scholarly journals Mutability and Relationality: Towards an African Four-Dimensionalist Pan-Psychism

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1094
Author(s):  
Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Temporal Parts ◽  
Indiscernibility Of Identicals

This article challenges a certain Theist conception of God as immutable. I argue that the idea that God is immutable can be challenged on the grounds of its metaphysical groundwork. More precisely, I contend that the idea that God is immutable entails endurantism, which I demonstrate to be mistaken. This view cannot be right because it potentially involves three absurd implications: (a) a violation of the principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals (b) the idea that God becomes a different God with any change that occurs (c) the view that only the present is real and there is no future and past. As these solutions are absurd, the endurantist view ought to be abandoned. I then suggest an alternative theory that does not meet the same problems, which I call African four-dimensionalist Pan-Psychism. This theory I advance maintains that God is the sum of His spatial and temporal parts, is mutable and has relational properties (e.g., He changes with the occurrence of evil or good in the world). I uphold that this view does not have the absurd implications of its competitors.

“Suddenly Everyone Started to Love Our Anthem, Our Flag”: Identity Construction, Crisis, and Change in (Almost) Sovereign Kosovo

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 721-736
Author(s):  
Alissa Boguslaw
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
National Symbols ◽  
The World

AbstractHow, amidst a crisis of sovereignty and identity, did once-rejected national symbols become meaningful to Kosovo’s Albanians? Having declared independence in 2008, a 2014 study found that less than one-third of Kosovo’s citizens identified with their newly adopted state symbols. As meanings are always shifting, depending on the contexts in which their forms appear and the actors involved, theories of social construction have focused on the representational aspects of meaning-making: the ways in which the forms stabilize (or destabilize) the constructs they depict. Instead of focusing on the representational—the determinable, measurable, and rational aspects, this article investigates the discursive mechanisms that mobilize meanings and configure contexts, extending Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s alternative theory of events. Through discourse and semiotic analysis, it tracks Kosovo’s new flag and anthem through the construction, crisis, and transformation of three social realities: political independence, national identity, and the world of international competitive judo, illuminating how changing meanings change, shifting contexts shift, and how to interpret actors’ fleeting emotions. In the Kosovo case, the construction is the crisis, as well as the change.

Where do sets come from?

1991 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold T. Hodes
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Object ◽  
Semantic Theory ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Special Relation ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Usual Model ◽  
First Order ◽  
Order Language ◽  
The World ◽  
In Virtue Of

Many philosophers take set-theoretic discourse to be about objects of a special sort, namely sets; correlatively, they regard truth in such discourse as quite like truth in discourse about nonmathematical objects. There is a thin “disquotational” way of construing this construal; but that may candy-coat a philosophically substantive semantic theory: the Mathematical-Object theory of the basis for the distribution of truth and falsehood to sentences containing set-theoretic expressions. This theory asserts that truth and falsity for sentences containing set-theoretic expressions are grounded in semantic facts (about the relation between language and the world) of the sort modelled by the usual model-theoretic semantics for an uninterpreted formal first-order language. For example, it would maintain that ‘{ } ∈ {{ }}” is true in virtue of the set-theoretic fact that the empty set is a member of its singleton, and the semantic facts that ‘{ }’ designates the empty set,‘{{ }}’ designates its singleton, and ‘∈’ applies to an ordered pair of objects iff that pair's first component is a member of its second component.Now this theory may come so naturally as to seem trivial. My purpose here is to loosen its grip by “modelling” an alternative account of the alethic underpinnings of set-theoretic discourse. According to the Alternative theory, the point of having set-theoretic expressions (‘set’ and ‘∈’ will do) in a language is not to permit its speakers to talk about some special objects under a special relation; rather it is to clothe a higher-order language in lower-order garments.

scholarly journals Transformative Learning for Knowledge: From Meaning Perspectives to Threshold Concepts

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Hodge
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Threshold Concepts ◽  
Personal Change ◽  
Transformation Theory ◽  
Formal Knowledge ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
The World ◽  
Ways Of Being

Mainstream transformative learning emphasizes personally significant learning and liberation from limited ways of being in the world. Reflecting humanistic and emancipatory philosophical commitments, this emphasis can make it difficult to appreciate the transformative potential of learning for and by knowledge, a type of transformation adults can experience in the process of learning occupations and disciplines. The analysis presented in this article is prompted by a small, qualitative study of transformative learning that highlights the role occupational knowledge can play in triggering and bestowing meaning upon personal change. While mainstream transformation theory illuminates aspects of this learning, the alternative theory of “threshold concepts” accounts for the part played by formal knowledge. It is argued that transformation theory can be enhanced by threshold concepts theory when it is shown that the transformative potential of formal knowledge can be viewed as consistent with humanist and emancipatory principles.

A Metaphysics of Ordinary Things and Why We Need It

Philosophy ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Rudder Baker
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
Temporal Parts

AbstractMainstream metaphysicians today take little ontological interest in the world as we interact with it. They interpret the variety of things in the world as variety only of concepts applied to things that are basically of the same sort—e.g., sums of particles or temporal parts of particles. I challenge this approach by formulating and defending for a contrasting line of thought. Using what I call ‘the Constitution View,’ I argue that ordinary things (like screwdrivers and walnuts) are as ontologically significant as particles. I further argue for why we need recourse to such ordinary things in our basic ontology.

scholarly journals Is Sider still a perdurantist?

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 111-125
Author(s):  
Nikola Stamenkovic
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Fundamental Level ◽  
Mereological Nihilism ◽  
The World ◽  
Mereological Fusion ◽  
Temporal Parts ◽  
Theodore Sider ◽  
Four Dimensionalism ◽  
Additional Object

In Writing the Book of the World (2011) Theodore Sider claims that on the fundamental level of reality there are no objects composed of parts, which makes his view a version of mereological nihilism. However, in his previous book entitled Four-Dimensionalism (2001), Sider endorses mereological universalism, the thesis that every class of objects has a mereological fusion, i.e. that there exists an additional object containing those objects as parts, which plays a crucial role in his argument from vagueness in favour of perdurantism, that is the thesis of the existence of temporal parts of material objects. In this paper I will investigate whether Sider can still be a perdurantist in spite of his latest commitment to mereological nihilism.

A New Strategy for Anti-Corruption

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Bo Rothstein
Keyword(s):  
Good Governance ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Economic Approach ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Principal Agent Theory ◽  
Agent Theory ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
New Strategy

Corruption in its various forms has turned out to be a resilient, sometimes well-organized, and well-entrenched enemy. It is difficult to trace any major results from the “good governance” programs the World Bank and other organizations have launched since the mid-1990s, the bulk of which have almost exclusively been guided by an economic approach called “the principal-agent” theory. It is argued that this theory is particularly ill-suited to the corruption problem. An alternative theory is presented based on the social contract tradition in political philosophy. This implies that corruption should be understood as a problem of collective actions which leads to very different policy recommendations for how countries can get corruption under control. The corruption problem is neither based in the historically inherited culture of a society, nor its legal system. Instead, most of the problem of corruption exists in what in organizations theory is known as “standard operating procedures.”

scholarly journals A phone in a basket looks like a knife in a cup: The perception of abstract relations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alon Hafri ◽  
Michael F. Bonner ◽  
Barbara Landau ◽  
Chaz Firestone
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Image Features ◽  
Target Image ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Single Target ◽  
The World ◽  
Dynamic Relations ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind

The world contains not only objects and features, but also relations between them. When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. How does the mind represent relations themselves, separately from the objects participating in them? Though abstraction of this sort is frequently studied within the domains of language and higher-level reasoning, here we show that abstract relations may also arise in automatic visual processing, by exploring a surprising perceptual “error” that such relations can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in force- dynamic relations — e.g., a phone contained inside a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting inside a cup. Participants’ task was to respond to a single target image (e.g., phone-in- basket) within the stream of distractors. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images that matched the target’s relational category than to those that did not — even when such images involved completely different objects. In other words, when participants were searching for a phone in a basket, they were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments using this “image confusion” paradigm ruled out strategic responding, and also controlled for various image features that may have been confounded with these relations. We suggest that relational properties are automatically extracted by the mind, and in ways that are abstract: We see relations themselves, beyond the identities of the objects participating in them.

scholarly journals Egy fenomenológiai ellenérv a perdurantizmussal szemben

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
László Bernáth
Keyword(s):  
Unified Model ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Parts ◽  
The Mind

The paper explicates an argument against a perdurantist theory of change. Perdurantism explains change by positing temporal parts in the past, the present, and the future. The aim of the counterargument is to show that this theory is not plausible as a unified model of change: as soon as it is extended to the mind, its direct implication will be the idea that one suffers from radical misunderstanding of how the world appears to him/her. This notion of radical misunderstanding is hard to believe, as a phenomenon is directly accessible to one as a phenomenon.

Artefacts as Social Things

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 400-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Piekarski ◽  
Witold Wachowski ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Design Practice ◽  
Cognitive Ecology ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
The World ◽  
Forms Of Life

In these reflections, we want to prove a thesis whereby normativity of rules and norms may be linked to the domain of artefacts which we understand as social things. We claim that some norms and rules are situated in human socio-material ecosystems especially when it comes to the role played by affordances. The thesis advanced in this article will also enable us to indicate one of the potential interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ concept, demonstrating that some solutions suggested by the author of Philosophical Investigations are still relevant today. We will relate the issue of the normativity of artefacts to the problem of rule recognition which Wittgenstein also raises in some of his later studies. We will demonstrate that the problem of normativity recognition is linked to (1) relational properties of objects, that is affordances; (2) structured nature of the world of human communities; and (3) the ability to recognise affordances related to the ability to create predictions about future states of affairs. The analyses presented herein will show that it is possible to link the perspectives of cognitive ecology, design practice and philosophical analyses focused on the problem of normativity.

A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science and its implications for replication

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Gantman ◽  
Robin Gomila ◽  
Joel E. Martinez ◽  
J. Nathan Matias ◽  
Elizabeth Levy Paluck ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Behavioral Measurement ◽  
The World ◽  
Pragmatist Philosophy

AbstractA pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.

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