Racism: a Moral or Explanatory Concept?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
César Cabezas
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Concept

scholarly journals Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
HANS ASENBAUM
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Identity Performance ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Explanatory Concept

Although anonymity is a central feature of liberal democracies—not only in the secret ballot, but also in campaign funding, publishing political texts, masked protests, and graffiti—it has so far not been conceptually grounded in democratic theory. Rather, it is treated as a self-explanatory concept related to privacy. To overcome this omission, this article develops a complex understanding of anonymity in the context of democratic theory. Drawing upon the diverse literature on anonymity in political participation, it explains anonymity as a highly context-dependent identity performance expressing private sentiments in the public sphere. The contradictory character of its core elements—identity negation and identity creation—results in three sets of contradictory freedoms. Anonymity affords (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. This contradictory character of anonymity's affordances illustrates the ambiguous role of anonymity in democracy.

scholarly journals Synergies in coordination: a comprehensive overview of neural, computational, and behavioral approaches

2018 ◽  
Vol 120 (6) ◽  
pp. 2761-2774 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Bruton ◽  
Nicholas O’Dwyer
Keyword(s):  
Motor Control ◽  
Hierarchical Control ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Control Scheme ◽  
The One ◽  
Explanatory Concept ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
And Task

At face value, the term “synergy” provides a unifying concept within a fractured field that encompasses complementary neural, computational, and behavioral approaches. However, the term is not used synonymously by different researchers but has substantially different meanings depending on the research approach. With so many operational definitions for the one term, it becomes difficult to use as either a descriptive or explanatory concept, yet it remains pervasive and apparently indispensable. Here we provide a summary of different approaches that invoke synergies in a descriptive or explanatory context, summarizing progress, not within the one approach, but across the theoretical landscape. Bernstein’s framework of flexible hierarchical control may provide a unifying framework here, since it can incorporate divergent ideas about synergies. In the current motor control literature, synergy may refer to conceptually different processes that could potentially operate in parallel, across different levels within the same hierarchical control scheme. There is evidence for the concurrent existence of synergies with different features, both “hard-wired” and “soft-wired,” and task independent and task dependent. By providing a comprehensive overview of the multifaceted ideas about synergies, our goal is to move away from the compartmentalization and narrow the focus on one level and promote a broader perspective on the control and coordination of movement.

Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony O’Hear
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
World City ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
Secular Religion ◽  
Explanatory Concept ◽  
Universal Scale

Culture comprises those aspects of human activity which are socially rather than genetically transmitted. Each social group is characterized by its own culture, which informs the thought and activity of its members in myriad ways, perceptible and imperceptible. The notion of culture, as an explanatory concept, gained prominence at the end of the eighteenth century, as a reaction against the Enlightenment’s belief in the unity of mankind and universal progress. According to J.G. Herder, each culture is different and has its own systems of meaning and value, and cannot be ranked on any universal scale. Followers of Herder, such as Nietzsche and Spengler, stressed the organic nature of culture and praised cultural particularity against what Spengler called civilization, the world city in which cultural distinctions are eroded. It is difficult, however, to see how Herder and his followers avoid an ultimately self-defeating cultural relativism; the task of those who understand the significance of human culture is to make sense of it without sealing cultures off from one another and making interplay between them impossible. Over and above the anthropological sense of culture, there is also the sense of culture as that through which a people’s highest spiritual and artistic aspirations are articulated. Culture in this sense has been seen by Matthew Arnold and others as a substitute for religion, or as a kind of secular religion. While culture in this sense can certainly inveigh against materialism, it is less clear that it can do this effectively without a basis in religion. Nor is it clear that a rigid distinction between high and low culture is desirable. It is, in fact, only the artistic modernists of the twentieth century who have articulated such a distinction in their work, to the detriment of the high and the low culture of our time.

scholarly journals The computational stance in biology

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1774) ◽  
pp. 20180380 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
Cognitive Architectures ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Concept Of Information ◽  
Explanatory Concept ◽  
Is Value

The goal of this article is to call attention to, and to express caution about, the extensive use of computation as an explanatory concept in contemporary biology. Inspired by Dennett's ‘intentional stance’ in the philosophy of mind, I suggest that a ‘computational stance’ can be a productive approach to evaluating the value of computational concepts in biology. Such an approach allows the value of computational ideas to be assessed without being diverted by arguments about whether a particular biological system is ‘actually computing’ or not. Because there is sufficient difference of agreement among computer scientists about the essential elements that constitute computation, any doctrinaire position about the application of computational ideas seems misguided. Closely related to the concept of computation is the concept of information processing. Indeed, some influential computer scientists contend that there is no fundamental difference between the two concepts. I will argue that despite the lack of widely accepted, general definitions of information processing and computation: (1) information processing and computation are not fully equivalent and there is value in maintaining a distinction between them and (2) that such value is particularly evident in applications of information processing and computation to biology.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Liquid brains, solid brains: How distributed cognitive architectures process information’.

scholarly journals Generality of “drive-decay” as an explanatory concept

1965 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-12) ◽  
pp. 127-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Stutz ◽  
Isaac Lewin ◽  
Kenneth W. Roeklin
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Concept

Habit as an Explanatory Concept in the Social Sciences

Ethics ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 269
Author(s):  
Charner M. Perry
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Explanatory Concept

Analyzing equivalences in discourse

Pragmatics ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigurd D’hondt
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Membership Categorization Analysis ◽  
Dance Class ◽  
Membership Categorization ◽  
Political Talk ◽  
Explanatory Concept

Facing a crucial leap from political philosophy to empirical analysis, the approach to discourse analysis that arose in the aftermath of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), and that is currently known as the Essex school of discourse theory (DT), has in recent years repeatedly been accused of suffering from a methodological deficit. This paper examines to what extent membership categorization analysis (MCA), a branch of ethnomethodology that investigates lay actors’ situated descriptions-in-context as practical activity, can play a part in rendering poststructuralist DT notions such as articulation and equivalence analytically tangible in empirically observable discourse. Based on a review of Laclau and Mouffe’s foundational text as well as on Glynos and Howarth’s recent exposition of the framework (2007), it is argued that MCA empirically substantiates many poststructuralist claims about the indeterminacy of signification. However, MCA consistently falters - and willingly so - at the point where DT would articulate emerging equivalences between identity categories as part of a second-order explanatory concept, such as Glynos and Howarth’s notion of political logic. Nevertheless, MCA also contains the kernel of an “endogenous” notion of the political that comes fairly close to DT’s all-pervasive understanding of the concept. To support these arguments, a variety of empirical sources are mobilized, ranging from the transcript of a political talk show, a newspaper report regarding a discrimination case in a dance class, to data drawn from earlier research on the way that minority members are treated by the Belgian criminal justice system.

Validation of the Explanatory Concept for Decision Support in Air-to-Air Combat

1997 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-31
Author(s):  
Jeffrey L. Crick ◽  
Stephen J. Selcon ◽  
Maddalena Piras ◽  
Craig Shanks ◽  
Chris Drewery ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Support ◽  
Data Fusion ◽  
Graphical Representation ◽  
Ecological Validity ◽  
Graphical Displays ◽  
Air Combat ◽  
Control Version ◽  
Explanatory Concept ◽  
Military Pilots ◽  
Visual Range

A decision-support aid developed for use by pilots in air-to-air combat was evaluated in a simulated beyond-visual-range combat scenario in which military pilots competed against one another head-to-head. Combat performance was assessed on a range of operationally-valid measures with three different versions of a head-down display showing integrated information derived from data fusion. One version presented graphical, dynamic representations of both ownship's and the enemy's missile performance envelopes (launch success zones); another showed only the launch success zones of the enemy aircraft; and a third, control version showed neither form of graphical representation. Superior attacking performance was demonstrated with the display showing both ownship and enemy launch success zones, while more successful evasive performance was associated with the display showing only enemy launch success zones. Greater levels of situation understanding were associated with the display showing both ownship and enemy launch success zones. The results lend ecological validity to the use of explanatory graphical displays in providing decision support for pilots in air-to-air combat.

Generalized mental rigidity as an explanatory concept

1962 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-66
Author(s):  
Marvin D. Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Concept
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