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Concept Appraisal
Full text linkThis paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the importance of also considering how a thinker assesses the epistemic value of beliefs and other cognitive resources and, in particular, concepts. We demonstrate that there are multiple, reliably judged, dimensions of epistemic appraisal of concepts. Four of these dimensions are accounted for by a common underlying factor capturing how well people believe they understand a concept. Further studies show how dimensions of concept appraisal relate to other aspects of concepts. First, they relate directly to the hierarchical organization of concepts, reflecting the increase in specificity from superordinate to basic and subordinate levels. Second, they predict inductive choices in category-based induction. Our results suggest that epistemic appraisals of concepts form a psychologically important yet previously overlooked aspect of the structure of concepts. These findings will be important in understanding why individuals sometimes abandon and replace certain concepts; why social groups do so, for example, during a “scientific revolution”; and how we can facilitate such changes when we engage in deliberate “conceptual engineering” for epistemic, social, and political purposes
How some countries are using digital ID to exclude vulnerable people around the world
Full text linkThe world has become interconnected at a level we never before imagined possible. States, banking, communications, transport, tech and international development organisations have all embraced digital identification. The current conversation hinges on the need to speed up registrations to ensure that every person on this planet has their own digital ID
Bayne, T. & Shea, N. (2020), ‘Consciousness, Concepts, and Natural Kinds’, Philosophical Topics 48(1), 65-84.
Full text linkWe have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of
consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behaviour. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult (if not impossible) to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants, people with brain damage, non-human animals, and AI systems. There is a pressing need to identify measures of consciousness that can be applied to challenging cases. This
paper explores one of the most promising strategies for identifying and validating such measures—the natural kind strategy. The paper is in two broad parts. Part I introduces the natural kind strategy, and contrasts it with other influential approaches in the field. Part II considers a number of objections to the approach, arguing that none succeeds
Accountability in Displacement Contexts: A case study on client-responsiveness in collaboration with IRC Tanzania
Full text linkHumanitarian actors recognise that accountability to affected populations (AAP) and involving people affected by crisis in decision-making can improve the effectiveness, relevance, and quality of humanitarian response. In line with recent initiatives such as the Core Humanitarian Standards on Quality and Accountability (CHS) and the Grand Bargain Participation Revolution, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has committed to making humanitarian programming more accountable to the communities it serves by developing and implementing its Client Responsive Programming Framework.
This evaluation explores how IRC Tanzania Country Programme employs client responsiveness and examines challenges and opportunities of AAP. While the report focuses on IRC Tanzania’s application of client responsiveness, it highlights best practices that humanitarian organisations more broadly can adopt to enhance affected populations’ participation and ability to influence programming, and foster staff’s greater receptivity to client responsiveness
Countering the Politics of Fear - Reframing Threat Narratives about Refugees in Hungary
Full text linkThis paper applies the Discourse Historical Approach to examine how a text published by a Hungarian human rights NGO constructs an alternative discourse to the ‘Othering’ right-wing populist discourse on refugees, which capitalises on the threat narratives of the securitisation of migration. The research draws on literature about right-wing populism, the securitisation of migration – including the ‘war on terrorism’ – the impact of securitisation policies and right-wing populist rhetoric on stoking fears among the public, as well as the concepts and assumptions underlying human rights advocacy in challenging the status quo. Furthermore, Viktor Orbán’s anti-migration campaigns in relation to the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ are outlined, along with the repercussions this has had on refugee protection, civil society, and public attitudes towards refugees and immigrants in Hungary. The analysis shows that three building blocks carry the articulation of the NGO’s alternative discourse and then explores what can be learned from these. The NGO’s discourse is arguably constructed differently to how human rights advocates ‘traditionally’ frame refugee rights and counter threat narratives, therefore, it may provide tools to initiate a more constructive public dialogue on the topic of perceived threats associated with refugees
Accountability to Affected Populations in Displacement Contexts and During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Full text linkDuring the pandemic, the RLI has undertaken a real-time evaluation of the impact of Covid-19 on IRC Uganda’s humanitarian response and accountability to affected populations. While the report focuses on IRC Uganda’s application of Client Responsiveness during the Covid-19 pandemic, key findings and lessons are relevant and applicable to other IRC country programmes, as well as other humanitarian organisations. The report shows how humanitarian organisations can be accountable to the communities they serve even during a pandemic when engagement between humanitarian staff and affected populations is heavily restricted due to lockdown regulations. IRC Uganda country programme demonstrated how challenges can be overcome by adapting programming and communication channels, and by finding new and different strategies to support refugees, reach remote areas and the most vulnerable people. New strategies and ways of operating can improve programming in ordinary times too
Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture
Full text linkThis article examines the role of law in shaping visual commercial culture by telling the story of the hoarding—the outdoor advertising surface for posters—in the formative decades of mass advertising in Britain, from roughly 1840 to 1914. The hoarding emerged in this period as a distinct property and a focal point of contestation over ways of seeing. Its meaning as a visual environment hinged on questions, which are still resonant today, about the interaction between economic and aesthetic categories: advertising and art, capital and beauty, commerce and culture. Historical actors—among them the organized billposting trade, the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, a civil society organization that took up the cause of protecting public spaces from advertising, governmental and local lawmakers, and citizens—enlisted private and public legal means to respond to these questions. This analysis draws on an expansive interdisciplinary archive to trace them. As it shows, legal means were engaged in cultural demarcation or what Thomas Gieryn has aptly termed boundary work. In establishing cultural boundaries, law defined the terms on which advertising became an integral element of daily visual experience, at once omnipresent and derided. The legal history of advertising thus offers deep insights for visual legal studies.</jats:p
Intermediary XML schemas: constraint, templating and interoperability in complex environments
Full text linkThis article introduces the methodology of intermediary schemas for complex metadata environments. Metadata in instances conforming to these is not generally intended for dissemination but must usually be transformed by XSLT transformations to generate instances conforming to the referent schemas to which they mediate. The methodology is designed to enhance the interoperability of complex metadata within XML architectures.
This methodology incorporates three subsidiary methods: these are project-specific schemas which represent constrained mediators to over-complex or over-flexible referents (Method 1), templates or conceptual maps from which instances may be generated (Method 2) and serialized maps of instances conforming to their referent schemas (Method 3).
The three methods are detailed and their applications to current research in digital ecosystems, archival description and digital asset management and preservation are examined. A possible synthesis of the three is also proposed in order to enable the methodology to operate within a single schema, the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS)
Cultural Worlds of the Jesuits in Colonial Latin America
Full text linkThe Jesuits’ colonial legacy in Latin America is well-known. They pioneered an interest in indigenous languages and cultures, compiling dictionaries and writing some of the earliest ethnographies of the region. They also explored the region’s natural history and made significant contributions to the development of science and medicine. On their estates and in the missions they introduced new plants, livestock, and agricultural techniques, such as irrigation. In addition, they left a lasting legacy on the region’s architecture, art, and music.
The volume demonstrates the diversity of Jesuit contributions to Latin American culture. This volume is unique in considering not only the range of Jesuit activities but also the diversity of perspectives from which they may be approached. It includes papers from scholars of history, linguistics, religion, art, architecture, music, medicine and science
Representation in Cognitive Science - Replies
Full text linkIn their constructive reviews, Frances Egan, Randy Gallistel and Steven Gross have raised some important problems for the account of content advanced by Nicholas Shea in Representation in Cognitive Science (2018, OUP). Here the author addresses their main challenges as follows. Egan argues that the account includes an unrecognised pragmatic element; and that it makes contents explanatorily otiose. Gallistel raises questions about homomorphism and correlational information. Gross puts the account to work to resolve the dispute about probabilistic contents in perception, but argues that a question remains about whether probabilities are found in the content or instead in the manner of representation