Variantism about Responsibility

This chapter argues that experimental assessment of intuition pumps in the moral responsibility literature presses a dilemma on philosophically orthodox approaches to moral responsibility, which frequently maintain both invariantism and conservativism. Invariantist approaches maintain that there are exceptionlessly relevant criteria for responsibility attribution, while conservative approaches maintain that folk theories of responsibility are (defeasible, but substantial) constraints of philosophical theories of responsibility. However, the experimental record suggests that folk theory is conspicuously variantist (or pluralist) and evinces little commitment to exceptionlessly relevant attribution criteria. Therefore, invariantism and conservativism cannot be simultaneously maintained. Implications for theory choice and revision are discussed.

Hardly Speaking

Within anthropological folk theory, rapport has often been understood as pivoting on unproblematic notions of co-presence, fuzzy relations of friendship, and the centrality of denotation—that is, what people talk about, rather than how they talk (see Goebel, Chapters 1 and 2, this volume). Contrary to this conventional view, this chapter focuses on the semiotic and meta-pragmatic components of the ethnographic encounter. Drawing on her gradual and unplanned involvement in the domestic chores of the household where she was hosted, the author describes how during her fieldwork in upland Sulawesi she learned how to make offers and elicit preferences in a pragmatically acceptable way. As her role shifted from being a guest to being a host of her host’s guests, she discovered, through a series of misunderstandings, the role of food-mediated commensality in the reproduction of local hierarchies and developed a new understanding of how ethnographic rapport is built through minute, yet meaningful, instances of conversational exchange.

Is unified institutional economics possible?

In recent years, some papers were published with the aim to integrate the original institutional economics and new institutional economics. This paper considers the possibility to solve this problem. To do this, it has analyzed four tasks: firstly, how do the original institutionalists characterize their scientific program specificity; secondly, how do the original institutionalists criticize new institutional economics; thirdly, what do they mean by the integration of original institutional economics and new institutional economics, that they have been observing since the 1990s and fourthly, what do they propose as a integration program. The analysis showed that the explicit methodology of original institutionalism, in fact, attributes to it characteristics, which are very close to the properties of “folk theory”. New institutional economics’ criticism is often based on the distorted interpretations of this scientific research program. The authors typically understand as the institutionalisms’ similarity the facts of the new institutionalism development by Douglass North, who used the data of the empirical behavioral research, but not the claims of original institutionalism. The method of integration proposed in the literature presupposes the adoption of the old institutionalism methodology by the new institutionalism, which could drastically reduce the quality of its research. The paper concludes that under present-day conditions, it is practically impossible to create a unified institutional economics.

Folk theories of algorithms: Understanding digital irritation

This article draws on the framework of “folk theories” to analyze how people perceive algorithms in the media. Taking algorithms as a prime case to investigate how people respond to datafication in everyday media use, we ask how people perceive positive and negative consequences of algorithms. To answer our question, we conduct qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended answers from a 2019 representative survey among Norwegians, identifying five folk theories: algorithms are confining, practical, reductive, intangible, and exploitative. We situate our analysis in relation to different application of folk theory approaches, and discuss our findings in light of emerging work on perceptions of algorithms and critiques of datafication, including the concept digital resignation. We conclude that rather than resignation, digital irritation emerges as a central emotional response, with a small but significant potential to inspire future political action against datafication.

The Limits of Theoretical Disagreements in Jurisprudence

This paper discusses the “positivistic” idea of the limits of law in various contexts: the conceptual problem of the “limits of law”, the limits of legal interpretation and the limits of theoretical disagreements in jurisprudence. In the latter case, we briefly show how contemporary “reflective” or “critical” positivist theories approach the possibility and limits of disagreements over the “grounds” of law. In what follows, we argue that these theories, which argue for a form of an “institutional” limit for admissible “legal” reasons as built upon theories of basic concepts or normative theories of interpretation, are themselves actually underdetermined by “legal culture” or, so to speak, a “folk theory of law”. In the final section, we outline how a folk theory of law constrains both conceptual and interpretive enterprises in jurisprudence.

Das metaphorische Idealisierte Kognitive Modell des BUCHS und der LEKTÜRE in informellen deutschen und spanischen Laienrezensionen literarischer Texte auf Online-Plattformen

Im Unterschied zu literaturwissenschaftlichen Analysen und Interpretationen literarischer Texte sind literarische Rezensionen per se nicht-wissenschaftliche Texte. Der professionelle Literaturkritiker, sei er Literaturwissenschaftler oder nicht, ist nichts anderes als ein privilegierter, d.h. gebildeter Leser, der Argumente benutzt, die auf einer Alltagstheorie oder folk-theory darüber beruhen, was ein Buch seiner Auffassung nach sei bzw. wie es zu sein habe, sowie über das Lesen. Insofern unterscheidet er sich nicht vom nicht-professionellen Leser, der zum okkasionellen Kritiker wird, trotz aller selbstverständlich bestehenden Unterschiede zwischen beiden Arten von Literaturkritik. Durch die Analyse von informellen Buchrezensionen, die in den letzten Jahren in großer Zahl in den sozialen Medien, vor allem auch bei Internet-Verkaufsplattformen für Bücher erscheinen, soll eine erste Beschreibung des metaphorischen kognitiven Modells gegeben werden, das in den Rezensionen Verwendung findet, sodass Aussagen über die Alltagstheorie von BUCH und LEKTÜRE sowohl im Deutschen als auch im Spanischen gemacht werden können. Die theoretische Grundlage bildet dabei die kognitive Metapherntheorie von Lakoff / Johnson (1980ff.) und anderer Autoren, die ähnliche Theorien vertreten (z. B. Jäkel 1997; 2003). Auch auf die Rolle der Phraseologismen innerhalb dieses metaphorischen Modells soll eingegangen werden.

Verbal humor

This chapter deals with puns. The classification of puns is discussed and a basic definition of pun is provided: a text in which a sequence of sounds must be interpreted with a formal reference to a second sequence of sounds and two incongruous meanings are triggered by this process. Puns may come from ambiguity, or paronymy (puns that are similar in sound). The phonetic distance is the measure of how far two paronyms may differ and still be considered puns. The position of the connector (the ambiguous or paronymic element) and the disjunctor (the element in the text that triggers the recognition of the pun) are discussed. A Cratylistic motivated folk-theory of language is shown to underlie puns in the minds of speakers. Finally, a discussion of the psycholinguistics of puns completes the chapter.

Folk Theories of Artifact Creation: How Intuitions About Human Labor Influence the Value of Artifacts

What are the consequences of lay beliefs about how things are made? In this article, we describe a Western folk theory of artifact creation, highlighting how intuitive dualism regarding mental and physical labor (i.e., folk psychology) can lead to the perceived transmission of properties from makers to material artifacts (i.e., folk physics), and affect people’s interactions with material artifacts. We show how this folk theory structures the conceptual domain of material artifacts by differentiating the contemporary lay concepts of art/craft and industrial production, and how it influences people’s evaluations of different types of artifacts and their makers. We propose that the folk theory and lay concepts of art/craft and industrial production are best understood within a specific sociohistorical context, and review potential sources of cross-cultural and cross-temporal variation. We conclude by making recommendations for future research and examining the implications for promoting environmental sustainability and social justice in production systems.

Who Is a Creative Person? Conceptualisation of creativity by people with autism spectrum disorder.

Arkadiusz Gut, Małgorzata Moszyńska, Natalia Reszuta, Who Is a Creative Person? Conceptualisation of creativity by people with autism spectrum disorder. Interdisciplinary Contexts of Special Pedagogy, no. 27, Poznań 2019. Pp. 373–387. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISSN 2300-391X. e-ISSN 2658-283X. DOI:https://doi.org/10.14746/ikps.2019.27.17 A growing body of literature has focused on individuals with autism spectrum disorder who are entering adulthood. Thus, one of the main topics is social interactions and the issue of their functioning in professional contexts. Researchers focus their attention on those individuals’ folk theories that are also crucial in the lives of the normative sample. One of the key folk theories that guide our professional lives is a folk image of the creative person. The folk theory is nothing more than tacit knowledge held by a group of people. It is a system of beliefs and an inner standard of assessment that serves us to explain, for example, why we believe that someone is creative or when we assess the effects of their work. The aim of this paper is to present chosen findings from our study of the folk theory of creativity and creative person using a sample of persons with an autism spectrum disorder. We used a reversed version of Klaus Urban’s and Hans Jellen’s Test for Creative Thinking – Drawing Production (TCT-DP) where respondents selected previously prepared drawings, instead of making them. Their task was to select the most and least creative drawings and rank all the drawings according totheir level of creativity. We also measured respondents’ levels of creative efficiency and creative identity.

The social construction of media trust: An exploratory study in underserved communities

Trust in the news media has re-emerged as an important research topic but scholarship often focuses on the narrow question of credibility and overlooks underserved communities. This study explores how people in marginalized communities define trust in their own words. Based on data from focus groups, this article identifies key dimensions of trust and proposes a folk theory of trust in the news media: Trust depends on responsibility, integrity and inclusiveness.