Speaking and Silence as Means of Resistance in Alifa Rifaat\u27s \u3cem\u3eDistant View of a Minaret\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eBahiyya\u27s Eyes\u3c/em\u3e

This study aims at investigating the dilemma of creating a counter discourse that speaks against the dominant androcentric one in Alifa Rifaat’s fiction. The study explores the characterization of the protagonists of two short stories: “Distant View of a Minaret” and “Bahiyya’s Eyes,” culled from Rifaat’s collection Distant View of a Minaret and Other Short Stories (1983). These stories present two different paradigms of resistance that the female protagonists use, which are speaking and silence. The study argues that both speaking and silence are attempts to heal women’s cyclic trauma, as they are means of representing women’s experience and oppression over time. The protagonists’ response to the hegemonic discourse in the two stories is carnivalesque because the use of language (or its absence) aims at deconstructing the phallogocentric discourse and establishing a new one. Accordingly, Rifaat uses two narrative points of view in each story to express the protagonists’ new discourses. Speaking and silence, thus, are not to be judged according to the symbolic discourse of men; instead they are placed in the purview of the Discourse of the Hysteric, which is regarded as an arena of resistance for women

Constructivism, Intersubjectivity, Provability, and Triviality

Sharon Street defines her constructivism about practical reasons as the view that whether something is a reason to do a certain thing for a given agent depends on that agent’s normative point of view. However, Street has also maintained that there is a judgment about practical reasons which is true relative to every possible normative point of view, namely constructivism itself. I show that the latter thesis is inconsistent with Street’s own constructivism about epistemic reasons and discuss some consequences of this incompatibility

The Parallel Manipulation Argument

Matt King has recently argued that the manipulation argument against compatibilism does not succeed by employing a dilemma: either the argument infelicitously relies on incompatibilist sourcehood conditions, or the proponent of the argument leaves a premise of the argument undefended. This article develops a reply to King’s dilemma by showing that incompatibilists can accept its second horn. Key to King’s argument for the second horn’s being problematic is “the parallel manipulation argument.” I argue that King’s use of this argument is problematic, but I suggest that a (modified) parallel manipulation argument is effective for a different, though more restricted, purpose

Responsible Innovation for Decent Nonliberal Peoples: A Dilemma?

It is hard to disagree with the idea of responsible innovation (henceforth, RI), as it enables policy-makers, scientists, technology developers, and the public to better understand and respond to the social, ethical, and policy challenges raised by new and emerging technologies. RI has gained prominence in policy agenda in Europe and the United States over the last few years. And, along with its rising importance in policy-making, there is also a burgeoning research literature on the topic. Given the historical context of which RI emerges, it should not be surprising that the current discourse on RI is predominantly based on liberal democratic values. Yet, the bias towards liberal democratic values will inevitably limit the discussion of RI, especially in the cases where liberal democratic values are not taken for granted. As such, there is an urgent need to return to the normative foundation of RI, and to explore the notion of ‘responsible innovation’ from nonliberal democratic perspectives. Against this background, this paper seeks to demonstrate the problematic consequences of RI solely grounded on or justified by liberal democratic values. This paper will cast the argument in the form of a dilemma to be labelled as The Decent Nonliberal Peoples’ Dilemma and use it to illustrate the problems of the Western bias

Evolutionary Dynamics of Populations with Conflicting Interactions: Classification and Analytical Treatment Considering Asymmetry and Power

Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination or cooperation of interacting entities will occur, be it spins, particles, bacteria, animals, or humans. Here, we analyze the case, where the entities are heterogeneous, particularly the case of two populations with conflicting interactions and two possible states. For such systems, explicit mathematical formulas will be determined for the stationary solutions and the associated eigenvalues, which determine their stability. In this way, four different types of system dynamics can be classified, and the various kinds of phase transitions between them will be discussed. While these results are interesting from a physics point of view, they are also relevant for social, economic, and biological systems, as they allow one to understand conditions for (1) the breakdown of cooperation, (2) the coexistence of different behaviors ("subcultures"), (2) the evolution of commonly shared behaviors ("norms"), and (4) the occurrence of polarization or conflict. We point out that norms have a similar function in social systems that forces have in physics

Connecting Societal Change to Value Differences Across Generations: Adolescents, Mothers, and Grandmothers in a Maya Community in Southern Mexico

This study tests the hypothesis that societal change from subsistence agriculture to a market economy with higher levels of formal schooling leads to an increase in individualistic values that guide human development. Values relating to adolescent development and the transition to adulthood were compared across three generations of women in 18 families in the Maya community of Zinacantán in southern Mexico. Grandmothers grew up in Zinacantán when it was a farming community; mothers grew up during the introduction of commerce in the late 1970s and 1980s; daughters are now experiencing adolescence with an opportunity to attend high school in their community. Comparisons were also conducted between 40 female and male adolescents in high school and a matched sample of 40 adolescents who discontinued school after elementary. Values were measured using eight ethnographically derived social dilemmas about adolescent relationships with parents and peers, work and family gender roles, and sexuality and partnering. One character in the dilemmas advocates for interdependent values; a second character advocates for independent values. High school adolescents were more likely to endorse characters articulating independent values than non–high school adolescents, mothers, and grandmothers. Involvement in a market economy was also associated with higher levels of independent value endorsement in the mother and grandmother generations. Results suggest that the introduction of commerce drove value changes between grandmother and mother generations, and now schooling drives change. Qualitative examples of participants’ responses also illustrate how families negotiate shifting values

Einstein's Boxes

At the 1927 Solvay conference, Einstein presented a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the incompleteness of the quantum mechanical description of reality. In the following years, the thought experiment was picked up and modified by Einstein, de Broglie, and several other commentators into a simple scenario involving the splitting in half of the wave function of a single particle in a box. In this paper we collect together several formulations of this thought experiment from the existing literature; analyze and assess it from the point of view of the Einstein-Bohr debates, the EPR dilemma, and Bell's theorem; and generally lobby for Einstein's Boxes taking its rightful place alongside similar but historically better-known quantum mechanical thought experiments such as EPR and Schroedinger's Cat.Comment: Published versio

The Limits of Rational Belief Revision: A Dilemma for the Darwinian Debunker

We are fallible creatures, prone to making all sorts of mistakes. So, we should be open to evidence of error. But what constitutes such evidence? And what is it to rationally accommodate it? I approach these questions by considering an evolutionary debunking argument according to which (a) we have good, scientific, reason to think our moral beliefs are mistaken, and (b) rationally accommodating this requires revising our confidence in, or altogether abandoning the suspect beliefs. I present a dilemma for such debunkers, which shows that either we have no reason to worry about our moral beliefs, or we do but we can self-correct. Either way, moral skepticism doesn’t follow. That the evolutionary debunking argument fails is important; also important, however, is what its failure reveals about rational belief revision. Specifically, it suggests that getting evidence of error is a non-trivial endeavor and that we cannot learn that we are likely to be mistaken about some matter from a neutral stance on that matter

A semantical approach to equilibria and rationality

Game theoretic equilibria are mathematical expressions of rationality. Rational agents are used to model not only humans and their software representatives, but also organisms, populations, species and genes, interacting with each other and with the environment. Rational behaviors are achieved not only through conscious reasoning, but also through spontaneous stabilization at equilibrium points. Formal theories of rationality are usually guided by informal intuitions, which are acquired by observing some concrete economic, biological, or network processes. Treating such processes as instances of computation, we reconstruct and refine some basic notions of equilibrium and rationality from the some basic structures of computation. It is, of course, well known that equilibria arise as fixed points; the point is that semantics of computation of fixed points seems to be providing novel methods, algebraic and coalgebraic, for reasoning about them.Comment: 18 pages; Proceedings of CALCO 200