Contemporary Theory Research Articles

An Exploratory Study of the Trait "Friendliness and Gregariousness" In the Religious Domain and their Relation to Human Well-being

This research investigates the characteristics of "Friendliness and Gregariousness "in the context of religion and their complex relationships to the welfare of people. The study emphasizes how crucial friendliness and gregariousness are to promoting healthy social dynamics. The intricate ways in which these characteristics are expressed within religious frameworks are revealed by the qualitative content analysis. By analyzing how the religious emphasis on friendliness and gregariousness coincides with scientific evidence on the positive effects of social connectivity on mental and emotional health, the research bridges the gap between religious beliefs and contemporary psychology theories. The study aims to contribute significant new data to the growing corpus of knowledge regarding the connection between friendliness and well-being by employing an interdisciplinary approach. The purpose of the study is to identify timeless principles that may lead people in many cultural and religious contexts toward a more satisfying and harmonious existence by investigating the universality of these features across different religious traditions.

To Invite or Not to Invite to Sociology? Thinking about P. Berger`s Critical Essay “Sociology: A Disinvitation?”

The authors of an unpublished translation of P.L. Berger's essay, written in the early 1990s and published in the journal “Society” (1992), demonstrate the relevance and surprising timeliness of this work for a wide readership. Sociology sometimes experiences crises and deadlocks in theory and research. Contemporary global events exacerbate these crises, and sometimes it seems that sociology can no longer cope with the study and explanation of new phenomena and processes. From the point of view of the authors, P.L. Berger, while criticizing and lamenting the shortcomings of his contemporary sociological theory and the short-sightedness of sociologists, paradoxically does not disappoint or discourage sociology, but invites once again and more insistently to engage in this science, recalling what the classics of sociology wrote and did.

Театр как «наблюдение второго порядка»: опыт Никласа Лумана

The article describes a viewpoint on theatre arts from the perspective of the Systems theory developed by the social philosopher Niklas Luhmann. The target of the study is theatre as a part of the social system. The theatre, being extremely dialogical and “demonstrative” kind of art, is described in terms of communication: self-reference, hetero-reference, autopoiesis, operational closure, first-and second-order observation. The paper aims to consider the theatre as a subsystem of the social system “art”, focusing on the notion of “second-order observation” which presumably can be a key to understanding the contemporary theatre form. Despite its social significance theatre has rarely been an object of social and philosophical studies. One of the aims of this article is to attempt to fill this gap. Luhmann avoided the political bias which was not always possible for social philosophers of the mid-twentieth century, so his view on the space and structure of theatre may also be of interest to contemporary researchers.

Betty Shamieh’s The Black Eyed: An Arab-American Woman Playwright Inverts and Subverts Orientalism

Arab-American playwright Betty Shamieh emerged on the contemporary theatre scene in the early 2000s with an artistic voice and cultural perspective that broke new ground on the American stage. Her early plays were personal stories of family that studied the immigrant experience through the eyes of exclusively Arab-American characters. Shamieh’s writing shifted after the events of 9/11 and resulted in her writing “The Black Eyed”, a play that addresses the Middle East conflict through the stories of four Arab women. Shamieh’s play adjusts the lens through which audiences witness the Arab-American experience and confront their Orientalist tendencies. Her cultural investigation rides a razor’s edge of Orientalism; she positions herself as both “us” and “them” within the discourse as she flips the hegemonic power structure. In this essay I use a close reading informed by Edward Said’s theories to examine the ways in which Shamieh inverts and subverts a gendered use of Orientalism in “The Black Eyed’s” themes and characters, using established tropes like the harem, houris, martyrs, violence, and seduction to fuel her project.

Isolationism, instrumentalism and fiscal policy

Abstract When reading contemporary theories of distributive justice, one could easily get the impression that questions of fiscal design are normatively speaking merely instrumental for realizing the distributive ideal. Once the overall conception of justice is settled upon, questions of how the state should arrange its institutions and policies are settled if they effectively and efficiently promote the preferred distribution. I argue that such pure instrumentalism is mistaken in the context of fiscal policy. As a result, there is nothing problematic or morally arbitrary about accepting domain-specific principles of fiscal justice.

The “Global” Deception: Flat-Earth Conspiracy Theory between Science and Religion

The article focuses on flat earthism, one of the most well-known contemporary conspiracy theories in popular culture. According to proponents of this theory, which has found a growing international following in recent years, political institutions such as the U.S. government and scientific institutions such as NASA would operate to deceive humanity about the real shape of our planet and the universe in which we live. In countering the data acquired by modern science and common sense knowledge, flat earthism stands as a heterodox theory and a radical critique of the authority of socially legitimized epistemic institutions. This article consists of two parts. The first part will offer a genealogical reconstruction of the flat-earth conspiracy, tracing its history from the 19th century to the exponents of the current movement. The second part will delve into the discourse of the proponents of flat earthism with specific reference to the Italian context, through documentary analysis of recent publications and online material available on YouTube and Telegram, which constitute some of the main channels for the discussion and dissemination of flat earthism in Italy today. On the basis of the data collected and analyzed, it will be shown how flat earthism represents a paradigmatic case of superconspiracy, that is, of a far-reaching theory capable of linking and including within itself a set of other, more circumscribed theories. To this end, flat earthism elaborates on a discourse that ambivalently combines two registers, scientific and religious language, proposing itself as a dissident narrative that if on the one hand rejects the knowledge of institutionalized and organized science and religion, on the other hand accredits an alternative and anti-intellectualist path of knowledge, accessible to the “common man” that aims to create a space of autonomy and opposition to the processes of secularization and globalization in which the flat earthers see the project of building a dystopian New World Order.

Threshold and Upper Bound for The Controller’s Designed Parameter of Fokker Planck Kolmogorov Probability Density Function with Applications to Cryptocurrency

This work is the first in literature to tackle the difficult open problem of determining the upper bound and threshold theorem for the TDCDP (time-dependent controller parameter) of the (Fokker Planck Kolmogorov) probability density function. This revolutionary exposition will put control theory and other related inter-disciplinary fields to a higher level towards contemporary control theory. Notably, based on the influential role of control theory in both engineering and industry, this paper will be of great value to all engineering and industry professionals who seek to know more about advanced trends within control theory settings. On the other remit of the spectrum, Fokker Planck Kolmogorov(FPK) equations are of high importance to physicists as well as mathematicians, based on their multiple applicability to information theory, graph theory, data science, finance, economics, and beyond. So, this by default adds more taste and credibility to this study. This leads by nature to introducing a different flavor to this ground-breaking research by highlighting the impact of Fokker Planck Kolmogorov(FPK) to revolutionize crypocurrency,which have received its name because it uses encryption to verify transactions, a new debatable digital payment system that doesn't rely on banks to verify transactions. It’s a peer-to-peer system that can enable anyone anywhere to send and receive payments. The paper ends with closing remarks combined with some challenging open problems and the next phase of research

Metalinguistic Attention and Punctuation

This article offers an analysis of the phenomenon of metalinguistic attention in relation to the punctuation marking of compound sentences with a common secondary element (determinant) expressing conjunctive relations. The research material consists of a microcorpus compiled by selectively extracting texts mainly from Russian fiction prose of the 20th21st centuries. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that in contemporary punctuation theory, which increasingly draws on research on metalinguistic operations, the question of metalinguistic attention and its involvement in punctuation marking has not yet been discussed. It is clarified that metalinguistic attention represents a focus on a specific object and its inclusion in the act of metalinguistic reflection. Metalinguistic attention is characterized by its directedness towards activity with the object, its arbitrariness, distributed nature, and reliance on apperception. In the process of punctuation marking, metalinguistic attention performs prognostic and controlling functions. It is demonstrated that in the punctuation marking of compound sentences with a common secondary element (determinant), metalinguistic attention is focused on their individual constituents (common element and linking means) on the one hand, and their structural-semantic integrity on the other.

Literary theory between contingency and contiguity: Yakov Druskin’s “Law of Heterogeneity”

The notion of chance epitomizes the limits and challenges of any theory’s struggle for control over itself as well as over its objects. Although contemporary literary theory has adapted its terminology and conceptual framework in line with the emergence of dynamic, “open forms” (Wölfflin in Principles of art history: The problem of the development of style in later art, Dover Publications Inc, New York, 1986), chance has nevertheless remained a highly problematic category to come to terms with. How can literary theory embrace chance? The paper approaches this question in three steps. First, it reconstructs three basic poetological propositions against whose backdrop contingency gains profile: the proposition of causal connections as a means to transform literature into a realm of necessity, the proposition of form as means to reduce arbitrariness, and the proposition of control as a means to protect the aesthetic object against the risks of external intrusions. The second part of the paper discusses a largely forgotten but highly relevant approach to the problem of contingency by Yakov Druskin. Druskin links the function of contingency in theoretical investigation with concepts of contiguity and proximity, first of all touch. His fragmentary sketch of a “law of heterogeneity” represents a paradoxical attempt to theorize contingent obstruction as a privileged systematic device to establish physical contact. The third part of this paper unpacks the implicit urge to rethink the traditions of theory formation itself through the “law of heterogeneity.” It argues that Druskin’s law introduces a different type of theory, one which is deeply indebted to the tactile, thus challenging the ocularcentrism of theoría.

How Valid Are Trust Survey Measures? New Insights From Open-Ended Probing Data and Supervised Machine Learning

Trust is a foundational concept of contemporary sociological theory. Still, empirical research on trust relies on a relatively small set of measures. These are increasingly debated, potentially undermining large swathes of empirical evidence. Drawing on a combination of open-ended probing data, supervised machine learning, and a U.S. representative quota sample, our study compares the validity of standard measures of generalized social trust with more recent, situation-specific measures of trust. We find that survey measures that refer to “strangers” in their question wording best reflect the concept of generalized trust, also known as trust in unknown others. While situation-specific measures should have the desirable property of further reducing variation in associations, that is, producing more similar frames of reference across respondents, they also seem to increase associations with known others, which is undesirable. In addition, we explore to what extent trust survey questions may evoke negative associations. We find that there is indeed variation across measures, which calls for more research.

Effects of a Contingent Responses Intervention on the Quantity and Quality of Vocalizations of Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Multiple contemporary theories emphasize the quantity and quality of child vocalizations for promoting spoken language acquisition. Yet, empirical evidence for facilitating vocal development is strikingly lacking including for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have difficulty developing language. We evaluate use of contingent responses and vocal enhancement strategies to increase the quantity and quality of child vocalizations to which adults can respond with language-facilitating input for children with ASD. Three preschool children with ASD and minimal verbal skills participated. Using an alternating treatments design embedded within a multiple probe across participants design, we compared using contingent responses with and without vocal enhancement strategies versus a non-contingent control condition. Based on visual analysis and effect sizes, all participants showed a functional relation between both active intervention conditions and quantity of vocalizations, as predicted. For quality of vocalizations, changes under the active intervention conditions were less pronounced than those observed for quantity. Two participants showed a functional relation between at least one quality variable and the active interventions. Our hypothesis that vocal enhancement strategies would exhibit a value-added effect was partially supported for quantity and quality. Findings support using contingent responses to improve the quantity and to some degree the quality of vocalizations in young children with ASD and minimal verbal skills. Support for the added value of vocal enhancement strategies was mixed. Refining the intervention strategies is warranted to meet the needs of the understudied population of children with ASD and minimal verbal skills.

Socialness effects in lexical-semantic processing.

Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioral evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words' degree of social relevance, or socialness, influences lexical-semantic processing. In Study 1, across a series of item-level regression analyses, we found that (a) socialness can facilitate responses in lexical, semantic, and memory tasks, and (b) limited evidence for an interaction of socialness with concreteness. In Studies 2-3, we tested the preregistered hypothesis that social words, compared to nonsocial words, will be associated with faster and more accurate responses during a syntactic classification task. We found that socialness has a facilitatory effect on noun decisions (Study 3), but not verb decisions (Study 2). Overall, our results suggest that the socialness of a word affects lexical-semantic processing but also that this is task-dependent. These findings constitute novel evidence in support of proposals that social information is an important dimension of semantic representation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Victorian London, England and Englishness in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs

Neo-Victorianism is described as a genre in critical and fictional writing which alters our perspective of past and present by bringing two different centuries into focus. From a new genre which is rooted in the past and strongly attached to the present, arise analytical comparisons and alternative-creative works. Victorian England is a vantage point for the Industrial Revolution; when contemporary readers and critics trace effects and results of major social, economic and intellectual changes in the twenty-first century back to their source, Victorian England appears as a model for the industrial shift in Europe. This situation justifies the choice of setting for a great number of Victorian and Neo-Victorian novels: among numerous nineteenth-century settlements, Victorian London becomes prominent. London is a designed spot in time and space which is laden with success in industrial production to become a role model, but at the same time with its characteristics such as the heavy burden of urbanisation, showing itself in over-populated places, filthy and inhumane living and working conditions; it exhibits the downside of the industrialisation period. Social and institutional vices of industrialism are portrayed in historical documents as well as literary works in settlements and places of the nineteenth-century: factories, workhouses, slums, hospitals, asylums, and colonies. Period-specific developments are measured through recorded personal and social stories, coming from every class of society, belonging to every age, gender and ethnicity, in the motherland as well as colonies. Moving from the philosophies influencing mainly the first half of the twentieth century, it is argued that contemporary theories show a growing interest on perception, representation and production of space. This article aims to emphasize the set of relations between the concepts of belonging, identity and otherness in the light of the theories on heterotopias and third spaces in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, which is a Neo-Victorian rewriting of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Socialized into depression – toward a social phenomenological psychopathology

ABSTRACT The article aims at expanding the horizon of phenomenological psychopathology of depression from a social theoretical perspective. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ontology, in the first section, depression is reinterpreted as a disruption of chiasm: it is not merely the illness of the body, the disorder of the mind, or a specific form of social suffering, but the interrelated distortion of time consciousness, agency, and interaffectivity. The phenomenological clarification of these components provides opportunity for connecting sociological and psychopathological insight. In the second part, contemporary critical theories of acceleration, globalization, biopolitics, and system colonization are reinterpreted to highlight the structural and cultural context of late modern time consciousness, agency, and interaffectivity. In the third section, it is analyzed, how these social constituents shape the space of contemporary socialization processes, including the emergence of those intersubjective distortions, which potentially affect the entirety of chiasm in a depressive way. In the final section, the conclusions for therapy are explored, including the potentials for expanding the epistemological, substantive, and emancipatory horizon of phenomenological psychopathology.

Scientific Knowledge in Bacon Philosophy: Insights from Dialectical Materialism

Francis Bacon occupies a central position in the history of the philosophy of science, representing a pivotal shift from medieval to early modern scientific thought. Therefore, in the contemporary context, understanding Bacon's philosophy is crucial for appreciating the foundations of modern science and its ongoing evolution. The purpose of the article is to examine the enduring relevance of Francis Bacon's philosophy of science, particularly in the context of his emphasis on empirical methodology, experimentation, and the socio-cultural dimensions of scientific knowledge. By analyzing Bacon's contributions, the study aims to elucidate his methodological innovations and their implications for contemporary scientific practice and theory. The work uses thematic and comparative analysis to determine the role of F. Bacon's philosophy in the analysis of the concept of knowledge.The research highlights Bacon's seminal contributions to the philosophy of science, emphasizing his advocacy for empirical methodology, systematic experimentation, and the socio-cultural context of scientific inquiry. By critiquing the methodological limitations of scholastic philosophy and advocating for a methodological overhaul grounded in experience and observation, Bacon laid the groundwork for modern experimental science. In the conclusion, his integration of dialectical materialism and interdisciplinary perspectives underscores the significance of collective scientific endeavor and the foundational role of natural history in establishing the ontological basis of scientific knowledge. By elucidating Bacon's vision for a science that serves the general welfare of society, the study underscores the continued importance of his insights for addressing contemporary challenges and advancing scientific knowledge for the betterment of humanity.

Serum NFL and tau, but not serum UCHL-1 and GFAP or CSF SNAP-25, NPTX2, or sTREM2, correlate with delirium in a 3-year retrospective analysis.

Delirium represents a common terminal pathway of heterogeneous neurological conditions characterized by disturbances in consciousness and attention. Contemporary theories highlight the acute impairment of synaptic function and network connectivity, driven by neuroinflammation, oxidative stress, and neurotransmitter imbalances. However, established biomarkers are still missing. Innovative diagnostic techniques, such as single-molecule array analysis, enable the detection of biomarkers in blood at picomolar concentrations. This approach paves the way for deeper insights into delirium and potentially therapeutic targets for tailored medical treatments. In a retrospective 3-year study, we investigated seven biomarkers indicative of neuroaxonal damage [neurofilament light chain (NFL), ubiquitin carboxyl-terminal hydrolase (UCHL-1), and tau protein], microglial activation [glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) and soluble triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (sTREM2)], and synaptic dysfunction [synaptosomal-associated protein 25 (SNAP-25) and neuronal pentraxin 2 (NPTX2)]. The analysis of 71 patients with delirium, Alzheimer's disease (AD), and non-AD controls revealed that serum NFL levels are higher in delirium cases compared to both AD and non-AD. This suggests that elevated NFL levels in delirium are not exclusively the result of dementia-related damage. Serum tau levels were also elevated in delirium cases compared to controls. Conversely, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) SNAP-25 showed higher levels in AD patients compared to controls only. These findings add to the increasing body of evidence suggesting that serum NFL could be a valuable biomarker of neuroaxonal damage in delirium research. Although SNAP-25 and NPTX2 did not exhibit significant differences in delirium, the exploration of synaptic biomarkers remains promising for enhancing our understanding of this condition.

An analysis of figurative language in the interpretation of contemporary English poetry

This article examines the various facets of figurative language. This study considers figurative language from a traditional perspective as an embellishment of language and compares it with contemporary theory in literature especially in poetry. The main material for the analysis of figurative language in poetry is poetic texts of contemporary American poets like William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Charles Bernstein. We selected 15 poems that contain a lot of figurative expressions and analyzed them namely “The Red Wheelbarrow”, “This Is Just to Say”, “To a Poor Old Woman”, “The Road Not Taken”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “Fire and Ice”, “Mending Wall”, etc. The authors conducted about evaluation of the use of metaphors, hyperboles, idioms, and similes. The most used figurative language in all the analyzed poems is metaphor. It occurred in all 15 poems. Figurative language adds an element of beauty and artistry to poetry. Metaphors, similes, and other figurative expressions infuse the language with color, imagery, and creative aesthetics that captivate the reader's senses.

The Problems of Free Will and Moral Responsibility in Buddhist Ethics

At the end of the 20th century, a discipline of Buddhist ethics was formed in English-speaking countries, within the framework of which a community of closely interacting researchers is engaged in the comprehension and systematization of ethical positions within Buddhism, often resorting to the use of analytical philosophy tools. One of the directions within the discipline of Buddhist ethics is an attempt to embed the ethical content of Buddhism in a contemporary Western European philosophical context and to put before it questions characteristic of Western philosophy, for example, the questions of moral responsibility, free will and determinism. While some researchers believe that Buddhist texts reflect a compatibilist position, others see Buddhist ethical position as resembling incompatibilism. The first problem faced by Buddhist researchers interested in this topic is that Buddhism does not have a concept of “free will” similar to the one that exists in Western philosophy. Nevertheless, contemporary theorists believe that classical Buddhism contains enough material to allow for a conversation about causality and responsibility. The purpose of this research is to substantiate the possibility of discussing free will in the context of the ethics of Buddhism. In order to do this the research examines the key provisions of Buddhist teaching relevant in the context of free will: dependent arising, absence of self and karma. It is noted that one of the reasons for the difference in the conclusions of researchers of Buddhist ethics regarding the issue of free will and moral responsibility in Buddhism are the peculiarities of Theravada and Mahayana and their particular texts different theorists mainly refer to.

What Makes an Argument Strong?

It is widely believed that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argumentation is vulnerable to the charge of relativism. This paper provides a more charitable interpretation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s normative views, one that properly considers the historical trajectory of their work and a wider range of texts than existing interpretations. It is argued that their views are better characterized as a form of “contrastivism about arguments” than any kind relativism. This more accurate depiction contributes to ongoing efforts to revive interest in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s work as well as build bridges with trends in contemporary argumentation theory.

A multi-method study of interpersonal complementarity and mentalization

Research finds cross-sectional relationships between mentalizing impairments and maladaptive personality traits. The current study connects mentalizing impairments to dynamic interpersonal processes using a multi-method design. A sample of 218 participants completed the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC; Dziobek et al., 2006) to assess mentalizing ability. Subsequently, participants rated their agentic and communal behavior and their perception of interaction partners’ agentic and communal behavior over 21-days. Mentalizing ability moderated the within-person relationship between behavior and perception for both agency and communion. Worse performance on the MASC was associated with weaker interpersonal complementarity, suggesting that mentalizing impairments lead to deviations from expected patterns of behavior and perception across interpersonal situations. These findings confirm the assumption of Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory that mentalization impairments can disrupt normative interpersonal processes (Cain et al., 2024; Pincus & Hopwood, 2012).