bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The legacy of Lucy Snowe: reconfiguring spinsterhood and the Victorian family in inter-war women’s writing
Authors: Liggins Emma
Published: January 2018

This chapter traces women writers’ reinterpretations and re-workings of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘feminist voice’ between 1910 and 1940, considering political and auto/biographical writing by Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair and Vera Brittain, before focusing on the new spinster heroines of modernist novels such as Sinclair’s The Three Sisters and Winifred Holtby’s The Crowded Street. These prominent inter-war literary writers are worth (re-)exploring for the ways in which they challenged and reconfigured assumptions about the Victorian family, often through invoking the ‘myth’ of Charlotte Brontë. This post-Victorian mythologising of Charlotte as both dutiful daughter and champion of female singleness was important to feminists, as they traced the genealogies of the woman writer and of women’s political achievements. For women writers from the 1910s to the 1940s, Charlotte Brontë is revered as a figure emblematic of the Victorian daughter’s entrapment within the patriarchal household, and as a pioneering woman writer who created modern, rebellious heroines. Looking back to representations of solitude, independence and singleness in Charlotte’s letters and in her last novel, Villette, modernist authors used their spinster heroines to reject purely domestic identities in order to embrace the world of paid work.
Hunger, rebellion and rage: adapting Villette
Authors: Poore Benjamin
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the critical fortunes and adaptation history of Charlotte Brontë’s final novel, Villette. It suggests that the critical reappraisal of Villette came too late in the twentieth century for the novel to become canonised in Hollywood film adaptations in the manner of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, while at the same time, the innumerable plays and films about the Brontë sisters’ lives have limited the opportunities for adaptations of the Brontës’ other works. This chapter investigates the specific challenges of adapting Villette for the screen, while also considering why, conversely, it has been adapted more frequently for stage and radio. It argues that the solutions that radio and theatre adapters have found can force us into a reassessment of Villette’s power and distinctiveness.
‘The insane Creole’: the afterlife of Bertha Mason
Authors: Cox Jessica
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the character of Bertha Mason as a significant obstacle to writers and artists seeking to adapt Jane Eyre: to treat her in the same manner as Charlotte Brontë is to replicate her degradation on the grounds of sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and dis/ability. Focused upon portrayals of her appearance, madness and death, this chapter charts the evolution and variation of Bertha’s character from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracing the impact of feminist and postcolonial theorising upon creative engagements with Brontë’s novel. Encompassing a wide variety of adaptations across different media, including Young Adult and neo-Victorian fictions, film, television, theatre and the visual arts, it argues that recreations of Bertha point to an ongoing desire to recover this character from the margins of Brontë’s novel.
‘Reader, I [shagged/beat/whipped/f****d/rewrote] him’: the sexual and financial afterlives of Jane Eyre
Authors: Yates Louisa
Published: January 2018

This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.
A state of passionate detachment: Charles Gaines by way of conclusion
Authors: Shaked Nizan
Published: January 2018

The career of Charles Gaines has been dedicated to resisting or attempting to circumvent subjectivity. The political referent emerged in his work not as a means to represent himself or his political persuasion, but as a way to examine the relation of the poetic syntax of visual language to subject matter. A staunch conceptualist, Gaines has been creating artworks from rule-based processes since the early 1970s in order to question the operation of representation and modes of reference. By the 1990s he began analysing the specificity of tropes, focusing on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, and eventually moving to work with particular political referents in a decisively non-descriptive, non-narrative, manner. In his early works Gaines set up a conceptual system from which the appearance of the work would be derived. Often employing chance operation or other aleatoric means to generate form, the work’s aesthetic was determined by systems, highlighting not only the distinction between the meaning of the terms random and arbitrary but also the distinction of the algorithmic from them both.
Scaling down in early studio realism
Authors: Hewett Richard
Published: January 2018

Though still commonly referred to as the ‘early’ era of television, by 1953 it was possible for actors working in the medium to have acquired over a decade of experience. The Quatermass Experiment features a cast taken from a variety of backgrounds, with differing amounts of television experience. The ways in which this informs performance style are examined alongside the exigencies of live multi-camera television studio production, which required the continuity to which actors versed in theatre would be accustomed, while imposing severe technological limitations on freedom of movement and the need for physical and vocal projection. The extent to which the nascent studio realism of Quatermass was representative of its time is examined via Viewer Research Reports and contemporary press reviews, which already reveal a notable divergence of opinion with regard to what was acceptably verisimilitudinous in television acting.
The French anarchist movement and the First World War
Authors: Bantman Constance , Berry David
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the heated debates within the French anarchist movement after the outbreak of the First World War, leading up to the 1916 Manifesto of the Sixteen and the Russian Revolutions of 1917. It focuses on the movement’s shift from a near-unanimous anti-militarist stance to a more equivocal one, with significant voices being heard in support of interventionism. What were the arguments deployed by the supporters of the Union Sacrée, and how much did they owe to the influence of Peter Kropotkin? Crucially, could the revolutionary project of the anarchists co-exist with participation in the war effort, or did the war in fact expose the growing integration of the working classes into the nation, defusing their revolutionary potential? The chapter then examines how the anarchists’ varied attitudes to the national war effort largely determined their differing responses to the two Russian revolutions of 1917. It concludes that the failure of the movement to prevent the mobilisation of 1914 was a watershed for the French anarchist movement, provoking some profound soul-searching about the state of the movement and, specifically in relation to war, a much less ambitious attitude with regard to anti-militarist positions and tactics.
The anarchist anti-conscription movement in the USA
Authors: Ferguson Kathy E.
Published: January 2018

This paper explores the activities of The No-Conscription League in the U.S. in order to analyse the conceptual logic and the political strategy of the movement. The grounds of the anarchists’ opposition were not based on pacifism, but on the right to choose what to fight for. Contrary to contemporary images of anarchists as isolated extremists, the anarchists forged an effective coalition with socialists and other progressives. The connected their opposition to militarism and to capitalism with their support for birth control, because all three issues have to do with freedom to control one’s own body. They questioned conscription from the theoretical position of internationalism, as well as appealing to the rights of Americans to protect their liberties. They also critiqued the militarization of American society as a greater danger than those the war was intended to fight.
Introduction: the Dunsæte Agreement and daily life in the Welsh borderlands
Authors: Brady Lindy
Published: January 2018

Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England argues that the Welsh borderlands formed a culturally distinctive region during the Anglo-Saxon period. The book begins with a close examination of a late Old English legal text known as the Dunsæte agreement, which governs procedure for the recovery of stolen cattle taken across the river which ran between the Welsh and English banks of the Dunsæte territory. This text reflects Anglo-Welsh equality, community, and cooperation, providing a window into the lived reality of the borderlands: it was a region where two peoples lived together for hundreds of years, not simply a space of endless warfare as it is often understood in scholarship on early medieval Britain. The introduction contextualizes this book within recent work in postcolonial studies, border/frontier studies, and the history of Anglo/Welsh relations, laying out a case for why the Welsh borderlands should be understood as a distinctive region during the Anglo-Saxon period.
Introduction
Authors: Fives Allyn
Published: January 2018

This is a book about parents, power, and children and, in particular, the legitimacy of parents’ power over their children. It is also a book about political philosophy itself, as it examines the role of this discipline when we evaluate the legitimacy of parents’ power. If parents have power, and if they exercise power over their children, what makes some power relations legitimate and others illegitimate, and how do we justify these conclusions?
Normative legitimacy
Authors: Fives Allyn
Published: January 2018

Without in any way claiming to be exhaustive, in this chapter, I offer a critical overview of numerous ways in which philosophers have evaluated the legitimacy of power. My exegesis will take a particular form as I have a specific purpose in mind. Although I will discuss numerous theoretical positions (in particular, republicanism, anarchism, various forms of liberalism, and social contract theory), I do not pretend to offer a comprehensive judgement of their value as political theories. I do not have the space required to do justice to such a task, but in any case it would not meet our current needs. I am not concerned here with which theoretical position is the best ‘fit’ with the reality of parental power, although in the main it is in those terms that they have been presented to us. Rather, I will analyse these various opposing theoretical arguments in order to illustrate how moral values may come into conflict when we evaluate the legitimacy of parents’ power in concrete situations. I hope to show the inadequacy of efforts made to equate power with one of its forms and, in that way, to reduce moral complexity concerning the legitimacy of power, namely arguments about liberty, coercion, control, authority, and paternalism. Even among those who concern themselves with, say, coercion, seemingly intractable moral disagreements arise, and these theoretical disagreements are, I shall argue, evidence of underlying conflicts between independent moral values.
Dancing mad! The modernisation of popular dance
Authors: Abra Allison
Published: January 2018

This chapter traces the early development of modern ballroom dancing in Britain, from its origins in the ragtime era prior to the First World War through the dance craze that came with the peace. It provides a history for the major dances that would predominate in Britain from the 1920s through the 1950s, particularly the so-called ‘standard four’ – the foxtrot, the modern waltz, the tango, and the one-step. The chapter also examines the social and cultural response to the new dances in Britain – particularly their perceived modernity – which was celebrated by some, but condemned by others. It explores controversies that surrounded popular dance, and the active defence mounted by its proponents, who touted dancing’s value for the cultivation of good health and beauty, among numerous other advantages.
Doing the Lambeth Walk: novelty dances and the commodification of the nation
Authors: Abra Allison
Published: January 2018

This chapter uses as a case study a series of novelty dances produced by the Mecca dance hall chain starting in 1938: the Lambeth Walk, the Chestnut Tree, the Park Parade, the Handsome Territorial, and Knees Up, Mother Brown. These were deliberately simply sequence dances, which Mecca director C.L. Heimann hoped would bring more patrons into his company’s dance halls, particularly those who were untutored in ballroom dancing. While the marketing campaign for the dances stressed their ease and accessibility, another major focus was on the dances’ British origin and character, and the nation was explicitly commodified to sell the new dances. The first Mecca novelty dance, the Lambeth Walk, was a staggering success, both at home and abroad, and was embraced by the dancing public for its connections to British culture. However, the chapter shows that the other four Mecca novelty dances which followed the Lambeth Walk met with a mixed response, and argues that their success or failure was largely owing to their quality as dances rather than their national origins.
Beyond the borders: displaced persons in the Italian linguistic space during the First World War
Authors: Mondini Marco , Frizzera Francesco
Published: January 2018

According to the most commonly accepted figures, the experience of displacement in Italy between 1915 and 1918 affected about 600,000 civilians, either forced to leave their homes or voluntarily fleeing to the internal regions of the state. The civilians registered as ‘displaced persons’ at the end of war mostly originated from the north-eastern provinces of the Italian peninsula, which since May 1915 had been war zones and which in late 1917 following the Italian defeat at Caporetto were invaded by the Austrian and German armies. The chapter shows how refugees from Trentino were legally supported and subsidised as compatriots in Italy. In terms of everyday life, however, they did not integrate themselves into the host community, with the exception of those places where irredentist groups were active. On the contrary, they demonstrated pro-Italian feelings only in order to gain concrete benefits, to avoid internment, and to gain the respect of the local population. Most of them kept a low profile.
Reading the Gothic and Gothic readers
Authors: Smith Andrew
Published: January 2018

In ‘Reading the Gothic and Gothic Readers’ Andrew Smith outlines how recent developments in Gothic studies have provided new ways of critically reflecting upon the nineteenth century. Smith then proceeds to explore how readers and reading, as images of self-reflection, are represented in the fin de siècle Gothic. The self-reflexive nature of the late nineteenth-century Gothic demonstrates a level of political and cultural scepticism at work in the period which, Smith argues, can be applied to recent developments in animal studies as a hitherto largely overlooked critical paradigm that can be applied to the Gothic. To that end this chapter examines representations of reading, readers, and implied readers in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), focusing on how these representations explore the relationship between the human and the non-human. An extended account of Dracula identifies ways in which these images of self-reflection relate to the presence of the inner animal and more widely the chapter argues for a way of rethinking the period within the context of animal studies via these ostensibly Gothic constructions of human and animal identities.
Epilogue1
Authors: Moscoso Javier
Published: January 2018

This epilogue discusses how the tension between the visualization of violence and the experience of pain affects our understanding of human suffering and the way in which we may consider its cultural modulations. Whereas the different contributions of the volume pay attention to the local and cultural variations of human suffering and visualisations and performances of hurt(ful) bodies, the epilogue provides a critical reflection on historical methods and the tension between experiences and narratives in particular. To do so, it deals with the work of pioneers in the history of emotions, like William Reddy, after which the work of Reinhart Koselleck is brought to the fore. It especially argues that it is important to consider long-term formal structures of the history of pain and the role of beholders and institutions in order to find out how a primal experience of pain may be turned into a story.
Introduction
Authors: Laybourn Keith , Shepherd John
Published: January 2018

This essay examines the life and work of Professor Chris Wrigley, a leading historian of British labour history, modern biography, and the modern industrial relations. It suggests that he has not only been a prolific researcher and writer but that he has also influenced a whole generation of historians, including all the contributors to this volume. In particular, it suggests that his work on industrial relations, trade unionism, and biography has been seminal in shaping current thinking. Chris Wrigley has widened our understanding of how British industrial relations have worked since the nineteenth century and examined the increasing democratisation of trade unionism. He has also examined British history through the prism of biography.
George Howell, the Webbs and the political culture of early labour history
Authors: Chase Malcolm
Published: January 2018

This essay focuses upon British trade unionism and examines the different interpretation of the formation and emergence of trade unions. George Howell, in his various writings, argued that trade unions had their origin on Anglo-Saxon rights and in the emergence of the medieval guilds that distinguished between skilled and unskilled workers. Alternatively, the Webbs trade unions emerge somewhere around the beginning of the eighteenth century and set up this new orthodoxy of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century trade unionism. The Webbs shaped an historiography and explanation which Malcolm Chase, amongst others, now challenge on the basis of recent research which has revealed the legacy of the guilds.
Neither Individualistic nor Interactionist
Authors: Paolo Ezequiel Di , Jaegher Hanne De
Published: January 2018

We summarize some of the main proposals of the enactive approach to social understanding and discuss some common misreadings of the notion of participatory sense-making. The emphasis on the role played by social interaction in the enactive perspective is sometimes misinterpreted as the adoption of an interactionist stance, whereby individual processes are less relevant. This is not the case, and we proceed to explain and exemplify the central role played by individual agency, subpersonal processes and subjective personal experience in the framework of participatory sense-making. This is clear from how social interaction is defined as involving the co-arising of autonomous relational patterns, not under the full control of any participant, but without loss of individual autonomy of those engaged in the social encounter. We discuss how interactive patterns can sustain a deep entanglement between brain, body and interactive dynamics during social engagement, as well as the functional role played in some case by collective dynamics.
The enactive approach is neither individualistic, nor interactionist. However, we express skepticism regarding the usefulness of hybrid approaches, which perpetuate dualistic distinctions between mind and body. Instead, the tensions in the notion of participatory sense-making are elaborated dialectically, demonstrating how complex forms of social agency, including language, develop from the primordial tension in participatory sense-making.
The Primacy of the “We”?
Authors: Brinck Ingar , Reddy Vasudevi , Zahavi Dan
Published: January 2018

The question of the relation between the collective and the individual has had a long but patchy history within both philosophy and psychology. In this chapter we consider some arguments that could be adopted for the primacy of the we, and examine their conceptual and empirical implications. We argue that the we needs to be seen as a developing and dynamic identity, not as something that exists fully fledged from the start. The concept of we thus needs more nuanced and differentiated treatment than currently exists, distinguishing it from the idea of a ‘common ground’ and discerning multiple senses of ‘we-ness’. At an empirical level, beginning from the shared history of human evolution and prenatal existence, a simple sense of pre-reflective we-ness, we argue, emerges from second-person I-you engagement in earliest infancy. Developmentally, experientially and conceptually, engagement remains fundamental to the we throughout its many forms, characterized by reciprocal interaction and conditioned by the normative aspects of mutual addressing.
The Significance and Meaning of Others
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: January 2018

I argue that the distinction between significance and meaning made in debates about the nature of interpretation in hermeneutics is relevant to contemporary discussions of social cognition. In this chapter, I review the debates about interpretation focusing on Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Then, within the framework of a pluralist approach to social cognition, I discuss some problems with mindreading approaches that attempt to get to the “inner” meaning of the other. I defend a Gadamerian view of social cognition that models our encounter with others as dialogical interaction and the emergence of significance.
The Role of Affordances in Pretend Play
Authors: Rucińska Zuzanna
Published: January 2018

Pretending is often conceptualized as an imaginative and symbolic capacity, positing mental representations in its explanation. This paper proposes an alternative way to explain pretending with the use of affordances, instead of mental representations, as explanatory tools. It shows that a specific notion of affordance has to be appropriated for affordances to play the relevant explanatory roles in pretense. This analysis opens up a discussion on the nature of affordances, clarifying how on various conceptions the environment and the animal play a role in shaping affordances. It then clarifies which notion is best compatible to explain pretending; the paper suggests that a particular conception of affordances as dispositional properties of the environment (a la Turvey 1992) can make affordances explanatorily useful. The paper then shows how the environmental affordances with animal effectivities, placed in the right context (formed by canonical affordances or other people), could form an explanation of basic kinds of pretend play (section 3). The paper is a proof of concept that some forms of cognitive activity, such as basic pretense, can be explained by embodied and enactive theorists without the need to posit mental representations. It emphasizes the non-trivial role of social and cultural factors in actualizing pretense, providing a crucial aspect of a coherent explanation of basic pretense.
Paid
Authors: Sterling Bruce
Published: January 2018

For over a hundred years, many have envisioned a cashless society, whether utopian or dystopian. Now, in an era of mobile money and Bitcoin, it seems that cashlessness might not be far off. In recent years, there has been a flurry of payment innovation. Many of these new technologies offer a dream of money as pure information: seamless andinstantaneous. But instead of becoming dematerialized, new money technologies rely on as much, if not more, stuff than cash ever did. This book investigates the material of money past, present, and future. It is a collection of essays by scholars across fields, including anthropology, archaeology, media, technology, history, as well as journalists and industry professionals. Each essay focuses on one transactional object, including cash, checks, cards, and cryptocurrencies. Some of these items are valuable (such as bits of silver traded by libertarians), some are obsolete (such as first generation ATMs), and some are trash (such as receipts carefully collected in a cigar box). By attending to the stuff of money, these scholars investigate questions of value, authority, community, identity, and materiality.Contributors: Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo, Maria Bezaitis, Finn Brunton, Lynn H. Gamble, David Graeber, Jane I. Guyer, Keith Hart, Sarah Jeong, Alexandra Lippman, Julien Mailland, Scott Mainwaring, Bill Baurer, Taylor C. Nelms, Rachel O’Dwyer, Michael Palm, Lisa Servon, David L. Stearns, Bruce Sterling, Lana Swartz, Whitney Anne Trettien, Gary Urton
Dongles
Authors: Mainwaring Scott
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the social and technical features of electronic payment methods that rely on dongles or devices that attach to mobile phones, such as Square. It considers the history of the term dongle, and the hacks or workarounds that allowed the earphone jack to be adapted to serve electronic payment. Sharable devices and tablets have the potential to change the retail experience, too, taking advantage of dongles’ attributes as connection technologies, clever hacks, and authorization tokens that allow the point of sale to be more mobile and the experience of payment to feel more personal. Considering the technical and aesthetic aspects of cell phone accessories to facilitate payment also reveals unequal power relationships between merchants, consumers, and payment providers masked by this repersonalization of payment.
Tattoos
Authors: Gamble Lynn H.
Published: January 2018

California indigenous peoples used strings of shells to serve as money. Their value was set by standards based on length, measured by tattoos on the arms of men of noble rank. The chapter discusses the history of shells and tattoos among the Hupa and Yurok of northern California, and the Cahuilla and Chumash in the south. In the south, only clan leaders, and not all man of noble rank, possessed tattoos. Where in the north shells were associated with the pursuit of individual gain and wealth questing, in the south, they had ceremonial functions and were associated with social hierarchy and prestige. Tattoos were thus records in the flesh of value, but different values.
Dogecoin
Authors: Jeong Sarah
Published: January 2018

Dogecoin—a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency notable for its use of a meme of a bemused shibainu dog—is perhaps one of the most absurd and most adorable money experiments. The community around it was known for being more welcoming than that of other cryptocurrencies. It engaged in community activities that were seen as charitable and wholesome, such as sponsoring the Jamaican national bobsled team. The story of Dogecoin is in many ways the story cryptocurrencies in miniature. Each and every cryptocurrency is a referendum on whether money can exist without an issuing government. But each of these grand theoretical experiments always seems to end in fraud and disappointment. This chapter tells the tale of Dogecoin’s rise and fall.
Leaves
Authors: Trettien Whitney Anne
Published: January 2018

In the early 18th century, the American colonials were awash with both paper currency and its twin: counterfeit bills. Benjamin Franklin became a proponent of using leafs prints in currency as an anti-counterfeiting measure. Duplicating a leaf print is difficult not just because the resulting patterns are so complex, but because the original leaf is destroyed in the process. Franklin’s innovation, then, is that he shifts the burden of counterfeiting from copying the content of a note to discerning and iterating the process of its reproduction—even as that very process prevents the thing, the leaf, from ever being reproduced in the same way again. In this, we can see a kind of environmental nationalism: authority inheres not in the material substance of the paper itself but rather in the land that prints it and it printed upon it.
The Many Faces of Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger
Authors: Grigar Dene
Published: January 2018

This chapters challenges the accepted view that Judy Malloy produced four versions of her pioneering work of electronic literature, Uncle Roger, showing through material uncovered from archival research, interviews, and Traversals, that there are instead six. Through a close reading of each version, the chapter also reveals subtle as well as significant changes the author made to the work during its 30-year history.
From Casimir Forces to Black-Body Radiation: Quantum and Thermal Fluctuations
Authors: Rodriguez Alejandro W. , Plasencia Adolfo
Published: January 2018

This dialogue with physicist Alejandro W. Rodríguez is in two parts. The first part, which took place in the MIT campus, reflects on how theory has been overtaking experimentation in recent developments in science. It also addresses the subject of the Casimir forces and their effects by using devices which benefit from them in everyday life. Later, Alejandro explains why the vacuum is not empty; and, what are the "virtual photons". In the second part, Alejandro explains his current research in the Department of Electrical Engineering of Princeton University, focusing on the black body; and quantum and thermal processes of electromagnetic fluctuations at the nanoscale, where the rules of quantum mechanics now hold sway. He is now studying quantum fluctuations and how the forces and energy exchanged between objects work. This all-important area is the current driving force for development in the field of thermovoltaic energy and thermal panels for capturing light; an area with a revolutionary potential capable of changing the existing relationship of humans with energy, technology and the environment, in other words, with the planet.
Between Caves: From Plato to the Brain through the Internet
Authors: Echeverria Javier , Plasencia Adolfo
Published: January 2018

In this dialogue, the philosopher of science and mathematician Javier Echeverria, begins by explaining how Leibniz created the first modern binary system, in which ‘1 and 0’ is capable of expressing everything, - something that marked the beginning of all modern computing and the subsequent digital revolution -, and why there would be no Internet without this language. He then argues why everything that is intelligible cannot be digitized. After, he explains why digitization is part of the invention of writing, how it transforms the world and might imply a great evolutionary step forward. He then rationalizes why we should speak of “intelligences”, in the plural, rather than just one intelligence and why, for him, intelligence is a question of degree. Later in the dialogue, he reflects on collective and “biosocial” intelligence, as well as explaining his vision of the Internet as Plato’s Cave, why he thinks metaverses are possible, and why he believes in the possibility that the universe is a huge hologram. Finally, he describes how our brains are starting to become bionic (“techno-brains”), thus enabling control technologies, and why this digital revolution poses a great challenge for the humanities
Measuring the Intelligence of Everything
Authors: Hernández-Orallo José , Plasencia Adolfo
Published: January 2018

In this dialogue comprising seven widely diverse sections, José Hernández-Orallo, specialist in AI, reflects on a variety of topics surrounding Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence (AI): 1. On what is measurable in intelligence, and what its ingredients are; 2. On how to universally measure intelligence; 3. On the Turing test; 4. On compared intelligences and the IQ (Intelligence Quotient); 5. On the AI agents of software; 6. On whether the human condition, (and happiness), can be mathematized; 7. On the relationship between intelligence and humor; and, 8. Are there universal ingredients in what we call intelligence? Toward the end, he talks about the current science and technology debate on whether the evolution of AI and its latest most disturbing incarnations (e.g., lethal autonomous weapons) can become an existential threat for humans or not. His reflections are culminated with arguments concerning a real danger— that someone, or something, might modify the present natural distribution of intelligence in the planet, which could end up being controlled by a global oligopoly.
Touching the Soul of Michelangelo
Authors: Colalucci Gianluigi , Plasencia Adolfo
Published: January 2018

The restorer-scientist, Gianluigi Colalucci, starts this dialogue explaining the difference between an artist or creator and a restorer. He then describes the emotions he felt and the importance played by touch in his restoration work of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, and what spiritual trace he encountered beneath their surface. Next, he explains the differences existing today between the concepts of 'Restoration' and 'Conservation', which is followed by a reflection on the concept of ‘original’ and how it is interpreted differently in the Eastern and Western worlds. Later, he argues why both the artist and the restorer should clear up their doubts before beginning to work, and finally explains the reasons why a work of art is for everyone and is part of the human condition.
Policies of Panic: Porn, Predators, and Peers
Authors: Vickery Jacqueline Ryan
Published: January 2018

The chapter analyses select U.S. federal and state policies that aim to regulate young people’s use of technology from the 1990s onward. There have been three waves of panics related to young people’s use of technology: porn, predators, and peers (specifically bullying and sexting). Each concern was fuelled by sensational media attention, and at times, fallacious research. Although policies are often a necessary aspect of regulation, the chapter demonstrates the ways policies often reflect privileged understandings of risk and overlook the unintended consequences of prohibitive regulation, particularly for marginalized populations. Additionally, it argues that other modes of regulation – such as the market and social norms – can be effective modes of balancing risks and opportunities.
Access Denied: Information, Knowledge, and Literacy
Authors: Vickery Jacqueline Ryan
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyses the unintended consequences of federal policies that require schools to block students’ access to potentially harmful or objectionable online material. Justifications for blocking online content are often based on perceptions of sexual risks. For many low-income youth, school is one of the primary access points and blocking sexual content perpetuates a lack of sexual education; there needs to be a balance between protection and access. Additionally, this chapter considers the claim that students are at risk of being overloaded with information and misinformation. Rather than blocking information, schools should play a greater role in helping students develop critical digital literacies required to participate in a digital culture: by helping them become critical consumers, responsible contributors, and activists. Lastly, it argues that blocking students’ access to online content is value-laden and often overlooks other risks such as the ways advertising and data collection can also be harmful and exploitative.
Networked Sharing: Participation, Copyright, and Values
Authors: Vickery Jacqueline Ryan
Published: January 2018

This chapter challenges understandings of participatory culture by examining the barriers that prevent some marginalized media creators from sharing their creative media in online spaces. Students cited three reasons why they didn’t want to share their creative content online: fear that someone would steal it, concerns that their work wasn’t professional enough, or they lacked the time and access required to build beneficial online networks. The students’ legitimate concerns reflect the ways learning is embedded within cultural systems and relationships and highlights the need for literacy development and adult guidance in learning how to fully and safely participate online. Although intentional online visibility is accompanied by risk, it can also be beneficial to students’ identities and future aspirations. The chapter makes suggestions for ways that schools can equip students with the necessary digital literacies and protections necessary for them to safely participate in a collaborative manner that is mutually beneficial to students and society.
Reasons to REConceive
Authors: Hutto Daniel D. , Myin Erik
Published: January 2018

Chapter 2 introduces REC’s Equal Partner Principle, according to which invoking neural, bodily, and environmental factors all make equally important contributions when it comes to explaining cognitive activity. In line with that principle, it is made clear how REC can accept that cognitive capacities depend on structural changes that occur inside organisms and their brains, without understanding such changes in information processing and representationalist terms.
This chapter explicates the Hard Problem of Content, aka the HPC, as basis for a compelling argument for REC. The HPC is a seemingly intractable theoretical puzzle for defenders of unrestricted CIC. A straight solution to the HPC requires explaining how it is possible to get from informational foundations that are noncontentful to a theory of mental content using only the resources of a respectable explanatory naturalism that calls on the resources of the hard sciences.
It is revealed how the need to deal with the HPC can be avoided by adopting REC’s revolutionary take on basic cognition, and why going this way has advantages over other possible ways of handling the HPC.
From Revolution to Evolution
Authors: Hutto Daniel D. , Myin Erik
Published: January 2018

Chapter 3 introduces the contours of REC’s positive program for relating to and allying with other major theories of cognition. In these efforts it aims to provide analyses and arguments designed to sanitize, strengthen, and unify existing representational and antirepresentational offerings. This theoretical work takes the form of RECtification—a process through which the target accounts of cognition are radicalized by analysis and argument, rendering them REC-friendly. This chapter shows how this process works in action by targeting Predictive Processing accounts of Cognition, or PPC. Some theorists have already argued that it is fruitful to combine PPC with E-theories of cognition. Yet they continue subscribe to a cognitivist reading of PPC. This chapter shows how an alliance between PPC with E-theories of cognition can only be properly forged, by giving the central ideas of PPC a REC rendering. It also shows why this crucial adjustment to PPC avoids crippling problems. This reveals why allying with REC is independently well motivated and theoretically beneficial.
Epilogue: Missing Information?
Authors: Hutto Daniel D. , Myin Erik
Published: January 2018

The epilogue takes a last look at the possibility that REC may be leaving out something explanatorily important because it says nothing about how the brain processes informational content. Focusing on a prominent case, it is demonstrated that REC has the resources to understand the groundbreaking research on positioning systems in rat brains. It is argued that rat brains can be informationally sensitive without processing informational content. No explanatory power is lost in adopting REC’s deflated explanation; but much is gained by doing so since it avoids the Hard Problem of Content. The chapter concludes by showing how REC’s proposed vision of neurodynamics is wholly compatible with its dynamical and extensive account of cognition; a vision of cognition that opens the door to broader lines of research in the cognitive sciences that taking into account the ways in which culture can permeate cognition.
Technology and Machines Speak (for) Themselves
Authors: Neumark Norie
Published: January 2018

In this chapter the author attends to things as they voice themselves, focusing on mechanical and technological voices speaking (for) themselves—rather than mediating or carrying voices of others. She listens to insistent thingly voices, by attending to technology that itself speaks, speaks itself, voicing its own curious essence as it brings its own voice forcibly into the conversation. This includes loudspeakers and microphones that no longer humbly and quietly enable or transmit other voices, but voice themselves at the same time. The chapter also engages with works of sonification, a curious case of ‘as if’ a thing or force of nature is speaking but, the author proposes, is more about the voice of technology. The examples—including machines, from robots to toys to tattoo machines—attend to what they have to say about politics and economics as they speak of and for themselves.
Unvoice in Media and the Arts: Voice Going off the Rails
Authors: Neumark Norie
Published: January 2018

This chapter introduces the figure unvoice to listen to works where the usual relationship between soundtrack and image track is disturbed and disturbing. As unvoicing breaks the usual synchronization and hierarchy of image over sound, their very relationship becomes audible. The chapter works with the figures of ‘un,’ medianatures, minor aesthetics, and ekphrasis, bringing them into conversation with works ranging from YouTube lip-syncing remixes to artful animations, from machinima to cat videos, from video artworks to installations. It encounters unvoicing in works of portraiture and subtitling. Whether accidental or purposeful, unvoicing thinks the relations of voice, soundtrack and imagetrack anew.
A Mark of the Mental
Authors: Neander Karen
Published: January 2018

How do thoughts get to be about the world, how do they refer to their contents? This book tackles the most tractable part of this ancient problem by offering a theory of original intentionality for (nonconceptual) sensory-perceptual representations. To pave the way, Neander discusses the role played by the notions of representation and representational content in cognitive science, and explain how it stems from combining a standard biological strategy for explaining how bodies and brains operate or function with a mainstream information-processing approach to explaining cognitive (including perceptual) capacities. The author also argues that this supports an informational version of teleosemantics, and develops the theory of content in three stages. First she elucidates how sensory-perceptual systems have response functions, and why the sensory-perceptual representations they produce may be said to refer to the causes in response to which they are, in that sense, supposed to be produced. Second, she explains how sensory-perceptual systems might therefore have functions to produce inner state changes that are both caused by and the analogs of their contents, and thus how analog relations (i.e., relations of second-order similarity) as well as causal-information relations can be content-constitutive. Finally, she discusses the notorious problem of distal content and offers a solution that ismost suited for (nonconceptual) sensory-perceptual representations. Along the way, the author solves six aspects of the content-indeterminacy problem.
Thinking about Thought
Authors: Neander Karen
Published: January 2018

Thoughts are about items in (or aspects of) the world, and mental representations refer to them: how can this representational power be explained? In this chapter, the author introduces the philosophical problem of intentionality, clarifies how key terms will be used in this book, explains (and to some extent motivates) the author’s starting assumptions, and sets out her main aims. Among other things, she here discusses the naturalization project, relations between intentionality and consciousness, the distinction between original and derived intentionality, and the (natural-factive) notion of informational content as distinct from the notion of representational content involved in semantic evaluations. The aim in this book is to give a “modest” theory of original intentionality, a theory of referential-intentional content with its scope initially limited to sensory-perceptual (nonconceptual) representations. The focus will be on the origination question (what is the basis of original intentionality?), not on the derivation question (how do more sophisticated forms of intentionality derive from less sophisticated?).
The Content-Determinacy Challenges
Authors: Neander Karen
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, the author begins developing the details of the causal-informational version of teleosemantics (CT) for (nonconceptual) sensory-perceptual representation. She also lists six content-determinacy challenges, and explain how CT handles the first three (leaving the others to be treated in chapters 8 and 9). Content determinacy challenges ask why a representation (R), which has the content C, has the content C (and not, say, Q). The first three challenges ask why R has the content there’s C and not there’s Q (given that C is not Q) and, (i) C and Q were co-instantiated where and when selection for the R-producing and R-using systems took place, (ii) C and Q were both causally implicated in past selection for the R-producing and R-using systems, and (iii) C and Q have necessarily been co-instantiated, even though “C” and “Q” do not co-refer. In relation to (iii) the author discusses the case of seeing green rather than grue, and the case of seeing a shape as a diamond rather than as a regular square. In effect, the author defendsStampe’s early idea, that taking the teleosemantic turn is a good way to improve upon a causal theory of reference.
Removing Borders, Erasing Palestinians: Israeli Population Maps after 1967
Authors: Bier Jess
Published: January 2018

Chapter 3, “Removing Borders, Erasing Palestinians”, provides an analysis of the ways that even abstract statistical facts are conditioned by the political landscapes where they are produced. It examines Israeli population maps in the years 1967-1995. After 1967, the close geographic proximity of Palestinians posed a challenge to the policy of not indicating the borders of the Palestinian Territories on Israeli maps. Roberto Bachi, the director of the Israeli population census, sought to address this challenge while also helping to turn cartography into an international science. As a result, he led the census away from mapping shaded areas of uniform population, and towards dot maps of population distribution. Such efforts served to limit the calculation methods at the census cartographers’ disposal. They also revealed that, despite repeated claims by Israeli politicians that Palestinians did not exist, in fact the Israeli cartographers’ methods were inherently shaped by the presence of large numbers of Palestinians in the region. For even though Palestinian areas were intentionally left blank, the resulting gaps actually made them show up on the map. So through their exclusion, Palestinian populations were made visible, and this is one way that the landscapes of the occupation have shaped Israeli maps.