bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Metamathematics versus Conventionalism
Authors: Warren Jared
Published: December 2020

This chapter deals with objections to mathematical conventionalism, focusing especially on technical objections. To make things easier to follow and more self-contained, the chapter begins with a brief overview of arithmetization. Then a technical argument alleging incompatibility between the factuality of conventions and the conventionality of arithmetic is discussed followed by discussion of a related but more general worry about circularity. Then an anti-conventonalist argument from Pollock is discussed and related to Montague’s paradox. Finally, Gödel’s argument against conventionalism is critically discussed. Ultimately the chapter demonstrates that there is no incompatibility between conventionalism and metamathematical results and methods.
Old Slogans, New Dogmas
Authors: Warren Jared
Published: December 2020

This chapter steps back and provides a general overview. It begins by discussing how each of the classic conventionalist slogans (about truth in virtue of meaning, analyticity, tautologies, and more) fares in light of my conventionalist theory. Then the chapter discuses Carnap’s Logical Syntax-era theory of logic and mathematics in detail, before turning to Giannoni’s less well-known account in Conventionalism in Logic. Finally, the chapter briefly considers how it is that the rejection of conventionalism has turned into a new dogma, not just of empiricism, but of contemporary philosophy as a whole.
Curing Madness?
Authors: Rajpal Shilpi
Published: December 2020

Curing Madness? focuses on the institutional and non-institutional histories of madness in colonial north India. ‘Madness’ and ‘cure’ are explored as shifting categories which travelled across cultural, medical, national, and regional boundaries, thereby moving beyond asylum-centric histories. It is based on extensive research of archival materials gathered from various repositories in India and abroad. The book focusses on governmental policies, legal processes, everyday patterns of treatment, discipline and resistance behind the walls, and individual case histories. It also brings to fore the non-institutional histories of madness. While few ended up in asylums, most people suffering from insanity were cared for by their families and the local vidyas, ojhas, shamans, and pundits. Western medicine denigrated indigenous healing traditions forcing them to reconceptualize and reinvent themselves. The spread and dissemination of Western medical knowledge led to the reshaping of some of the Ayurvedic concepts of mental illness. Based on an examination of Hindi medical advice literature which primarily includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, the study locates the history of madness within and beyond the asylum walls.
Epilogue
Authors: Rajpal Shilpi
Published: December 2020

The emergence of professionalized psychiatry created a milieu where a plethora of healing practices and beliefs were regarded as primitive and superstitious charlatanism. More recently, psychiatrists and psychologists have come to accept the significance of healing cultures to the local members of communities who had little or no access to Western medical treatment. It has been proven that faith, socio-religious practices, and healing are often essential for recovery and well-being of those suffering from mental illness. On the other hand, many psychiatric practices including that of lobotomy and ECT have become redundant. The book has attempted to bring together rather disjointed world views of ‘scientific’ and religious, institutionalised and non-institutionalised, and colonial and nationalistic ideas on curing madness.
Authority and Essence
Authors: Guhin Jeffrey
Published: December 2020

The first chapter outlines the book’s central theoretical questions and contributions, emphasizing the importance of boundaries and authorities. These boundaries—politics, gender, sex, and the Internet—help to establish the distinctions from the outside world that ground each school’s identity. That identity is then experienced as real through certain practices, and those practices are maintained via certain “external authorities,” especially scripture, prayer, and science. These external authorities are at once practices themselves and the institutionalization (what some might call reification) of these practices, things that people do (read the Bible, pray, invoke science) but at the same time, things that seem to exist above and beyond any individual person, and seemingly with the ability to act on people themselves. The chapter ends by describing the four high schools—two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Protestant—where the author conducted fieldwork.
Politics and Public Schools
Authors: Guhin Jeffrey
Published: December 2020

Chapter 2 examines how the four schools distinguished themselves from public schools, a distinction that helped them establish what was essential (or fundamental to their identity) about their own communities and their politics. The chapter also establishes some of the debates about what was “accidental” (or not fundamental to their identity) in the schools. It then turns to how the schools engaged broader questions of politics, especially how both conservative Protestants and Muslims felt excluded by the United States, with Protestants feeling the rest of the nation had forgotten America’s “Christian identity” and Muslims feeling a mix of hope and discouragement that they might be accepted as just another American religion. In discussions of both public schools and politics, community members described essential differences between themselves and the rest of the world, and they expressed frustrations that outsiders disagreed with them about which differences were essential and which were accidental.
Differently Differentiating Gender
Authors: Guhin Jeffrey
Published: December 2020

Both the Christian and Muslim schools emphasize their boundary from the outside world through their performance of gender. For the Muslim schools, the difference was rooted in actual physical activity, especially how males and females separated from each other, while for the Christian schools, the difference was rooted primarily in what people—especially women—said about their actions. Evangelicals’ history of proclamation means their boundaries take on a different character, formed by opposition to ideas as itself a key practice, over and above the more explicitly bodily practices of gender and sexuality. In contrast, there is more interpretive flexibility for Muslims about gender-related practices. The hijab and gender separation can serve an important double function: they can simultaneously allow patriarchs to believe they are maintaining male dominance while allowing others to believe Muslim women are maintaining these practices for entirely different reasons.
Information and Its Value
Authors: Dunn J. Michael , Golan Amos
Published: December 2020

In this chapter, we are interested in understanding the nature of information and its value. We focus on information that is used for making decisions, including related activities such as constructing models, performing inferences, and making predictions. Our discussion is mostly qualitative, and it touches on certain aspects of information as related to the sender, receiver, and a possible observer. Although our emphasis is on shedding more light on the concept of information for making decisions, we are not concerned here with the exact details of the decision process, or information processing itself. In addition to discussing information, our expedition takes us through the traditional notions of utility, prices, and risk, all of which, under certain conditions, relate to the value of information. Our main conclusion is that the value of information (used in decision making) is relative and subjective. Since information is relative, it can have more than one value, say a value for the sender, a value for the receiver, or even different values for different senders and receivers, and various values for various “eavesdroppers.” Of course, the value might be zero for any of these. Importantly, that value is inversely related to risk when the information is used for decision making. Although this conclusion is likely expected, we did argue for it in a way that relies on some fundamentals about both value and information.
A Computational Theory of Meaning
Authors: Adriaans Pieter
Published: December 2020

A computational theory of meaning tries to understand the phenomenon of meaning in terms of computation. Here we give an analysis in the context of Kolmogorov complexity. This theory measures the complexity of a data set in terms of the length of the smallest program that generates the data set on a universal computer. As a natural extension, the set of all programs that produce a data set on a computer can be interpreted as the set of meanings of the data set. We give an analysis of the Kolmogorov structure function and some other attempts to formulate a mathematical theory of meaning in terms of two-part optimal model selection. We show that such theories will always be context dependent: the invariance conditions that make Kolmogorov complexity a valid theory of measurement fail for this more general notion of meaning. One cause is the notion of polysemy: one data set (i.e., a string of symbols) can have different programs with no mutual information that compresses it. Another cause is the existence of recursive bijections between ℕ and ℕ2 for which the two-part code is always more efficient. This generates vacuous optimal two-part codes. We introduce a formal framework to study such contexts in the form of a theory that generalizes the concept of Turing machines to learning agents that have a memory and have access to each other’s functions in terms of a possible world semantics. In such a framework, the notions of randomness and informativeness become agent dependent. We show that such a rich framework explains many of the anomalies of the correct theory of algorithmic complexity. It also provides perspectives for, among other things, the study of cognitive and social processes. Finally, we sketch some application paradigms of the theory.
Inferring the Logic of Collective Information Processors
Authors: Daniels Bryan C.
Published: December 2020

From neurons to insects to societies, across biology we see impressive feats of collective information processing. What strategies do these systems use to perform useful computations? Moving toward an answer to this question, this chapter focuses on common challenges in inferring models of complicated distributed systems and how the perspective of information theory and statistical physics is useful for understanding collective behavior.
Information-Theoretic Perspective on Human Ability
Authors: Choi Hwan-sik
Published: December 2020

This chapter proposes an information-theoretic perspective on the role of human ability in decision making. I define personality as a response system of a person that maps a situation to a behavior. The person-specific response system is characterized by various constraints. Based on the principle of maximum entropy, I treat these constraints as information since they reduce the entropy of the system. Physical laws and the human genome provide rudimentary constraints on the response system. Human ability constitutes an important set of advanced constraints. Therefore, human ability is entropy-reducing information. In particular, I define the information capacity of a person as the amount of entropy reduced by person-specific ability, which includes the ability to acquire information, to process information, and to discern incorrect information. I provide a heuristic discussion that relates information capacity with broad domains of noncognitive ability. I also highlight the connection between information capacity and three traits of noncognitive ability: Openness, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness.
Maximum Entropy
Authors: Harte John
Published: December 2020

A major goal of ecology is to predict patterns and changes in the abundance, distribution, and energetics of individuals and species in ecosystems. The maximum entropy theory of ecology (METE) predicts the functional forms and parameter values describing the central metrics of macroecology, including the distribution of abundances over all the species, metabolic rates over all individuals, spatial aggregation of individuals within species, and the dependence of species diversity on areas of habitat. In METE, the maximum entropy inference procedure is implemented using the constraints imposed by a few macroscopic state variables, including the number of species, total abundance, and total metabolic rate in an ecological community. Although the theory adequately predicts pervasive empirical patterns in relatively static ecosystems, there is mounting evidence that in ecosystems in which the state variables are changing rapidly, many of the predictions of METE systematically fail. Here we discuss the underlying logic and predictions of the static theory and then describe progress toward achieving a dynamic theory (DynaMETE) of macroecology capable of describing ecosystems undergoing rapid change as a result of disturbance. An emphasis throughout is on the tension between, and reconciliation of, two legitimate perspectives on ecology: that of the natural historian who studies the uniqueness of every ecosystem and the theorist seeking unification and generality.
Performance and Risk Aversion of Funds with Benchmarks
Authors: Foster F. Douglas , Stutzer Michael
Published: December 2020

This chapter provides a simple method of ranking mutual funds’ probabilities of outperforming a benchmark portfolio. We show that ranking fund performance in this way is identical to ranking each fund’s portfolio with a generalized entropy, equivalent to an expected generalized power utility index that uses a risk-aversion coefficient specific to that fund. When the return differential between fund and benchmark portfolio (log gross) returns follows a Gaussian process, this ranking is equivalent to using a simple modification of the Information Ratio (1998). We develop and apply feasible parametric and nonparametric estimators to rank the performance of the small fraction of mutual funds that (from the results of an hypothesis test) could outperform the S&P 500 Index in the long run, and to estimate the fund-specific risk-aversion coefficients required for the ranking. We also argue that an auxiliary hypothesis that fund managers attempt to maximize the outperformance probability is no less plausible than an extant alternative behavioral hypothesis and is more parsimoneously parametrized.
Information-Theoretic Estimation of Econometric Functions
Authors: Mao Millie Yi , Ullah Aman
Published: December 2020

This chapter introduces an information-theoretic approach to specify econometric functions as an alternative to avoid parametric assumptions. We investigate the performances of the information-theoretic method in estimating the regression (conditional mean) and response (derivative) functions. We have demonstrated that they are easy to implement and are advantageous over parametric models and nonparametric kernel techniques. For the implementation of our estimation method, a recursive integration procedure is introduced. An empirical illustration is also presented to study the Canadian earning function. The asymptotic properties of the regression and derivative functions are established. In addition, a test for normality is also proposed.
Poetry in Structure
Authors: Leong Daphne
Published: December 2020

This chapter reads Milhaud’s setting of “L’Aurore” from Lucile de Chateaubriand’s Trois Poèmes en prose as a musical poem—one that supplies the “poetic” structure missing from Chateaubriand’s prose poem. This new poem’s rhythm and rhyme are created by the counterpointing of descending lines moving at different rates of speed, the surface and deeper-level rhythms they articulate, their interactions with textual stresses, and the resulting metric and hypermetric structure. The chapter begins with a brief description of the role of text in Milhaud’s oeuvre, followed by discussion of the French prose poem, Lucile de Chateaubriand, and Chateaubriand’s “Aurore.” It analyzes the song’s contrapuntal motion, describes the authors’ performative conception, and presents practical considerations, closing with the authors’ performance on video.
Introduction
Authors: Hefling Charles
Published: December 2020

The introductory chapter explains the general character of the Book of Common Prayer as a set of liturgies, scripts for enacting corporate worship. It suggests one important sense in which it has functioned as a sacred text by forming personal identities and communities of faith within a tradition of religious belief and practice that has come to be known as Anglican. After an overview of the contents and organization of the twelve chapters that follow, the introduction points out the deliberate limitations of the whole book, explains certain conventions, including the point of reference for sorting out different texts that bear the title Book of Common Prayer, and defines several basic terms that are used throughout.
Establishment
Authors: Hefling Charles
Published: December 2020

The text of the Book of Common Prayer as it now stands in the Church of England was established in 1662 as part of the Restoration settlement of religion. A great many amendments were included in the final version of the text, notably the adoption of the Authorized or King James Version for many of the biblical extracts. Some of the revisions had been agreed to by both parties at the Savoy Conference, convened in response to long-standing puritan objections to the Prayer Book. While most of the changes had no effect on the meaning of the text, a few did modify the Communion service in a conservative direction. A number of new services were added as well; and with that the Book of Common Prayer arrived at the form it has had in England ever since.
Threats to and Benefits of the Protective Policies
Authors: Coverage Crime
Published: December 2020

Journalism practices in Protector countries are deeply rooted in the once largely homogenous cultures from which they developed and remain a part. Globalization, most intensely focused on crime and immigration and the tell-all reporting style popular on the Internet and social media platforms, threatens the embedded sense of who a people are, how they treat one another, and how they ought to address the challenges of difference. This chapter considers how immigrants have been framed as threat across these nations. The varying responses are examined from news outlets, as well as press councils, about how best to advance these public conversations, which details ought to be included and why. Crimes stories reflect a faith in the government, the courts, and the penal system.
Threats, Harms, and Benefits
Authors: Coverage Crime
Published: December 2020

Democratic institutions in Portugal, Spain, and Italy are younger than those in the Protector and Watchdog countries, thus journalism ethics and professionalism are less established. Journalists’ eagerness to tell crime stories even when official information is unavailable indicates a leaning toward Watchdog values: seeing their primary professional duty as informing the public and keeping a wary eye on the criminal justice. However, reporters’ faith in protecting accused persons’ presumption of innocence by shielding their identities signals a sympathy with Protector countries’ codes. Their “ambivalence” may allow journalists to embrace aspects of both Watchdog and Protector systems and create something new. However, news practices are still deeply rooted in a partisan past. Autonomy is receding further as layoffs and newsroom closings make employment more precarious. In this environment, the Internet is a mixed blessing. It opens up new opportunities for expression even as it undermines the news media’s traditional economic foundation.
Avoid and Delegate
Authors: Roychowdhury Poulami
Published: December 2020

Chapter 7 traces how law enforcement managed their sense of disempowerment. When women showed up unaccompanied, they suppressed their complaints. But when had organized help, law enforcement neither suppressed their claims nor did their jobs. Instead, they “incorporated” organized women into regulatory functions. Incorporation took two forms. First, law enforcement reassigned casework by urging women to conduct investigations, round up witnesses, and deliver documents. At other times, they promoted “parallel claims,” encouraging women to extract concessions and carry out extralegal punishment.
Running a Case
Authors: Roychowdhury Poulami
Published: December 2020

By incentivizing the law and by incorporating women into the daily work of regulation brokers and law enforcement personnel encouraged women to “run cases.” Chapter 8 details the practice of “running a case” and the specific capabilities it engendered. First, to “run a case,” women had to risk estrangement, not only from intimate partners and in-laws but also from agnatic kin. Second, they had to confront and work with law enforcement: courageously demonstrating their organized connections, overcoming insults and neglect, and resolutely pursuing rights despite delays. Third, they had to learn to do the state’s work: either completing case-processing duties or finding a way to acquire a semblance of rights outside formal legal procedure.
Aspirational and Strategic
Authors: Roychowdhury Poulami
Published: December 2020

The act of “running a case,” shifted how women perceived both the law and themselves. Chapter 9 details transformations in legal consciousness, mapping the rise of a dual and seemingly contradictory subjectivity. First, by “running a case” women started aspiring to the life the law promised, a life free of violence where they could exercise a modicum of control over their bodies and material possessions. Second, they began thinking of the law as a strategic field they could engage and manipulate. This “aspirational-strategic” subjectivity arose through their routine encounters with brokers and law enforcement personnel and departed significantly from their initial commitments for family life and fear of the state.
Conclusion
Authors: Roychowdhury Poulami
Published: December 2020

The central finding of this book is that women negotiate rights in India not by performing victimhood but by becoming capable: deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. The conclusion considers the benefits and drawbacks of women’s capability. The author juxtaposes this citizenship model to victimhood, discussing how capability may create openings for women while simultaneously forcing them to take on a new dangerous burden of labor. The author ends by theorizing the broader implications of her findings and discussing why rights continue to matter to people when criminal justice institutions deny them justice.
Organizational Perspectives on Intellectual-Property Reform
Authors: Barnett Jonathan M.
Published: December 2020

This chapter presents a novel organizational perspective on “patent reform” in the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress, and the federal courts during 2006–2020. Debates between proponents of strong and weaker patents can be understood as a conflict between entities that rely on integrated business models for monetizing R&D, which deploy non-IP complementary assets to capture returns on innovation, and entities that rely on non-integrated business models, which monetize R&D through licensing and other IP-dependent contractual relationships. Weak-IP regimes induce an organizational bias that favors integrated and platform-based firms that capture returns on innovation within internal capital and information markets while impeding entry by smaller, R&D-specialized entities that capture returns on innovation through external capital and informational markets. By contrast, strong-IP regimes enable firms and other entities to select from the full range of more and less integrated structures for executing the innovation and commercialization process.
Containing “Country Music Marxism”
Authors: Peck Reece
Published: December 2020

This chapter tracks the populist stylistic resonances between country western music and Fox News Channel programming. Using country musician John Rich’s 2009 song “Detroit” as a case study, it demonstrates how Fox News employed a unique mix of tabloid aesthetics and populist epistemic appeals to conscribe potentially progressive interpretations of Rich’s song. In doing so, the chapter illuminates how Fox endows its conservative political news brand with affective power and social meaning. Tracking the migration of country style from the music sector to the news sector, it elucidates how political-taste alignments factor into conservative news cultures. The chapter concludes with a call for greater scholarly attention to the way conservative news actively partisanizes national taste divisions while relying on those very divisions in framing news coverage.
Making Media Safe for Corporate Power
Authors: Pickard Victor
Published: December 2020

This chapter contends that a corporate libertarian vision of media policy established the discursive terrain in which conservative media thrived in the United States after World War II. The corporate libertarian approach conceives of news media as a commodity—as opposed to a public resource—best left under private control and ownership. This vision became a hegemonic common sense that came to dominate US media policy discourses beginning in the late 1940s—thanks in part to a propagandistic influence campaign executed by corporate interests. This led to insufficient resources invested in a democratic news system. Such a policy orientation created conditions for a commercial media system driven by a competition to meet consumer demand. It also created a space for right-wing media activists to mobilize and cultivate conservative publics through outlets propped up by patronage networks and ideologically motivated venture capital.
Great Oboists on Music and Musicianship
Authors: Fiala Michele L. , Schuring Martin
Published: December 2020

This volume contains interviews with twenty-six of the most prominent oboists from around the world. The chapters are in prose format and highlight different aspects of each musician’s career, focusing on musicianship and pedagogy in ways that are applicable to all musicians. The interviews contain topics such as creating musical interpretations and shaping phrases, the relationship of vocal to instrumental music, taking orchestral auditions, and being a good ensemble player/colleague. The subjects describe their pedagogy and their thoughts on breathing and support on wind instruments, developing finger technique, and creating a useful warm-up routine. The oboists discuss their ideals in reed making, articulation, and vibrato. They also share stories from their lives and careers. The oboists and English hornists profiled from North America are Pedro Diaz, Elaine Douvas, and Nathan Hughes (Metropolitan Opera Orchestra); John Ferrillo (Boston Symphony Orchestra); Carolyn Hove (Los Angeles Philharmonic); Richard Killmer (Eastman School); Nancy Ambrose King (University of Michigan); Frank Rosenwein and Robert Walters (Cleveland Orchestra); Humbert Lucarelli (soloist); Grover Schiltz (formerly Chicago Symphony); Eugene Izotov (San Francisco Symphony, originally from Russia); Allan Vogel (Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra retired); David Weiss (formerly Los Angeles Philharmonic); Randall Wolfgang (New York City Ballet and formerly Orpheus Chamber Orchestra); Alex Klein (Brazil, formerly Chicago Symphony and currently Calgary, Canada); and Sarah Jeffrey, Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The performers based in Europe are Neil Black, Nicholas Daniel, and Gordon Hunt (England); Maurice Bourgue and David Walter (France); Thomas Indermühle (Switzerland); László Hadady (Hungary and France); and Omar Zoboli (Italy). From Australia is Diana Doherty of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Financialization and the Tyranny of Bootstraps
Authors: Friedline Terri
Published: December 2020

This chapter explores recent trends in student loan debt, particularly the for-profit educational corporation Corinthian Colleges’ scandal, in order to define the key terms financialization and neoliberalism. Finance is playing an expanded role in higher education and securitization is being employed to capitalize off of students’ loan debt. Students are increasingly taking on debt and bearing responsibility for a capitalist economy that is stacked against them. Banks and lenders bundle and sell this debt to wealthy, white investors as securities. Given that Black and Brown borrowers take out more student loans, repay their debts plus interest over longer periods of time, and experience higher default rates compared to their white counterparts, these securities are racialized just like the individual lines of debt from which they were created.
Non-biblical Tonalities
Authors: Shelleg Assaf
Published: December 2020

Chapter 1 revolves around Josef Tal’s 1955 opera Saul at Ein-Dor, whose libretto is word-for-word the narrative given in 1 Samuel 28. Through this opera the chapter examines the actualization of the Bible in Hebrew culture and its promotion of territorial nationalism, as well as the artistic formulations that contested the literalist way Zionists had selectively appropriated the Bible. Under the purview of what Anita Shapira terms “biblical literalism” and Jean-Christophe Attias calls “Zionist biblocentrism,” the literal reading of selected texts facilitated a national allegory that actualized tropes of return, of redemption, and of territorial expansionism. To understand the cultural networks activated by such readings, the chapter studies the works of Ben-Haim, Orgad, Boskovich, and additional works by Tal. A parallel discussion on the portrayals of King Saul in modern Hebrew poetry complements the entire narrative, and a thorough analysis of the post-tonal devices in Tal’s opera concludes the chapter.
On smuggling, the freezing ban, labels, and tough-constructions
Authors: Bošković Željko
Published: December 2020

Smuggling refers to a situation where movement of α‎ would induce a violation that is voided by movement of a larger constituent β‎ that contains α‎, which is followed by movement of α‎. Smuggling thus involves movement out of a moved element, which is traditionally assumed not to be possible (the constraint is referred to as the freezing ban). This chapter shows that there is no general freezing ban. Extraction out of moved elements is generally allowed. The cases where such extraction appears not to be allowed involve independent problems concerning labeling. The chapter re-examines from this perspective (which allows but restricts the possibilities for smuggling) the smuggling derivations proposed in Collins (2005a, 2005b), focusing on the passive construction, and the smuggling analysis of tough-constructions proposed in Hicks (2009). A modified version of the latter is argued to be superior to the traditional null Op analysis of tough-constructions. Several conclusions regarding the structure of infinitives are also drawn; thus, the discussion of tough-construction coordinations provides evidence against analyses which place infinitival to low in the structure. The discussion in the chapter also shows that there is a strong relationship between movement and labeling: unlabeled elements cannot undergo movement; unlabeled elements do not function as interveners; and movement cannot target unlabeled elements.
On children’s late acquisition of raising seem and control promise
Authors: Mateu Victoria , Hyams Nina
Published: December 2020

The goal of this study is to address two questions: (i) whether the delays in the acquisition of subject-to-subject raising (StSR) seem and subject control (SC) promise are related, as would be predicted by various developmental accounts, and (ii) whether delays are due to limited processing capacity or immature grammatical abilities. Our two comprehension tasks reveal two groups of children: (i) a below-chance group; they have a non-adult grammar of StSR or SC, and processing capacity does not predict performance; and (ii) an at-/above-chance group: they have an adult-like grammar of StSR or SC, and processing capacity modulates performance. Importantly, we find no correlation between StSR and SC performance—some children have mastered StSR with seem but not SC with promise and some show the opposite pattern, suggesting a dissociation between the grammatical development of StSR and SC, specifically of the mechanisms required to circumvent intervention.
Smuggling, ergativity, and the final-over-final condition
Authors: Roberts Ian
Published: December 2020

This paper argues that the lack of SVO ergative languages (“Mahajan’s Generalization”; see Taraldsen 2017) can be explained by the combination of a smuggling analysis of ergative alignments and the Final-over-Final-Condition (FOFC), which bans orders where a head-final category has a head-initial category in its Specifier (the head-initial category may have moved there, given the prevalence of roll-up derivations in surface head-final languages). The smuggling derivation, when the smuggled category is internally head-initial, creates a configuration which violates FOFC. For this reason, SVO and ergativity do not combine in the world’s languages, a notable typological lacuna that has hitherto defied explanation. The implications of the analysis for V-initial ergative languages and for passives are briefly explored.
Subversion
Authors: Spencer Danielle
Published: December 2020

This chapter explores the second stage of the metagnostic narrative arc: subversion. Following the conception of a metagnostic revelation as both recognition and misrecognition, it examines the ways in which the revelation may unsettle labels and categories. First, central concepts of disability studies are introduced and explored, and it is suggested that terms such as disability and impairment are illuminated and interrogated by a metagnostic revelation, as it breaches the expected mapping between body and classification. Indeed, situating a given revelation requires a sudden renegotiation of the ontological balance between biological impairment and socially constructed disability, and also subverts customary narrative strategies for situating disability. Second, the individual’s relationship with a given disease is seen anew and challenged in light of metagnosis, as are concepts of disease, illness, and sickness. This chapter also serves as an introduction to key concepts in disability studies and philosophy of medicine.
Ennius and the Tradition of Republican Epic
Authors: Nethercut Jason S.
Published: December 2020

This chapter re-examines the influence of Ennius on subsequent Latin epic poetry before Lucretius, showing that this influence is far less apparent and much more nuanced than has been generally assumed. Close analysis of the fragments of post-Ennian Republican epic shows that engagement with the Annales during this period was dynamic and eristic, rather than reflexive and inevitable. In the final analysis, this chapter argues for a new conceptualization of the literary terrain into which Lucretius embarks in writing his poem, one marked by creative engagement with the Annales.
The Effects of the Movement of Women into the Workforce on Income Trends
Authors: Furchtgott-Roth Diana , Leboeuf Beila
Published: December 2020

This chapter presents evidence suggesting that the movement of women into the workforce, combined with changing trends in marriage, divorce, and life expectancy, may have contributed to rising household inequality. Over the past four decades, women’s labor force participation has risen, especially in skilled occupations and particularly for mothers. Women’s educational attainment has also risen, facilitating entry into professional careers in record numbers. As more women went to school and work, declining marriage rates, changing selection into marriage, and assortative mating may have contributed to a rise in high dual-income households. On the other hand, high divorce rates and higher life expectancy may have led to more single-female led low-income households. While the empirical evidence is mixed, results are generally consistent with the conclusion that women’s professional progress may have indirectly and unintentionally contributed to rising inequality.
The Distribution of Wealth in America (1983–2013)
Authors: Weicher John C.
Published: December 2020

This chapter covers a period of rising wealth followed by abrupt decline. Between 1983 and 2007, real median household wealth rose by 70 percent, from $80,000 to $136,000 (in 2013 dollars). This increase disappeared completely, however, in the Great Recession; by 2010, median wealth had dropped by 40 percent, to $82,000, and it did not improve by 2013. The typical household of 2013 was no wealthier than the typical household of 1983. In addition, the distribution became markedly more unequal during the Great Recession; the richest 10 percent experienced a smaller reduction of 10 percent. For families in the middle, the most important asset was their home, but in 2013, fewer of them were homeowners and home values dropped for those who were. The declines in home ownership and home values accounted for most of the loss in wealth for middle-wealth families as a group.
Focusing
Authors: Zerubavel Eviatar
Published: December 2020

Defying the conventional artificial split between “theory” and “methodology” and treating them as inseparable, this chapter introduces a yet unarticulated “concept-driven” method of theorizing that helps sociologists identify and analyze social patterns. It emphasizes the significant role of “sensitizing concepts” that, like magnets, “attract” empirical data to researchers’ minds by sensitizing their awareness to many they would have most likely overlooked otherwise. This concept-driven way of conducting research sharply contrasts with the way sociologists are conventionally trained to approach their objects of study by insisting that they commit to a particular conceptual focus (rather than a particular statistical sampling procedure, as in survey research, “field,” as in ethnographic research, or period, as in historical research) and thereby remain rigorously “focused.” It is such conceptual foci, indeed, that drive the empirical part of their research.
Generalizing
Authors: Zerubavel Eviatar
Published: December 2020

A theory presupposes an effort to apply it to more than just a specific situation, and “theoretical” statements are thereby supposed to be generalizable. Social theorizing thus involves a “generic” outlook on social life distinctly characterized by its conscious disregard for specificity. Instead of studying specific groups, situations, and events, theorizers thus try to transcend their singularity. Focusing their attention on the generic rather than the specific, they actually study genericized “types” of groups, situations, and events in an effort to reveal general patterns that are practically “invisible” to those who only study the specific. This chapter examines theorizers’ epistemic endeavor to “distill” such generic social patterns from the specific contexts in which they actually encounter them, effectively detaching them from their specific cultural, historical, and situational instantiations and introducing a “generic sociology” that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, as well as transsituational) in its scope.
Eureka!
Authors: Zerubavel Eviatar
Published: December 2020

This chapter examines what we gain by disregarding the richly textured singularity of the particular by discussing the theoretico-methodological danger of “undergeneralizing,” particularly given the compartmentalization of modern academic knowledge, which impedes intellectual cross-fertilization. It also reminds us that only by decontextualizing our findings can we mentally distill generic social patterns from the specific social contexts in which we encounter them—patterns we would have actually missed had we focused on the distinctness of those contexts. The chapter then explores the way analogical reasoning helps scholarly discovery. Differences, after all, are often merely superficial, and using analogies to “dive” beneath the surface helps reveal what is otherwise “invisible.” Only by disregarding “surface” differences between seemingly disparate instantiations of what is indeed the very same generic social pattern can we uncover their fundamental transcontextual commonalities.
Six
Authors: Maçães Bruno
Published: December 2020

This chapter assesses the problem of liberalism. Liberal society is based on a principle of freedom: each person has a claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties. The problem was that liberalism had been so extraordinarily effective at specifying the conditions of a free society that it could produce an answer to every political question. One almost forgets the whole point of a free society was to let people decide important questions in their own lives. The new America is founded on a different principle. This can be called the principle of unreality: everyone can pursue their own happiness so long as they refrain from imposing it on others as something real—as something valid for all. One way to think about the principle is to note that a society may be richer in human possibilities if it allows for the existence of illiberal ways of life, but in that case it is the value of diversity or experimentation that is being pursued, not the values defended by those ways of life. Citizens must be at liberty to adopt and abandon different values, to enter or exit different experiments in living. The state must recognize and enforce this right to enter and leave.
Eight
Authors: Maçães Bruno
Published: December 2020

This chapter describes how the novel coronavirus pandemic is a war against reality, one that Americans are destined to lose. In America, the virus has remained a symbol, the underlying reality evaded or ignored, and the president can be seen as leading that evasion. Donald Trump is still attempting “to impose a narrative on an epidemic which has its own narrative.” Escapism was how America responded to the virus. For the best of two months, as the epidemic raged in China and then Italy, Trump kept insisting that the disease was no worse than the seasonal flu. Ultimately, Trump evaded reality by believing there was no problem, then everyone else evaded reality by believing the problem was Trump. The chapter then identifies three distinct stages in the way America has approached the pandemic—three distinct strategies or three kinds of escapism. When America turned from the virus to protest, following the murder of George Floyd, it revealed that the fight against the pandemic was after all a story-—not a necessity—-which could be replaced by a better story.
Introduction
Authors: Pearson David
Published: December 2020

As the United States emerged triumphant from the Cold War and became the world’s sole superpower, the 1990s underground punk renaissance challenged the narrative that democratic capitalism was the best possible world. It did so by transforming punk musical style, politics, and culture to speak to new conditions and revolutionize the punk scene from the inside out. An outline of punk’s history and musical development, as well as an exposition of original methods of musical analysis for punk rhythms, riffs, timbres, and vocals, provide the necessary background for understanding 1990s punk.
Out of the “Dregs of the Eighties” and Screaming at the New World Order
Authors: Pearson David
Published: December 2020

In the late 1980s, the US punk scene was plagued by Nazi skinheads, macho violence, and hostility toward leftist politics. At the dawn of the 1990s, several punk bands challenged this state of affairs by putting radical leftist politics at the heart of the scene, ejecting racists, and opening space for women, Latino, and queer participants. They fostered new and more intense musical styles distinct from New York Hardcore (NYHC) style, and built new institutions—zines, performance venues, and record labels—to give shape to their music and politics. The music of the all-Latino band Los Crudos exemplifies the trend of intense hardcore punk with a strident political message.
Nietzsche and the Intensification of the Dialectic of Anxiety
Authors: Bergo Bettina
Published: December 2020

After Marx but in a profoundly different way, Nietzsche would set German idealism on its head, proposing to philosophize out of what he called the great intelligence of the body. Adopting a critical phenomenalism, Nietzsche reproved Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Will with its intellectualist ascetic response. He repondered the latter’s noumenal Will as an infinity of “hermeneutic” forces, which governed aristocratically, in view of life and creativity. When forced back into themselves under sociohistoric conditions, these forces were res-senties and re-experienced as anxiety and fear. This morbid cultural situation might gradually be reversed by a “transvaluation” of values following the death of God. It was Scheler who explored a psychology of resentment, where anxiety formed the core of the European complex.
What’s Causing Secularization? Insecurity
Authors: Inglehart Ronald F.
Published: December 2020

Evolutionary modernization theory holds that both religiosity and pro-fertility norms are linked with existential insecurity, and a massive body of empirical evidence confirms this: secure people and secure countries show the lowest levels of religiosity. Existential security reflects not only a society’s per capita GDP but how evenly it is distributed, making income inequality a strong predictor of religiosity. Similarly, high levels of social welfare expenditures have a strong negative impact on religious attendance. Historic vulnerability to disease also has a persisting impact on religiosity: countries that were vulnerable to disease tend to be relatively poor and have low life expectancy and high infant mortality and high religiosity today. Overall, various indicators of existential security have a strong impact on religiosity, but this impact has a generational delay: the strongest predictor of religiosity around 2018 is the society’s level of infant mortality, not at the time of the survey but almost 40 years earlier, in 1980.
Light as a Life Tool
Authors: Parrington John
Published: December 2020

Visual light, and radiation of other frequencies, are highly important for scientific research. The first light microscopes made it possible for the first time to see that organisms from plants to humans are composed of cells. Electron microscopes have allowed scientists to study the structural components of cells in great detail, and even determine the shapes of individual proteins. Many lifeforms also use light to attract a mate or prey, or deter an attacker. Following the identification of the gene coding for the fluorescent protein that makes certain jellyfish glow green it has become possible to use this to genetically label proteins in a living cell, or even a live animal. This means that now the location of proteins in a cell can be determined exactly. A major recent step forward in neuroscience came with the discovery of protein channels in algae that conduct ions in response to light. By creating transgenic mice that have these proteins in their brain neurons, it is now possible to modulate the activity of these neurons by shining light into the brain though microscopic fibre optic cables. This new science of optogenetics allows neurons to be switched on or off experimentally. The optogenetic approach has been used to uncover the neural circuits involved in memory, pain and pleasure. In the future this technique might be used to treat physical pain or depression in people. Controversially, it might be also be misused, to supress memories, or even create completely false ones in people’s heads.