East Asians and Westerners differ in various aspects of perception and cognition. For example, visual memory for East Asians is believed to be more influenced by the contextual aspects of a scene than is the case for Westerners (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). There are also differences in visual search: for Westerners, search for a long line among short is faster than for short among long, whereas this difference does not appear to hold for East Asians (Ueda et al., submitted). However, (...) it is unclear how these group-level differences originate. To investigate the extent to which they depend upon environment, we tested visual search and visual memory in East Asian immigrants who had lived in Canada for different amounts of time. Recent immigrants were found to exhibit no search asymmetry, unlike Westerners who had spent their lives in Canada. However, immigrants who had lived in Canada for more than two years showed performance comparable to that of Westerners. These differences could not be explained by the general analytic/holistic processing distinction believed to differentiate Westerners and East Asians, since all observers showed a strong holistic tendency for visual recognition. Results instead support the suggestion that exposure to a new environment can significantly affect the particular processes used to perceive a given stimulus. (shrink)

This paper discusses and criticizes Joseph Nye’s account of soft power. First, we set the stage and make some general remarks about the notion of social power. In the main part of this paper we offer a detailed critical discussion of Nye’s conception of soft power. We conclude that it is too unclear and confused to be of much analytical use. However, despite this failure, Nye is aiming at explaining an important but also neglected form of social power: the power (...) to influence the will and not just the behavior of other agents. In the last part of this paper we briefly discuss Steven Lukes’ alternative view of a “third dimension” of power and end with a sketch of a more promising way to account for this neglected form of power. (shrink)

In this article, the concept of system of symbolic 2-plithogenic linear equations and its solutions are introduced and studied. The Cramer's rule was applied to solve the system of symbolic 2-plithogenic linear equations. Also, provided enough examples for each case to enhance understanding.

En el contexto en el cual la ideología de género e implícito lo femenino se ha vuelto un tema que preocupa, nos proponemos una reflexión sobre cómo deberíamos entender el papel de lo femenino en nuestra sociedad contemporánea, en relación al estudio de las vidas y las ideas de dos mujeres importantes para la cultura alemana de final de siglo XVIII e inicio del siglo XIX: Caroline Schlegel y Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Cuando hablamos de pensamiento femenino, tenemos que tener (...) una mirada retrospectiva y comprender muy bien cuál ha sido el aporte de las mujeres para nuestra cultura para así saber cuál tiene que ser la dirección de nuestros debates actuales sobre el mismo. El artículo se enfoca en resaltar la importancia de la formación y el cultivo de las capacidades espirituales de estas dos mujeres que lograron en su época volverse figuras muy respetadas y apreciadas por los grandes filósofos románticos, con la intención de transmitir que la “cuestión femenina” no se puede reducir a un asunto de meros derechos y política, sino que tiene que ver con la labor y la tarea que la mujer tiene de asumir las potencias de sus cualidades y usar su inteligencia para edificar nuestra cultura. (shrink)

Discussione di "Alienazione", di Rahel Jaeggi, Roma: 2105.

Introduzione alla raccolta di saggi di Rahel Jaeggi "Forme di vita e capitalismo", curata e tradotta da Marco Solinas. L'introduzione presenta una breve panoramica del pensiero dell'autrice e si sofferma sul suo progetto incentrato sulla critica immanente del capitalismo come forma di vita.

I give a pedagogical derivation of the Cramer-Rao Bound, which gives a lower bound on the variance of estimators used in statistical point estimation, commonly used to give numerical estimates of the systematic uncertainties in a measurement.

"Introduzione" alla raccolta di articoli di Rahel Jaeggi "Forme di vita e capitalismo", curata e tradotta da Marco Solinas, e uscita per Rosenberg & Sellier nel 20016.

El objetivo de este trabajo es examinar el diagnóstico crítico que Rahel Jaeggi realiza de la sociedad. El trabajo comienza desarrollando el análisis que lleva a cabo de la crítica de la ideología. Luego mostraremos los elementos centrales de su teoría crítica desplegados en Alienación y Crítica de las formas de vida. La conclusión es que la teoría crítica de Jaeggi es una crítica inmanente y una crítica de la ideología de la sociedad contemporánea.

n this paper, I analyse Rahel Jaeggi’s socio-ontological account of forms of life. I show that her framework is a two-sided one, since it involves an understanding of forms of life both as inert bundles of practices and as having a normative structure. Here I argue that this approach is based on an a priori argument which assumes normativity as the condition of intelligibility of social criticism. I show that the intimate tension between these two sides is reflected in (...) the socio-ontological model of the constitution of social phenomena, which on the one side is understood in terms of habituation and materialization, and on the other side in terms of constitution through norms. The second side in the end prevails and leads to some sort of normative essentialism which involves a prescriptive meta-theoretical understanding of normativity combined with a socio-ontological model of constitutive rules. I then analyse two arguments that Jaeggi offers in support of her assumption that normative constitution is the deep structure of social practices. I name these the functional- teleological argument, and the crisis developmental argument, and argue that neither succeeds in proving that practices are not normatively underdetermined. (shrink)

Models are indispensable tools of scientific inquiry, and one of their main uses is to improve our understanding of the phenomena they represent. How do models accomplish this? And what does this tell us about the nature of understanding? While much recent work has aimed at answering these questions, philosophers' focus has been squarely on models in empirical science. I aim to show that pure mathematics also deserves a seat at the table. I begin by presenting two cases: Cramér’s random (...) model of the prime numbers and the function field model of the integers. These cases show that mathematicians, like empirical scientists, rely on unrealistic models to gain understanding of complex phenomena. They also have important implications for some much-discussed theses about scientific understanding. First, modeling practices in mathematics confirm that one can gain understanding without obtaining an explanation. Second, these cases undermine the popular thesis that unrealistic models confer understanding by imparting counterfactual knowledge. (shrink)

A co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, its newspaper, and hospitality houses, the writer Dorothy Day promoted public peace nationally and internationally as a journalist, an organizer of public protests, and a builder of associational communities. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s conceptions of the role of speech and action in creating the public realm, this paper focuses on several of Day’s most controversial public positions: her leadership of non-cooperation against Civil Defense drills intended to prepare New York City residents to survive (...) a nuclear war; her urging of Catholics to find common cause with the Cuban revolutionary government; and her support for interracial farming communities in the Southern United States. As Arendt asserts about Rahel Varnhagen’s salon in Berlin, by being public meeting spaces hosted in private houses, Catholic Worker communities fostered egalitarian rather than “agonal” politics. Like Gandhi’s newspapers and ashrams as well as “Occupy” communities such as Zuccotti Park, Day’s newspaper was a center for incubating and implementing social reform. The Catholic Worker provided a place where writers could question the official rhetoric of such conflicts as World War II and the Cold War, put forward different interpretations of unfolding events, and chart possible alternatives to establishment agendas. (shrink)

In this paper, following Rahel Jaeggi’s critique of forms of life, I contend that to identify genuine critical thinking we should start from an analysis of the normative nature of forms of life as the basic constituents of the social world. In this view, critical thinking can be seen as a critical behaviour. While genuine forms of life can recognize and consider the variety of concrete and diverse situations, on the contrary non-functioning forms of life’s critical rationality understands the (...) norm as applied from outside of the form of life. In this case the norm, erroneously understood as a neutral and universally applicable principle, such as economic rationality, is not able to consider the particularity of forms of life as goods in themselves. I defend the meaning that an education in critical thinking must have, as a genuine and functional rationality characterising human beings in a social world. -/- . (shrink)

About thirty years ago, when the Internet started to be commercialised, access to the medium became a topic of research and debate. Up-to-date evidence about key predictors, such as age, is crucial because of the Internet's ever-changing nature and the challenges associated with gaining access to it. This paper aims to give an overview of New Zealand's Internet access trends and how they relate to age. It is based on secondary analysis of data from a larger online panel survey with (...) 1,001 adult respondents. The Chi-square test of independence and Cramer's V were used in the analysis. The study provides new evidence to understand the digital divide. Specifically, it uncovers a growing disparity in the quality of Internet connectivity. Even though fibre is the most common type of broadband connection at home, older adults are less likely to have it and more likely to use wireless broadband, which is a slower connection type. Additionally, a sizable majority of people in all age categories have favourable opinions on the Internet. Interestingly, this was more prevalent among older people, although they report an increased concern about the security of their personal information online. The implications of the results are discussed and some directions for future research are proposed. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is often--but somehow not unfailingly--credited, together with Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, as being one of the central voices in the philosophical turn to the concept of narrative of a generation or more ago. Some have even cited her 1958 The Human Condition as providing a particular impetus for later accounts of narrative. This essay examines what contemporary philosophical accounts of narrative might still owe Arendt, exploring her approach to narrative in theory as well as practice. (...) The first part looks at Arendt's use of philosophical sources from the tradition--Aristotle, Augustine and Hegel--with an eye to how her appropriation of these figures differs from that of contemporary philosophers of narrative. Three of Arendt's typically bold and rich claims about narrative action emerge as important: the notion of action as revealing an agent's own daimon: the condition that such action be revealable within a world or shared public space which has resilience yet vulnerability; and the potential for agents revealed within such a world to discover some form of narrative rebirth in their efforts at storytelling. The second section examines the extent to which Arendt herself allowed those claims to be tested and thought through in her own attempts (in Men in Dark Times, Rahel Varnhagen and elsewhere) at constructing biographical narratives. (shrink)

The explicit history of the “hidden variables” problem is well-known and established. The main events of its chronology are traced. An implicit context of that history is suggested. It links the problem with the “conservation of energy conservation” in quantum mechanics. Bohr, Kramers, and Slaters (1924) admitted its violation being due to the “fourth Heisenberg uncertainty”, that of energy in relation to time. Wolfgang Pauli rejected the conjecture and even forecast the existence of a new and unknown then elementary particle, (...) neutrino, on the ground of energy conservation in quantum mechanics, afterwards confirmed experimentally. Bohr recognized his defeat and Pauli’s truth: the paradigm of elementary particles (furthermore underlying the Standard model) dominates nowadays. However, the reason of energy conservation in quantum mechanics is quite different from that in classical mechanics (the Lie group of all translations in time). Even more, if the reason was the latter, Bohr, Cramers, and Slatters’s argument would be valid. The link between the “conservation of energy conservation” and the problem of hidden variables is the following: the former is equivalent to their absence. The same can be verified historically by the unification of Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Schrödinger’s wave mechanics in the contemporary quantum mechanics by means of the separable complex Hilbert space. The Heisenberg version relies on the vector interpretation of Hilbert space, and the Schrödinger one, on the wave-function interpretation. However the both are equivalent to each other only under the additional condition that a certain well-ordering is equivalent to the corresponding ordinal number (as in Neumann’s definition of “ordinal number”). The same condition interpreted in the proper terms of quantum mechanics means its “unitarity”, therefore the “conservation of energy conservation”. In other words, the “conservation of energy conservation” is postulated in the foundations of quantum mechanics by means of the concept of the separable complex Hilbert space, which furthermore is equivalent to postulating the absence of hidden variables in quantum mechanics (directly deducible from the properties of that Hilbert space). Further, the lesson of that unification (of Heisenberg’s approach and Schrödinger’s version) can be directly interpreted in terms of the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics in the cherished “quantum gravity” as well as a “manual” of how one can do this considering them as isomorphic to each other in a new mathematical structure corresponding to quantum information. Even more, the condition of the unification is analogical to that in the historical precedent of the unifying mathematical structure (namely the separable complex Hilbert space of quantum mechanics) and consists in the class of equivalence of any smooth deformations of the pseudo-Riemannian space of general relativity: each element of that class is a wave function and vice versa as well. Thus, quantum mechanics can be considered as a “thermodynamic version” of general relativity, after which the universe is observed as if “outside” (similarly to a phenomenological thermodynamic system observable only “outside” as a whole). The statistical approach to that “phenomenological thermodynamics” of quantum mechanics implies Gibbs classes of equivalence of all states of the universe, furthermore re-presentable in Boltzmann’s manner implying general relativity properly … The meta-lesson is that the historical lesson can serve for future discoveries. (shrink)

Purpose: Despite the prevalent use of the golden ratio in the environment design for autistic users, there is no experimental research that explains their desired space ratio. This study aims to find the desired ratio in the learning environment, like an occupational therapy room for autistic users, while considering effective variables on their choices. Methodology: Based on McAllister's (2012) study, a scale model inspired by a dollhouse has been chosen to work and play with autistic children directly and find their (...) desired space ratio. Meanwhile, the furniture configuration and the access type in the environment could also define the ratio for interviewees. Accordingly, the scale model was designed with six different scale rooms containing three ratios and two spatial access types represented by the furniture arrangement. 50 autistic children of different ages, genders, and disorders in the moderate and medium spectrum have been randomly sampled. Then, they were asked to choose their desired ratio by playing with the scale model and putting the doll in their preferred room. This study also included 50 non-autistic children as a control group with different genders and defined ages. Result: After interviewing both groups, the chi-square test with Cramer's V calculation analyzed the result to find the statistically significant correlation between control variables, among which two independent variables had a statistically significant correlation with the chosen ratio for all the interviewees. First, being autistic significantly impacted their desired ratio choice as autistic children went for a ratio of 2:5, and no autistic ones had a high tendency toward the golden ratio (1:1.6). The chi-square test also showed that the access type in the scale model was the effective variable for both groups when choosing their desired ratio. Conclusion: The access type of the room with its furniture configuration impacted how users perceived the room's ratio, as well as being autistic or non-autistic users. (shrink)

Als Signatur moderner demokratischer Gesellschaften gilt heute weithin, was John Rawls zu Beginn der 1990er Jahre als „vernünftigen Pluralismus“ bezeichnet hat. Mit ihm einher geht die Frage, wie divergierende Lebensformen miteinander ins Gespräch gebracht werden können und wie sich dabei zu legitimen politischen Urteilen kommen lässt. Ich werde in meinem Beitrag argumentieren, dass sich die genannte Frage lösen lässt, wenn wir uns der jüngeren Diskussion von Arendts Theorie der Urteilskraft von Linda Zerilli zuwenden und diese mit Rahel Jaeggis Überlegungen (...) zur Kritik von Lebensformen verbinden. Dafür werde ich zunächst Arendts Überlegungen zur politischen Urteilskraft rekonstruieren und zeigen, wie diese Kants Modell der ästhetischen Urteilskraft auf den Bereich des Politischen zu übertragen versucht. Ich werde argumentieren, dass Arendt diese Transposition nur teilweise gelingt und eine Reihe von wichtigen Fragen ungelöst bleibt. Arendts Überlegungen sind damit jedoch keineswegs obsolet, sondern müssen vielmehr weiter gedacht werden. Zerilli hat hierfür jüngst einen wegweisenden Vorschlag vorgelegt, der Arendts Theorie der Urteilskraft nicht mehr im Ausgang von Kant, sondern von Wittgenstein zu denken versucht. Die damit einhergehende Perspektivverschiebung erlaubt es, den Streit zwischen divergierenden Lebensformen mit Jaeggi als eine mit den Mitteln der immanenten Kritik geführte Auseinandersetzung um deren Lernfähigkeit zu begreifen, was am Beispiel des Streits zwischen den Lebensformen der Kleinfamilie und der Kommune deutlich gemacht werden soll. (shrink)

Há atualmente um debate interdisciplinar profícuo sobre a noção de sofrimento social (social suffering). Pensadores e pensadoras como Barrington Moore Jr., Emmanuel Renault e Rahel Jaeggi desenvolvem o assunto a partir de um pressuposto elementar: sofrimento social diferencia-se de sofrimento individual na medida em que as causas do primeiro não são aturais (desejos básicos insatisfeitos, doenças, catástrofes naturais), mas resultam do agir humano; e, mais ainda, não resultam anto de relações interpessoais imediatas, mas de relações sociais mais amplas, como (...) a guerra, a pobreza, a exploração etc. No artigo Schopenhauer e a sociedade, Horkheimer afirmou que “no intransigente nominalismo de Schopenhauer em relação à sociedade estriba a raiz de sua grandeza” (p. 47). Para o pai da Teoria Crítica, a acepção schopenhaueriana de que apenas os indivíduos e o curso de suas vidas são reais, enquanto os povos são meras abstrações, não implicaria contrapor a sociedade e o Estado à pessoa singular ou esta àqueles. A sociedade se origina e se transforma a partir de indivíduos socialmente vinculados; o indivíduo não é uma ilha. Com essa chave de leitura, Horkheimer, como discípulo herético, consegue destacar e valorizar em Schopenhauer o aparato social da noção metafísica de sofrimento. O objetivo deste artigo é (i) mostrar em que medida a diferenciação entre sofrimento individual e social estaria implicitamente indicada em Schopenhauer e (ii) até que ponto a leitura de Horkheimer sobre o nominalismo de Schopenhauer em relação à sociedade permitiria sugerir elementos schopenhauerianos para os debates contemporâneos sobre sofrimento social. (shrink)

This monograph contrasts two prominent models of education, Competence-Based Education (CBE), more recent and currently dominant in most school systems around the world, and Bildung-Oriented Education (BOE), once the basis of the school systems of Northern Europe. CBE is assessment-oriented and interprets learning as the acquisition of clearly definable and allegedly measurable competences, and is supported by supranational organisations, such as the OECD, which approach education from the perspective of human capital theory. BOE is instead teaching-oriented and characterises learning holistically (...) as aimed at the progressive articulation of a meaningful ‘big picture’ in the student’s mind. Emerged in Northern Europe under the influence of the ideals of the Enlightenment and Neo-Humanism of individual and collective autonomy and responsibility, BOE was subsequently enriched with a hermeneutical approach to teaching and socio-political objectives of emancipation and solidarity originating within Critical Theory. The book first analyses CBE and argues that, in spite of its celebrated ‘scientificity’, it is internally incoherent and unreliable, contributes to structural forms of oppression and injustice, can foster social pathologies, and fails to provide students with the kind of intellectual autonomy they need as both human beings and citizens of our complex post-industrial societies. Then, it introduces BOE and articulates and defends an updated version of it from objections raised by critical theorists, poststructuralists and postcolonial thinkers. It argues that BOE is a coherent and flexible model of education that endows students with autonomy and responsibility, can reduce structural forms of oppression and injustice, and can heal social pathologies. (shrink)

The claim that there is “no alternative”, to contemporary neoliberal capitalism is widespread today. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the notion of reification to scrutinize the alleged necessity of the capitalist social order. Developed by Georg Lukács, the problem of reification refers to the experience of social arrangements as thinglike entities rather than as products of social construction. By addressing the problem of reification within a social ontology of forms of life, the occurrence of reification is understood as resulting (...) from the normatively neutral self-presentation of the capitalist form of life. To de-neutralize social norms that shape the capitalist form of life, this paper argues that social critique should turn to shared standpoints from which reification is experienced as a problem. Such standpoints can be found in social practices that are already involved in shared, normatively imbued forms of life beyond the reified logic of the capitalist form of life. Hence, it is argued that alternative forms of life are positioned to de-reify the norms that guide the capitalist form of life at large. (shrink)