bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Imitation as a Synchronizer of Minds and Brains
Authors: Nadel Jacqueline
Published: February 2025

Immediate imitation is seen as a synchronizer of minds and brains in line with dynamical systems theory focusing on synchronization as a key feature of social cognition. It offers the most achieved model of dynamical co-regulation in a two-person perspective. It makes ‘imitate and be imitated’ a genuine communicative format, including dyadic variables that describe the continuous dynamics leading to a co-ownership of actions. Young preverbal children and non-verbal children with autism can capture the other’s intention at the first person while perceiving the effects of the other’s action in their own body. Hosting real-life interactions via imitation in neuroimaging hyperscanned experiments reveals alpha–mu synchronization in the centroparietal regions of pairs of brains. As constructs, interpersonal synchrony, shared motives, and togetherness all directly refer to Trevarthen’s theory of intersubjectivity and are support for further explorations of a two-person perspective interweaving behavioural and brain explorations in a neuroscience of synchrony.
Philosophical Consideration of the Metaphysics of Intersubjectivity
Authors: Phemister Pauline
Published: February 2025

This chapter identifies significant similarities between the metaphysics of intersubjectivity advanced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the psychological account of intersubjectivity advanced by Colwyn Trevarthen, opening up the possibility that Leibniz’s metaphysics might provide rationalist support for Trevarthen’s empirically grounded research on mother and infant interactions. Leibniz and Trevarthen conceive intersubjectivity as a relationship between autonomous and spontaneously acting living subjects, in which each subject mirrors or expresses the physical and mental states of the other. There is furthermore a remarkable convergence in their respective views of the purposiveness of persons engaging in intersubjective communications and the motivational and guiding role of pleasure located in the experiencing of beauty and communicative harmony, exemplified by musicality. However, Leibniz’s doctrine of pre-established harmony upon which his claims regarding the autonomy, spontaneity, and intersubjectivity of his monadic subjects depend, rejects causal interaction between subjects. There is instead only the appearance of causal interaction resulting from the exact correspondences between subjects’ perceptions and the physical motions of their bodies. Nevertheless, since causal interaction is itself derived from perceived correspondences between subjects, this difference may not be an insuperable problem.
Neoteny, Social Practice, and Meaning-Making
Authors: Gallese Vittorio
Published: February 2025

Cognitive neuroscience can shed new light on human symbol-making. In this chapter I address the origin of symbol-making from an evo-devo perspective and emphasize the role of human ‘neoteny’: the slowed and delayed physiological and somatic development of individuals. This development largely depends upon the quantity and quality of interpersonal relationships individuals establish with their adult peers. Neoteny, on the one hand, favours and facilitates the development of cognitive exapted qualities, like sophisticated forms of communication and symbolic expression, by reusing neural resources originally selected for other purposes. On the other, neoteny amplifies and prolongs learning and potentiates family relationships. Stronger family relationships potentiate the transfer of knowledge across generations, helping to build oral traditions, which, in turn, promote cultural practices. Capitalizing upon pragmatism, and social practice theory, I discuss the relationship between body, practice, and rituals and their bearing on the creation of symbolic objects and cultural artefacts.
The Dance of Emotions in Infant Semiolinguistic Development
Authors: Lüdtke Ulrike M. , Bansner-Ahrberg Marie C. , Beta Kirsten , Lück Senta , Polzin Chantal , Schütte Ulrike , Wu Julia , Frank Bodo
Published: February 2025

Inspired by Colwyn Trevarthen’s concepts of intersubjectivity, musicality, and sympathy, as well as by his early writings on children’s semiogenesis, this chapter discusses the dance of relational emotions as the driving force for early communicative and semiolinguistic development of infants, focusing not only on the intersubjective dyads where miraculous narratives are constantly created but especially on those context factors as well, which may have a negative impact on the emotion regulation in vulnerable mother/caretaker–child dyads, such as disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds or institutional care. This chapter provides a short overview of our manifold methodological attempts to investigate these intricate and subtle intersubjective relations. It draws on research examples from our Leibniz Laboratory for Relational Communication Research. We propose a conceptual framework that shows the paradigmatic trajectory from an individualistic and rationalistic research paradigm to an intersubjective and emotion integrating research paradigm or from ‘logos’ to dialogue.
Amae and the Theory of Intersubjectivity
Authors: Watanabe Hisako
Published: February 2025

Trevarthen’s wisdom and his scientific observations have given language to what the Japanese have historically known about Amae, that is, the human interactions derived from infancy. Amae is a Japanese term that refers to the affective mental wellness activated within intimate infant–caregiver relationships. The experience of Amae involves each individual to attune to the visceral experiences shared within the relationship. The author, a child psychiatrist, has created ‘Amae Therapy’ out of the decades of her observation that Japanese families in postwar Japanese society needed culturally appropriate interventions that aligned with the intuitive parenting and other traditional interpersonal practices that fostered connection of non-verbal dimensions. Amae Therapy mobilizes the child’s regression as a vehicle to revive intimacy lost in early life and to foster or retrieve reciprocity, empathy, and companionship with the primary parent, yielding true self, sense of agency, and shared narratives within the context of the relationship. Trevarthen’s work on intersubjectivity bridges this culturally embedded understanding in Japan to the scientific world of the West.
Special relativity
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

Based upon the principle that light travels at the same speed, c, in all inertial frames, we describe the geometry of spacetime in Chapter 1 and show that the consequences that stem from this are surprisingly far-reaching. The chapter introduces some key ideas of special relativity and outlines its experimental basis.
Vectors in flat spacetime
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 2 we show how vectors are treated in special relativity and how the dynamics of particles in flat spacetime can be obtained from the principle of least action.
Linear slot machines
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

We introduce tensors in Chapter 4, describing them as ‘linear slot machines’ into which you insert a number of vectors and their dual objects which are called 1-forms; the slot machine then spits out a number. Vectors and 1-forms are themselves both tensors, as is the energy-momentum tensor which we also introduce.
Finding a theory of gravitation
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 6, we introduce some of the key ideas behind general relativity, and in particular the equivalence principle that states that a person falling under gravity can’t feel their own weight. We describe this principle in both its weak and strong forms.
Parallel lines and the covariant derivative
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 7, we describe the notion of what it means for vectors to be parallel in curved spaces. We introduce connection coefficients which allow us to take derivatives of vectors in curved space.
Free fall and geodesics
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapters 8 and 9, we investigate geodesics: the paths that particles fall along in spacetime. They can be found by extremizing the path between two events using the calculus of variations, which is much simplified if length parametrization is used. Free massive particles follow timelike geodesics. Light travels along null geodesics.
Geodesic equations and connection coefficients
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

Geodesics are the paths that particles fall along in spacetime. In Chapter 9 we show that the connection coefficients may be extracted using a simple routine based on extremizing the action. The metric therefore leads directly to the connection coefficients.
Making measurements in relativity
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

Although we study curved space, we make physical observations locally, in the flat space of our experience. Thus, measurements in general relativity are carried out by observers in locally flat spacetime who carry around with them an orthonormal coordinate system. The method to translate between different frames of reference is described in Chapter 10. In particular, we introduce a vielbein, which is a matrix that allows the transformation between orthonormal frames and coordinate frames.
An introduction to cosmology
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

Having formulated a theory of gravity, we are now going to use it on the largest conceivable problem: the origin and fate of our Universe. In Chapter 15, we introduce the ideas behind the field of cosmology and in particular the cosmological principle, which says that the Universe is spatially homogeneous and isotropic. We also investigate two model universes (i) an empty universe (Universe 0) has flat spacetime described by a Minkowski metric field; (ii) the de Sitter model (Universe 1) is spatially flat, but has a spacetime with a constant curvature.
Robertson–Walker spaces
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 16 we investigate the possible geometries describing homogeneous, isotopic spacetimes with constant curvature. These Robertson-Walker spacetimes are all isotropic and homogeneous and are classified as closed (k = 1), flat (k = 0) and open (k=−1). They evolve as a function of time and we examine the effect they have on the measured redshift.
Newtonian orbits
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 20 we review the machinery of Newtonian gravity and the methods for determining the possible motions in a Newtonian gravitating potential. Orbits in a Newtonian potential are elliptical and do not precess. They can be understood by identifying an effective potential. The variable u = 1/r allows us to rewrite the problem and solve the equations of motion. In our analysis, we can also make use of conserved quantities: energy and angular momentum.
Black-hole singularities
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

Black holes likely contain a singularity in spacetime, which are understood using tools described in this chapter. The Schwarzschild black hole has a coordinate singularity located at r = 0, whose presence gives rise to closed trapped surfaces. It has a coordinate singularity at the Schwarzschild radius that can be removed by a change in coordinates. Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates remove the singularity for either incoming or outgoing rays, but not for both.
Charged and rotating black holes
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 29 we discuss the rich structures that result if we allow our black holes to carry charge or to rotate in space. Charged black holes are unlikely to be realized in Nature. They are described by the Reissner-Nordstöm coordinates and have three regions of interesting spacetime. The singularity at the centre of a charged black hole is repulsive. A traveller can use the wormhole created by the charge to tunnel into a new Universe. Rotating black holes are described by the Kerr geometry given in Boyer-Lindquist coordinates.
Classical curvature
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Part V of the book we take a closer look at the mathematics of differential geometry and curvature. These ideas will be put to work in the final part of the book. In Chapter 30, we look at how curved lines and surfaces can be described mathematically using classical differential calculus. Gaussian curvature allows the measurement of the intrinsic curvature of a two-dimensional surface, using measurements made entirely within that surface.
Geometry of the connection
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 34, we study the geometry of the connection that links up different parts of the manifold.
Cartan’s method
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

The material in the previous chapter enables us, in Chapter 36 to compute the curvature from a metric using an incredibly efficient procedure invented by Élie Cartan.
Duality and the volume form
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 37, we discuss how to deal with areas and volumes in coordinate-free language. The Hodge star operation allows us to map between forms and antisymmetric tensors built from vectors.
Fluids as dry water
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 39, we examine the physics of fluids, including their equations of motion and thermodynamics. Conservation laws are developed, and a relationship involving the divergence of the energy-momentum tensor is derived.
Lagrangian field theory
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 40 we approach the Einstein equations from the point of view of classical field theory where, using the idea of a Lagrangian density we can see how general relativity fits into the framework of field theory.
Charge conservation and the Bianchi identity
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

The ideas in the previous chapter are developed in Chapter 43 and we use differential geometry to understand the conservation of charge.
Weak gravitational fields
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapter 45 we examine gravitation in the domain where it is usually encountered: the limit of small field.
The properties of gravitons
Authors: Lancaster Tom , Blundell Stephen J.
Published: February 2025

In Chapters 47–49 we investigate how quantum mechanics might be linked with gravitation. This chapter focusses on the idea that gravity might be mediated by a spin-2 particle called the graviton.
Observing ICC Legal Culture on the Arms Trade
Authors: Hamilton Tomas
Published: February 2025

Chapter 6 considers how judges and lawyers of the International Criminal Court (ICC) view the arms trade, using interviews, participant observation, and empirical research to explore their perceptions. It argues that the absence of ICC arms trade cases is consistent with attitudes, beliefs, and commitments expressed by the Court’s judges and lawyers. The chapter finds two common framings of the possibility of an ICC arms trade case. In Frame 1, the arms trade is perceived from the perspective of Arms Trade Law, rather than criminal accountability. In Frame 2, pragmatic constraints are believed to make ICC investigations impossible. The chapter advocates for a shift in legal culture towards greater awareness of the arms trade, proposing changes in prosecutorial strategies and case selection. By analysing institutional biases and operational challenges, it reveals pathways for integrating arms trade issues into the ICC’s prosecutorial agenda, enhancing its effectiveness in combating impunity.
Investigating the Arms Trade in the Second Congo War
Authors: Hamilton Tomas
Published: February 2025

Chapter 8 presents a detailed case study of the Second Congo War from August 1998 to May 2003, characterized by atrocious crimes that were fuelled by the supply of small arms and light weapons. At the time, UN investigations identified responsible individuals and companies, yet no accountability measures ensued. The chapter therefore analyses the ineffectiveness of Arms Trade Law during this war, highlighting the failures of UN Security Council embargoes and national export controls to prevent arms flows. It details the pivotal role of arms brokers and transporters in supplying weapons to Non-State Armed Groups, directly impacting the dynamics of the conflict. The chapter raises the question whether the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s lack of action against arms brokers was a missed opportunity to use International Criminal Law to address the more structural, economic causes of the war.
Conclusion
Authors: Hamilton Tomas
Published: February 2025

Chapter 10 concludes that the question of whether arms traders have a place in the future of international criminal justice depends as much on who is imagined to be responsible for international crimes as it does on legal considerations. In recent times, international tribunals have paid limited attention to the structural causes of violence—the predilection for pursuing senior military and political leaders is pervasive. This suggests that the legal and institutional cultures of international criminal justice tend to view weapon supplies as ‘already regulated’ by Arms Trade Law, obscuring the potential for accountability through the rules on accomplice liability. In restricting the scope of prosecutions to certain perpetrator types, the practice of International Criminal Law obscures viable cases, fostering impunity for arms traders, notably the small-scale brokers who are often pivotal to the commission of atrocities. Ultimately, this impacts the doctrinal development of International Criminal Law, by narrowing the scope of application of its modes of liability. The book concludes with a call for broader engagement with the Rome Statute’s mandate; to take seriously its enforcement against the full range of actors who are responsible for international crime.
Prisoners of War and Military Honour, 1789–1918
Authors: 9780192698933  , Heinzen Jasper
Published: February 2025

Customs adapted from experience have always informed the conduct of armies towards each other and towards enemy populations. By the seventeenth century parole had become one such mainstay of the laws of war. The pawning of their personal honour enabled officers to purchase freedom of movement and other privileges when they were taken captive. Increasingly, other ranks and civilians claimed a right to parole, too. Based on material from close to thirty British, Dutch, French, German, and Swiss archives the book investigates how captives, statesmen, and humanitarians understood honour in the ‘long nineteenth century’, how they negotiated national differences, and why parole d’honneur continued to matter as a humanitarian resource into the First World War despite recurring infringements. It is argued that the dichotomy created by a substantial amount of scholarship between the ‘good’ codes of conduct prevalent in the eighteenth century and modern warfare calls for a re-assessment. In explaining the longevity of parole, this study sheds new light on a question which loomed large during the centenary of the First World War: why did international agreements like the Geneva and Hague Conventions that provided for the humane treatment of captives fail to stem the tide of total war?
Honour in a World of Camps
Authors: Heinzen Jasper
Published: February 2025

The colonial ‘small wars’ of the late nineteenth century saw experimentation with new forms of incarceration which confined hostile populations to discrete locales to cut insurgents off from their bases of support. Counter-intuitively, ‘concentration camps’ did not put an end to conditional releases on parole. During the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) captured Boer commandos held in the far reaches of the British empire continued to enjoy the privilege while their families died by the thousands in South African camps. The scrupulous adherence of the two belligerents to international law in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) restored European observers’ faith that parole could alleviate the need for mass incarceration. Despite the systemic violence prisoners of war and civilian internees experienced in the First World War (1914–1918), honour-based pledges that granted captives varying degrees of relief therefore continued to take place in different theatres of the conflagration. In fact, agreements from 1915 onwards for the transfer of long-suffering prisoners to the custody of neutral Switzerland and later the Netherlands generated a late flowering of the humanitarian ideals of parole. With the introduction of official guarantees to return escapees to neutral internment, the nationalization of military honour reached a natural point of culmination.
Epilogue
Authors: Heinzen Jasper
Published: February 2025

The First World War marked the terminus of parole’s humanitarian utility. The foregrounding of race and ideology in the military conflicts of the twentieth irrevocably altered the terms of enmity. All attempts since 1918 to resurrect the internment of prisoners of war in neutral countries have failed, as have mass paroles more generally. The Epilogue asks why that is on the basis of two case studies. The first concerns the conditional release of Dutch officers after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, the second the Japanese authorities’ extraction of a forced promise on their honour from Allied captives at Hong Kong and Singapore in 1942 that they would not try to escape. In reviewing the peculiarities of these cases, the Epilogue pulls together the main analytical threads of the book.
The Death Penalty from Ancient to Modern Times
Authors: Costanzo Mark
Published: February 2025

Killing those convicted of crimes is an ancient and enduring form of punishment. This chapter provides a brief historical recounting of the various crimes that were considered punishable by death and the ways in which executions were carried out. Torture and humiliation were often part of the process of capital punishment. Crimes that today would be considered misdemeanors, such as theft, were often punishable by death. Executions were often public affairs, spectacles attended by crowds of onlookers. Modern sensibilities require that the process of state-sponsored executions be as humane as possible and removed from public view. Thus sanitized, capital punishment becomes an abstract consideration in the eyes of the public.
Does the Death Penalty Deter Potential Murderers?
Authors: Costanzo Mark
Published: February 2025

One argument in support of the death penalty holds that this form of punishment deters others from committing heinous crimes. The idea of deterrence is explored in this chapter. Although deterrence is seemingly self-evident—if the potential punishment for a particular behavior is great, people are likely to avoid that behavior—research shows that capital punishment does not deter people from committing murder. As early as the 1840s, research showed the deterrence effect to be not only illusory, but actually counterproductive. Rates of crime often surge in the period surrounding an execution. More modern research that compares US states with and without the death penalty confirms the finding that the death penalty does not have a deterrent effect on crime.
Does the American Public Support the Death Penalty?
Authors: Costanzo Mark
Published: February 2025

Media reports on capital punishment still declare that the penalty of death enjoys the support of the American public. But although about 54% of Americans declare their support for capital punishment, this may not reflect the actual beliefs of the general public. This reliance by politicians and policymakers on solid public support for capital punishment has consequences. Those who are entrusted to make decisions about the value of the death penalty justify their decisions by proclaiming that they are carrying out the will of the people. Public opinion on the death penalty not only affects the actions of political candidates and office holders: It also affects the Supreme Court’s judgments concerning what does and does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Thus, it is vital to understand the dynamics of public opinion on capital punishment.
Is the Death Penalty Cheaper Than Life Imprisonment?
Authors: Costanzo Mark
Published: February 2025

Disagreements about the death penalty usually turn on issues of fairness, morality, and effectiveness. Although a purely economic analysis might be considered vulgar or irrelevant to discussion of a life-or-death issue, assertions about financial cost often emerge in debates about the value of the death penalty. Proponents of capital punishment sometimes claim that killing murderers saves money. Some Americans support capital punishment because they believe it is cheaper to execute a condemned prisoner than to imprison that person for the remainder of his or her natural life. However, the US system of capital punishment is shaped by concerns about fairness, consistency, morality, and the possibility of wrongful conviction. The appeals process is a long and costly one, and as a result, the death penalty is no longer swift or cheap.
Ethical Realism
Authors: Copp David
Published: February 2025

Ethical naturalism is a kind of ethical realism, as is nonnaturalism. The fundamental idea of ethical realism is captured by the “Parity Thesis” according to which ethical properties are simply one kind of property along with many others, including physical, psychological, mathematical, logical, and temporal properties, and, in that they are properties, they have the same basic metaphysical status as properties of these other kinds, whatever that is. The Parity Thesis makes corresponding claims about ethical facts, judgments, beliefs, and truths. Of course, on objectualist views, ethical properties are unlike other properties in that they are normative, but this is compatible with the Parity Thesis. The availability of minimalist views, including minimalism about truth, complicates matters. Also, some doctrines that are often thought to be entailed by ethical realism are not obvious implications of the Parity Thesis. The chapter discusses these issues. It aims to explicate ethical realism.
Naturalism I: Natural Properties
Authors: Copp David
Published: February 2025

This chapter proposes a criterion for identifying the natural properties, the “empirical criterion.” (It does not claim to provide an analysis of the property of being natural.) G. E. Moore made a similar proposal. Think of the natural world as the world around us, the world we learn about through experience. This chapter proposes that, to a first approximation, a property N is natural if and only if any synthetic proposition of the form N(α) that can be known could only be known empirically. A more technical formulation says that a property N is natural if and only if, roughly, there are propositions of the form N(α) that are both synthetic and possibly true, and no such proposition is strongly a priori. The chapter responds to four major objections. It considers and argues against several alternative characterizations of the natural, including Rosen’s “full grounding” characterization.
The Problem of Normativity
Authors: Copp David
Published: February 2025

The central challenge for metaethics is to explain the nature of robust normativity. This is the problem of normativity. Ethical naturalism faces the objection that it cannot explain the nature of normativity. (Ethical nonnaturalism also faces this objection.) This chapter explains how ethical naturalism can answer the objection. Earlier chapters argued that a satisfying answer would have to be a reductive metaphysical analysis of the property of being robustly normative. Among the theories discussed in Chapter 8, only Neo-Humean Subjectivism, Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism, and Pluralist-Teleology promise such analyses. This chapter makes these analyses explicit. Each proposes a proposition of the form, [for a property to be robustly normative is for it to have an analysans, one element of which is the property (or condition) of being (X, Y, Z)]. For the analysis to be reductive; the proper elements of the condition (X, Y, Z) must not be themselves (individually, essentially) normative.
The Morality of Contested Descriptions in Everyday and Institutional Settings
Authors: Robles Jessica S.
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines how contested descriptions in conversation accomplish moral positioning. Data include interactions in a range of face-to-face, mediated, private and public settings. The contested descriptions examined herein do a number of actions, such as complaining, explaining, proposing, expressing, asserting, defining, and informing. Their formulation as not anticipating contestation, but nevertheless being subsequently contested, is the basis for their comparison. The analysis shows how these forms of descriptions and their contestation produce moral judgments and array copresent and nonpresent parties with regard to good or bad evaluation. The argument is that descriptions designed to preclude examination can cause their own trouble where that description is not shared and may therefore become operable.
Moral Stance in Mothers’ Stories in Online Peer Advice-Giving
Authors: Lindholm Loukia
Published: February 2025

This chapter focuses on the moral landscapes that mothers construct and negotiate by telling personal and vicarious experience stories in peer-to-peer advice exchanges on an American online support forum for mothers. Using Ochs and Capps’s narrative approach as an analytical lens, this chapter examines how mothers use stories to make moral judgments and claims about themselves and others with respect to motherhood and mothering practices; explores the moral positions mothers as advice-givers take with their stories; and maps out the moral stance types that stories display on the moral stance continuum. It is found that mothers use stories as vehicles for moral arguments, essentially using them as guides to moral action when they give advice to peers. These stories also bring into relief specific themes of responsibility and accountability that emerge from attributions of praise and blame in the stories, constructing moral versions of the “good” or “bad” mother.
The Discursive Construction of Morality in Political Blame Games
Authors: Hansson Sten
Published: February 2025

Blame games—symbolic struggles over the blameworthiness or otherwise of some individual or collective actor—are ubiquitous in modern political life. When people talk or write about blame issues in political contexts, they may seek to construct competing representations of character traits of actors, the rights and obligations of actors, and the consequences of their actions. In this chapter, examples from conflict talk surrounding the highly controversial Brexit policy in the British press are analyzed to illustrate how to interpret both offensive and defensive rhetorical moves of political actors from the perspective of morality. It is demonstrated how struggles over blameworthiness can be analyzed in terms of these competing representations to reveal certain (often unexpressed) understandings of morality that opposing sides may be appealing to. The chapter concludes by outlining a set of normative underpinnings for further analysis of discursive blame games.
Morality, Metapragmatics, and Race
Authors: Bridges Judith , Vásquez Camilla
Published: February 2025

This chapter considers the discursive construction of morality in online discussions and debates over race-centered metapragmatic language. Focusing on three social media platforms associated with distinctive user demographics—Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr—the authors examine instances of the neologism “whitesplain,” which provokes moral discussions about language, race, and racism in the United States. Our qualitative analysis of several situated interactions shows how, by exploiting and exploring semantic and pragmatic meanings of whitesplain, social media users negotiate and make sense of the communicative dynamics between speakers of varying races, experiences, and viewpoints. Furthermore, the chapter highlights how metapragmatic disputes provide insights into the complex relationships between language and morality.
Introduction
Authors: Gidal Marc
Published: February 2025

The introductory chapter, titled “Introduction: ‘New York Brazilian Jazz,’ ” argues that Brazilian jazz in New York City has different cultural meanings than the music has in Brazil, comparing the author’s fieldwork in New York to studies based in Brazil. Brazilian musicians in the United States try to assimilate musically and culturally in order to build careers in the jazz industry; whereas scholars of jazz and Brazilian jazz in Brazil, where the latter is called “instrumental music,” have emphasized Brazilian nationalist responses to historical tensions in US-Brazil relations and Brazilian anxieties about US cultural imperialism. The introduction defines Brazilian jazz, situates its place in New York’s jazz industry, and summarizes the goals and work of the internationally diverse, professional musicians who played the music between 2000 and 2020. After summarizing the book chapters, it concludes with the author’s research methods, positionality, and subjectivity.
“Paying Dues” and “Carrying Flags”
Authors: Gidal Marc
Published: February 2025

Chapter 1, “ ‘Paying Dues’ and ‘Carrying Flags’: Demographic Diversity and Inequities among Musicians,” explains that systemic racism, sexism, and classism caused imbalanced demographic diversity among professional musicians who played Brazilian jazz in New York City between 2000 and 2020. An original dataset of 173 musicians, their instruments, and social categories (nationality, race, and gender) is compared to published data about Brazilian immigrants in the United States and jazz musicians in New York. Approximately 70 percent are male and 70 percent are white; half are Brazilians, a quarter are US-born Americans, and the rest immigrated from Japan, Israel, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere in South America. It compares racial categories, ideologies, and inequities in Brazil and the United States, and their impact on transnational migrants. It relates these social categories to social dynamics among musicians and potential critiques of exploitative cultural appropriation.
Samba Jazz at Carnegie Hall
Authors: Gidal Marc
Published: February 2025

Chapter 4, “Samba Jazz at Carnegie Hall: Genre Fusion in Instrumental Music,” explains how professional musicians who played Brazilian jazz in New York City between 2000 and 2020 created and performed improvised, up-tempo, instrumental music that is related to bossa nova. After considering musical fusion as its own genre in addition to a combination of stylistic ingredients, the chapter describes the practices and compositions of influential New Yorkers. The instrumentation and harmony of jazz is prevalent. Drummers transferred the rhythms, timbres, and roles of samba percussion to the drum set in ways that align with conventional practices of jazz drumming. Musicians commingle swing feels (patterned uneven micro-durations of notes) of samba and jazz. The chapter also utilizes instructional method books written by several local musicians.
Exile, the Jewish Mystical Tradition, and the Sephardi Diaspora
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines Kabbalistic teachings justifying diaspora, particularly those of the Zohar, which was written in reconquered Christian Spain. It then considers responses of Spanish Jews to their new exile, following the expulsion of 1492. The increasing persecutions of Jews in Christian Spain reinforced their feeling that they were living in exile. The most significant response to this development was that of the kabbalists, who, in the Zohar, deemed exile the fated condition of Israel and the Shekhinah together. The power of this idea was fully realized only when Spanish Jews were expelled in 1492, creating a double exile, both from the Holy Land and from Sepharad. Compelled to make sense of this new catastrophe, some found hope in the insistence that God protects Israel in all her wanderings, always providing persecuted Jews with new, often superior diaspora homes. Others, like Spinoza, eschewed Jewish explanations altogether, preferring more universalistic solutions.
The Great Theorizer of Diaspora
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the defense of diaspora offered by one of its most significant theorizers, Rabbi Judah Loew (ca. 1525–1609), known as the Maharal of Prague. Drawing on medieval science and philosophy, the Maharal observes that all things exist in their “natural” place, for something would be destroyed in a place unnatural to it. Since Jews have lived so long in exile without being destroyed, this must mean that exile is the Jews’ natural place. At the same time, since Jews did not survive in the Holy Land, the Land must be unnatural for Jews, at least until the arrival of the messiah. On this foundation, Maharal goes in several surprising directions, virtually turning on its head the traditional view of the relationship of Jews with the Holy Land and the diaspora.
Haskalah, Reform, and Early Zionism
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: February 2025

This chapter explores Jewish reflections on diaspora in the context of a quickly changing Jewish world, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At that time, Enlightenment offered Jews unprecedented opportunities. Many moved to the great cities of Europe, rising to the cultured middle class with surprising swiftness. These developments led many Jews to deny their particularities. Reformers instituted changes in Jewish liturgy, denying the hope of messianic redemption because redemption could be realized where they were. Later in the same century, antisemitic outbursts and emerging, modern nation-states led to a new, secular ideology—Zionism—which insisted that a solution to the Jewish problem required mass relocation of Jews to Palestine. Some Zionists believed Jewish life in diaspora was untenable, but others insisted that Zion and diaspora could only grow together. And there were many who continued to defend Jewish life in diaspora, including most religious Jews, along with socialists and others.
Chapter the Second.
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: February 2025

The second chapter of ERCE aims to show, against Hume, that “Reason, not fancy [i.e., the imagination] and ‘custom’ leads us to the knowledge” of the central principle (now often called Shepherd’s “Causal Principle”) that “everything which begins to exist must have a Cause.” The chapter provides an argument in defense of that principle and then a further argument from it to the crucial principle (now often called Shepherd’s “Causal Likeness Principle”) that “similar causes must necessarily produce similar effects.” It goes on to describes the source of the idea of necessary connection and outlines her own positive theory of relation of cause and effect. Next, it provides Shepherd’s own positive definitions of ‘cause’, ‘necessary connexion’, and ‘power’, and raises objections to Hume’s definitions of cause’. Finally, it seeks to establish her “Uniformity Principle”: “Nature cannot be supposed to alter her Course without a contradiction in terms.”
Chapter the Third.
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: February 2025

The third chapter of ERCE seeks to show, against Hume, that “Custom and Habit alone are not our guides; but chiefly reason, for the regulation of our expectations in ordinary life.” This requires explaining why we expect apparently similar objects to behave similarly. The solution to this practical problem has two parts. First, Shepherd argues, we can demonstrate from the Causal Likeness Principle that if two apparently similar objects were produced entirely by the union of exactly similar contributing causes, then those objects are exactly similar and hence will have exactly similar effects. Secondly, by investigating the observable similarities of those contributing causes, and the observable similarities of their contributing causes, and so on, we can render it highly probable that the objects were in fact produced by exactly similar causes and so will have exactly similar effects.
Chapter the Fourth.
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: February 2025

The fourth chapter of ERCE discusses Thomas Brown’s Observations on the Nature and Tendency of the Doctrine of Mr. Hume, concerning the Relation of Cause and Effect. First, it disputes Brown’s Humean definition of ‘cause’ as requiring temporal succession. Second, it discusses and assesses each of the five Humean propositions about the epistemology of the relation of cause and effect that provide a central focus of Brown’s book. Third, it argues, against Brown, that Hume’s account of the origin of the idea of “power” in the operation of custom rather than reason cannot avoid atheistic implications. Furthermore, it concludes, Brown’s own conception of the idea of “power,” as the consequence of an unavoidable instinctive belief whose truth cannot be established by reason, is fundamentally no better than Hume’s in this respect.
Sharing Personal Memories on Social Media
Authors: Stone Charles B. , Dockery Shayla , Vasquez Angelina N.
Published: February 2025

Social media has become a powerful and efficient means by which individuals share their personal memories with friends, family, and the world at large. Despite this, researchers are only beginning to examine the motives and mnemonic consequences associated with sharing personal experiences via social media—for both the producer (i.e., the person posting the material) and the consumer (i.e., the individual viewing the material). The aim of the present chapter is threefold: (1) review the state-of-the-art research examining the psychological motives and mnemonic consequences associated with producing or sharing content on social media, (2) present the latest research from a lab and colleagues extending these lines of research, and (3) discuss methodological considerations associated with conducting social media research in terms of attrition rates, ecological validity and the evolving nature of social media itself, and present avenues for future research.
Varieties of Offloading Memory
Authors: Risko Evan F. , Kelly Megan O. , Lu Xinyi , Pereira April E.
Published: February 2025

For many, the Internet functions as a kind of limitless external memory store. Like the variety of external artifacts available to aid remembering, how we use them to distribute our memory can take a variety of forms. This chapter introduces a framework for situating these different uses and examines the cognitive consequences in the context of extant research on cognitive offloading. This framework provides a useful means of organizing the various ways external memory stores are integrated into our day-to-day remembering. In addition, it demonstrates that how an external memory store is used will alter the impact it has on cognition and performance. Last, the chapter explores the implications that these different uses of external memory stores might have for the design of tools to aid remembering and the unique features of using the Internet as an external memory store.
Fake History
Authors: Evans Jennifer V. , Rigato Brandon
Published: February 2025

This chapter analyzes two large Twitter data sets from the days leading up to and out of the Capitol riot for the way users draw on historical analogies to frame their outrage at the 2020 election. Analogies to historical fascism and communism represent ways in which everyday people as well as political leaders sought to make sense of the Trump presidency. Their repetition in the frenetic months of December and January, combined with the intensity of emotions they encapsulated and propelled along, coalesced into distinct media templates that buoyed the online crowd on both ends of the political spectrum. Historical analogies served a vital role in the online and offline legacy of the Capitol riot.
Exploring Online Social Interactions in the Remaking of Memory
Authors: Rajaram Suparna
Published: February 2025

The human cognitive system seeks efficiency, and the use of memory is no exception in this regard. But this efficiency also comes at a cost. As information becomes widely available, easily accessible, and generally unfiltered—as is increasingly the case with the use of the Internet and social media—these Internet properties, combined with certain properties of memory, can affect how we process information and form memories. Central to this thesis is also the cognitive-experimental evidence that experiences are routinely shared and remembered with others, and this social process alters our memories, sometimes making them more erroneous. With our increasing access to vast networks of social connections on the Internet and social media, properties of memory and facets of the Internet discussed here raise questions for future research about what we can predict and test about memory-making in the age of the Internet and social media.
When Memories Become Data
Authors: Smit Rik
Published: February 2025

This chapter sets an agenda for the study of the platformization of memory. It argues that platforms—which are defined simultaneously as business models and technological infrastructures—shape memory work and, increasingly, automatically remember for us. This occurs through the rendition of memories into data, which are then transformed and represented to users as memories. An argument is made that, in the process of platformization, platform users come to depend on not only platforms to keep their autobiographical memories (storage), but also active selection, retrieval, and representation of such memories (process). This dependence further contributes to the commercialization and industrialization of memory.
Hybrid Methodologies for Studying Social and Cultural Memory in the Postdigital Age
Authors: Merrill Samuel
Published: February 2025

This chapter highlights the need for “hybrid methodologies” suited to the study of social and cultural memory in a postdigital age characterized by the continuing pervasiveness of the internet and social media. Contextualized by an account of the continuing deficit of explicit discussions of memory research methods within the social sciences and humanities and contrasted against references to “hybridized methods” therein, it is suggested that it is not sufficient to merely combine methods to understand memory’s new digital extensions. Rather, the ontological hybridity of memory that these extensions create is better grasped by applying “hybrid methodologies.” To aid the elaboration of such methodologies, the chapter points out several trajectories of social and cultural memory’s hybridity (technological, spatial, temporal, and agentic). Toward the same goal, the chapter then outlines a series of hybrid methodological impulses and procedures related to embracing complexity and messiness, following mnemonic objects, and enrolling computational collaborators.