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Affect And Time: On The Worldly Origins Of Schizophrenic Vulnerability
Get PDFThis chapter reconceives core symptoms of schizophrenia by shifting the explanatory centre of gravity from putative structural breakdowns of time-consciousness to its affective distortion as rooted in the living, situated body. Drawing on Heidegger’s existential temporality, and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied, social and psychopathological temporality, we propose ‘schizophrenic vulnerability’ (SV) as a world-involving mode of dysregulation in which affective ‘irruptions’ alter saliency and meaning in past–present–future relations without abolishing structure itself. This argument unfolds across six progressive steps: (2) a critical review of clinical phenomenology’s shift from structural to affective accounts of time; (3) exegetical analyses of relevant notions in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty; (4) schizophrenia’s prodromal phase; (5) embodied affective temporality in schizophrenia (6) intersubjective affective temporality in schizophrenia; (7) A case study of ‘mission delusions’ in which an affectively charged future mandate reorganises existential time. We conclude by emphasising a perspective that situates schizophrenia at the mind–body–world interface, deepening dialogue between phenomenology and psychiatry
Mound builders, mound blunders: mythmaking in nineteenth century American archaeology
Get PDFIn this paper, I critically examine and overturn a narrative from the history of American archaeology wherein historians have classified the overthrowing of the Mound Builders
mythology in the late 19th century as a triumph for science. Despite there being ample evidence that Indigenous peoples constructed the mound earthworks of the eastern USA, a mythical “lost race” was invented that embodied the colonial aims of the new America. The triumph for science view relies on a naïve demarcation criterion, wherein science is identifiable by its association with the correct hypothesis. I argue that the triumph narrative obscures the historical development of archaeological practice that progressed in steps, offering a view of science that is continuous and cumulative, making it difficult to draw a fine line between science and mythmaking at any point in the 19th century. I call for the reclassification of this episode as a demonstration of the ways that epistemically rigorous methodologies can still contribute to falsehoods in a science entangled with cultural aims
Counting in Goodman and Quine's constructive nominalism
Get PDFIt is well-known that one cannot use first-order logic with
identity and the predicates Cat(x) and Dog(x) to say that there are
more cats than dogs. Nonetheless, Goodman and Quine (1947) offered
an ingenious translation of the sentence into a richer but thoroughly
finitist and nominalist language with mereological vocabulary and size
comparison for individuals. However, their translation as it stands fails
in the case of counting comparisons involving overlapping objects (say,
conjoined twin cats). Furthermore, we prove that no general translation
of equinumerosity (and hence of “more”) can be given in the overlapping
object setting using the predicates in Goodman and Quine’s translation,
assuming size comparison can be cashed out by counting mereological
atoms, and we use computational complexity theory to prove a more
general inexpressibility result. We end with some open questions
Political philosophy of experimentation
Get PDFIn this article, I sketch out the contours of a political philosophy of experimentation.Drawing on the work of Joseph Rouse, Hans Radder, Gilbert Hottois, and Jerome Ravetz, I argue that such a political philosophy of experimentation already exists, but has often been rendered invisible. Mainstream Anglophone philosophy of science often focuses on epistemological questions, typically at the expense of political questions about science. I argue that such a politicization of philosophy of science can be linked to the topic of experimentation, which transforms epistemologicalquestions about representations of the world into political questions aboutinterventions in the world. In the first section of the article, I examine the work of a number of political philosophers of experimentation in order to make explicit what I mean by a “political” philosophy of experimentation. In the second section of the article, I present a systematized argument why a philosophy of experimentation should be political. Finally, in the last section, I map out more explicitly the set of questions that are central to such a political philosophy of experimentation,in particular questions about what I call the politics of interaction, referring to how science and society should interact; the politics of organization, referring to how science should be organized; and the philosopher as political activist, referring to the question of whether philosophers should also act on their theories
Virtue and Structure in Epistemic Justice at Work
Get PDFThis paper examines what is required to achieve epistemic justice in contemporary workplaces and evaluates the contribution of Miranda Fricker’s (2007) virtue-epistemological framework. Fricker’s model highlights how social identity shapes epistemic harm, but in organizational settings, epistemic justice also depends on structural features that shape whose knowledge is recognized and acted upon. Drawing on structural critiques by Elizabeth Anderson, José Medina, Kristie Dotson, and Gaile Pohlhaus, the paper develops a hybrid model that integrates epistemic virtues with workplace reform. Two workplace cases, a telemarketer performance monitoring system and a personality-based hiring process, demonstrate how virtues like open-mindedness and reflexivity remain ethically important but require enabling structures to function epistemically. The paper argues that fostering epistemic justice in workplaces depends not only on virtuous agents but on redesigning workplace conditions to redistribute interpretive authority, enhance transparency, and support dissent
A Neopragmatist Intervention in Science
Get PDFPragmatism is not a doctrine but an approach to conceptual problems. It regards concepts as intellectual tools we create and use for particular purposes, improving them in the light of experience. Neopragmatism is an approach to conceptual problems wherever these arise as humans manifest their naturally explicable capacity to deploy concepts, in thought as well as in language, and in science as well as in philosophy. It rejects any attempt to solve these problems by appeal to something in unconceptualised reality for a concept to represent or a linguistic item to refer to or be made true by. Focussing on concepts’ symbolic expression, the neopragmatist asks what function is served by talk of various kinds―of morals, mathematics, causes, modality, probabilities, truth, reference and representation. Starting with what we have learnt from science about our situation in the world, a neopragmatist asks how talking that way helps us to solve general problems we face as situated agents. She sees good answers as dissolving conceptual problems that stem from the assumption that the function of this talk is simply to represent reality. There are many ways in which neopragmatism helps one to dissolve problems we face in understanding quantum theory. It shows how we apply models of a theory non-representationally. It reveals the significance of talk of probability and laws of nature without indulging in metaphysics. It explains the non-representational roles of quantum states, and how inference, not reference, makes claims about the results of measurements meaningful. It makes sense of relative truth as an extension of a deflationary approach to truth and uses this to dissolve some novel quantum paradoxes. Finally, it show that quantum theory is objective although it offers no “view from nowhere”
Book Review - Maria M. Sojka: A Heated Debate: Meta-Theoretical Studies on Current Climate Research and Public Understanding of Science.
Get PDFHomeostasis and Causal Control
Get PDFHomeostasis is a core biological concept concerning the way organisms maintain quantities within a given range. Mathematical models of homeostasis build on mechanisms for feedback control from engineering. The concept of control also figures centrally in causal analysis, where it is typically linked to interventions. This paper uses dynamic causal models (Iwasaki and Simon, 1994) to bridge these three domains, leading to the correction of a misunderstanding common in all of them. In each, control is regularly understood as aiming to maintain certain variables at constant values. Yet paradigm control feedback and homeostatic mechanisms do not maintain these variables constant, and intervening on them would destroy the mechanisms’ functions. Instead of focusing how feedback loops allegedly maintain constancy, dynamic causal models reveal how control systems exploit such lower-scale feedback loops to produce higher-scale causal relationships. The discussion points toward a novel engineering-inspired approach to causal inference, and clarifies how biological and engineered systems combine existing mechanisms to perform increasingly complex functions
Can Self-Locating Uncertainty Ground the Born Rule? An Inconsistency Argument
Get PDFVaidman's self-locating uncertainty (SLU) represents an innovative and influential approach to deriving Born rule probabilities in the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, offering a promising epistemic foundation for understanding probabilities in a deterministic multiverse. This paper examines a potential inconsistency in the SLU framework: while the concept relies on observer branching to generate multiple copies and thus enable uncertainty about branch location, such branching results in pure, deterministic local states for each copy, making the mixed reduced density matrix (RDM)—a key element in deriving amplitude-squared probabilities—unavailable. Conversely, if the mixed RDM is retained, the observer remains unentangled and spans all branches, eliminating the multiplicity essential to SLU. The derivations by McQueen and Vaidman appear to draw on both SLU (which presupposes branching) and the mixed RDM (which presupposes no branching), without fully addressing this tension. Our analysis suggests that the inconsistency poses a significant challenge to grounding the Born rule purely in SLU, independent of specific branching models. The results highlight unresolved questions in the foundations of Everettian probability and point toward the need for further refinement or supplementation of the SLU approach
From symmetry to supersymmetry to supergravity
Get PDFThe (theoretical) developments that led to supersymmetry - first global and then local – over a period of about six years (1970/71-1976) emerged from a confluence of physical insights and mathematical methods drawn from diverse, and sometimes independent, research directions. This contribution is devoted to illustrate the entanglement of ideas, methods and motivations informing the entire process – from symmetry to supersymmetry (sect. 2), from supersymmetry to supergravity (sect. 3) – , with a final reflection on the scientific modality of these developments