Rational Subject Research Articles

Disquotation and consistency: a reply to Frances

Two increasingly entrenched positions have evolved in the debate about the semantic role of proper names. The Millian holds that the sole semantic function of a proper name is to refer to its bearer. This view entails Substitutivity-that is, that truth-value is preserved if we intersubstitute coreferential proper names in otherwise identical sentences, even sentences that report beliefs and other propositional attitudes. Because of this the Millian is committed to the possibility that a perfectly rational subject in a traditional Frege-case might be saddled with beliefs that are, at least superficially, contradictory. Thus, Lois believes that Superman can fly and, since she believes that Clark Kent cannot fly, she thereby also believes that Superman cannot fly. Or so says the Millian. This violation of Consistency-the claim that we should attribute contradictory beliefs only to irrational agents-seems counter-intuitive at first. However, Millians have shown how this sting might be partially relieved through pragmatics: it would be misleading, although strictly speaking true, to say that Lois believes that Superman cannot fly. Alternatively (or in addition), the Millian might hold that the oddity we feel about the violation of Consistency may just be the surprise of philosophical enlightenment. It turns out that we attribute contradictory beliefs to a subject not only when she suffers some internal failure of rationality (faulty inference, insufficient attention, untidy cognitive house-keeping and so on), but also when external circumstances conspire in just the right wayas when, unbeknownst to the agent, distinct names (perhaps with distinct causal and associational histories) pick out the same individual. On this view, the attribution of contradictory beliefs is a sign that things are cognitively sub-optimal (and should be changed, other things being equal) for either internal or external reasons. It can, of course, be just as important to expose an external conspiracy (e.g., to discover that Superman is none other than Clark Kent) as it is to clear up some internal failure. The Millian's opponent holds that names play a richer semantic role, particularly in the attribution of beliefs and other propositional attitudes. In such attributions, names can be used to report on the different ways that a subject represents to herself some individual to which the names corefer. The anti-Millian is moved by a desire to honour more closely what she takes to be our actual belief-reporting practice (particularly our de

Exquisite Corpses: Representations of Violence in the Collective Surrealist Unconscious

Exquisite Corpses: Representations of Violence in the Collective Surrealist Unconscious in Megan at C. McShane University. is a doctoral candidate Art History Emory This paper will address the collective method for producing drawings and collages employed by the Surrealists, known to as the cadavre exquis or exquisite corpse. In 1925 the Surrealists began playing the exquisite corpse game using words to produce fantastic sentences. The game was quickly adapted entailed passing a sheet of paper produce strange and unexpected figural images. Playing the game among participants while folding the paper in order to conceal the previous person's response. Each person would contribute a part of the sentence or, if drawing, a partial image of a body. In the linguistic method, the players followed the approximate syntactical sequence of subject, verb, and predicate. In the visual method, the image of a body was substituted for the sentence. Andre Breton cites the elemental segments to be supplied by each person: subject, verb, or predicate adjective— head, belly, or legs {hkmifestos The first sentence produced provided the unusual name for the game: The exquisite a collective corpse will drink the young wine [Le-cadavre-exquis-boira-le-vin-nouveau] {Dictionnaire As The endeavor, the Suirealist games were important ways for the group to explore ideas collaboratively. exquisite corpse drawings that survive are examples of these explorations. These drawings reveal the Surrealists' fascination with death and trauma. Through these collective exercises artists questioned the concepts of individual authorship and rational subjectivity. The exquisite corpse drawings are an important part of Surrealist artistic production. Their original display in the same locations as other Surrealist art works in the publications and exhibitions of the group indicates the value the Surrealists placed on the drawings.' They were displayed prominently in historical Surrealist publications. Four major Surrealist journals published examples of exquisite corpse drawings: La Revolution

The idea of emancipation from a cosmopolitan point of view

R. Rorty uncouples cosmopolitanism from emancipation and rejects the latter on both phylogenetic and ontogenetic grounds. Thus: 1. There is no human nature to be emancipated, and 2. The notion of a rational, transcendental and conditioning subject (presupposed by traditional theories of emancipation) is obsolete. He preserves the idea of cosmopolitanism, which, in an effort to avoid foundationalisrn, he associates only with the development and progress of liberal societies. His cosmopolitanism relies on the distinction between persuasion and force and his preference for conversation over rational discourse. In this paper, I discuss Rorty's claims and trace residues of biologism, positivism, and behaviourism in them. By putting forward an immanent critique of Rorty's account of cosmopolitanism and emancipation, I defend a non-foundationalist notion of redemption as self-realization and propose a new justification of Rorty's distinction between force and persuasion.

The Heroine's Subjection: Clarissa, Sadomasochism, and Natural Law

The Heroine’s Subjection: Clarissa, Sadomasochism, and Natural Law Laura Hinton* (bio) I love, when I dig a pit, to have my prey tumble in with secure feet and open eyes; then a man can look down upon her, with an O-ho, charmer, how came you there? —Lovelace to John Belford, Clarissa Critical analyses of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa ask oedipal questions that are ontological ones. What is the nature of the heroine, they ask, and whose perspective does she represent? Fielded through the sympathetic vector of Richardson’s own sentimental vantage point, answers to these questions confirm Clarissa’s identity as a paragon of virtue, as well as a quintessential victim of male sovereignty, or they view Clarissa as a haughty member of the bourgeoisie, a daddy’s girl. 1 However we view Clarissa, we cannot dispute that at the bottom of Lovelace’s “pit” is a subjugated female body. Given the heroine’s harassment, I do not quibble with the opinion that Clarissa is a victim, either martyr-like saint championing the Christian faith or protofeminist championing women’s consciousness. “Clarissa” may be composed of “ciphers,” a “body” of fragmented writings, as Terry Castle observes; Clarissa’s own body generously, perversely, may accommodate a multiplicity of views. 2 Nevertheless, Clarissa is a figure of subjection, and so I ask: how did she get there, down in the pit, in the first place? [End Page 293] One answer to this question lies in Clarissa’s experience as a subject. What has been called the “Clarissa ideal” is the autonomous, independent individual, the “Enlightenment self.” 3 In writing about “the autonomous individual” of Richardson’s novels and the early stages of the British novel’s development in general, Ian Watt comments that “[w]ithout allies, Clarissa is the heroic representation of all that is free and positive in the new individualism” of the eighteenth century and the post-Enlightenment era. 4 I suggest, however, that the “autonomous” subject of Clarissa is also subject to the sociopolitical demands of another through natural law, social and philosophical discourses central to the Enlightenment. While natural law puts “strong emphasis on the role of virtue in moral life” for the individual, it also embodies a theory of the civil state enveloped by the law, whose rational subjects maintain individual rights at the expense of the rights of others, like women. 5 I argue that the heroine’s subjection reflects the ironies of natural law, as a system of ethics and social contract. These ironies are symptomatic of Clarissa’s value as a female subject. By corollary, I argue that Clarissa’s faith in the nature of the law creates, through natural law’s hidden authoritarian propensities, intersubjective conditions that recent psychoanalytic theories attribute to sadomasochism. Morris Golden has written in general about the sadistic impulses Richardson inflicts upon female characters. 6 My argument focuses upon the sadomasochistic structure underlying the heroine’s desire for both natural law’s radical autonomy and social submission. As Clarissa acts according to the law’s moral precepts and reason, she illustrates the tug and pull between the dominance and submission of a sadomasochistic dialectic. Clarissa’s autonomous moral position, therefore, is radically compromised by the very foundations of that position. I Perceived as “all that exists beyond mere rationalism,” in Leslie Fiedler’s words, Clarissa is seen as a representation of the sentimental “heart.” 7 Critics writing about Clarissa and its heroine often refer to the “heart.” Linda Kauffman, for example, suggests that the heroine’s “discourse” presents “the supremacy of the heart...antithetical to the logic enforced by men.” 8 Fred Kaplan suggests that “Richardson made his appeal to the heart through the heart,” alluding to the epistolary method itself—in the words of Alexander Pope, “the most impartial Representations of a free heart.” 9 Others view the heroine’s “heart” as a more ideological structure, a “site of ideological contradiction,” as John P. Zomchick comments. 10 Analyzing a contradiction in the heart of the heroine, as well as at the heart of the novel’s structure, William Warner writes that Clarissa’s “heart” is a “locus of virtue...planted with principles that are the laws...

The Strength of Markets in Latin America's Sociopolitical Discourse, 1750-1850

In The Passions and the Interests, A. 0. Hirschman traces the origin of the Smithian doctrine of private vices and public virtues to a crucial transition in political discourse, the point where interests replaced as the main motivating force of human interaction (Hirschman, 1977). Gradually, the search for a rational subject whose actions would lead to good government reinforced the Renaissance disillusionment about the power of philosophy and morality to control human passions to produce, by the eighteenth century, a widespread discourse about passions. Calmer and more beneficial passions could contain other more violent and harmful ones. Interest, the drive to accumulate wealth, was one of the calmer passions, said to be powerful enough to divert men and women from the pursuit of more harmful action. Commerce in particular came to be conceived of as an activity that made conquest and war unnecessary, transformed the manners of barbarian nations, and kept the authoritarian pretensions of the sovereign at bay. To Montesquieu and the men of the Encyclopedia, for whom the process of civilization consisted of the taming and refining of human passions, commerce seemed a civilizing force. This construct of a soothing, civilizing commerce (which Hirschman calls doux commerce) was later recaptured by Smith and turned into a hegemon: (economic) interest became not just a countervailing passion but the king of passions, the common underlying rationality of all human action.' On the basis of this particular characterization of interest-as a ubiquitous passion stronger and gentler than its predecessors-Smith advanced the notion that the market, a social institution

A Mathematical World On Paper Written Examinations in Early 19th Century Cambridge

In the early nineteenth century, Henry Brougham endeavored to improve the moral character of England through the publication of educational texts. Soon after, Brougham helped form the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to carry his plan of moral improvement to the people. Despite its goal of improving the nation’s moral character, the Society refused to publish any treatises on explicitly moral or religious topics. Brougham instead turned to a mathematician, Augustus De Morgan, to promote mathematics as a rational subject that could provide the link between the secular and religious worlds. Using specific examples gleaned from the treatises of the Society, this article explores both how mathematics was intended to promote the development of reason and morality and how mathematical content was shaped to fit this particular view of the usefulness of mathematics. In the course of these treatises De Morgan proposed a fundamentally new pedagogical approach, one which focused on the student and the role mathematics could play in moral education.

Aging as becoming oneself: A philosophical ethics of late life

Enlightenment and modernity have forgotten old age in constructing an abstract ethics of reason, addressing a general rational subject. By contrast, the ancient ethics of happiness asked what a good life might be for people in specific life-stages, such as the aged. It is nowadays important to regain this tradition: What does it mean for a finite being to age but still lead a good life? During the process of aging, a radicalization of our vulnerable corporality and finitude takes place. This becoming-oneself-in-aging can be understood not only in its ethical meaning, but also implies a correction of our modern understanding of man.

Rotations: Matching Schemes that Efficiently Preserve the Best Reply Structure of a One Shot Game

Suppose that we have a two player game in which we want to test experimentally whether the subjects learn to play the game theoretic solution. For this purpose we need a matching scheme which assures that a rational subject behaves in each round of the experiment as if he played a separate stage game. In this paper we show that such a ‘best-reply-structure-preserving matching scheme’ has to be free of repercussion effects, and that the rotation of two equally sized groups of subjects, which was introduced by Cooper, DeJong, Forsythe and Ross, solves the problem efficiently.

De bello omnium(i) contra omnes(j)

The paper suggests a new theory of mass ethnic violence. Theoretical explanations so far provided admit not rational behaviors. It is argued that mass ethnic violence may develop among fully rational subjects if some plausible conditions hold.

A Nietzschean defense of democracy: an experiment in postmodern politics

Nietzsche was wrong to repudiate democracy, since democratic politics can be more amenable to his own way of thinking than he imagined. Yet Nietzsche was right to expose fundamental flaws in traditional democratic theory, especially the modernist emphasis on human equality, rational subjectivity, and natural rights. Lawrence Hatab offers a postmodern account of democracy freed from traditional assumptions expressed in the Enlightenment project. He shows that democratic politics need not be based on egalitarianism or essentialism and need not be identified with a conformist mediocrity; rather it can be construed as an agonistic pluralism and an unrestricted meritocracy, both of which are consonant with Nietzsche's outlook.

Rights, World‐Society and the Crisis of Legal Universalism*

Abstract. The universalism of rights is a corollary to the individualistic semantics of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Paradoxically, the grounds of universalism were those legal and political concepts that theoretically describe the 19th century nation‐state (such as sovereignty of the people, citizenship, rights, and the like). All these concepts of the liberal tradition construct the nation‐state on the presupposition of a highly homogeneous political community of rational subjects, whose homogeneity consists in the very social, economic, political and sexual conditions of their rationality. This kind of legal and political semantics is no longer adequate to characterize contemporary society which is a multicultural, highly in‐homogeneous world‐society. It no longer incorporates an ethic which is able to enforce universal leading values for human action.

Beyond the Rational (Male) Subject in Small Groups?

Beyond the Rational (Male) Subject in Small Groups?

Performing Work: Bodily Representations in Merchant Banks

Not only is the workplace a significant site of the social construction of feminine and masculine identities but in an increasing range of service sector occupations, a gendered bodily performance is a significant part of selling a product. In this paper, we draw on Butler's notion of gender identity as a regulatory fiction to investigate the consequences of the specificity of embodiment and gendered performances. Drawing on three case studies in the City of London, we explore the differential fictions constructed by men and women engaged in interactive service work in a professional capacity in merchant banks. We examine the ways in which women are embodied and/or represented as ‘woman’ in the workplace, comparing women's sense of themselves and their everyday workplace experiences with those of men doing the same job. Our aim is to establish whether the necessity of selling oneself as part of the product in such service sector employment challenges the idealisation of male workers as disembodied rational subjects, while not necessarily disrupting the inferior position of embodied women.

Law Frames: Historical Truth and Narrative Necessity in a Criminal Case

Postmodern storytellers can fashion narratives that convey many different, yet equally convincing, visions of reality. The film offers not just one frameup, the causal-linear frameup of Randall Dale Adams, but perpetual, repeat frameups, indifferent to narrative logic and linear time. By describing the critical storytelling failures that occur within The Thin Blue Line, I hope to elucidate important lessons for lawyers and legal scholars about the art of persuasion in legal storytelling. Yet postmodern ideas about the demise of the author and of authority in general, the dissolution of the autonomous, rational subject, the end of linear time and causation, the erasure of difference between truth and error, reality and fiction, and the abandonment of stability to the contingency of truth and justice, seem to have limited appeal and dubious utility for persuasive legal storytelling. While the affirmative postmodern concedes the demise of the autonomous modern subject, s/he still finds meaning through the distributed self: an identity made up of discrete cultural and social constructs shared by others.

Allocentric and Idiocentric Personalities: A Comment

In this article I question the idiocentric/allocentric distinction on the grounds that: a) it utilizes an increasingly discredited humanist conception of the rational autonomous subject associated with the definition of idiocentrism; b) it distinguishes forms of motivation which fail to offer reliable indices of behavioural patterning; and c) it offers a characterization of different cultural norms and societal morality which is ultimately misleading.

The Street-Level Epistemology of Trust

Abstract Rational choice and other accounts of trust base it in objective assessments of the risks and benefits of trusting. But rational subjects must choose in the light of what knowledge they have, and that knowledge determines their capacities for trust. This is an epistemological issue, but not at the usual level of the philosophy of knowledge. Rather, it is an issue of pragmatic rationality for a given actor. It is commonly argued that trust is inherently embedded in iterated, thick relationships. But such relationships are merely one source of relevant knowledge in a street-level epistemological account. Early experience may heavily influence later capacity for trust. For example, bad experience may lead to lower levels of trust and therefore fewer opportunities for mutual gain.

Psychophysical supervenience: Its epistemological foundation

My primary goal in this paper is to focus attention on a certain conception of internal access, on the Cartesian conception that a rational subject's capacity to determine sameness and difference in explicit propositional attitudes is independent of knowledge of the external world. This conception of introspection plays a crucial, if unacknowledged, role in numerous arguments and theoretical positions. In particular, it plays a large role in motivating psychological internalism. I argue in favor of rejecting this epistemology and the internalism it supports.

Gaston Bachelard, subversive humanist: texts and readings

Bachelard, who died in 1962, left 12 works on the philosophy of science, nine on the poetic imagination, and two on time and consciousness, written in an image-laden style that rejected traditional academic discourse in favour of a subversive, allusive, highly metaphorical way of thinking and writing. Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist offers an introduction to Bachelard's idiosyncratic writings about the relation of science, poetry, and human consciousness. The extracts are framed in succinct critical essays that explicate the development of his ideas and clarify his relation to the contemporary French intellectual more commonly associated with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The matrix of Bachelard's thought is 20th century-science, the new scientific mind that he dates from 1905, and Einstein's special theory of relativity. Like the discovery of America 500 years before, the discoveries of mathematics and physics today have undermined our familiar epistemologies. Modern science has forced us to revise our conception of the rational subject and of the relation between reason and reality, subject and object. A psychic revolution has accompanied this in reason. If we try to grasp the dialectics of matter and energy in physics, or the dualism of waves and particles, we shall learn to maintain difference and handle complexity; we are shaken out of the reductive, identity-ridden habits of ordinary life and thought.

Montage and spectator: Eisenstein and the avant-garde

We could say that the avant-garde at the beginning of the century received the advent of cinema enthusiastically; that is not strange. Though the differences between groups, movements, works, or acts that are included under this arrogant name are sometimes too vast, there was a similar project — or group of projects — whose aim was to proclaim the crisis of a homogeneous world, born in the humanism of the Renaissance and validated in the Age of Enlightenment . Cinema thus became a suitable space for attacking and criticizing the artistic and cultural tradition. We can enumerate briefly some reasons for this attitude. First, cinema was one of the less 'artistic' forms of art, so to speak. Cinema was a modality placed in a field that was historically nearer to the development of the productive forces; in this way, it reestablished the old link between art and production by means of technique. Furthermore, this took place under a precise form of production (industry) that demonstrates the rupture with a characteristic bourgeois idea — the autonomy of art (Burger 1984). Secondly, cinema revealed a high degree of mechanical reproduction. In its mechanism the loss of aura', whose beginnings were discovered by Walter Benjamin (1969) in the invention of the printing press and later in the general use of photography in the last two thirds of the nineteenth century, was definitively accomplished. The consequences of this loss — the end of the condition that links the artistic work with cult and ritual — were also pointed out in Baudelaire's poetry and criticism. In spite of his criticism of photography, Baudelaire's critical and poetic output showed the impossibility of artistic autonomy and its new status within modernity. Later, Adorno also found in cinema a 'suspicious' presence of these artistic auratic elements, but in any case cinema itself was the coup de grace to the sacred basis of art. Thirdly, the destruction of the rational subject, the guarantor of a

The pattern‐forming mode of teaching and learning statistics

Although statistics is a rational subject, it does not follow that students can or do learn statistics in a rational way. Students learn statistics in the pattern‐forming mode more than in the rational mode. The paper describes and compares the two modes, and identifies three conditions that prevent or discourage learning in the rational mode. The diagnosis of pattern‐forming de‐emphasizes mathematical derivations and proofs as a means of allowing students to understand statistical concepts. The primary recommendation is that the teacher should deliberately manipulate the pattern‐forming process. The underlying idea is for the teacher to view the process for what it means to the student.