The Limits of Neutrality

Frege ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 222-240
Author(s):  
Charles Travis
Keyword(s):  

For Frege logic is topic-neutral and thinker-neutral. Its laws, for him, are thus immune to be borne on by anything outside of logic itself, and thus to being or have been any other than they are. This chapter examines those two notions of neutrality and their limits. It locates logic in a particular restricted area of the object of the capacities of a rational being. It then asks how much of this can really be immune to thinker-specificity. It also draws on ideas of Leibniz, Reichenbach, and Putnam to cast doubt on the supposed consequences of topic-neutrality (or anyway offers a different understanding of what topic-neutrality might be).

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
BRUCE JANCIN
Keyword(s):  

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona M. M. Macdonald

The career and posthumous reputation of Andrew Lang (1844–1912) call into question Scottish historiographical conventions of the era following the death of Sir Walter Scott which foreground the apparent triumph of scientific methods over Romance and the professionalisation of the discipline within a university setting. Taking issue with the premise of notions relating to the Strange Death of Scottish History in the mid-nineteenth century, it is proposed that perceptions of Scottish historiographical exceptionalism in a European context and presumptions of Scottish inferiorism stand in need of re-assessment. By offering alternative readings of the reformation, by uncoupling unionism from whiggism, by reaffirming the role of Romance in ‘serious’ Scottish history, and by disrupting distinctions between whig and Jacobite, the historical works and the surviving personal papers of Andrew Lang cast doubt on many conventional grand narratives and the paradigms conventionally used to make sense of Scottish historiography.


Asian Survey ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 1072-1089
Author(s):  
Marie-Eve Reny

Myanmar began a transition in 2011 that ended almost 50 years of military rule. During the transition, a nationalist movement called for protecting Buddhism from an “Islamic threat.” Anti-Islam nationalism was not new in Burmese history, yet the timing of its resurgence deserves attention. I argue that the incumbents’ anticipated electoral weakness in transitional elections was the primary reason for its resurgence. The incumbents sought to maximize societal support, and they faced a strong contender, the National League for Democracy, whose probability of winning was high. Social opposition was also significant by the time military rule ended. In a campaign to pass reforms to better “protect” Buddhism, the incumbents used monks to cast doubt on the NLD’s ability to represent Buddhist interests and to recruit former regime opponents who were nationalists. The incumbents garnered wide support for the reforms, yet it was insufficient for an electoral victory.


2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Giacometti ◽  
Renato Roganti ◽  
Dario De Tann ◽  
Nasikat Stahlberger-Saitbekova ◽  
Gabriela Obexer-Ruff
Keyword(s):  

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels van de Ven ◽  
Monique Maria Henriettte Pollmann ◽  
Rob Nelissen ◽  
Nadiya Sayenko

Ample anecdotal and some scientific evidence suggests that men who enter a relationship feel that they are flirted with more frequently than before they had a partner. This phenomenon has been interpreted as a form of mate choice copying; the idea that females prefer males that are in a relationship with another female. In two samples (N = 271 and N = 396) we replicate that people indicate that flirting increased after entering a relationship. However, on a more absolute measure (how often people feel they are flirted with), we did not find that those in a relationship felt to be flirted with more than those without one. Our findings cast doubt on the interpretation that ours (and similar) findings are support for mate choice copying, and we argue that alternative explanations should be considered.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis David Von Gunten ◽  
Bruce D Bartholow ◽  
Jorge S. Martins

Executive functioning (EF) is defined as a set of top-down processes used in reasoning, forming goals, planning, concentrating, and inhibition. It is widely believed that these processes are critical to self-regulation and, therefore, that performance on behavioral task measures of EF should be associated with individual differences in everyday life outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to test this core assumption, focusing on the EF facet of inhibition. A sample of 463 undergraduates completed five laboratory inhibition tasks, along with three self-report measures of self-control and 28 self-report measures of life outcomes. Results showed that although most of the life outcome measures were associated with self-reported self-control, none of the life outcomes were associated with inhibition task performance at the latent-variable level, and few associations were found at the individual task level. These findings challenge the criterion validity of lab-based inhibition tasks. More generally, when considered alongside the known lack of convergent validity between inhibition tasks and self-report measures of self-control, the findings cast doubt on the task’s construct validity as measures of self-control processes. Potential methodological and theoretical reasons for the poor performance of laboratory-based inhibition tasks are discussed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 216747952199237
Author(s):  
Ondřej Trunečka

This study explores how professional athletes perceive sports journalists and the role of the media. They acknowledge that communication with journalists is an essential part of their profession and appreciate the verified information, knowledge, and dutiful preparation. They consider the main role of media as monitorial. In some cases, they cast doubt on journalists’ ability to evaluate athletic performance accurately, and they are also critical of errors in interviews, however they acknowledgethat there are good, and possibly excellent journalists as well.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-85
Author(s):  
Cletus Famous Nwankwo

AbstractThis paper examines the effect of rurality on party system fragmentation in the Nigerian presidential elections of the fourth republic. The findings show that party system fragmentation (PSF) has been characteristically low in the Nigerian presidential elections and rurality does not significantly predict party system fragmentation. Rurality has a negative effect on PSF in all the elections studied except the 2003 election but only significant in the 2011 poll. Thus, the paper cast doubt on previous studies that indicate that striking rural-urban differences manifest in party system fragmentation in African elections and attribute it to previous studies’ measure of rurality. The paper argues that the use of a composite measure of rurality instead of singular measures of rurality might provide better analysis that helps us understand the effect of rurality on party systems. Also, it argues that in the study of the rural-urban difference in voting behaviour or political behaviours more broadly, data should be aggregated based on cities and non-city areas because cities have distinctive urban characters compared with non-city places. Analyses done on states or constituencies level may not reveal the rural-urban difference because states and constituencies usually have a mix of rural and urban population and other characteristics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172110085
Author(s):  
Anna Jurkevics

The recent phenomenon of land grabbing—that is, the large-scale acquisition of private land rights by foreign investors—is an effect of increasing global demand for farmland, resources, and development opportunities. In 2008–2010 alone, land grabs covered approximately 56 million hectares of land, dispossessing and displacing inhabitants. This article proposes a philosophical framework for evaluating land grabbing as a practice of territorial alienation, whereby the private purchase of land can, under certain conditions, lead to a de facto alienation of territorial sovereignty. If land grabs alienate territorial sovereignty, it follows that inhabitants can claim a violation of the people’s right to “permanent sovereignty over natural resources.” However, because sovereignty is entangled in the historical and contemporary causes of land dispossession, I cast doubt on this strategy. Territorially sovereign regimes often undermine democratic land governance by obstructing participation in activities such as zoning, land use, property regulation, and environmental stewardship. These activities, which I theorize as practices of “world-building,” are key to democracy because they give occupants a say in the shape of their common home. The perplexities of sovereignty in matters of land governance suggest that establishing democratic participation in rule over land requires fracturing sovereignty.


Author(s):  
Piotr Koc

AbstractPolitical participation is a mainstay of political behavior research. One of the main dilemmas many researchers face pertains to the number of dimensions of political participation, i.e. whether we should model political participation as a unidimensional or multidimensional latent construct. Over the years, scholars usually have favored the solution with more than one dimension of political participation and they have backed the claim of multiple dimensions with a number of empirical tests. In this paper, I argue that the results from the frequently used testing procedures which rely on the model fit inspection and the Kaiser criterion can be very misleading and may yield in extracting too many dimensions. By employing bi-factor modeling to a European Social Survey dataset, I show that in a majority of countries political participation can be considered an essentially unidimensional latent quantity. I demonstrate that additional dimensions of political participation are very weak and unreliable and that we cannot regress them on external variables nor build composite scores based on them. These findings cast doubt on the conclusions of numerous previous studies where researchers modeled more than one dimension of political participation.


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