Bodies-in-Relation: Fine-Tuning Group-Directed Empathy

In this paper I analyze Alessandro Salice and Joona Taipale’s account of ‘group-directed empathy.’ I am highly sympathetic to Salice and Taipale’s account and intend this paper to be an endorsement of their project. However, I will argue that a more fine-grained account of group-directed empathy can be offered, and I seek to contribute to this discussion by outlining at least one way in which different types of group-directed empathy may be identified. I argue that while Salice and Taipale are right to claim that an account of group-directed empathy requires a corresponding account of ‘collective bodiliness,’ there is an important form of collective bodiliness that their account does not fully incorporate, namely embodied interaction between others. I argue that a closer look at the perceivability of interactions between others offers a richer and more complete account of how we can empathetically perceive shared emotions between groups of people.

Do item-dependent context representations underlie serial order in cognition? Commentary on Logan (2021)

Logan (2021) presented an impressive unification of serial order tasks including whole report, typing, and serial recall in the form of the context retrieval and updating (CRU) model. Despite the wide breadth of the model’s coverage, its reliance on encoding and retrieving context representations that consist of the previous items may prevent it from being able to address a number of critical benchmark findings in the serial order literature that have shaped and constrained existing theories. In this commentary, we highlight three major challenges that motivated the development of a rival class of models of serial order, namely positional models. These challenges include the mixed-list phonological similarity effect, the protrusion effect, and interposition errors in temporal grouping. Simulations indicated that CRU can address the mixed list phonological similarity effect if phonological confusions can occur during its output stage, suggesting that the serial position curves from this paradigm do not rule out models that rely on inter-item associations, as has been previously been suggested. The other two challenges are more consequential for the model’s representations, and simulations indicated the model was not able to provide a complete account of them. We highlight and discuss how revisions to CRU’s representations or retrieval mechanisms can address these phenomena and emphasize that a fruitful direction forward would be to either incorporate positional representations or approximate them with its existing representations.

It's About Bloody Time and Space

Time frames relationships of power, especially in the context of law. One of the clearest ways in which time is implicated in both law and society is via discourses about women’s biological functions. This Article is an introduction to a larger project that analyzes legal discourses regarding a crucial aspect of women’s calendrically-associated biological functions: women’s menstrual periods. Over the course of the project, I explore legal discourses about menstruation through the notion of what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls “chronotopes”—a connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. Temporality, Bakhtin argues, is closely associated with certain paradigmatic spaces, and the combination of shapes, ideologies, and identities. Legal discussions of women’s menstrual bleeding are key sites for the discursive creation and maintenance of certain ideologies of womanhood. These discussions appear in a wide variety of contexts and in ways that either explicitly reference or implicitly index ideologies of female identity. All are characterized by efforts to mark them as narratives linked to other temporally prior or future moments, and are often indices of chronologically or spatially related stigmas and taboos. While legal discourses of menstruation do not give a complete account of the category “woman,” they provide cogent examples of how womanhood ideologies are constructed in legal contexts.

Inside the Box: Safety, Health, and Isolation in Prison

A large social science research literature examines the effects of prisons on crime and socioeconomic inequality, but the penal institution itself is often a black box overlooked in the analysis of its effects. This paper examines prisons and their role in rehabilitative programs and as venues for violence, health and healthcare, and extreme isolation through solitary confinement. Research shows that incarcerated people are participating less today than in the 1980s in prison programs, and they face high risks of violence, disease, and isolation. Prison conditions suggest the mechanisms that impair adjustment to community life after release provide a more complete account of the costs of incarceration and indicate the performance of prisons as moral institutions that bear a responsibility for humane and decent treatment.

Aristotle and Johnston on Hylomorphism and the Character of Objects

As M. Loux has recently reminded us, there are two basic strategies for explaining the character of particular objects, the ‘relational approach’ and the ‘constituent approach’. The prime example of a constituent approach would be Aristotelian hylomorphism. This article reveals three things. First, it gives a roadmap towards what the author considers to be the exegetically correct reconstruction of Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory. Second, it provides a presentation of the basic claims of a neo-Aristotelian hylomorphic theory, the one argued for by M. Johnston. Finally, it argues that regardless of whatever shortcomings it may have, Aristotle’s theory has an advantage over that proposed by Johnston. Unlike Johnston’s theory, it may give us a complete account of the character of a particular object.

Wisdom

The world is simultaneously facing many crises that humanity is failing to solve. Yet, at the same time, humans are smarter (with IQs on average thirty points higher than a century ago) and more knowledgeable (with the world's knowledge base at our fingertips), and scientific advances are accelerating. However, intelligence and knowledge are not enough: wisdom harnesses these strengths to serve the common good. Education is focused on acquiring knowledge, but schools would do better also to teach and test for the development of wisdom. To a lot of people, wisdom is an abstraction, but there is a growing body of scientific research into what wisdom is and how it works. This introduction sets out why wisdom is so important. Drawing on insights from psychology, philosophy, science, and common sense, this book provides a complete account of wisdom and how we can develop it throughout our lives.

The Lienzo de Tlaxcala and the Indian Conquistadors

The conquest of Mexico can be better understood if one leaves aside the myths of European superiority and acknowledge the key role played by the Indigenous conquistadors in the defeat of the Mexica and later the formation of the realm of New Spain. Dozens of Mesoamerican polities, large and small, joined the victorious Indo-Spanish armies, and hundreds of thousands of Mesoamerican women, warriors, and assistants, participated in the twenty years of “Mesoamerican wars” that started with the war against México-Tenochtitlan, 1519–1521, and continued all across what is now Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua until the 1540s. The victorious Indigenous conquistadors produced legal testimonies and historical accounts of their feats of war to obtain rewards and privileges, often granted by the Spanish crown. The most spectacular were the lienzos, visual histories of the conquest painted on large cloths. There are many of these Indigenous accounts, but the best known and perhaps the most influential one is the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. It is the most complete account of the Mesoamerican wars, produced by the most important ally of the Spaniards, and it is also the foremost example of the historical and ritual discourses produced by the Indigenous conquistadors, as the ultimate proof of their leading role in this process. This spectacular artwork easily assimilated European pictorial conventions to the much more complex Amerindian pictographic and ritual narrative genres. As such, it was the anchor for complex ritual performances that re-enacted the feats of those wars and also allowed for the constitution of the Amerindian “complex beings” of Malinche and Santiago, the keystones of Tlaxcalan cultural memory of the conquest. Its communicative success can be proved by the fact that the Tlaxcalan embassies that presented the Lienzo de Tlaxcala and other historical books and precious gifts obtained the privileges they sought and asserted the autonomy of Tlaxcala.

Detachment Issues: A Dilemma for Beall’s Contradictory Christology

Jc Beall offers a novel resolution to worries about Christ’s contradictory nature by introducing an account of logical consequence that allows for true contradictions. However, to prevent his view from exploding into heresy, Beall must deny that conditionals detach. But without detachment, the language fails to capture other true entailments which must be included in a complete account of Christ. Beall faces a dilemma, then, between heresy and inadequacy.

Stereotypes and Epistemic Value

How Stereotypes Deceive Us provides a conceptual framework that can be used to understand the various epistemic faults associated with stereotypes and stereotyping. Chapter 7 begins the task of developing this framework by assessing the adequacy of existing epistemological frameworks to the task of capturing the epistemic faults associated with stereotyping. Existing epistemological frameworks are categorized as upstream, downstream or static approaches. It is found that each of these types of approach has strengths and shortcomings with regards to the task of capturing the epistemic faults associated with stereotyping. It is argued that a full and complete account of the epistemic faults associated with stereotyping should therefore be pluralistic, drawing on the advantages and avoiding the shortcomings of each of the types of approach to epistemology.

A voice without a mouth no more: The neurobiology of language, consciousness, and mental health

Most research on the neurobiology of language ignores consciousness and vice versa. Here, language and inner speech are proposed to cause and sustain self-awareness and meta-self-awareness, i.e., extended consciousness. Converging empirical evidence supporting this proposal is reviewed and explanatory mechanisms are described. The latter are embedded in a ‘HOLISTIC’ model of the supporting neurobiology that involves a ‘core’ set of inner speech production regions that initiate conscious ‘overhearing’ of words. These have an affective quality deriving from activation of associated sensory, motor, and emotional representations, involving a largely unconscious dynamic ‘periphery’, distributed throughout the whole brain. This is the basis for inner conversations, involving ‘default mode’ activation and prefrontal and thalamic/brainstem selection of contextually relevant responses. Entrenched patterns of connectivity in these networks form the basis of diminished wellbeing and mental health problems. Overall, this framework constitutes a more parsimonious and complete account of the ‘neural correlates’ of extended consciousness than existing models that consider language peripherally if at all and provides a viable mechanistic account of psychotherapy.