Group Belief

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
Domingos Faria ◽  

Beliefs are commonly attributed to groups or collective entities. But what is the nature of group belief? Summativism and nonsummativism are two main rival views regarding the nature of group belief. On the one hand, summativism holds that, necessarily, a group g has a belief B only if at least one individual i is both a member of g and has B. On the other hand, non-summativism holds that it is possible for a group g to have a belief B even if no member of g has B. My aim in this paper is to consider whether divergence arguments for non-summativism and against summativism about group belief are sound. Such divergence arguments aim to show that there can be a divergence between belief at the group level and the corresponding belief at the individual level. I will argue that these divergence arguments do not decisively defeat a minimal version of summativism. In order to accomplish this goal, I have the following plan: In section 2, I will analyze the structure of two important counterexamples against the summativist view, which are based on divergence arguments. Such counterexamples are based on the idea that a group decides to adopt a particular group belief, even if none of its members holds the belief in question. However, in section 3, I will show that these counterexamples fail, because they can be explained without the need to posit group beliefs. More specifically, I argue that in these apparent counterexamples, we have only a ‘group acceptance’ phenomenon and not a ‘group belief’ phenomenon. For this conclusion, I advance two arguments: in subsection 3.1, I formulate an argument from doxastic involuntarism, and in subsection 3.2, I develop an argument from truth connection. Thus, summativism is not defeated by divergence arguments. Lastly, in section 4, I will conclude with some advantages of summativism.

Author(s):  
Anna Peterson

This book examines the impact that Athenian Old Comedy had on Greek writers of the Imperial era. It is generally acknowledged that Imperial-era Greeks responded to Athenian Old Comedy in one of two ways: either as a treasure trove of Atticisms, or as a genre defined by and repudiated for its aggressive humor. Worthy of further consideration, however, is how both approaches, and particularly the latter one that relegated Old Comedy to the fringes of the literary canon, led authors to engage with the ironic and self-reflexive humor of Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus. Authors ranging from serious moralizers (Plutarch and Aelius Aristides) to comic writers in their own right (Lucian, Alciphron), to other figures not often associated with Old Comedy (Libanius) adopted aspects of the genre to negotiate power struggles, facilitate literary and sophistic rivalries, and provide a model for autobiographical writing. To varying degrees, these writers wove recognizable features of the genre (e.g., the parabasis, its agonistic language, the stage biographies of the individual poets) into their writings. The image of Old Comedy that emerges from this time is that of a genre in transition. It was, on the one hand, with the exception of Aristophanes’s extant plays, on the verge of being almost completely lost; on the other hand, its reputation and several of its most characteristic elements were being renegotiated and reinvented.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (01) ◽  
pp. 41-74
Author(s):  
Ahmed Abdellah Ahmed Alhossany

This study deals with the Quranic treatment of extremism in terms of extremisms concept and semantics, types, causes, images,  and the Quranic approach in its treatment, and we try to link the Muslim to the Quran approach in the treatment of extremism as a problem which the individual and the old and new society suffer; Because extremism can be transformed from mere idea to apparent behavior while demonstrating that extremism in fact transcends the rules of law and divine orders, it is excessive in the commitment to religion on the one hand or negligence in adhering to it, on the other hand, it is not always concerned with bringing the matter but also enters into relinquishing. In addition to the need to be warned that extremism is a method of religiosity and not religion itself, and Islam with its centrist approach rejects such practices and seeks to address them through the curriculum of the Holy Quran


Author(s):  
Manuel Jiménez Sánchez ◽  
Raúl Álvarez Pérez ◽  
Gomer Betancor Nuez

El movimiento de los pensionistas en 2018 supuso la primera movilización multitudinaria basada en una identidad colectiva de personas mayores en España, y mostró una capacidad de contestación popular sin precedentes en el tema de las pensiones. Este trabajo indaga en el proceso de configuración de la identidad colectiva como estrategia analítica que permite entender la aparición y la naturaleza (exitosa) de la movilización. Siguiendo la conceptualización de Melucci, este proceso se analiza desde una doble perspectiva. Por un lado, como estrategia de actores colectivos que persiguen articular la contestación popular a la política de pensiones puestas en marcha durante la Gran Recesión. Aquí, el análisis se centra en identificar el proceso organizativo en el que se sientan las bases identitarias del movimiento, y que se extenderían con éxito en la fase posterior de contestación masiva. Por otro lado, se presta atención a la naturaleza de la identificación entre los propios pensionistas como resultado de procesos de aprendizaje durante sus experiencias de movilización. Para la primera perspectiva, el trabajo se basa en informaciones obtenidas en noticias de prensa sobre las actividades de protesta y en documentos producidos por las organizaciones del movimiento. La perspectiva individual de los participantes se fundamenta en el análisis de los discursos obtenidos en entrevistas personales focalizadas a participantes. Este doble enfoque, como estrategia organizativa intencionada y como proceso de aprendizaje durante la experiencia de la movilización, ofrece informaciones clave para comprender no solo el proceso, inédito en España, de construcción de una voz propia de los pensionistas sino también para indagar en los procesos de aprendizaje y cambio actitudinal que implican para los participantes corrientes. En un sentido más amplio, esta estrategia de análisis permite igualmente, por un lado, ubicar el proceso de movilización de los pensionistas en una trayectoria temporal más amplia de contestación popular y, en particular, vincularlo a los legados del ciclo de movilización que protagonizó el 15-M. Por otro lado, también permite destacar esos procesos de contestación como espacios de aprendizaje en los que se modelan actitudes, valores y demás elementos de la cultura de protesta. The pensioners' movement in 2018 was the first mass mobilization based on a collective identity of older people in Spain, and showed an unprecedented capacity for popular contestation on the issue of pensions. This paper inquires into the process of collective identity configuration as an analytical strategy that allows us to understand the emergence and (successful) nature of the mobilisation. Following Melucci's conceptualization, this process is analysed from a double perspective. On the one hand, as a strategy of collective actors seeking to articulate popular contestation to the pension policies implemented during the Great Recession. Here, the analysis focuses on identifying the organizational process in which the identity bases of the movement are established and, which were successfully extended in the subsequent phase of mass protest. On the other hand, attention is paid to the nature of the collective identification among pensioners themselves as result of learning processes during their protest experiences. The analysis of the organizational configuration of the movement is based on information obtained from press reports on the protest activities and documents produced by the movement's organizations. The individual perspective of the participants relies on the analysis of the discourses obtained in focused interviews with participants. This dual approach, as an intentional organizational strategy and as a learning process during the mobilization experience, provides key information to understand not only the process, unprecedented in Spain, of building a voice for pensioners, but also to investigate the learning processes and attitudinal change involved for ordinary participants. More broadly, it also allows, on the one hand, to place the process of mobilization of pensioners in a broader temporal trajectory of popular contestation and, in particular, to link it to the legacies of the cycle of mobilization in the wake of the 15-M movement. On the other hand, it also allows us to observe protest as learning spaces in which attitudes, values, and other elements of the culture of protest are modelled.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2019 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-107
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Czejkowska ◽  
Katarina Froebus

Zusammenfassung: Der vorliegende Beitrag widmet sich Narrativen der Verunsicherung, die in Zusammenhang mit der COVID-19-Krise aufgerufen werden und für ,,innere Sicherheit“ sorgen sollen. Dabei identifizieren wir Kalküle, die einerseits individuelle Besonnenheit aktivieren und anderseits gesellschaftliche Stabilisierung gewährleisten sollen. Das gelingt uns mit Rückgriff auf psychoanalytische Subjekttheorien, die Strategien der individuellen Rationalisierung fokussieren, und auf diskursorientierte Subjekttheorien, die gesellschaftliche Disziplinierungstechnologien in den Blick nehmen.Abstract: This article is focused on narratives of uncertainness, being created during the COVID-19 crisis in order to provide ‘home security’. In doing so, we identify approaches that on the one hand activate individual level-headedness and on the other hand are supposed to ensure societal stabilization. We succeed in doing this by resorting to psychoanalytic subject theories that emphasize strategies of individual rationalization and to discourse-oriented subject theories that accent social disciplinary technologies.


Politeia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 238-260
Author(s):  
Franco Manni ◽  

From the ideas of Aristotle, De Saussure and Wittgenstein, philosopher Herbert McCabe elaborated an original anthropology. 'Meaning' means: the role played by a part towards the whole. Senses are bodily organs and sensations allow an animal to get fragments of the external world which become 'meaningful' for the behaviour of the whole animal Besides sensations, humans are ‘linguistic animals’ because through words they are able to 'communicate', that is, to share a peculiar kind of meanings: concepts. Whereas, sense-images are stored physically in our brain and cannot be shared, even though we can relate to sense-images by words (speech coincides with thought). However, concepts do not belong to the individual human being qua individual, but to an interpersonal entity: the language system. Therefore, on the one hand, to store images is a sense-power and an operation of the brain, whereas the brain (quite paradoxically!) is not in itself the organ of thought. On the other hand, concepts do not exist on their own.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maren Wehrle

AbstractPhenomenologically speaking, one can consider the experiencing body as normative insofar as it generates norms through repeated actions and interactions, crystallizing into habits. On the other hand according to Foucauldian approaches, the subjective body does not generate norms but is itself produced by norms: Dominant social norms are incorporated via repeated practices of discipline. How is the individual level of habit formation in phenomenology related to this embodiment of supra-individual norms? In what sense can we differentiate between a habit formation that results in a skill and one that disciplines a body? To address these questions the paper will analyze examples of the embodiment of norms in Foucault and feminist philosophy and show how they rely on the phenomenological concept of the actual and habitual body.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 54-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durk Gorter ◽  
Jasone Cenoz

In this article we discuss the concept of translanguaging in relation to a holistic view of linguistic landscapes that goes beyond the analysis of individual signs. On the one hand, we look at instances of multilingual signage as a combination of linguistic resources. On the other hand, at the neighborhood level the individual signs combine, alternate and mix to shape linguistic landscapes as a whole. We expand our “Focus on Multilingualism” approach from school settings to the multilingual cityscape. One bookshop and its surrounding neighborhoods in Donostia-San Sebastián illustrate how readers navigate between languages and go across linguistic borders. Through translanguaging we foreground the co-occurrence of different linguistic forms, signs and modalities. At the level of neighborhood emerges the space in which translanguaging goes outside the scope of single signs and separate languages. We conclude that translanguaging is an approach to linguistic landscapes that takes the study of multilingualism forward.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-225
Author(s):  
Arif A JAMAL

AbstractIn considering the articles in this Special Issue, I am struck by the importance of a set of factors that, in my view, both run through the articles like a leitmotif, as well as shape the major ‘take away’ lesson(s) from the articles. In this short commentary, I elaborate on these factors and the lesson(s) to take from them through five ‘Cs’: context; complexity; contestation; the framework of constitutions; and the role of comparative law. The first three ‘Cs’ are lessons from the case studies of the articles themselves, while the second two ‘Cs’ are offered as lessons to help take the dialogue forward. Fundamentally, these five ‘Cs’ highlight the importance of the articles in this Special Issue and the conference from which they emerged on the one hand, while on the other hand, also making us aware of what are the limits of what we should conclude from the individual articles. In other words, taken together, the five ‘Cs’ are, one might say, lessons about lessons.


1940 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. d'E. Atkinson

The derivation given by Hoyle and Lyttleton for an accretion formula proposed by them is examined. A number of arguments against its validity are put forward, especially that on the one hand their capture radius depends on the theorem that if the velocity of certain masses of gas after collision is less than the velocity of escape at the point, they will not in fact escape, while on the other hand it is clear (and is now admitted) that the gas cannot in fact move with this velocity at all. It is also shown that since, ex hypothesi, the individual molecules will all, on the average, retain their hyperbolic velocities, there is not the compelling reason for their capture that there appeared to be in Hoyle and Lyttleton's argument, where only the mean radial velocity of the centre of gravity of the mass was considered. Further, it seems improbable that the temperature of the interstellar matter can be low enough for the initial assumptions of their theory to hold.


Africa ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzette Heald

AbstractThe literature has tended to deal with diviners only where they have been seen to play a notable role in the transformation of social relationships. This leads us to overlook their relative social invisibility in many African societies. Yet we may gain insight into the rise of prophets and charismatic healers by looking at the other side of this story in the multitude of very humble practitioners plying their trade. This is the context in which this article explores the role of diviners among the Gisu of Uganda.The privacy of consultation, the search for distant diviners, the way they are approached only at times of crisis and as agents of private counteraction or vengeance, go some way towards explaining why it is difficult for diviners to gain recognition. Added to which are the difficulties of another order which relate to what might here be regarded as divinatory success. For divination may be seen to fail at a number of different levels: in the lack of credibility of a given practitioner, i n a lack of unanimity among those consulted and in the multiplicity of causal agents evoked.An argument put forward here is that scepticism is endemic to the system and, possibly, distinctive to it. We should ask not, as Evans-Pritchard did, how belief i s sustained despite the presence of scepticism but what it is about these beliefs which encourages scepticism. It is not useful to explore this issue in terms of the rationality question or the ‘truth’ of belief systems. If we are to draw a comparison with modern attitudes, of greater significance are the organisation and differentiation of knowledge and its relationship to power. It is suggested that diagnostic systems used by societies such as the Gisu encourage an agnostic attitude in a way i n which those of the modern West do not.In the final part of the article the social role of divination is reconsidered and some of the positive functions proposed for it are questioned. Gisu divination can be seen to have evolved into a very narrow niche whose parameters are bound, on the one hand, by the limits of belief and, on the other, by a system of interpersonal vengeance. We may say that the socially marginal attributes of diviners, exclusively concerned with the negative aspects of social relationships, represent a real social marginality. At best they are agents by which the individual may be reconciled with harshnesses imposed by his own destiny, of ancestral affliction; at worst they are agents of individual vengeance and retribution. This may be taken as more or less disqualifying them from articulating a positive, future-oriented vision on behalf of the community. Clearly it is not impossible but it is a huge jump from these humble practitioners, interpreting the present in terms of the past and trading evil with evil at an individual level, to prophets capable of formulating a positive social vision, a means forward, on behalf of a wider moral or social community.


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