Functionalist Interrelations among Human Psychological States Inter Se, Ditto for Martians

Author(s):  
Nicholas Shea

Functionalism is designed to allow that psychological states can be multiply realized. Mark Sprevak has argued that, for a functionalist account of psychological states to apply to creatures that are organized in a very different way from humans (call them Martians), the way a psychological state is functionally individuated has to be relatively coarse-grained (Sprevak 2009). The argument for coarse-grained individuation fails if we distinguish functionalism about what it takes to be a psychological state in general from functionalism about a particular state type such as belief. Theorists are not precluded from including functional relations to consciousness or deliberate judgment in their account of (human) belief, consistent with allowing that Martians would have their own collection of functionally interrelated psychological states. Sprevak’s coarse-grained functionalism implies an implausibly liberal form of extended cognition. The point about functional interrelations allows us to avoid that conclusion without jettisoning functionalism (as Sprevak suggests we should): records in a human notebook may not enter into the right interrelations with other human psychological states to count as beliefs; nor do they enter into any interrelations with Martian psychological states.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Linling Yang

Chinese poetry plays an important part in Chinese literature, and has been the focus of research and the way for Chinese people savor life and for their self-cultivation. The appearance of cognitive poetics shed the new light on the research of literature, especially on poetry. It rose up from the 1970s, combining the theories of literature and those of linguistics, and emphasized the recording and interpreting the psychological state of readers or, simply their reading of the texts which involves information processing, individual psychological states, it was naturally connected with the researches on the mind, cognition, and of course the investigation of language itself. This paper mainly attempts to applying cognitive linguistic theories to interpreting a very renowned Chinese ancient poem Qing Ming, written by Du.mu, a poet from Tang dynasty, and meanwhile digs it deeper about the above phenomena: various combinations of the same elements should have such different artistic and aesthetic effect.


Author(s):  
Linda MEIJER-WASSENAAR ◽  
Diny VAN EST

How can a supreme audit institution (SAI) use design thinking in auditing? SAIs audit the way taxpayers’ money is collected and spent. Adding design thinking to their activities is not to be taken lightly. SAIs independently check whether public organizations have done the right things in the right way, but the organizations might not be willing to act upon a SAI’s recommendations. Can you imagine the role of design in audits? In this paper we share our experiences of some design approaches in the work of one SAI: the Netherlands Court of Audit (NCA). Design thinking needs to be adapted (Dorst, 2015a) before it can be used by SAIs such as the NCA in order to reflect their independent, autonomous status. To dive deeper into design thinking, Buchanan’s design framework (2015) and different ways of reasoning (Dorst, 2015b) are used to explore how design thinking can be adapted for audits.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anaheed Al-Hardan

The 1948 Nakba has, in light of the 1993 Oslo Accords and Palestinian refugee activists' mobilisation around the right of return, taken on a new-found centrality and importance in Palestinian refugee communities. Closely-related to this, members of the ‘Generation of Palestine’, the only individuals who can recollect Nakba memories, have come to be seen as the guardians of memories that are eventually to reclaim the homeland. These historical, social and political realities are deeply rooted in the ways in which the few remaining members of the generation of Palestine recollect 1948. Moreover, as members of communities that were destroyed in Palestine, and whose common and temporal and spatial frameworks were non-linearly constituted anew in Syria, one of the multiples meanings of the Nakba today can be found in the way the refugee communities perceive and define this generation.


Author(s):  
Shai Dothan

There is a consensus about the existence of an international right to vote in democratic elections. Yet states disagree about the limits of this right when it comes to the case of prisoners’ disenfranchisement. Some states allow all prisoners to vote, some disenfranchise all prisoners, and others allow only some prisoners to vote. This chapter argues that national courts view the international right to vote in three fundamentally different ways: some view it as an inalienable right that cannot be taken away, some view it merely as a privilege that doesn’t belong to the citizens, and others view it as a revocable right that can be taken away under certain conditions. The differences in the way states conceive the right to vote imply that attempts by the European Court of Human Rights to follow the policies of the majority of European states by using the Emerging Consensus doctrine are problematic.


Author(s):  
Matti Eklund

What is it for a concept to be normative? Some possible answers are explored and rejected, among them that a concept is normative if it ascribes a normative property. The positive answer defended is that a concept is normative if it is in the right way associated with a normative use. Among issues discussed along the way are the nature of analyticity, and there being a notion of analyticity—what I call semantic analyticity—such that a statement can be analytic in this sense while failing to be true. Considerations regarding thick concepts and slurs are brought to bear on the issues that come up.


Author(s):  
Lisa Rodgers

‘Ordinary’ employment contracts—including those of domestic servants—have been deemed to attract diplomatic immunity because they fall within the scope of diplomatic functions. This chapter highlights the potential for conflict between these forms of immunity and the rights of the employees, and reflects on cases in which personal servants of diplomatic agents have challenged both the existence of immunity and the scope of its application. The chapter examines claims that the exercise of diplomatic immunity might violate the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the way in which courts have dealt with these issues. The chapter analyses diplomats’ own employment claims and notes that they are usually blocked by the assertion of immunity, but also reflects on more recent developments in which claims had been considered which were incidental to diplomatic employment (eg Nigeria v Ogbonna [2012]).


Author(s):  
David Rosenthal

Dennett’s account of consciousness starts from third-person considerations. I argue this is wise, since beginning with first-person access precludes accommodating the third-person access we have to others’ mental states. But Dennett’s first-person operationalism, which seeks to save the first person in third-person, operationalist terms, denies the occurrence of folk-psychological states that one doesn’t believe oneself to be in, and so the occurrence of folk-psychological states that aren’t conscious. This conflicts with Dennett’s intentional-stance approach to the mental, on which we discern others’ mental states independently of those states’ being conscious. We can avoid this conflict with a higher-order theory of consciousness, which saves the spirit of Dennett’s approach, but enables us to distinguish conscious folk-psychological states from nonconscious ones. The intentional stance by itself can’t do this, since it can’t discern a higher-order awareness of a psychological state. But we can supplement the intentional stance with the higher-order theoretical apparatus.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Nils Franzén

Abstract This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.


Author(s):  
Helen Ray-Jones ◽  
Mikhail Spivakov

AbstractTranscriptional enhancers play a key role in the initiation and maintenance of gene expression programmes, particularly in metazoa. How these elements control their target genes in the right place and time is one of the most pertinent questions in functional genomics, with wide implications for most areas of biology. Here, we synthesise classic and recent evidence on the regulatory logic of enhancers, including the principles of enhancer organisation, factors that facilitate and delimit enhancer–promoter communication, and the joint effects of multiple enhancers. We show how modern approaches building on classic insights have begun to unravel the complexity of enhancer–promoter relationships, paving the way towards a quantitative understanding of gene control.


1981 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nicholson

Among the school of scholars of international relations, neatly called by Roy Jones the ‘English School’, the work of Martin Wight is placed in particularly high esteem. More perhaps than anyone else, he is regarded as the scholar who did international relations as it ought to be done. I suppose no one would assert that this form is exclusive and needed no complement. The need for the discussion of economic factors in international relations for example would presumably not be denied, nor that such a discussion might not need other methods. What I take to be asserted, however, is that the sort of problem which Wight faced is central to international relations (and given the generality of some of these problems, for some issues, at least, this would not be widely denied) but more importantly that the way he tackled them is the right way.


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