Explanatory Relevance and the Doing/Allowing Distinction

This chapter by Jacob Ross clarifies the traditional moral distinction between actions and omissions. He levels various objections against counterfactual and causal ways of drawing the distinction, and proposes instead an explanatory view that avoids the objections while capturing our moral judgments about the relevant cases.

Frame Disputes or Frame Consensus? “Environment” or “Welfare” First Amongst Climate Strike Protesters

Present debates suppose a close linkage between economic, social, and environmental sustainability and suggest that individual wellbeing and living standards need to be understood as directly linked to environmental concerns. Because social movements are often seen as an avant-garde in pushing for change, this article analyzes climate protesters’ support for three key frames in current periods of social transformation, i.e., an “environmental”, an “economic growth”, and a “welfare” frame. The analyzed data material consists of survey responses from over 900 participants in six Global Climate Strikes held in Sweden during 2019. The article investigates the explanatory relevance of three factors: (a) political and ideological orientation, (b) movement involvement, and (c) social characteristics. The results indicate that climate protesters to a large degree support an environmental frame before an economic growth-oriented frame, whereas the situation is more complex regarding support for a welfare frame vis-á-vis an environmental frame. The strongest factors explaining frame support include social characteristics (gender) and protestors’ political and ideological orientation. Movement involvement has limited significance. The article shows how these frames form a fragment of the complexity of these issues, and instances of frame distinctions, hierarchies, and disputes emerge within the most current forms of climate change demonstrations.

Towards More Realistic Modeling of Linguistic Color Categorization

The ways in which languages have come to divide the visible spectrum with their color terminology, in both their variety and the apparent universal tendencies, are still largely unexplained. Building on recent work in modeling color perception and categorization, as well as the theory of signaling games, we incrementally construct a color categorization model which combines perceptual characteristics of individual agents, game-theoretic signaling interaction of these agents, and the probability of observing particular colors as an environmental constraint. We also propose a method of transparent evaluation against the data gathered in the World Color Survey. The results show that the model’s predictive power is comparable to the current state of the art. Additionally, we argue that the model we suggest is superior in terms of motivation of the principles involved, and that its explanatory relevance with respect to color categorization in languages is therefore higher. Our results suggest that the universal tendencies of color categorization cannot be explained solely in terms of the shape of the color space induced by our perceptual apparatus. We believe that only by taking the heterogeneity of the phenomenon seriously can we acquire a deeper understanding of why color categorization takes the forms we observe across languages.

Causality and History: Modes of Causal Investigation in Historical Social Sciences

Studies at the confluence of history and social science address issues of causation in three ways: morphological, variable-centered, and genetic. These approaches to causal investigation differ with regard to their modi operandi, the types of patterns they look for, their underlying assumptions and the challenges they face. Morphological inquiries elaborate causal arguments by uncovering patterns in the empirical layout of socio-historical phenomena. To this end, these inquiries draw on descriptive techniques of data formalization. Variable-centered studies engage causal issues by investigating patterns of association among empirical categories under the twofold assumption that these categories a priori have explanatory relevance and each category empirically has the same meaning across cases. Genetic analyses ground their causal claims by identifying patterned processes of emergence or production.

How Content Explains

The varitel accounts of content allow us to see how the practice of representational explanation works and why content has an explanatory role to play. They establish the causal-explanatory relevance of semantic properties and are neutral about causal efficacy. Exploitable relations give the accounts an advantage over views based only on outputs. Content does valuable explanatory work in areas beyond psychology, but it need not be explanatorily valuable in every case. The varitel accounts illuminate why there should be a tight connection between content and the circumstances in which a representation develops. The accounts have some epistemological consequences. Representations at the personal level are different in a variety of ways that are relevant to content determination. Naturalizing personal-level content thus becomes a tractable research programme. Most importantly, varitel semantics offers a naturalistic account of the content of representations in the brain and other subpersonal representational systems.

Perversity in the Performative

To study the staged performative transgressions of victims, sadistic cruelty borne by the desire on the part of perpetrators to witness the collective dying of victims, requires analytical orientations beyond those focused exclusively on motivations cast in rational or rationalizing, cognitive or purposive strategic terms. Performativity as a theoretical perspective establishes the explanatory relevance of the unconscious in appraising the dynamics of desire, shame, and sadistic cruelty among perpetrators. Various psychosocial perspectives may be adopted in this regard. Sadistic behaviors are not only cruel; they demand that the cruelty be displayed in the name of the laws of prohibition. Perpetrator behaviors in mass atrocity demonstrate the psychic elements of emotionality and fantasy, paranoia and obsession. Group dynamics in the macabresque ebb and flow in the subterranean tides of anxiety and psychic desire made manifest by reifications and sadistic hate, a central focus of study in the analysis of perpetrator performativity.