scholarly journals Hayek's "Scientism" essay: the social aspects of objectivity and the mind

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diogo Lourenço
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
External World ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Central Nervous System ◽  
Behavioral Evidence ◽  
The Mind

In his essay "Scientism and the study of society" Hayek argues that attitudes are central to the moral sciences. Since the natural sciences show that "ordinary experience" often does not reproduce the relations between things in the external world, the understanding of attitudes is possible due to the similarity between the mind of the moral scientist and that of the agent. I argue that Hayek’s arguments for the differentiation between the natural sciences and what he calls "ordinary experience" are problematic. I offer an alternative justification by appealing to the manifold goals and social contexts of inquiry. I also elucidate his claim that minds are similar, and how this relates to our understanding of others—both as ordinary agents and as economists. In so doing, I discuss two alternative accounts found in Hayek's work: the first account suggests that understanding is a projection of mental categories from behavioral evidence; the second account—which is found in The sensory order—suggests that understanding is the result of a functional correspondence between structures in the central nervous system.

Embodiment of emotion and its situated nature

2018 ◽  
pp. 528-552
Author(s):  
Evan W. Carr ◽  
Anne Kever ◽  
Piotr Winkielman
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Cognitive Networks ◽  
Grounded Cognition ◽  
Affective Processing ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Situational Cues ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Emotional Concepts ◽  
Emotion Concepts

Social functioning requires emotion. We must be able to recognize, interpret, and generate emotions across a variety of social contexts. But how are emotions conceptually represented in the mind? Embodiment (or grounded cognition) theories propose that processing of emotional concepts is partly based in one’s own perceptual, motor, and somatosensory systems. We review evidence for this account across a variety of domains, including facial expression perception, interpretation of emotional language, somatic involvement in affective processing, and “mirroring” of others’ actions. We also contrast embodiment theories with more traditional “amodal” frameworks, which represent emotional information as abstract language-like symbols in cognitive networks. Overall, we argue that a comprehensive account of emotion concepts requires considering their embodiment. Simultaneously, we highlight that embodiment is flexible and dynamic, especially within the social environment. This means that when and how emotion concepts are embodied critically depends on situational cues and current representational needs.

Civic Competence in the Logic of Openness: A Phenomenological Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-79
Author(s):  
Igor V. Gibelev
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Subject Knowledge ◽  
Pedagogical Design ◽  
The Social ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Civic Mindedness

The article offers a phenomenological view on civic competency, openness of education, and values as type of competencies. The need for such a comparison is dictated by the discrepancy between the humanistic meanings of education and the social reality in which they are supposed to be implemented. It is assumed that a phenomenological perspective can present civic competency as a borderline connecting both the areas. This study is methodically supported by explication of the philosophical (transcendental-phenomenological) logic of the concept of openness.The appeal to openness, which is the essence of human subjectivity (autonomy), clarifies the substantive character of civic competency structure.Firstly, the study underlines the connection between openness and universalism as cultural principle (that is, in culture and through culture) of self-determination of the mind, constituting civic mindedness as a universal moral and legal modus of subjectivity. Bringing the civic idea to the competency range is the own task of education, which can be accomplished only in continuous actualization of the concept of openness.Secondly, the article proposes to consider the concept of value in the meaning of “type of competencies” according to the Council of Europe’s “Reference Framework of Competence for Democratic Culture” as a tool for crystallizing the self-determining mind into civic competency. Attention to this document is drawn by the coherence of openness and universalism with educational policies and practices, which is formalized in the pedagogical design of values as a type of competence. The study’s argumentation confirms this connection and ascertains that an open edu­cational system is defined in its essence not by a set of accessible educational environment technologies, but by the depth of its rooting in the logic of openness.Thirdly, the actualization of values as a type of competence in the logic of openness provides an opportunity for phenomenological designing of pedagogical technologies. The essential idea of this approach is that civic competency can be constituted as a semantic determination of different types of subject knowledge and, through their correction, can transform broad social contexts. As an example of that sort of transformative participation, the article presents the values’ influence on the strengthening of human capital in aggregation of new technologies and inequality.

Gastrointestinal Satiety Signals I. An overview of gastrointestinal signals that influence food intake

2004 ◽  
Vol 286 (1) ◽  
pp. G7-G13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Woods
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Food Intake ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Meal Size ◽  
Gi Tract ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adiposity Signals ◽  
The Central Nervous System

An overview is presented of those signals generated by the gastrointestinal (GI) tract during meals that interact with the central nervous system to create a sensation of fullness and satiety. Although dozens of enzymes, hormones, and other factors are secreted by the GI tract in response to food in the lumen, only a handful are able to influence food intake directly. Most of these cause meals to terminate and hence are called satiety signals, with CCK being the most investigated. Only one GI signal, ghrelin, that increases meal size has been identified. The administration of exogenous CCK or other satiety signals causes smaller meals to be consumed, whereas blocking the action of endogenous CCK or other satiety signals causes larger meals to be consumed. Satiety signals are relayed to the hindbrain, either indirectly via nerves such as the vagus from the GI tract or else directly via the blood. Most factors that influence how much food is eaten during individual meals act by changing the sensitivity to satiety signals. This includes adiposity signals as well as habits and learning, the social situation, and stressors.

Metaphors of Inscription: Discipline, Plasticity and the Rhetoric of Choice

1998 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pippa Brush
Keyword(s):  
Cosmetic Surgery ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Economic Constraints

The metaphor of inscription on the body and the constitution of the body through those inscriptions have been widely used in recent attempts to theorize the body. Michel Foucault calls the body the ‘inscribed surface of events’ (Foucault, 1984: 83) and Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ‘female (or male) body can no longer be regarded as a fixed, concrete substance, a pre-cultural given. It has a determinate form only by being socially inscribed’ (Grosz, 1987: 2). The body becomes plastic, inscribed with gender and cultural standards. While Foucault assumes the existence of a pre-inscriptive body, many theorists reject that idea and argue that ‘there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings’ (Butler, 1990: 8). The constitution of the body rests in its inscription; the body becomes the text which is written upon it and from which it is indistinguishable. Starting from Catherine Belsey's suggestion that to ‘give the metaphor literal significance … is to … isolate it for contemplation’ (Belsey, 1988: 100), I discuss this metaphor of inscription, using cosmetic surgery as one literal example. While some theorists reject the pre-inscriptive body, the popular discourses advocating changing one's body assume unproblematically the existence of a body prior to these ‘elective’ procedures and reinforce the mind/body dualism which recent theory has sought so insistently to reject. I examine how popular discourses of body modification enforce a disciplinary regime (in Foucault's sense) and impose degrees of both literal and figurative inscription. Juxtaposing these two perspectives, I explore how both discourses efface the materiality of the body and the social contexts within which bodies are experienced and constructed. While the rhetoric surrounding cosmetic surgery denies the physical process and the economic constraints, so theories of the body which stress the body's plasticity also deny the materiality of that process and the cultural and social contexts within which the body is always placed.

Corporeal Ontology: Beyond Mind-Body Dualism?

Politics ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Status ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Dynamic Interplay

The definition and boundaries of the political have received considerable attention in recent times in political science, perhaps as a result of the wavering confidence in the scientific status of the knowledge that the discipline creates. However, a conspicuous absence continues to haunt mainstream political science, one that if rectified threatens, in some ways, to broaden both the nature of the political still further and to challenge the very division of knowledge into the social and natural sciences. This absence is the human body and this article seeks to ask after its exclusion and to suggest that its exclusion is both political and needs rectifying. I argue that the exclusion of the body in political science is a consequence of an inadequate ontological short cut, which is accepted (mostly) unquestioningly by political analysts and which has severe epistemological and methodological consequences. I suggest that a more reflective consideration of the body and its dynamic interplay with the mind could offer the discipline a greater understanding of the human subject, as well as alter power-knowledge relations.

A Suggested Approach to the Problems of Neuro-Psychiatry

1935 ◽  
Vol 81 (333) ◽  
pp. 317-331
Author(s):  
D. Noel Hardcastle
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Suggested Approach ◽  
Vast Amount ◽  
The Central Nervous System ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
The Mind

In considering the structure of the central nervous system as the vehicle for the mind, due regard must be paid to the vast amount of psychological knowledge which has been accumulated, and any new theories advanced must at least to some extent be able to explain accepted psychological material in neurological terms.

Toward an Affective Political Ecology of Obesity

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-366
Author(s):  
Emma-Jayne Abbots ◽  
Karin Eli ◽  
Stanley Ulijaszek
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Ecologies ◽  
Political Economic

This article argues for an affective approach to obesity that destabilizes the conceptual boundaries between the biological and the social aspects of food, eating, and fatness. Its approach foregrounds visceral experience, attends to food both inside and outside the body, and explores how bodies labeled “obese” consume their political, economic, and material environments. This approach is termed affective political ecology. The authors’ aim is to draw attention to how the entanglements between the physiological and social aspects of eating tend to be absented from antiobesity public health rhetoric. By exploring a range of ethnographic examples in high-income countries, they illuminate how such interventions often fail to account for the complex interplays between subjective corporeal experience and political economic relations and contend that overlooking an individual’s visceral relationship with food counterproductively augments social stigma, stresses, and painful emotions. They demonstrate, then, how an approach that draws together political economic and biomedical perspectives better reflects the lived experience of eating. In so doing, the authors aim to indicate how attending to affective political ecologies can further our understanding of the consumption practices of those in precarious and stressful social contexts, and they offer additional insight into how the entanglement of the biological and the social is experienced in everyday life.

Association, Agnosia, and Intellect

1961 ◽  
Vol 107 (451) ◽  
pp. 1043-1046
Author(s):  
David Bowsher
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Mental Function ◽  
Anatomical Basis ◽  
The Central Nervous System ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Sensory Functions

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall, Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.”The importance of the anatomical basis of the simpler motor and sensory functions of the central nervous system, and their disorders, has been recognized for over a century (Brown-Séquard, 1855). But that more complex intellectual functions and their disorders should also have a relevant anatomical substrate is only slowly coming into recognition. Indeed, a still-fashionable theory of mental function, originating in Vienna towards the end of the last century, regards the study of brain structure as unnecessary and beneath contempt—for all that its founder began as a neuro-anatomist.

scholarly journals Ecological Clues to the Nature of Consciousness

Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 611
Author(s):  
Robert E. Ulanowicz
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
The Central Nervous System ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Empirical Approaches

Some dynamics associated with consciousness are shared by other complex macroscopic living systems. For example, autocatalysis, an active agency in ecosystems, imparts to them a centripetality, the ability to attract resources that identifies the system as an agency apart from its surroundings. It is likely that autocatalysis in the central nervous system likewise gives rise to the phenomenon of selfhood, id or ego. Similarly, a coherence domain, as constituted in terms of complex bi-level coordination in ecosystems, stands as an analogy to the simultaneous access the mind has to assorted information available over different channels. The result is the feeling that various features of one’s surroundings are present to the individual all at once. Research on these phenomena in other fields may suggest empirical approaches to the study of consciousness in humans and other higher animals.

Seeking Truth

2022 ◽  
pp. 97-120
Author(s):  
Arthur Shelley
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Interactionism ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
American Mind ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Living Process

Truth is a living process playing out in each human mind/brain. That is, your truth is the sum of your own knowledge and experiences. One person's “truth” can be regarded as just another perspective in others' eyes. Absolute truths are difficult to define, especially in the social aspects of human interactions. This chapter provides a foundational understanding of truth as a changing target relative to self. The role of the Mediasphere is explored in terms of its influence on creating a collective societal reality, a collective consciousness. Specific attention is given to the importance of symbolic interactionism – consistent with the knowledge capacity explored in terms of neuroscience findings on how memories are stored in the mind/brain. To better understand what is happening in today's environment, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and brainwashing are explored in terms of their relationship with truth, and the attack on the American mind is addressed. An addendum includes three tools for breaking the pattern of untruths: truth searching, rhythm disruptor, and humility.

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