedding results deviate from the actual meaning. At the same time, our mental world contains many concepts about worldly facts. For human cognition, compared to knowledge that we learned, common-sense concepts are more basic and general, and they play important roles in human knowledge accumulation. In this paper, based on common-sense concepts information of entities from a concept graph, we propose a Knowledge Graph Embedding with Concepts (KEC) model that embeds entities and concepts of entities jointly into a semantic space. The fact triplets from a knowledge graph are adjusted by the common-sense concept information of entities from a concept graph. Our model not only focuses on the relevance between entities but also focuses on their concepts. Thus, this model offers precise semantic embedding. We evaluate our method on the tasks of knowledge graph completion and entity classification. Experimental results show that our model outperforms other baselines on the two tasks.

Tradução comentada de uma crônica de Machado de Assis para o espanhol: entre a letra e a literalidade

Neste artigo, uma tradução comentada, abordo um exemplo de tradução literária do português para o espanhol a fim de discutir algumas questões que se apresentam à atividade em razão da proximidade das línguas. O corpus é constituído pela crônica publicada por Machado de Assis n’O Cruzeiro, em junho de 1878. A partir do postulado de que as decisões tradutórias não são necessariamente coerentes, em todos os casos, com a estratégia adotada, analiso a dicotomia letra-sentido através da exploração das margens entre o conceito bermaniano de letra e o conceito de tradução literal do senso comum. As situações extraídas da tradução do corpus começam informando momentos em que a proximidade entre as línguas torna possíveis decisões coincidentes para projetos de tradução literal e da letra. Colocações e idiomatismos são consultados como caso particular em que é possível perceber a tensão entre ambas as estratégias. O perfil colocacional, entendido como atributo importante da letra, é usado para mostrar como uma tradução literal pode se afastar de uma estratégia de tradução da letra, o que nos exemplos abordados acontece tanto em razão de mudanças de registro quanto pela ação das tendências deformantes bermanianas. A seguir se mostra o caso de um ganho na tradução da letra usando expressão idiomática em espanhol para traduzir uma expressão idiomática em português, contrariando, em certo sentido, o posicionamento de Berman a respeito. A agramaticalidade também acontece às vezes nas opções literais, mesmo num par de línguas próximas como são o português e o espanhol, e sobre isso se oferece um exemplo. Na conclusão tenta-se pôr os pensamentos de Schleiermacher (2000), Ortega y Gasset (1957) e Berman (2013) numa perspectiva histórica para defender que a proposta de tradução da letra é compatível com a norma tradutória hegemônica no Brasil.

Austerity common sense and contested understandings of the austerity measures within a leadership of a professional association of social workers

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces a preliminary conceptualisation of ‘austerity common sense’ in order to understand why austerity policies, despite the social harm they cause, have support not only from the economic and political establishment but also from the wider population including members of the social work profession. Building on the Gramscian concept of common sense, ‘austerity common sense’ refers to the set of beliefs circulated by the ruling elite and adopted by members of the leadership of the Professional Association of Social Workers (SKLE), as well as others within Greece and the European Union, to understand austerity policies. Through this framing, austerity measures are largely accepted as inevitable rather than challengeable. The paper maintains that the concept of austerity common sense provides an analytical framework for understanding the acceptance of austerity measures in Greece and elsewhere, since similar ‘austerity common sense’ framing is encountered in many countries. Furthermore, it is maintained that the concept of ‘austerity common sense’ can facilitate the interrogation of the socio-economic construction of ideas and phrases. This is an important process with which the social work profession needs to engage.

Formal representation of qualitative direction

ABSTRACTThis paper reviews formal approaches to representing spatial knowledge about qualitative direction. Unlike geometric direction information, qualitative information does not employ numerical values but relies on comparison. The qualitative approach is often regarded as suitable for capturing commonsense concepts and thus is relevant to human-centered interfaces for spatial information systems. To establish a context for the work on qualitative direction, we preset a brief history of the development of qualitative temporal and spatial representations from different scientific perspectives. We identify main focal areas of these representations of spatial direction and propose a taxonomy. In the light of more than three decades of fruitful research, we obtain a map of formal representations that reveal interrelationships between different research strands in the field.

Again on the revolutionary subject: problematising class and subalternity in Gramsci on Tahrir

SUMMARYRoberto Roccu’s intervention provides a detailed reading of the concepts of subalternity, common sense and passive revolution as employed in Gramsci on Tahrir. Roccu calls for a more sustained and careful reading of how ‘subaltern agency’ is invoked and performed in revolutionary upheavals.

Probing Cognitive Enhancements of Social “Resonance” – Towards a Aesthetic Community of Sensing and Making Music Together

AbstractIn my general aim to probe a non-reductionist Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement, considering social self-other relations and the epistemic 2PP in social syn-aesthetic tuning-ins, synchronisations and tuning-outs, this paper amplifies the Aristotelian common sense concept κοινὴ αἲσθησις2 by analysing the concept and metaphor of “resonance”3 in contemporary debates on >resonance< as acoustic and multimodal figure of thought. Resonance as shown in scientific models derived from acoustics will be applied to an aesthetic comunity of sensing and making music together as explored in Alfred Schütz, as well as in social relations in social psychology. Finally, this paper puts resonance to test as well in technical atunements of social relations and closes with the necessary resistance to imposition of social resonance, introduced in this paper as xenoresonance.

National Character in the Context of Modern Societies

Discussions of the realisation and transformation of national characteristics and the emergence of new national identities in contemporary modern societies are not to be reduced solely to the effects of globalisation, contemporary capitalism and market economy. What needs to be foregrounded and confronted is the ideological and political factor. Scientific studies primarily examine the national character in the context of culture and personality, focusing on the isomorphism of personality traits and cultural patterns, which are often assessed according to political interests and national values. As such, they help to shape the collective movement of each nation, displaying the interdependence between the nation and its national sentiments. What is essential to contemporary modern societies is the national state in a political sense. As a result, the national character is now more than ever assessed on purely pragmatic foundations, such as the role of politics, national values, and forms of nationalism. These forms dictate the national symbols, myths, and national sentiments about a common origin, which are fundamental to the existence and revitalisation of people within a particular nation, a nation with a common national identity. What is crucial, the national rituals and sentiments are supposed to create a feeling of unity. The awareness of the unity and the sense of the shared mission of a particular nation, especially in terms of its cultural and political homogeneity and its common past, form the basis of a political perspective in examining its national character. The role and study of the national character were intensified in the wake of national revolutions, world wars, and similar crises, especially in the context of promoting forms of nationalism: the uncertain circumstances led to new explanations of the nation’s realities on the basis of common-sense conceptions, which generated distinct ideological polarisations between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Neuroscience and everyday life: Facing the translation problem

To enable the impact of neuroscientific insights on our daily lives, careful translation of research findings is required. However, neuroscientific terminology and common-sense concepts are often hard to square. For example, when neuroscientists study lying to allow the use of brain scans for lie-detection purposes, the concept of lying in the scientific case differs considerably from the concept in court. Furthermore, lying and other cognitive concepts are used unsystematically and have an indirect and divergent mapping onto brain activity. Therefore, scientific findings cannot inform our practical concerns in a straightforward way. How then can neuroscience ultimately help determine if a defendant is legally responsible, or help someone understand their addiction better? Since the above-mentioned problems provide serious obstacles to move from science to common-sense, we call this the 'translation problem'. Here, we describe three promising approaches for neuroscience to face this translation problem. First, neuroscience could propose new 'folk-neuroscience' concepts, beyond the traditional folk-psychological array, which might inform and alter our phenomenology. Second, neuroscience can modify our current array of common-sense concepts by refining and validating scientific concepts. Third, neuroscience can change our views on the application criteria of concepts such as responsibility and consciousness. We believe that these strategies to deal with the translation problem should guide the practice of neuroscientific research to be able to contribute to our day-to-day life more effectively.

Experimental Philosophy of Pain

The standard view of pains among philosophers today is that their existence consists in being experienced. The typical line of support offered for this view is that it corresponds with the ordinary or commonsense conception of pain. Despite this, a growing body of evidence from experimental philosophers indicates that the ordinary understanding of pain stands in contrast to the standard view among philosophers. In this paper, we will survey this literature and add to it, detailing the results of seven new studies on the ordinary understanding of pain using both questionnaire and corpus analysis methods.

Book review: Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept

Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept Reiner Robert , Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept, Polity: Cambridge, 2016; 272 pp.: 9780745660301, £50.00 (hbk).

Una aproximación a las tipologías en la investigación sociológica a partir de los estilos de vida de homosexuales masculinos en Lima

In this paper we present a heuristic pathway for the construction of typologies in sociological research. We show the main characteristics of the types, their relationship with the concepts of common sense and their place within scientific concepts. At the same time, using data from a survey conducted in late 2014 as part of an ongoing research about the forms of subjectivation of homosexuality in Lima, we present a typology of the lifestyles of men who practice homoeroticism. With this presentation we seek to reconstruct the modus operandi of the development of typologies, as it articulates the theoretical and technical-methodological research levels. For the first level we draw upon a brief framework for the analysis, as for the second we use two techniques of statistical analysis: the multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and the hierarchical ascendant classification (HAC).

Discourses of Exclusion: Immigrant-Origin Youth Responses to Immigration Debates in an Election Year

ABSTRACTPolitical discourse on immigration policy often provides a window into a society’s boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Here, we seek to understand how those in liminal positions respond to political debates that raise issues of boundary maintenance. Drawing from Bakhtinian concepts of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses as well as Gramsci’s concept of common sense, we analyzed how a superdiverse sample of 26 immigrant-origin adolescents (from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe) responded to video segments of presidential debates from the 2012 U.S. election. Youth’s responses to presidential video clips about undocumented immigration policies fell along a spectrum from inclusionary to exclusionary, with many voicing mixed responses to immigration policies. Half of the youth referenced their own family’s migration experience when discussing immigration policy, most frequently in empathetic ways; however, this did not preclude them from aligning with discourses of exclusion. The theme of fairness was prevalent in their responses, yet it emerged in distinct ways. This work highlights the need to interrogate common-sense discourses of exclusion.

CoreALMlib: An library translated from the Component Library

AbstractThis paper presents CoreALMlib, an $\mathscr{ALM}$ library of commonsense knowledge about dynamic domains. The library was obtained by translating part of the Component Library (CLib) into the modular action language $\mathscr{ALM}$. CLib consists of general reusable and composable commonsense concepts, selected based on a thorough study of ontological and lexical resources. Our translation targets CLibstates (i.e., fluents) and actions. The resulting $\mathscr{ALM}$ library contains the descriptions of 123 action classes grouped into 43 reusable modules that are organized into a hierarchy. It is made available online and of interest to researchers in the action language, answer-set programming, and natural language understanding communities. We believe that our translation has two main advantages over its CLib counterpart: (i) it specifies axioms about actions in a more elaboration tolerant and readable way, and (ii) it can be seamlessly integrated with ASP reasoning algorithms (e.g., for planning and postdiction). In contrast, axioms are described in CLib using STRIPS-like operators, and CLib's inference engine cannot handle planning nor postdiction.

The Proportionality Principle after the 2015 Amendments

Rule 26(b)(1) was revised as part of the 2015 Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1) to promote (2) by the incorporation of factors, then located in Rule 26(b)(2)(C), into the text of (b)(1), with the factors slightly re-adjusted and a new factor added. (3) Rule 26(b)(2)(C)(iii) now requires a court to the frequency or extent of when [iii] the burden or expense of the proposed is outside the permitted bv Rule 26(b)(1). (4) The revised permits of non-privileged information only if it is both to the claims or defenses of a party and is also to the of the case. The renewed emphasis on enforced through active case management, reflects a desire to achieve the goals of Rule 1. As Chief Justice Roberts put it in his 2015 Year-End Report, the amended crystalizes the concept of reasonable limits on through increased reliance on the common-sense concept of (5) I. Cases Interpreting the New Rules The flood of post-December 1 decisions on the and implementation of Rule 26(b)(1) and related changes is best summarized in the following categories, although the cases themselves need to be consulted as well. A. Relevancy The relevancy of sought to the claims or defenses continues to be the primary issue determining the scope of If the information sought is not relevant, courts need not focus on proportionality. For example, in LightSquared v. Deere & Co. the court acknowledged the amended but denied the based on a lack of relevance. (6) Courts refuse to ask a party to run down a rabbit hole chasing irrelevant information on collateral matters. (7) The threshold for relevancy under the amended remains relatively low, (8) in contrast to the enhanced showing of relevance required in some Circuits for purposes of securing an adverse inferences. (9) Some courts cite the terms of Federal Rules of Evidence 401, under which evidence is relevant if it has any tendency to make the existence of a fact of consequence more or less probable. (10) Moreover, as Judge Francis and others have held, relevance is still defined broadly by pre-December 1 case law, including the 1978 Supreme Court decision in Oppenheimer Fund v. Sanders, (11) which is often cited for that proposition. (12) B. Proportionality A on the of designed to guard against redundant or disproportionate discovery, has been part of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure since 1983. (13) After the 2010 Duke Litigation Conference, the Rules Committee acted on its conviction that discovery in civil litigation would more often achieve the goals of Rule 1 through an increased emphasis on proportionality, enforced through active case management. (14) Although the initial Draft Committee Note described this as a change designed to limit the of discovery, (15) the final version of the Committee Note more accurately states that it merely restores the factors to their original place in defining the of discovery. (16) A number of cases have explicitly denied of otherwise relevant information based on grounds, involving a variety of contexts. In Henry v. Morgan's Hotel Group, the court refused to enforce subpoenas against former employers as not proportional to the needs of the case where it was not even remotely apparent what relevance the information would have to the allegations in the case. (17) In another, requests were denied because they was precisely the kind of disproportionate that Rule 26--old or new--was intended to preclude. (18) In Wilmington Trust v. AEP Generating (19) the court concluded that the rule of proportionality would be violated if it ordered an additional search which might produce 200K documents that would have to be searched manually. …

Vulnerability and young people: care and social control in policy and practice

Vulnerability, as Kate Brown argues in her recent book, Vulnerability and Young People: Care and Social Control in Policy and Practice, is a ‘common-sense concept’ that has gained traction in conte...

Attention and the limits of conscious experience

The phenomenological conception of common sense inspired by James (1890) claims that attending is essentially a conscious mental phenomenon. The modal philosophical implications of this thesis regarding the nature of attention are clear. It is not possible to attend something without being conscious of that thing. On the basis of classical studies on visual pathologies such as blindsight and recent experiments with non-pathological subjects, this paper argues that the Jamesian philosophical conclusion regarding the metaphysics of attention is false. Evidence suggests that in fact it is possible to attend to objects without consciously experiencing them. Keywords: attention, consciousness, blindsight , common sense, phenomenology.

Bringing Plurality Together: Common Sense, Thinking and Philosophy in Arendt

ABSTRACTArendt's concept of common sense has generally been misunderstood. It is almost exclusively interpreted in light of Kant's common sense, either as an espousal of the latter or as a distortion of it. This narrow reading of Arendtian common sense has led to a problem, as her uses of the concept do not always fit its Kantian understanding. This has led to accusing her of being inconsistent, or as holding on to several, incompatible concepts of common sense.This article argues that Arendt has one complex concept of common sense, used more or less consistently throughout her writings. Rather than understanding Arendt's common sense in light of Kant's, as most readers do, I demonstrate its links to Aristotle and to the eighteenth‐century Scottish school of common sense. By doing so I turn attention to a difficulty that has thus far not been adequately treated, namely the fact that Arendt presents two, allegedly contradictory pictures of the relation between common sense on the one hand and science and philosophy on the other: a picture in which science and philosophy depend upon common sense, versus one in which they find themselves in a conflict that eventually leads to the loss or demise of common sense. The last part of the article suggests a way to settle the tension between these two pictures, by understanding the political significance Arendt ascribes to them as two distinct yet complementary ways of approaching the modern phenomenon of totalitarianism.