Explanation and Understanding in Animal Narratives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Herman
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Human Behaviors ◽  
Discourse Practices ◽  
Strategic Oscillation ◽  
Experimental Narrative ◽  
The Way

With chapter 6 having described the way norms for mental-state ascriptions operate in a top-down manner in discourse domains, chapter 7 explores how individual narratives can in turn have a bottom-up impact on the ascriptive norms circulating within particular domains. To this end, the chapter discusses how Thalia Field’s 2010 experimental narrative Bird Lovers, Backyard employs a strategic oscillation between two nomenclatures that can be used to profile nonhuman as well as human behaviors: (1) the register of action, which characterizes behavior in terms of motivations, goals, and projects; and (2) the register of events, which characterizes behavior in terms of caused movements that have duration in time and direction in space. In braiding together these two registers, Field’s text suggests not only how discourse practices can be repatterned, but also how such repatterning enables broader paradigm shifts—in this case shifts in ways of understanding cross-species encounters and entanglements.

Local Infrastructures for Peace

2021 ◽  
pp. 626-640
Author(s):  
Andries Odendaal
Keyword(s):  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Local Agency ◽  
The Core ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
The Way

The way “the local” had been interpreted led to contrasting top-down or bottom-up understandings of local infrastructures for peace. This chapter presents a reinterpretation of the relevance of infrastructures for peace from a practitioner’s perspective, considering past experiences and current theoretical debates. It argues for an appreciation of the complex, interlinked nature of global, national, and local conflicts and the necessity of flexible yet sustained and productive dialogue platforms at the points of frictional interactions at and between all these levels. The capacity to initiate and support such dialogue platforms where, crucially, local agency is respected is at the core of the approach that became known as “infrastructures for peace.”

e-Den goes down under

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-35
Author(s):  
Paul Brunton
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Education ◽  
Dental Education ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Dental School ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Self Directed Learning ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Directed Learning ◽  
The Way

Change is a constant in our profession, and we are familiar with this on a daily basis, as we constantly change how we practise. But consider how the way we learn and the very structure of our profession has changed in recent years. If I think back, I attended a traditional dental school and had, in my view, an excellent undergraduate education. Compare that top-down approach to the approach today, with its self-directed learning and student-led clinics – to give a couple of examples of a bottom-up model of providing effective dental education. The net result of this, in my view, is that today’s graduates are a little different in many respects, both when they graduate and in their long-term career ambitions.

Engineering the Battlefield

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ford
Keyword(s):  
British Army ◽  
Military Innovation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
User Experiences ◽  
Innovative Design ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Way

This chapter is concerned with exploring the way that engineers sought to reframe and make sense of user experiences of battle. The chapter shows how Britain’s engineers tried to introduce an innovative design of assault rifle into the British Army. The arguments they developed in turn had a range of impacts on American engineers who were themselves going through a series of discussions on how to update rifle technology. In terms of military innovation, this represented neither top-down nor bottom-up innovation. Instead, we might describe the efforts of these engineers as middle-out innovation.

Diffusion of Development Journalism Inside Egyptian Newsrooms

2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122110400
Author(s):  
Rasha Allam ◽  
Ahmed El Gody
Keyword(s):  
Arab Spring ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
The Way

This study examines the boundaries and limitations of the diffusion of “development journalism” among both the editorial body and the journalist body in the Egyptian newsrooms after the 2011 Arab Spring. Newsrooms under study represent different perspectives including state-owned, private-independent, and opposition newspapers. Through in-depth interviews with thirty-seven editors in chief and journalists, the authors studied how the editors and journalists at each newspaper define development journalism, whether the diffusion of development journalism follows a top-down or bottom-up approach, and if development journalism could influence the setting of the news agenda. Results show that the differences are not only apparent in the way development journalism is defined inside the different news organizations, but also between managers and journalists within each. Organizational structures and technological developments are as well factors that affect the way development journalism is diffused inside newsrooms.

Superimposed Mental Imagery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eamon Briscoe
Keyword(s):  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Amodal Completion ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mental Images ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Functional Differences ◽  
Augment Reality ◽  
Object Features ◽  
The Way

Human beings have the capacity to ‘augment’ reality by superimposing mental imagery on the visually perceived scene, a capacity that is here referred to as make-perceive. In the first part of this chapter, the author shows that make-perceive enables us to solve certain problems and pursue certain projects more effectively than bottom-up perceiving or top-down visualization alone. The second part addresses the question of whether make-perceive may help to account for the phenomenal presence of occluded or otherwise hidden features of perceived objects. The author argues that phenomenal presence isn’t well explained by the hypothesis that hidden features are represented using projected mental images. In defending this position, he points to important phenomenological and functional differences between the way hidden object features are represented respectively in mental imagery and amodal completion.

A Mirror of Society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Marat
Keyword(s):  
Political Context ◽  
The State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Legitimate Violence ◽  
The Way

The introductory chapter develops a new understanding of both police and police reform in the post-Soviet context. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the police as merely an institution of coercion, the chapter defines it as a medium for state-society consensus on the limits of the state’s legitimate use of violence. Police reform is, in turn, a never-ending top-down and bottom-up collaboration that may experience both great leaps forward and great setbacks, as opposed to a definite sum of projects. Depending on a country’s specific political context, changing the way the police operate will require some type of revision in how and when the state wields its monopoly on legitimate violence.

The Economics of Influence

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Colander ◽  
Roland Kupers
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Institutional Structure ◽  
Collective Choice ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Way

The complexity frame leads to a number of changes in the way we think of economic policy. This chapter considers norms policy because it is expected to be the most controversial. It argues that, as part of its economic policy, a society should have a norms policy through which institutions are developed to better allow people to express their collective choice about what norms and tastes should be encouraged and discouraged by society, and that such a policy should be integrated into the institutional structure of society. The essential trick is to design such policies so that they allow norms to emerge from the bottom up and not impose them from the top down. That is difficult and complicated to do.

THE WARSAW CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS: EMERGING UNDERSTANDINGS AND BATTLE LINES ON THE ROAD TO THE 2015 CLIMATE AGREEMENT

2014 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 721-740 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lavanya Rajamani
Keyword(s):  
Step Change ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Legal Form ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Climate Negotiations ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe Warsaw conference, 2013, marked the halfway point from the Durban conference, 2011, that launched negotiations towards a 2015 climate agreement and the Paris conference, 2015, slated as the deadline for these negotiations. As such, the Warsaw conference needed to register a step change in the process—from the airing of differences to negotiating them. It also needed to create the conditions necessary to reach agreement in 2015. This article analyses the outcome of the Warsaw negotiations with a view to determining the extent to which it paves the way for a 2015 climate agreement. In particular, this article explores the divisions over, prospects for and contours of a likely 2015 agreement. The 2015 agreement is likely to be shaped by the resolution Parties arrive at on three overarching issues. These are: architecture—whether the agreement will be ‘top-down’ (prescriptive) or ‘bottom-up’ (facilitative) or a hybrid version of the two; differentiation—the nature and extent of it, and in particular whether it will eschew or replicate the Kyoto model of differentiation and related vision of equity; and legal form—whether the 2015 agreement will be legally binding, and if yes, as is likely, which elements of the 2015 package will be in the legally binding instrument and which elements will be in non-binding complementary decisions. The Warsaw outcome will therefore be analysed with a view to providing insights into the likely architecture and legal form of as well as treatment of differentiation and equity in the 2015 agreement.

scholarly journals Remembering John Polkinghorne: a vision of one world, and one culture

Theology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 324-331
Author(s):  
Tom C. B. McLeish
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Student ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Personal Recollection ◽  
Creative Tension ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way ◽  
John Polkinghorne

A personal recollection of gratitude reports on the way that the writings of John Polkinghorne inspired and guided the author’s own thinking in science and theology since meeting him as a graduate student. Themes of both agreement and disagreement are selected from the many to be found in Polkinghorne’s corpus. Closer attention is paid to two of his books, Science and Christian Belief and Faith, Science and Understanding. A running theme is the creative tension of a ‘bottom-up thinker’, one of whose salient and influential arguments was that of ‘top-down causation’. Although there is disagreement over Polkinghorne’s exegesis of divine character in Job, thinking the argument through did bear fruit.

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