Paradigmatic Instance Research Articles

Unveiling Community Resilience: The Integral Role of Public Libraries

This research scrutinizes the instrumental contributions of public libraries in augmenting community resilience. The study deploys a methodological framework predicated on comprehensive literature examination and empirical investigation by focusing on the National Taiwan Library and the New Taipei City Library as paradigmatic instances. Employing a multi-layered approach of case studies and in-depth interviews with various library staff, the study aims to (1) formulate a nascent conceptual architecture of community resilience, (2) identify the multifaceted strategies public libraries employ to bolster resilience, and (3) articulate specific functional roles libraries execute in this resilience ecosystem. Empirical data coalesce into six salient categories: (1) Knowledge Curation, Skill Development, and Lifelong Learning; (2) Community Network Dynamics; (3) Human-Place Connections; (4) Infrastructure and Foundational Resources; (5) Innovation and Diversification; and (6) Public-Governmental Interface. Libraries surface as agile orchestrators in intricate socio-environmental nexuses, utilizing adaptive service models that leverage emergent community networks, enhancing intrinsic and extrinsic resilience. The roles libraries fulfill in community systems are manifold: they act as (1) Adaptive Sustainers in volatile conditions, (2) Socio-Organizational Mediators in community networking, (3) Stewards of Cultural Integrity, (4) Facilitators of Inclusive Information Access, and (5) Navigators in Collaboration with governmental and social entities. The findings contribute rich scholarly and practical perspectives on how public institutions fortify socio-ecological resilience.

Who Are You Really? A Philosopher’s Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Persons

Who Are You Really? A Philosopher’s Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Persons

Prejudice, generics, and resistance to evidence

ABSTRACT In his book, Prejudice, Endre Begby offers a novel and engaging account of the epistemology of prejudice which challenges some of the standard assumptions that have so far guided the recent discussion on the topic. One of Begby's central arguments against the standard view of prejudice, according to which a prejudiced person necessarily displays an epistemically culpable resistance to counterevidence, is that, qua stereotype judgments, prejudices can be flexible and rationally maintained upon encountering many disconfirming instances. By expanding on Begby's analysis, I argue that, given the variety of truth conditions for true generic statements, the generic form of stereotype judgements can sometimes make prejudice extremely resistant to encounters with statistical facts about the distribution of the property among members of a certain group. At the same time, I argue that a more careful consideration of the generic form of stereotypes also allows us to recognize that evidence about how many members of the kind instantiate a property is not the only type of evidence which could disconfirm a prejudice. Evidence of no explanatory relation between a kind and a property should also have a direct effect on a prejudicial belief. For this reason, things may not look as dim for the standard view of prejudice in assessing paradigmatic instances of prejudicial beliefs as irrationally resistant to evidence.

Understanding the Magnitude of Hypocrisy in Moral Contradictions: The Role of Surprise at Violating Strong Attitudes.

Although two people could both enact similar forms of hypocrisy, one person might be judged as more hypocritical than the other. The present research advances a novel, theoretical explanation for a paradigmatic instance of this: the increased hypocrisy ascribed to contradicting a morally (vs. nonmorally) based attitude. In contrast to prior explanations, the present research shows that people infer targets holding morally (vs. nonmorally) based attitudes are more difficult to change. Consequently, when people are hypocritical on these stances, it elicits greater surprise, which amplifies the perceived hypocrisy. Through both statistical mediation and experimental moderation, we provide evidence for this process and show how our explanation generalizes to understanding heightened hypocrisy in other contexts, too (i.e., violating nonmoral attitudes held with certainty vs. uncertainty). Altogether, we provide an integrative, theoretical lens for predicting when moral and nonmoral acts of hypocrisy will be perceived as particularly hypocritical.

Prospects for pure procedural moral progress

ABSTRACT Issues of methodology are central to the philosophy of moral progress. However, the idea that effective moral methodology, as well as being instrumental to progress, might also constitute progress has not been adequately explored. This paper will critically assess the merits of this idea – what I call ‘pure proceduralism about moral progress’ – taking Philip Kitcher's recent theory of ‘democratic contractualism’ (2021) as a test case. An epistemology of pure procedural moral progress will be sketched: namely, a naturalised epistemology of paradigmatic instances of moral progress. Assuming an ideal procedure exists and has been at least approximately instantiated (an empirical claim), we learn about its form by studying paradigms of historical moral progress. From this epistemological method will be derived theoretical constraints on what can count as a theory of moral progress per se: it must capture the core semantic constraints on the term ‘moral progress,’ those features without which we would not recognise a change as moral progress. While this poses a tougher challenge for pure proceduralism than for more traditional approaches to moral methodology, it will be concluded that the potential of pure proceduralism as a viable metaethics of moral progress remains an exciting open question.

Reference the untouchable. On the limits of revising concepts using the method of cases

The paper investigates to what extent the method of cases can be interpreted as either a descriptive or a normative enterprise. I demonstrate that although most instances of the method of cases in most philosophical theories could be interpreted as being intended to either discover or revise the meaning of their target concepts, within a theory of reference this method cannot be used to shift the meaning of the concept of reference. The reason for this is that intuitions of extension in a theory of reference constitute a set of data that needs to be explained, while in most other philosophical theories they could either be abandoned in favor of intuitions of intension or serve as a criterion for the adequacy of the proposed definition of the target concept. This feature of a theory of reference is caused by the fact that an implicit understanding of what reference is in a theory of reference is usually assumed and is out of discussion. In effect, the claim in paradigmatic instances of the method of cases within a theory of reference does not concern whether an expression does or does not refer in particular cases, but rather what the reference of a certain expression is, and therefore it cannot be justified by intuitions of intension.

The Epistemology of Groups

<i>The Epistemology of Groups</i>

US Hegemony, Economic Statecraft, and the Political Economy of US Power

Economic statecraft rested at the core of the Trump administration’s foreign relations; it weaponized it and securitized it¾a departure from longstanding US practice. This article looks at the ups and downs of US hegemony in the last five decades, focusing on the US use of economic statecraft as a political power resource, with special reference to the case of Latin America. It is divided into four sections: the first focuses on economic statecraft as an academic field, making the case for what I call “thick” economic statecraft; the second reviews the political and power dimensions of US economic statecraft, whereas the third deals with the evolution, since the 1970s, of the paradigmatic instance of US economic statecraft: trade policy (broadly defined) in three distinct phases 1971-1989, 1990-2000, and 2001-2016. Finally, I summarize the argument and make some considerations about the implications Trump’s presidency might have for the Biden administration’s attempts to reinvigorate US hegemony.

«The Matter Present in Sensibles but not qua Sensibles». Aristotle’s Account of Intelligible Matter as the Matter of Mathematical Objects

AbstractAristotle explicitly speaks of intelligible matter in three passages only, all from theMetaphysics, in the context of the analysis of definition as the formula that expresses the essence:Metaph.Z10, 1036 a8-11;Metaph.Z11, 1037 a5;Metaph.H6, 1045 a34-36 and 45 b1. In the case of the occurrences of Z10 and Z11, there is almost unanimous consensus that Aristotle uses the expression in a technical way, to indicate the matter of that particular type of objects that are intelligible compounds, of which mathematical objects are paradigmatic instances. By contrast, there is no agreement on how to understand the expression in the case of H6. Here, ‘intelligible matter’ would denote, as stated by some interpreters, the generic element of the definition. The aim of this paper is to show that ὕλη νοητή has the same technical meaning in all the three explicit occurrences in theMetaphisics. Contrary to the interpretation that there is a shift in meaning from Z10-11 to H6, my goal is to illustrate that in both contexts, Aristotle uses the expression ‘intelligible matter’ to designate the matter of mathematical objects insofar as they are paradigmatic intelligible compounds.

Self-Control without a Self

ABSTRACT Self-control is essential to the Buddhist soteriological project, but it is not immediately clear how we can make sense of it in light of the doctrine of no-self. Exercising control over our actions, thoughts, volitions, and emotions seems to presuppose a conception of self and agency that is not available to the Buddhist. Thus, there seems to be a fundamental mismatch in the practical instructions for exercising control in the Buddhist texts and the doctrine of no-self. In this paper, we develop and defend a general account of self-control that coheres with Abhidarma Buddhism. We defend the Buddhist against recent arguments that self-control depends on an executive self; instead, for the Buddhist, the psychology of self-control must be ‘horizontal’ (for example, one desire winning out over another). However, the characterization of the psychological process isn’t sufficient for a Buddhist theory of self-control. For the Buddhist account is substantive. According to Buddhism, a paradigmatic instance of self-control is an episode in which the desire that wins is a desire that conforms to Buddhist values; by contrast, an episode is not an instance of self-control if the desire that wins is opposed to Buddhist values. We also argue that there are significant resources on which the Buddhist can draw for enhancing self-control despite the denial of self.

Heidegger and race

ABSTRACT In this article, Wolin attempts to clarify a fundamental misunderstanding concerning the philosophical grounds of Heidegger’s support for National Socialism. Much of the previous literature has assumed that Heidegger, as an exponent of Existenzphilosophie, opposed Nazism on epistemological grounds. Heidegger’s defenders maintain that, since the Nazi world-view was predicated on ‘biological racism’, and since Heidegger was an inveterate critic of modern science, an unbridgeable gulf separated his Denkhabitus from the Nazi credo. However, careful scrutiny of the basic tenets of Nazi race doctrine indicates that it had very little in common with ‘scientism’. Instead, race thinking was an inherently ideological construct that emerged in polemical opposition to nineteenth-century positivism. As such, it was saturated with mystical and spiritualist elements. The end result was a confused, yet highly potent, amalgam of German romanticism, fin-de-siècle esotericism (Ariosophy), Aryan supremacism and Bismarckian Machtpolitik. At base, Nazi ‘race science’ was a contradictio in adjecto, a paradigmatic instance of modern political myth. As ‘myth’, it was untethered by the customary empirical and disciplinary constraints of the ‘logic of scientific discovery’. Moreover, Heidegger’s views on race thinking were far from unilaterally negative. In the Black Notebooks II–VI, he praised ‘race [as] a necessary and mediate condition of historical Dasein’. Fundamentally, there are very few qualitative differences between Heidegger’s defence of ‘spiritual racism’ and the understanding of race thinking propagated by Nazi ideologues such as Hans F. K. Günther and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. According to the philosopher and Heidegger student Karl Löwith, Heidegger ‘was not merely a distinguished representative of the “German revolution”; he was so in a manner much more radical than Ernst Krieck or Alfred Rosenberg.’

Legal Ridicule in the Age of Advertisement: Puffery, Quackery, and the Mass Market

Abstract This article examines the origins of the doctrine of puffery in Britain, in the first decades of its development during the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. The doctrine is a curious legal construct. Usually invoked as a defence, it identifies futile speech, typically of a seller, which does not give rise to liability. It operated, as it still does, in several fields of law. The analysis is not a traditional doctrinal one but rather a cultural legal study, which places the doctrine within the history of mass advertising, with two interrelated goals. First, following a review of developments based on primary sources, required given the scant literature on puffery, this article proposes a new interpretation of the doctrine as a legal mode of ridicule. While traditionally viewed as an instance of caveat emptor that supported commerce, the doctrine also involved a legal inferiorization of advertisements - taken as the paradigmatic instance of the sales pitch. Second, this article explores the interrelations between the history of law and the history of advertising, and demonstrates its productive potential for legal analysis with cases concerned with quack medicines. In the process, it offers a new reading of Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball and other cases. In conclusion, this article suggests that ridicule was a refusal to acknowledge the power of advertising and particularly its appeals to consumers’ imagination rather than reason, even as advertising was given legal licence.

Do delusions have and give meaning?

Delusions are often portrayed as paradigmatic instances of incomprehensibility and meaninglessness. Here we investigate the relationship between delusions and meaning from a philosophical perspective, integrating arguments and evidence from cognitive psychology and phenomenological psychopathology. We review some of the empirical and philosophical literature relevant to two claims about delusions and meaning: (1) delusions are meaningful, despite being described as irrational and implausible beliefs; (2) some delusions can also enhance the sense that one’s life is meaningful, supporting agency and creativity in some circumstances. Delusions are not incomprehensible representations of reality. Rather, they can help make sense of one’s unusual experiences and in some circumstances even support one’s endeavours, albeit temporarily and imperfectly. Acknowledging that delusions have meaning and can also give meaning to people’s lives has implications for our understanding of psychotic symptoms and for addressing the stigma associated with psychiatric conditions.

Alternate Possibilities, Divine Omniscience and Critique of Judgement §76

AbstractA philosophically and historically influential section of the Critique of Judgement presents an ‘intuitive intellect’ as a mind whose representation is limited to what actually exists, and does not extend to mere possibilities. Kant’s paradigmatic instance of such an intellect is however also the divine mind. This combination threatens to rule out the reality of the mere possibilities presupposed by Kant’s theory of human freedom. Through an analysis of the relevant issues in metaphysical cosmology, modal metaphysics and philosophical theology, I show that Kant in fact possesses the resources to reconcile the philosophical claims of §76 of the Critique of Judgement with his keystone commitment to the reality of human freedom.

Approaching Bounded Rationality: From Quantum Probability to Criticality.

The bounded rationality mainstream is based on interesting experiments showing human behaviors violating classical probability (CP) laws. Quantum probability (QP) has been shown to successfully figure out such issues, supporting the hypothesis that quantum mechanics is the central fundamental pillar for brain function and cognition emergence. We discuss the decision-making model (DMM), a paradigmatic instance of criticality, which deals with bounded rationality issues in a similar way as QP, generating choices that cannot be accounted by CP. We define this approach as criticality-induced bounded rationality (CIBR). For some aspects, CIBR is even more satisfactory than QP. Our work may contribute to considering criticality as another possible fundamental pillar in order to improve the understanding of cognition and of quantum mechanics as well.

An Image of the Cosmos: Repetition and Temporality in Sciarrino’s Instrumental Sillabazione Scivolata

An Image of the Cosmos: Repetition and Temporality in Sciarrino’s Instrumental Sillabazione Scivolata Antares Boyle (bio) Introduction: Sillabazione Scivolata in Sciarrino’s String Music Salvatore sciarrino’s recent music is characterized by a special type of repetition in which brief, distinctive melodic figures are minutely and unpredictably varied across their many recurrences. Example 1 shows a family of utterances from String Quartet No. 8 (2008) that loosely resemble each other in rhythm, pitch, melodic contour, and dynamic shape. These statements have been aligned vertically in the figure, with the precise duration of each initial long glissando removed, in order to make the varied repetition visually apparent. The excerpts are typical of a style of writing that has come to dominate Sciarrino’s recent work, which the composer once termed sillabazione scivolata, or “gliding syllable articulation.”1 My analyses of three passages from the Quartet will demonstrate how the distinctive features of this style can shape temporal experience by creating a [End Page 129] dynamic tension between the immediacy of familiar gestures and more elusive long-range continuities. But first, a preliminary description of the sillabazione scivolata technique, its transferal from the vocal to the instrumental realm, and its implications for periodization and analysis of Sciarrino’s output will provide context and motivation for this analytical claim. Click for larger view View full resolution Example 1. A FAMILY OF UTTERANCES IN THE SILLABAZIONE SCIVOLATA STYLE, STRING QUARTET NO. 8, MM. 85–100 Sciarrino has said that sillabazione scivolata, originally conceived as a vocal style, imitates the rhythms and inflections of natural speech.2 It involves melodies performed by an individual voice or by multiple voices in unison or octaves. Although consecutive melodic statements may overlap somewhat, they are only rarely presented in harmony or counterpoint—Sciarrino has called the style “absolute monody.”3 Its identifying features are listed in Example 2. [End Page 130] Click for larger view View full resolution Example 2. FOUR ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF SILLABAZIONE SCIVOLATA The extensive varied repetitions of the style establish families of utterances such as those in Example 1, and these excerpts can be considered paradigmatic instances of the technique.4 Such families are often defined by the position of specific pitches within a recurring series of gestures—such as, in Example 1, the F♯4 and F4 that end the first and last glissando of each excerpt—rather than by intervallic consistency. Canonical post-tonal operations such as transposition and inversion seem to play little to no role in this music. Although scholars have described the style as “modular,” repeated gestures are not reordered entirely freely: complexes like those in Example 1 are defined by a basic series of event types, although recurrences are subject to variation.5 The sillabazione scivolata style was originally developed for the vocal parts in Sciarrino’s operas of the 1990s; the composer first used it in Perseo e Andromeda (1990) and perfected it in Luci mie traditrici (1996–98).6 He began to apply the technique to his string writing shortly thereafter. String Quartet No. 7 (1999)—the composer’s first full-length quartet—repurposes a significant amount of material from Luci mie traditrici, and might even be considered a kind of overture to the opera, although Sciarrino makes no mention of this in his program note.7 String Quartet No. 8, from which the three analytical examples in this article are drawn, is written in a similar style but without any clearly recycled material. However, because sillabazione scivolata generates particular kinds of musical gestures, which are then subject to extensive variation, the line between self-referentiality and new [End Page 131] composition (or between “content” and “style”) is blurred in these works. Quotation and allusion have always been part of Sciarrino’s aesthetic practice—his published output includes homages to artists ranging from Hoagy Carmichael to Mozart—and his recent sillabazione scivolata works might be variously interpreted as a new frontier in intertextuality, an abundant flowering of a highly distinctive style, a strategy for compositional efficiency (one that has taken Sciarrino’s oft-noted productivity to new levels), or some mixture of the above. The composer himself does...

Cumulative culture and complex cultural traditions

Cumulative cultural evolution is often claimed to be distinctive of human culture. Such claims are typically supported with examples of complex and historically late‐appearing technologies. Yet by taking these as paradigm cases, researchers unhelpfully lump together different ways that culture accumulates. This article has two aims: (a) to distinguish four types of cultural accumulation: adaptiveness, complexity, efficiency, and disparity and (b) to highlight the epistemic implications of taking complex hominin technologies as paradigmatic instances of cumulative culture. Addressing these issues both clarifies the cumulative culture concept and demonstrates the importance of further cumulative culture research into non‐human animals and ancestral hominins.

Witnessing non-Markovian effects of quantum processes through Hilbert-Schmidt speed

Non-Markovian effects can speed up the dynamics of quantum systems while the limits of the evolution time can be derived by quantifiers of quantum statistical speed. We introduce a witness for characterizing the non-Markovianity of quantum evolutions through the Hilbert-Schmidt speed (HSS), which is a special type of quantum statistical speed. This witness has the advantage of not requiring diagonalization of evolved density matrix. Its sensitivity is investigated by considering several paradigmatic instances of open quantum systems, such as one qubit subject to phase-covariant noise and Pauli channel, two independent qubits locally interacting with leaky cavities, V-type and $\Lambda $-type three-level atom (qutrit) in a dissipative cavity. We show that the proposed HSS-based non-Markovianity witness detects memory effects in agreement with the well-established trace distance-based witness, being sensitive to system-environment information backflows.

Group Belief: Lessons from Lies and Bullshit

Abstract Groups and other sorts of collective entities are frequently said to believe things. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for instance, was asked by reporters at White House press conferences whether the Trump administration ‘believes in climate change’ or ‘believes that slavery is wrong’. Similarly, it is said on the website of the Aclu of Illinois that the organization ‘firmly believes that rights should not be limited based on a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity’. A widespread philosophical view is that belief on the part of a group’s members is neither necessary nor sufficient for group belief. In other words, groups are said to be able to believe that p even when not a single individual member of the group believes that p. In this paper, I challenge this view by focusing on two phenomena that have been entirely ignored in the literature: group lies and group bullshit. I show that when group belief is understood in terms of actions over which group members have voluntarily control, as is standardly thought, paradigmatic instances of a group lying or bullshitting end up counting as a group believing. Thus we need to look elsewhere for an adequate account of group belief.

Escaping the natural attitude about gender

Alex Byrne’s article, “Are Women Adult Human Females?”, asks a question that Byrne treats as nearly rhetorical. Byrne’s answer is, ‘clearly, yes’. Moreover, Byrne claims, woman is a biological category that does not admit of any interpretation as (also) a social category. It is important to respond to Byrne’s argument, but mostly because Byrne’s argument is a paradigmatic instance of a wider phenomenon. The slogan “women are adult human females” is a political slogan championed by anti-trans activists, appearing on billboards, pamphlets, and anti-trans online forums. In this paper, I respond to Byrne’s argument, revealing significant problems with its background assumptions, content, and methodology.