Ordinary Perceptions Research Articles

Formation of conceptual representations of reality on the basis of reflective practice (research experience)

Introduction. The transition from ordinary perceptions of reality to conceptualized ones is a significant problem of philosophical education. The aim of this article is to identify the ways of this transition in the course of doctoral students' work with modern philosophical literature, to substantiate ontological and epistemological principles of understanding reality, and to summarize modern approaches to solving this problem. Materials and Methods. On the basis of teaching practice, which goes back to Socrates' Maieutic method, the principle of “pro et contra”, and substantially determined by the discussions of realists and anti-realists about the nature of reality, the ways of strengthening the discipline of judgment, improving the reflexive culture, clarifying the bases of one's own ideas about the world and formalizing them in a thoughtful system of judgments are revealed. The method of research into the formation of conceptual representations of reality involves analyzing the ways of transition from unconsidered opinions through the recognition of their insufficiency and unsatisfactoriness to such knowledge, which Plato called ‘theory’ (θεωρία), i.e. rationally constructed principles of analytics. In this methodological approach (communicative-competence - in the modern formulation), the very sequence of cognitive acts is important: from ordinary ‘naïve’ perceptions - to a clear understanding of the complexity of the problem - then to the formation of questions in the audience that lead beyond a surface view of reality - and to the possible conceptual coherence and validity of perceptions of reality. Results. In the course of History and Philosophy of Science for doctoral students, the author proposed and justified the use of a three-level construct of moving from everyday representations of reality to conceptually meaningful ones. At the first level it was proposed to give an intuitive definition of the concept of ‘reality’; at the second level to analyze it, relying on sources from among those recommended by the lecturer or chosen independently, then briefly formulate the essence of realistic and anti-realistic approaches and identify the logic of one of them, and at the third level to move to the opposite position and present the relevant arguments. The author summarized the results of this procedure, which includes critical overcoming of ordinary statements about the nature of reality and dialogue between opposite conceptual solutions to the problem, and substantiated that such practice gives the effect of “awakened consciousness” and becomes the basis for readiness to conduct an internal dialogue on complex philosophical problems. Conclusions. The skills of reality analysis presented in the article develop and improve the reflexive practice of young researchers, clarify the basis of their own perceptions of the world, formalize them in a reasoned and critically elaborated system of judgments, and form their readiness to solve complex problems in science and philosophy.

The Mindful Animism of Ideophony in Pastaza and Upper Napo Kichwa

This paper proposes a novel perspective for thinking about ideophones, which are imitative words that communicate sensory perceptions and emotions with linguistic sounds and with so-called “paralinguistic” features, especially gesture and intonation. By considering their performative and depictive qualities with concepts from mindfulness and meditative practices, it is argued that a contemplative, mindful impulse underlies their use by Kichwa-speaking Runa living in Amazonian Ecuador. Using concepts from traditional meditation treatises, a contemporary guided meditation, and contemporary ethnographic research, the paper argues that, whatever else may motivate their articulations of ideophones, whether for expressive, humorous, or dramatic purposes, Kichwa speakers are mindfully and meditatively attending to the rising and falling of ordinary perceptions and giving a voice to the dynamic nature of their lived realities. By voicing the dynamic nature of sensory experiences, speakers are also able, momentarily, to become what they imitate, thereby expressing the perspectives of nonhuman beings according to their sounds, movements, appearances, and energies.

Delimiting Religion

Delimiting Religion

Fostering Post-Traumatic Growth in College Classrooms During COVID-19

Almost everything has changed. Aside from losing social connections, academic support structures, and enrichment opportunities, students face new anxieties about health, loved ones, and financial security within an uncertain economy. The sudden loss of control and unanswered questions about the future may leave many feeling helpless, fearful, angry, or grieving. In the middle of this global crisis, does classroom learning and traditional curricula suddenly feel less relevant? With attention on more salient problems and a complexity of emotions students can’t begin to process, where will the motivation and focus to learn come from? How can faculty account for this in their teaching? Feeling at a loss, I was delighted when a former student reached out to discuss these topics. Through a series of individual personal reflections and conversations, we explored ways of interpreting this adversity and ultimately co-created meaning in ways we hope will benefit both students and faculty, whether future learning is conducted virtually or face-to-face. We found great value in illustrating our experiences using Tedeschi and Calhoun’s 2004 conceptualization of posttraumatic growth, which entails positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle to make sense of a highly challenging life circumstance—one such as COVID-19, which can shatter our worldview, shake us from our ordinary perceptions, and force us to rebuild ourselves and find deeper meaning. Specifically, we discussed: What choices do students have in responding to the current situation and how can faculty support positive growth choices? What could posttraumatic growth look like during the COVID-19 pandemic? What is deliberative cognitive exploration, how can it foster growth, and how can faculty encourage it in their classrooms? What types of growth “outcomes” could not only give us purpose and meaning in this time, but also build resilience, and perhaps make us even better than before?

UMA REFLEXÃO SOBRE O USO DE ANALOGIAS NO ENSINO DE CIÊNCIAS E O DESDOBRAMENTO MULTIMODAL DA REALIDADE: O EXEMPLO DE TÓPICOS DA TEORIA DA EVOLUÇÃO BIOLÓGICA

As analogias são uma fonte heurística de pensamento para compreensão ou transição de ideias para a formação dos conceitos científicos, sendo muito utilizadas por cientistas e no cotidiano. Neste ensaio, buscamos fazer uma aproximação do conceito de analogia modal da teoria dooyeweerdiana com a Metodologia de Ensino com Analogia (MECA), no intuito de enriquecer as percepções ordinárias dos signos e a abertura cultural analítica científica. Realizamos uma pesquisa de sondagem sobre métodos de ensino com uso de analogias, para em seguida expormos conceitos da teoria cosmonômica de Dooyeweerd buscando fundamentar o conceito de analogia modal, abertura cultural e princípio Shalom. Por fim, evidenciamos o diálogo dessa concepção filosófica dooyeweerdiana com o uso da MECA no exemplo da analogia da Árvore da Vida de Charles Darwin. Nessa interação percebemos o enriquecimento (abertura cultural) de relações analógicas já conhecidas de desenvolvimento evolutivo, extinção e aparecimento de espécimes em função dos órgãos vegetais gomos, folhas e ramos; a construção de novas relações analógicas modais para outros órgãos e situações em que o vegetal comumente sobrevive, como a presença dos seres nos meios ambientais distintos (aquáticos, terrestres e aéreos) e reprodução de caráter teleológico em relação aos órgãos de raízes e frutos; e também a discursividade do equilíbrio para o contexto social e ambiental por meio do princípio Shalom.

Sensible Over-Determination

AbstractI develop a view of perception that does justice to Price's intuition that all sensory experience acquaints us with sensible qualities like colour and shape. Contrary to the received opinion, I argue that we can respect this intuition while insisting that ordinary perception puts us in direct contact with the mind-independent world. In other words, Price's intuition is compatible with naïve realism. Both hallucinations and ordinary perceptions acquaint us with instances of the same kinds of sensible qualities. While the instances in hallucination are mind-dependent, those in veridical perception are not. The latter are ontologically over-determined—they have their existence guaranteed both in virtue of having a material bearer and in virtue of being perceived by a mind. Such over-determined instances are mind-independent—they can continue to exist unperceived, because, in addition to the minds that perceive them, their existence is guaranteed by the material objects that are their bearers.

Actual and Potential Harm is Central to Perceptions of Greed

Despite its centrality to public discourse and everyday ethical judgment and behavior, a robust conceptual understanding of greed has been lacking from the management literature (Wang & Murninghan, 2011). This paper focuses on the factors that shape ordinary perceptions of greedy actions and business practices. Supplementing existing accounts that conceptualize greed as a sin of acquisitiveness or insatiability (always wanting more), we find in five studies that real or potential harm to other parties is an additional important determinant of whether actions are seen as greedy. People are sensitive to both the degree and victims of harm, and use both acquisitiveness and harm to evaluate the amount of greed reflected in real-world business practices. Results are discussed in terms of both theoretical and applied implications.

An Analysis of Countries’ Images through Linguistic Methods

Communication between countries tends to rest upon a country's international image, which is transmitted via mass media. Most international ideologies are far from true, but they prevent some countries from objective appraisal of other nations and, therefore, cause numerous intercultural and geopolitical problems. In order to solve these issues, it is crucial to study the global image of different countries. Using linguistic tools, my research analyzes the global perception of Russia. Methods used include a discourse analysis of modern American, British, French, and Russian media; and a psycholinguistic associative experiment with native English, French, and Russian speakers. As a result, I found two completely different views of modern Russia. The view based on the media analysis is negative and has a political bias, while ordinary people's perceptions of Russia were more positive and diverse. The research revealed spheres of Russian reality, which can become a new basis for a non-lopsided and more objective image - spheres of culture, history, people, and sport. Also, the linguistic tools mentioned above showed their efficiency in country image analysis and can be, therefore, used in further research.

Self-Projection: Hugo Münsterberg on Empathy and Oscillation in Cinema Spectatorship

ArgumentThis essay considers the metaphors of projection in Hugo Münsterberg's theory of cinema spectatorship. Münsterberg (1863–1916), a German born and educated professor of psychology at Harvard University, turned his attention to cinema only a few years before his untimely death at the age of fifty-three. But he brought to the new medium certain lasting preoccupations. This account begins with the contention that Münsterberg's intervention in the cinema discussion pursued his well-established strategy of pitting a laboratory model against a clinical one, in this case the “master-trope” of early cinema a spectatorship drawn from hysteria, hypnosis, and related phenomena like double-consciousness. Münsterberg's laboratory-oriented account also flowed from his account of cinema technology as an outgrowth of the apparatus of his own discipline of experimental psycho-physiology, which entailed a model of cinema spectatorship continuous with the epistemological setting of laboratory relations. I argue that inThe Photoplayand related writings projection functioned in three registers: material, psychological, and philosophical. Münsterberg's primary concern was with psychological projection, where he drew upon his own work in experimental aesthetics to articulate an account of how the basic automatisms of cinema produce a state of oscillation between immersion and distraction. I show how Münsterberg's experimental aesthetics drew upon German doctrines of aesthetic empathy, orEinfühlung, which Münsterberg sought to modify in accordance with the dynamic and temporal characteristics of psycho-physiological experiment. Finally, I argue that Münsterberg's cinema theory was enfolded in his action or double-standpoint theory, in which the transcendental self posits the material, objective conditions of laboratory experience as a means to know itself. This philosophical projection explained cinema's uncanny ability to suspend ordinary perceptions of space, time, and causality. It also made cinema uniquely suited for the philosophical emancipation of a popular mass audience.

The Making of the Piano Bar : Landscape, Art, and Discourse in Biscayne Bay

Este documento se centra en un hecho peculiar que se produjo en la Bahía de Biscayne en enero de 2011, cuando un piano de cola apareció en un banco de arena de 200 metros al este de las costas de Miami, Florida. Después de varios días, un adolecente solicitando a estudios de arte a nivel universitario reveló a la prensa que él había colocado el piano allí como una obra de arte. La cobertura informativa del evento muestra que la colocación misteriosa del piano en el banco de arena no fue apreciada universalmente, pero fue vista como un acto muy controvertido y provocador en relación con los discursos culturales de la naturaleza y el arte, la autoridad, el espacio público, y la transgresión. El evento es un ejemplo de las formas en que los medios de comunicación designan acontecimientos como dignos de atención y de cómo los medios influencian la representación de lugares y relaciones de las personas con éstos. Basándose en los bien establecidos vínculos entre el arte y la geografía, este trabajo analiza el piano de cola en términos del potencial de intersecciones entre el arte moderno y la geografía para alterar las percepciones ordinarias y las experiencias de lugares del diario vivir.

Radical transparency: Open access as a key concept in wiki pedagogy

<span>Educators have just started to use wikis and most of the educational research to date has focused primarily on the use of local wikis with access limitations. There seems to be little research related to how students can contribute in global, transparent wiki communities such as</span><em>Wikipedia</em><span> and </span><em>Wikibooks</em><span>. The purpose of this article is to argue that we need to extend our understanding of transparency as a pedagogical concept if we want to use these open, global wiki communities in an educational setting. By describing one wiki based course in detail, I argue that these kinds of radically transparent learning environments in tertiary education challenge traditional pedagogy and our ordinary perceptions of what a class and working assignment is. The course data in this article include a course description and teacher and student reflections on assessed group projects which produced "student written, collaboratively edited textbooks" on </span><em>Wikibooks</em><span>. Student perceptions indicate positive attitudes towards global learning environments, if the didactical design is carefully planned. In the article I suggest that "outsiders" and "former and future students" should be included as categories in a pedagogical definition of transparency. These categories represent a radical expansion of course space and course availability.</span>

Rhetoric's Making Strange

Please note that this talk has now been incorporated in a published article entitled, Legal Writing Scholarship, Making Strange, and The Aesthetics of Legal Rhetoric, also available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1591123.This is a talk presented at the Law & Rhetoric: Legal Writing Through a Rhetorical Lens Workshop in San Diego, CA, on January 6, 2009, sponsored by Mercer University School of Law and produced by Prof. Linda Berger of Mercer. The purpose of the talk was to demonstrate how improvisational teaching in a small advanced legal writing course could generate interesting topics for research. This is so because rhetoric has the ability to unsettle our ordinary perceptions. In fact, in this particular setting rhetoric's ability (an ability I think I am willing to defend as unique) to make everything seem strange is strong enough to turn upon rhetoric itself and to reveal anew those rhetorical insights that are now hidden from us because they have been implicit in Western culture for centuries. The talk is presented as an internal monologue: a stream of conscious exploration rather than an exposition. There is no single theme to this monologue. It is more of an honest search for a theme, for such is the way that interesting topics are generated, or so I believe.

Dorothy M. Richardson’s “The Garden” as an Amplification of a Recurrent Epiphanic Moment in Pilgrimage

This paper analyses Dorothy Richardson’s short story “The Garden” (1924) as an amplification of the recurring epiphanic garden scenes in Pilgrimage. “The Garden” could be considered a close-up of the episode recreated in the Pilgrimage garden memories seen through the eyes of a small child. In this short story there are no epiphanic implications, only the ordinary perceptions of a small child on a common day. However, when the protagonist of Pilgrimage remembers the childhood episode when she contemplated the flowers in the garden by herself, it is so full of significance and poetry that it becomes a symbol, a recurrent epiphanic motif that is a source of meaning and peace

Ship of Death: Eschatology in Michael Cook's Quiller

This essay examines Michael Cook's Quiller as a parable of personal eschatology. The ambivalent symbolism in the play expresses the uncertain state of consciousness in the title character, who is caught between his sense of prophetic insight and ordinary perceptions.

Ship of Death: Eschatology in Michael Cook's Quiller

This essay examines Michael Cook's Quiller as a parable of personal eschatology. The ambivalent symbolism in the play expresses the uncertain state of consciousness in the title character, who is caught between his sense of prophetic insight and ordinary perceptions.

The perceived causal structure of examination failure

The application of network analysis to the modelling of ordinary perceptions of causality was tested, using the explanations of examination failure reported in Stern & Weiner (1984). Subjects judged the causal interconnections among the set of causes. A network analysis was performed to identify the causal model underlying these judgements. The properties of the network were found to be similar to those predicted by Kelley (1983). Three types of causal role were identified (distal, mediating and proximal). The relationship between causal role in the network and locus, stability and controllability was examined.

The determination of death.

Editorials1 August 1983The Determination of DeathJOANNE LYNN, M. D.JOANNE LYNN, M. D.Search for more papers by this authorAuthor, Article, and Disclosure Informationhttps://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-99-2-264 SectionsAboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ExcerptAll living things will die. One would think there would have been enough experience of the phenomenon to make clear what marks the change from being alive to being dead. But the wealth of experience also serves to uncover numerous difficult cases in which our ordinary perceptions and imprecise categories are challenged. The article by Youngner and Bartlett (1) in this issue continues the ancient inquiry into the nature of life and death.Large numbers of difficult cases arose in the past few decades along with the technological ability to mechanically ventilate patients who could not otherwise breathe. Until now,...

Fragmented Selves in Adrienne Kennedy's "Funnyhouse of a Negro" and "The Owl Answers"

Adrienne Kennedy, one of the most innovative and subjective American playwrights to emerge in the 1960s, creates a theatrical nightmare world removed from ordinary perceptions of time and space. Rather than presenting linear plots with chronological narrative progression, she portrays the fragmented mental states of her characters, who dramatize their many facets by changing costumes as a symbolic representation of their changing personalities or by having their separate selves externally represented as separate characters. Of course, a staged nightmare cannot operate in the real world of time and space.

Prophetic and Mystic Experience: Comparison and Consequences

BEFORE sketching the distinctive features of the two major varieties of religious experience, it may be useful to introduce the discussion with an abstract analysis.2 The subject of a religious experience believes not only that (1) his perceptions are extraordinary and constitute a sharp break with the world of everyday experience, but that (2) they are far more important than ordinary perceptions and, unlike the latter, (3) their objective referents are not to be found in discrete aspects of the empirical world. The fourth criterion concerns the locus of this nonnaturalistic referent and subdivides into two categories: (4a) One who has had a mystic experience (the unio mystica) is convinced that the non-