Are Introspective Beliefs about One’s Own Visual Experiences Immediate?

The aim of this paper is to show that introspective beliefs about one’s own current visual experiences are not immediate in the sense that what justifies them does not include other beliefs that the subject in question might possess. The argument will take the following course. First, the author explains the notions of immediacy and truth-sufficiency as they are used here. Second, the author suggests a test to determine whether a given belief lacks immediacy. Third, the author applies this test to a standard case of formation of an introspective belief about one’s own current visual experiences and concludes that the belief in question is neither immediate nor truth-sufficient. Fourth, the author rebuts several objections that might be raised against the argument

Weather, climate, and the economy: Explaining risk perceptions of global warming, 2001-10

Abstract Two series of national survey datasets (2001-10), supplemented with monthly temperature and precipitation data and unemployment data, are used to examine how weather and climate, economic performance, and individuals\u27 sociodemographic backgrounds and political orientations affect public perceptions of global warming. Consistent with previous studies, political orientations play a key rolein determining public perceptions of global warming. Democrats and liberals are more likely than Republicans and conservatives to see global warming as an immediate and serious problem. Sociodemographic characteristics are also shown to be significant factors, with young people, women, and racial minorities likely to show higher concern about global warming than their counterparts. Moreover, individuals with lower income and higher levels of education tend to be more concerned about global warming. Net of these factors, summer temperature trends over the past 10 years, among other weather and climate measures, are shown to have consistently positive effects on public perceptions of global warming. This suggests that individuals who have experienced increasing summer heat are most likely to perceive immediate impacts and severity of global warming. Surprisingly, macroeconomic conditions - represented by the unemployment rate at the county level - do not appear to influence public perceptions of global warming

Sublating Kant and the Old Metaphysics: A Reading of the Transition from Being to Essence in Hegel's Logic

Kant’s “transcendental” or “critical” philosophy is an instance of what can be called the “critique of immediacy.” As part of his critical project, Kant argues that one cannot merely assume that there is a reestablished harmony between thought and being. Instead, one must effect a “return to the subject” and examine the forms of thought themselves, in order to determine the extent to which thought and being are commensurable. As a result of his “transcendental turn,” Kant concludes that what at first appears as immediately given to thought is always already (at least partly) the result of some kind of activity or mediation on the part of the thought itself. Hegel approves of Kant’s critical orientation: Kant correctly demanded to know “how far the forms of thought were capable of leading to the knowledge of truth,” and correctly concluded that “the forms of thought must be made into an object of investigation.” However, for Hegel, the problem with Kant was that he aimed to examine the forms of thought as if they were necessarily separated from being itself. Thus the Kantian strategy, for Hegel, led to a twofold absurdly

Creating Verbal Immediacy - The Use of Immediacy and Avoidance Techniques in Online Tutorials

Like many writing center directors, I was hesitant to introduce online tutoring. However, because of limited physical space on campus, the internet provides the only room for growth available to us—a problem faced by many writing centers (Carpenter 2). The inevitability of online growth is also supported by the increase of tertiary-level online and blended courses being offered at most post-secondary schools. I was hesitant to begin online tutoring because [of] the “complexities introduced by online tutoring: the increased potential for directive tutoring instead of nondirective tutoring . . . the lack of sustained dialogue in asynchronous tutorials, and technological problems of accessibility and compatibility” (Kastman Breuch 21). In a conscious effort to avoid some of these issues, when the writing lab I direct began providing online tutorials in spring 2010. Our staff chose to use a software product called ShowDocument.com that allows students to upload their drafts and then share an interactive white board with the tutor to annotate the paper being discussed while synchronously chatting. The program does not have an audio or video function, so participants type their messages. We considered using a program such as Skype that would allow the tutor and student to see each other as they speak. However, technology is never completely trustworthy, and the ongoing issues of poor, broken, or failed transmission made Skype and similar programs an unreliable choice. Second, the close confines in which we work make the noise level in our lab high, and students themselves often login to video conferences from their dorms, or apartments, where background distractions can greatly impede the tutorial. Finally, as Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch suggests, we learned that we could not assume that all of our students who use the online service have access to equipment that enables them to use Skype or similar programs (21).University Writing Cente

Minimum impact and immediacy of citations to physics open archives of arXiv.org: Science Citation Index based reports

The present work has calculated the minimum Open Archive Impact Factors and Open Archive Immediacy Index for the Physics Classes of arXiv.org as calculated for traditional journals in Journal Citation Reports of the Institute of Scientific Information using Science Citation Index without the citation by the classes itself. The calculated Impact Factors reveal that High-Energy Physics classes of arXiv.org (‘hep-th’, ‘hep-lat’, ‘hep-ex’, and ‘hep-ph’) have made more impact on the scientific community than any other classes except ‘nucl-ex’. The Impact Factors for the year 2003 are: ‘hep-th’ (0.999), ‘nucl-ex’ (0.806), ‘hep-lat’ (0.766), ‘hep-ex’ (0.73), ‘hep-ph’ (0.719), ‘nucl-th’ (0.338), ‘quant-ph’ (0.334), ‘cond-mat’ (0.313), ‘astro-ph’ (0.195), ‘math-ph’ (0.162), ‘physics’ (0.061), and ‘gr-qc’ (0.002). If the period for getting the citations to the open archive classes is considered one year as against two years for journal articles, the rank of the classes is the same. The immediacy of citing the Open Archives is also high for the High-Energy Physics classes. The Immediacy Indexes for the year 2003 are: ‘hep-ex’ (0.619), ‘hep-th’ (0.454), ‘hep-ph’ (0.44), ‘hep-lat’ (0.263), ‘nucl-ex’ (0.238), ‘quant-ph’ (0.202), ‘nucl-th’ (0.185), ‘cond-mat’ (0.168), ‘astro-ph’ (0.094), ‘math-ph’ (0.075), ‘physics’ (0.03), and ‘gr-qc’ (0.002). The impact is definitely much higher than what is concluded from the calculated factors because self-citations are not reckoned in the study. Use of web-tools like ‘Citebase’, ‘Citeseer’ etc. may strengthen the above argument

On what we experience when we hear people speak

According to perceptualism, fluent comprehension of speech is a perceptual achievement, in as much as it is akin to such high-level perceptual states as the perception of objects as cups or trees, or of people as happy or sad. According to liberalism, grasp of meaning is partially constitutive of the phenomenology of fluent comprehension. I here defend an influential line of argument for liberal perceptualism, resting on phenomenal contrasts in our comprehension of speech, due to Susanna Siegel and Tim Bayne, against objections from Casey O'Callaghan and Indrek Reiland. I concentrate on the contrast between the putative immediacy of meaning-assignment in fluent comprehension, as compared with other, less ordinary, perhaps translation-based ways of getting at the meaning of speech. I argue this putative immediacy is difficult to capture on a non-perceptual view (whether liberal or non-liberal), and that the immediacy in question has much in common with that which applies in other, less controversial cases of high-level perception

Processing the Therapeutic Relationship

The authors propose that if therapists and clients process their therapeutic relationship (i.e., directly address in the here and now feelings about each other and about the inevitable problems that emerge in the therapy relationship), feelings will be expressed and accepted, problems will be resolved, the relationship will be enhanced, and clients will transfer their learning to other relationships outside of therapy. The authors review theories supporting the idea of processing the therapeutic relationship, discuss the relevant empirical literature in this area, and provide their conceptualization of the construct of processing the therapeutic relationship based on the theory and empirical findings. Finally, they discuss methodological concerns and suggest implications for clinical practice, training, and further research

A Perspectival Account of Acedia in the Writings of Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard is well-known as an original philosophical thinker, but less known is his reliance upon and development of the Christian tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, in particular the vice of acedia, or sloth. As acedia has enjoyed renewed interest in the past century or so, commentators have attempted to pin down one or another Kierkegaardian concept (e.g., despair, heavy-mindedness, boredom, etc.) as the embodiment of the vice, but these attempts have yet to achieve any consensus. In our estimation, the complicated reality is that, in using slightly different but related concepts, Kierkegaard is providing a unique look at acedia as it manifests differently at different stages on life’s way. Thus, on this “perspectival account”, acedia will manifest differently according to whether an individual inhabits the aesthetic, ethical, or religious sphere. We propose two axes for this perspectival account. Such descriptions of how acedia manifests make up the first, phenomenal axis, while the second, evaluative axis, accounts for the various bits of advice and wisdom we read in the diagnoses of acedia from one Kierkegaardian pseudonym to another. Our aim is to show that Kierkegaard was not only familiar with the concept of acedia, but his contributions helped to develop and extend the tradition

Eternity and Vision in Boethius

Boethius and Augustine of Hippo are two of the fountainheads from which the long tradition of regarding God’s existence as timelessly eternal has flowed, a tradition which has influenced not only Christianity, but Judaism and Islam, too. But though the two have divine eternality in common, I shall argue that in other respects, in certain crucial respects, they differ significantly over how they articulate that notio

James and Whitehead: Assemblage and Systematization of a Deeply Empiricist Mosaic Philosophy

This paper contributes to a growing body of philosophical and psychological work that draws parallels between the writings of William James and Alfred North Whitehead. In Part One I introduce Whitehead’s distinction between assemblage and systematization (section 1) and suggest that Whitehead’s philosophy was in part a systematization of James’ psychological and philosophical assemblage (section 2). The systematization is based on a rethinking of the entity/function contrast (section 3) by way of Whitehead’s concept of the actual entity/occasion (section 4). This permits a process-oriented ontological extension and James’ notion of pure experience (sections 5 & 6), which yields a deepened version of radical empiricism (section 7). The four sections of Part Two build a more specific argument that James’ often implicit distinctions between energetic, perceptual, conceptual and discursive modes of experience can be systematized by way of Whitehead’s concepts of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference. Following the suggestion of Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une Pipe artwork, this yields an analysis of the sum of human experience into four progressively integrated factors: power, image, proposition and enunciation