bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Investment cost
Authors: Schmidt Oliver , Staffell Iain
Published: November 2023

The cost of energy storage fell rapidly in the past, but to what extent will these reductions continue in the future? This chapter introduces an objective method to answer this question by applying experience curves, which model a technology’s price as a function of how much of it has been built. It derives experience curves for electricity storage technologies using the latest cost and deployment data. It then projects future investment costs based on market growth models and explores potential barriers and limitations to the cost reduction potential of each technology, including raw materials costs, timescales, and the amount of financial capital required. The discussion considers the implications of these findings and critiques the experience curve method in comparison to alternatives. A worked example tied to www.EnergyStorage.ninja> allows readers to explore how experience rates and market growth rates will impact future investment costs for any storage technology.
Lifetime cost
Authors: Schmidt Oliver , Staffell Iain
Published: November 2023

Economic assessment of energy storage must be based on the lifetime cost of energy or power delivered, factoring in all parameters for technology cost, performance, and the service it provides. This chapter develops a comprehensive lifetime cost methodology for electricity storage technologies and projects future levelized costs using insights from the experience curve analyses in Chapter 4. It shows how to account for parameter uncertainty and considers various sensitivities around discount rate, electricity purchase price, and technology performance. It brings these elements together to chart the ‘competitive landscape’ for energy storage, a visual representation of which technologies will be able to provide different services at lowest cost, now and in the future. A worked example tied to www.EnergyStorage.ninja allows readers to explore the impact of custom cost, performance, and application parameters on the lifetime cost of the respective technology.
Background Independence in Classical and Quantum Gravity
Authors: Read James
Published: November 2023

‘Background independence’ is sometimes claimed to be the defining characteristic of general relativity, and an essential feature of any candidate quantum extension. This book appraises numerous definitions of background independence, before assessing whether various spacetime theories—both classical and quantum—manifest this quality. The book’s aims are threefold: (i) to clarify the best possible understanding of background independence; (ii) to assess the extent to which, at the level of classical spacetime theories, background independence is characteristic of general relativity alone; and (iii) to assess whether this quality is in fact manifest in some of our best candidate quantum gravity theories.
Introduction
Authors: Read James
Published: November 2023

‘Background independence’ is sometimes claimed to be the defining characteristic of general relativity, and an essential feature of any candidate quantum extension. In this introductory chapter, I recall briefly the origins of this notion, which, roughly speaking, is supposed to capture the idea that there is no fixed, non-dynamical geometrical structure in a given spacetime theory (paradigmatically, general relativity). Making such a notion precise is the purpose of this book: here, I sketch what's to come in later chapters of the book in the context of both classical and quantum theories of gravity.
Classical Background Independence
Authors: Read James
Published: November 2023

This chapter introduces the concepts of general covariance, diffeomorphism invariance, and background independence, and distinguishes between all three. It then proceeds to consider different possible definitions of background independence, with a particular focus on (a) the existence of certain kinds of ‘fixed’ fields in the formalism of a physical theory; (b) the presence of Andersonian ‘absolute objects’ in a theory; (c) definitions in terms of variational principles; and (d) definitions which involve appropriate ‘matching’ of geometrical and physical degrees of freedom in a theory. This chapter, therefore, develops the toolkit which will be used to assess the background independence of various physical theories in later chapters.
Quantum Theories of Spacetime
Authors: Read James
Published: November 2023

This chapter first modifies the definitions of background independence presented in previous chapters in order to be applicable to quantum theories of spacetime. It then assesses whether certain important such theories—in particular, perturbative string theories, theories related by holographic dualities, and loop quantum gravity—satisfy these definitions. Its aim in doing so is (in part) to clarify ongoing debates in the study of quantum theories of gravity as to which such theories truly are background independence, and which are not: the verdict is that while (a) loop quantum gravity does indeed come out as background independent on most accounts, (b) the case of perturbative string theory is highly sensitive to the definition of background independence in play, arguably making it much too quick to rule out this approach on the basis of its (supposed) lack of background independence.
Feminism Confronts AI
Authors: Wajcman Judy , Young Erin
Published: November 2023

This essay locates and unveils workforce injustices in key figures and analyses, breaking down the reasons why women are still under-represented. Wajcman and Young offer nuanced insight into how the digital gender divide manifests globally, not only in relation to access to technology but in learning and skills. They turn their attention to gendered divisions in different tech roles, how gender has shaped tech development, the history of feminist responses to digitalisation, and the origins and evolution of workforce divisions. They give crucial insight into the gender-specific impacts of future automation that are grounded in an understanding of current gendered divisions in the labour market. Ultimately, they argue that diversifying the workforce is not merely a matter of increasing the number of women and people from marginalised groups, but of achieving an upheaval in the culture and politics of tech companies.
From ELIZA to Alexa
Authors: Rhee Jennifer
Published: November 2023

Rhee traces the history of caring Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to explicate how these technologies replicate historic gendered and racialised dynamics associated with care labour. From its early imagining in Turing’s text, Rhee argues, AI has been entangled with care labour, forms of labour historically performed by women. Taking Turing’s influential writing as a starting point, Rhee examines the ongoing association between AI, care labour, and care labour’s gendered and racialised histories. Through her discussion of AI assistants, Rhee argues that it is not care labour that is foundational to AI and its inscriptions of humanness, but the devaluation of care labour and of those who are associated with the important work of caring for others. Rhee concludes with an analysis of artistic works that explore the possibilities that emerge from acknowledging the centrality of care labour’s devaluation to the history and present of AI.
Physiognomy in the Age of AI
Authors: y Arcas Blaise Agüera , Mitchell Margaret , Todorov Alexander
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines the reinvention of historical forms of pseudoscience, such as physiognomy and phrenology, through artificial intelligence-enabled facial recognition. The scientifically racist misuse of machine learning is illustrated through analyses of two examples. In the first case, Agüera y Arcas, Mitchell, and Todorov trace the history of pseudoscientific practices that attempted to discern criminality from the face, and examine how Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang’s deep neutral network similarly relies on erroneous and essentialist ideas about the ‘criminal face’. They then turn to the second example, showing how Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang’s DNN (deep neural network) does not reveal people’s sexual orientations, but rather exposes social signals and stereotypes about gender identity and sexuality. Agüera y Arcas, Mitchell, and Todorov conclude using machine learning to infer individual and presumed essential traits such as criminality and sexuality is a pseudoscientific practice, and can perpetuate forms of injustice under the guise of scientific objectivity.
The Cruel Optimism of Technological Dreams
Authors: Bassett Caroline
Published: November 2023

Bassett argues that artificial intelligence (AI) is destined to disappoint and destabilise because it fosters what Lauren Berlant called ‘cruel optimism’, where the very thing that promises to make your life better is in fact the obstacle to happiness. Bassett deconstructs AI into a ‘cluster’ of partial promises that are only executed on behalf of the select few. Drawing on Berlant, Bassett views societal desires and attachments to AI as giving meaning, sense, and continuity to human endeavour, and therefore as both necessary and harmful. Bassett compels us to consider how transhumanists and substantial media reporting present the possibility of artificial general intelligence as the final stage in orthogenetic evolution. These broader aspirations are not merely communicated to the public, but sold to us as ‘new’, as the threshold of an unrealisable future kept on hold by avoidable delays.
Introduction
Authors: Bulley Dan
Published: November 2023

The introduction makes the case for taking hospitality seriously as a primary way in which states and societies understand and make sense of their practices of immigration ethics. The chapter introduces hospitality and hostile environments by identifying their importance in a range of immigration contexts. It proposes to explore hospitality as a relational ethics, a critical mode of reflecting upon who ‘we’ are, how we create this ‘we’, and how ‘we’ then relate to others. The introduction then summarises the methods involved in a relational approach to the ethics of immigration, drawing on the feminist theory of Margaret Walker, and outlining the key questions that will guide the analysis. Finally, it concludes with a summary of the book’s structure and contents.
Hospitality as a Relational Ethics
Authors: Bulley Dan
Published: November 2023

The chapter begins by discussing the difficulties of defining hospitality in abstract terms, before suggesting a basic, structural definition to guide the book’s exploration of immigration ethics. Hospitality is characterised as a concrete expression of a society’s ethos and values, operating through spatial and emotional practices in which power is exercised to include and exclude. The second section situates this understanding of hospitality in a tradition of ‘relational ethics’. Emerging from poststructuralist, postcolonial, and particularly feminist approaches to moral theorising, it outlines how such a relational ethics can be interpreted as opposed to a normative or moralistic account of ethics. Finally, the third section unpacks the core components of any practice of hospitality—the use of space, the exercise of power, and the policing of emotions. This is a crucial precursor to subsequent chapters that explore these elements in particular immigration contexts.
Between Borders
Authors: Bulley Dan
Published: November 2023

While external borders determine which immigrants get in and internal borders determine their sense of belonging, this chapter explores those spaces in-between the two: interstitial spaces between sovereign jurisdictions. The discussion begins by exploring how these spaces are ignored in most immigration ethics literature, despite their rising prevalence. The chapter then moves on to outline different types of interstitial space, including planned camps, informal squats, and EU hotspots. These operate through practices of hospitality that separate immigrants and determine their level of welcome, care and harassment, as illustrated in Calais (France) and Azraq (Jordan). The final section argues that this demonstrates a moral mapping where responsibility is repeatedly deferred based in an ethos of ambivalent, racialised division.
Bach's Art of Fugue and Musical Offering
Authors: Dirst Matthew
Published: November 2023

Bach’s Art of Fugue and Musical Offering is the first comprehensive study of two closely related masterworks of the late Baroque fugal style. The initial volume in a series of American Bach Society Guides produced in collaboration with Oxford University Press, it unpacks these famously cerebral collections as endlessly fascinating material for study and play. Intended for a broad readership, this book also summarizes for practitioners and enthusiasts a considerable body of knowledge about this music. Initial chapters explain Bach’s idiosyncratic musical language while reviewing how both projects took shape during his final decade, as he reoriented his creative energies around capstone works of various kinds. The most systematic of these, the Art of Fugue and Musical Offering reflect his lifelong fascination with counterpoint, as demonstrated in elaborate series of fugues and canons in both and in an unusually intricate trio sonata in the latter. Later chapters provide commentary on individual movements and groups of pieces and on the historical reception of this music, including its impact on other disciplines. Recurring themes include Bach’s methodical exploration of contrapuntal types and techniques, his embrace of musical games of various sorts, and his creative assimilation of diverse musical styles.
From One, Many
Authors: Dirst Matthew
Published: November 2023

Chapter 3 focuses on Bach’s diligent research, during composition of the Art of Fugue and Musical Offering, into his thematic material’s potential for transformation, combination, and adornment. Distinct yet related single themes, one of them endlessly adaptable and the other somewhat immutable, drive both works. The first seven contrapuncti in the Art of Fugue and the two ricercari and the five Canones diversi in Musical Offering, all discussed sequentially in this chapter, provide the clearest evidence of a steady progression in each collection from relatively straightforward to more complex kinds of counterpoint. Bach thereby assimilated variation principle into the artifice-laden world of the contrapuntal cycle.
Musical Gaming
Authors: Dirst Matthew
Published: November 2023

Chapter 4 situates both collections within a culture of musical gaming, as practiced in Bach’s day at the composing desk and at the keyboard. Distinct types of notation are taken up first, since they commonly telegraphed during the Baroque age whether a keyboard work was intended to be read straight from the page or studied and perhaps transcribed first. For rigorously contrapuntal music, circles of initiates and devotees also embraced arcane rubrics, inscriptions, and the potential for meaning and allusion. Bach tailored these traditions to his own ends in the Art of Fugue and Musical Offering by engaging practitioners dialectically, in games that range from imitative puzzles to compulsory improvisation. This chapter thus highlights particular moments in the more challenging canons, the sonata, and the compound and mirror fugues.
Elusive Ideals
Authors: Dirst Matthew
Published: November 2023

Chapter 6 mediates fundamental problems in both works that continue to engage amateurs and professionals alike. The unfinished fugue long associated with the Art of Fugue, irrespective of the composer’s intentions for it, illustrates with unusual clarity the challenge of incompleteness in art, with its attendant obligation towards either guardianship or intervention. Lingering questions about the proper constitution and performance of either collection are also taken up here, with suggestions informed by the practice of Bach’s day but not restricted by it. Certain questions are left purposefully unanswered; instead, a range of options are proposed for further study, performance, and appreciation of Bach’s Art of Fugue and Musical Offering.
Order Flow, Liquidity, and Security Price Dynamics
Authors: Foucault Thierry , Pagano Marco , Röell Ailsa
Published: November 2023

This chapter provides a framework for understanding intraday stock price variations. It first sets out the implications of the Efficient Market Hypothesis for price dynamics, and then builds on these insights to explore settings in which prices react to the order flow. The chapter considers the primary factors that determine both the response of prices to the order flow and the bid-ask spread: adverse selection, order processing costs, dealers’ market power, and dealers’ inventory holding costs. Each of these factors is shown to be associated with a different dynamic response of prices to the order flow. This lays the groundwork both for the econometric analysis of the price impact of orders and for a more detailed analysis of market design issues.
Financial Stability and Market Liquidity
Authors: Foucault Thierry , Pagano Marco , Röell Ailsa
Published: November 2023

This chapter shows that the ability of market makers and arbitrageurs to provide market liquidity and prevent persistent mispricing hinges on their access to credit, hence on “funding liquidity.” But because the availability of “funding liquidity” may itself be affected by dislocations in asset prices, this mutual interaction between market and funding liquidity may generate a perverse feedback loop, where a large flow of sell orders placed by noise traders may eventually precipitate extreme mispricing. The feedback loop can threaten the stability of financial markets, not just by potentially triggering large asset price changes, but also by simultaneously impairing the balance sheets of market makers and of banks lending to them. These destabilizing effects can propagate across intermediaries via their interlocking balance sheets. Thus this chapter links market liquidity not only to funding liquidity, but also to the notion of “systemic risk,” i.e., the risk that swings in asset prices and in market liquidity may result in a financial crisis. The chapter closes with a section that highlights that the balance sheets of financial intermediaries matter for market liquidity not only because they may amplify and transmit asset price shocks, but also because doubts about the ability of intermediaries to fulfill their obligations can generate adverse selection in the markets where they operate, impairing market liquidity and representing an additional threat to systemic stability.
From Perception to Pleasure
Authors: Zatorre Robert
Published: November 2023

How does perception of abstract tonal patterns—music—lead to the pleasure we experience from these sounds? The answer presented in this book is that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable processing of sound patterns and subcortical circuits responsible for reward and valuation. The auditory cortex and its ventral-stream connections encode acoustical features and their relationships, maintain them in working memory, and form internal representations of statistical patterns from which predictions are made about how sound patterns evolve in time. Disruption of this pathway leads to amusia. The auditory dorsal stream allows for sensory-motor transformations, music production, and metrical representation, leading to predictions of when events will occur. These predictive processes play a central role in creating expectancies about musical events that are transmitted to the dopaminergic reward system, where hedonic responses are generated according to how well an event fits with predictions. These responses are linked to the balance between predictability and surprise in musical patterns. Disruption of interactions between perceptual and reward systems leads to musical anhedonia. Engagement of the reward system is also related to movement and vocal cues, social factors, musical preference, and emotion regulation.
Early Sound Processing
Authors: Zatorre Robert
Published: November 2023

The focus here is on the basic anatomy and physiology of the auditory cortex, and its inputs and outputs. Predictive coding mechanisms emerge already at early levels of processing in the interactions between auditory subcortical nuclei and cortex. The brainstem nuclei and auditory cortical fields are organized hierarchically such that each region sends and receives inputs to the next level. Mismatch responses emerge at early levels and reflect predictive mechanisms. The functional properties of auditory cortex especially important for musical processing include periodicity coding, which is related to the representation of pitch. Auditory cortical responses can be characterized in terms of sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation, allowing efficient encoding of complex sound patterns. Auditory cortical systems are also important for segregating multiple overlapping sounds, another function essential for music. Musical imagery is linked to the activation of auditory cortical circuits. Dysfunction of this circuitry can lead to auditory hallucinations.
Make No Prisoners
Authors: Conrath Ryan
Published: November 2023

This chapter introduces a discussion of “the expanded cut,” of film editing in the expanded field, through an engagement with Steve McQueen’s gallery exhibition practice. It looks at three of the artist’s early works—Bear (1993), Five Easy Pieces (1995), and Just Above My Head (1997)—as they were displayed together in 2013 on a tripartite projection “column” in the gallery. This exhibition mode enables a form of spatial montage where the edges of two given planes of projection operate as “cuts,” at once uniting and separating the three films as they unfold across this column. Lending this spatial montage its dynamism, in part, are viewers themselves, whose physical movement through space at any given moment determines the shape of the larger montage. This chapter argues that McQueen’s installation establishes a relational poetics of montage that emerges when viewers opt into an active relationship to the column itself, at once as a site of projection and as an aspect of the gallery’s architecture. At the same time, relation unfolds here at the level of the filmed bodies themselves, whose combustive interaction across this structure defies the self-containment of otherwise distinct shots and films. Through a sustained treatment of McQueen’s tripartite projection structure and a close analysis of the artist’s feature film Hunger, this chapter explores the expanded cut as an agent of conjunction and disjunction, as it acts toward a porousness of body, film, and world.
The Ecological Cut
Authors: Conrath Ryan
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines the role of montage in experimental films about place. Specifically, it discusses the function of the cut as an ecological technology: the ecological cut. Here, the cut is understood as an indispensable technique for mediating relationship between beings and their environment, or more broadly between human beings and the nonhuman world. This chapter works in part as a survey of the historical intersections (explicit and implicit) between environmentalism and the cinematic avant-garde, turning on a polemic aimed at the overrepresentation of the long take in the cinematic avant-garde’s environmental discourse. Against this privileging of the long take as a signifier of ecological consciousness or natural presence, the ecological cut attests to the fact that in an era of rapid environmental change, when humanity’s sense of dominion over the earth remains largely unchecked, the space between images becomes an indispensable tool for taking stock of and radically modifying our troubled relationship to the planet. To flesh out this idea, the chapter turns to recent works in contemporary avant-garde landscape cinema, including films by Daïchi Saïto, Peter Bo Rappmund, and Ja’Tovia Gary.
Automating Empathy
Authors: McStay Andrew
Published: November 2023

Chapter 1 sets the scene for content to follow. Opening with a vignette it introduces the key themes of the book, defines recurrent terminology, frames industrial interest, and makes the case of why it is sensible to connect the words ‘empathy’ and ‘technology’. It also identifies the motivating impulse of the book: to understand how quality and quantity interact and the consequences of this. The ‘how’ is found to be through the principle of simulation that since the earliest suggestion of artificial intelligence (AI) has been core to it. Chapter 1 also clarifies choice of the word ‘empathy’, especially given existing terminology that refers to use of biometrics to infer emotion and other subjective states. This is clarified in reference to schools of empathy scholarship, and the word is useful to diagnose attempts to understand first-person perspectives.
Hyperreal Emotion
Authors: McStay Andrew
Published: November 2023

Chapter 2 introduces key historical and critical concerns about automated empathy, especially regarding the artifice and imposition of a narrow understanding of emotional life. The chapter clusters concern under two headings: ‘unnatural mediation’ and ‘mental integrity’. The first is shown to relate to over-simplicity, problems in method, and what drawing on media philosophy is phrased as a ‘hyperreal’ account of emotion. The chapter outlines how digital phenotyping and debatable theories of emotional life all impact on people through normalisation of a highly limited framing of emotion, especially given opaque and demographically nonrepresentative data sets already shown to have racist properties due to poor curation. The chapter also sets out more fundamental concerns by drawing on neuroethics and sensitivity of individual and collective mental states, privacy, rights to cognitive freedom, mental security, and need to protect first-person perspective and the life world of individuals and groups.
Assessing the Physiognomic Critique
Authors: McStay Andrew
Published: November 2023

This chapter addresses the foremost criticism of emotion recognition technologies: that it is a modern form of physiognomy, or the practice of assessing a person’s character or personality from their outer appearance. Links with physiognomy are made in quality press coverage and critical technology studies, but the question for this chapter is whether the criticism correct. Does it follow that because emotional AI is akin to physiognomy in method, that emotional AI is also racist? To explore this, the chapter assesses early physiognomy as well as later and less-cited physiognomists. The chapter answers its original question but also finds physiognomy to be highly influential on several unexpected fields, including empathy itself, phenomenology, and critical theory. It also finds later physiognomy to be less reductive, leading it to tally with emergent and dynamic conceptions of automated empathy that admit of personal and contextual factors when making judgements about people.
Hybrid Ethics
Authors: McStay Andrew
Published: November 2023

This chapter expands upon the ethical orientation of Automating Empathy. It observes that for many people modern life is symbiotic with technologies that function by means of networks and data about intimate aspects of human life. It proposes ‘hybrid ethics’ as a means of considering the terms of connectivity with sociotechnical systems. With data ethics seen as less a matter of the right to be alone than interest in the terms of connectivity with systems and organisations, there is scope for controversy. The chapter accounts for this by discussing surveillance realism, overinterest in technology and usability, acceptance of dominance by major technology platforms, and seduction by marketing rhetoric. The hybrid view is argued to be mindful of these, instead purporting to rearrange and imagine alternative possibilities. The chapter progresses to simplify the chapter’s philosophically normative view for applied usage. This distils to questions of what sorts of technologies do people want to live with, on what terms, how do they affect the existing order of things, at what cost do the benefits of given technologies come, and how can the relationship be better?
Positive Education
Authors: McStay Andrew
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines automated empathy in education. It reviews the role of empathy in education in context of technological approaches to social and emotional learning. Interest in technology and data analytics is accounted for in relation to policy appetite for systems and modes of analysing student performance. The chapter observes that these interests have created conditions where use of emotion, intention, and attention-based technologies in physical and online classrooms is acceptable in service of understanding and optimising education. With particular attention to ‘General Comment 25’, the 2021 update to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the chapter progresses to assess automated empathy in education in relation to UNCRC priorities of rights to education and protection of rights such as privacy.
Waveforms of Human Intention
Authors: McStay Andrew
Published: November 2023

This chapter considers the development of consumer-level neurotechnologies and brain-computer interfaces. It reviews the history, hopes and politics of these technologies, and early pre-Web belief that these technologies would be merged with the Internet. It also situates early systematic speculation in relation to potentials of neuroscience today, finding scope for profiling of prethought. Such potentials are then situated in context of corporate interests in these technologies, especially those of Meta and Elon Musk’s Neuralink. While raising privacy and freedom of thought concerns, this surveillance is posited as neurophenomenological. This means that it encompasses body and brain materiality, also providing scope to profile, interact with, and anticipate first-person experience. This is argued to raise profound questions about determination and relationships with technologies, each other, companies, and governments.
Uncertainty for Good, Inverting Automated Empathy
Authors: McStay Andrew
Published: November 2023

This chapter assesses whether technologies that simulate empathy may do social good. It argues that automated empathy, how people interact with it, and to an extent its governance, needs to be inverted. Its argument is humanities-based, seeing value in the social life of data. The chapter claims that what good looks like for empathic systems is where people can engage with their bodies and communications to facilitate novel forms of reflection, learning, creativity, and expression. To address data protection, it takes its cue from philosophies of play. These refute the idea that play is predicated on openness and absence of rules, but the opposite: play as a safe setting for creative endeavour, experimentation, expression, strengthening, and learning. The same is argued for automated and simulated empathy.
Historical Background
Authors: Jobani Yuval
Published: November 2023

In the vision and the imagination of early twentieth-century Hebrew culture, the return of Jews to the motherland was associated with their return to nature. However, the meaning and the implications of that return to nature were the subject of heated debate among the Jewish pioneers. The chapter demonstrates that Gordon wrote Man and Nature as a critical response to Life and Nature by Yehuda Metmann, the founder of the Hebrew Gymnasium. Gordon came out against Metmann’s educational vision, which called for gaining control of nature in the Land of Israel by means of rigorous scientific investigation, in the spirit of the Baconian slogan “knowledge is power.” Gordon perceives the exploitation of nature as a product of the Enlightenment’s demystification of, and alienation from, nature. Instead of dominating nature, Gordon argued, we should strive to harmoniously integrate our lives with nature out of a deep sense of responsibility toward it.
Reasoning with Attitude
Authors: Incurvati Luca , Schlöder Julian J.
Published: November 2023

This book presents and develops inferential expressivism, a novel approach to the study of meaning which combines elements of the expressivist and inferentialist programmes. Expressivists explain the meaning of words in terms of the attitudes that they are used to express; inferentialists explain the meaning of words in terms of the inferences that they are used to draw. The book lays out the philosophical foundations of inferential expressivism by articulating and defending the view that the meaning of an expression is to be explained in terms of the inferences we draw involving the attitudes we express. The book, moreover, lays out the logical foundations of inferential expressivism by showing how to implement the view rigorously by means of novel formal systems which can deal with a variety of speech acts. As the book shows, by joining forces expressivism and inferentialism can meet their key challenges whilst retaining their distinctive insights and advantages. The book goes on to demonstrate the fruitfulness of the inferential expressivist approach to meaning by applying it to a diverse range of linguistic phenomena, including epistemic modals, probability operators, conditionals, moral predicates, the truth predicate, and propositional attitude predicates.
Inferentialism
Authors: Incurvati Luca , Schlöder Julian J.
Published: November 2023

This chapter introduces inferentialism, focusing on its application to the logical domain. It highlights the main attraction of inferentialism, namely that it grounds meaning in our inferential practices and distinguishes between semantic and meta-semantic theses associated with inferentialism. The chapter goes on to present three problems inferentialism faces: the Problem of Defective Concepts, the Problem of Constitutive Rules, and the Problem of Limited Applicability. It is argued that while inferentialists already have in house the resources to address the first two problems, they must join forces with expressivists in order to address the third problem. Moreover, joining forces with expressivists enables inferentialists to solve the first problem whilst allowing them to hold on to a classical notion of inference.
Epistemic Modals
Authors: Incurvati Luca , Schlöder Julian J.
Published: November 2023

This chapter develops an inferential expressivist account of epistemic modality. The chapter begins by showing that while a traditional expressivist approach accounts for certain well-known puzzles about the semantics of epistemic modality, it falls prey to a version of the Frege-Geach Problem. The chapter then develops an account whereby the meaning of the epistemic modal might is to be explained in terms of weak assertion, a speech act whose existence is argued for on the basis of linguistic evidence. It is shown that the proposed account of might provides a solution to the puzzles about epistemic modality while solving the Frege-Geach Problem and validating all classical arguments. This demonstrates that the inferential expressivist approach to meaning can be successfully extended beyond the core logical constants.
Attitudes
Authors: Incurvati Luca , Schlöder Julian J.
Published: November 2023

This chapter discusses propositional attitudes from the perspective of inferential expressivism. The chapter begins by distinguishing three different components of the Many Attitudes Problem: the problem of giving an account of the meaning of moral vocabulary in propositional attitudes ascriptions, the problem of explaining what it is to have a non-doxastic attitude with moral content, and the problem of explaining what it is to express a non-doxastic attitude with moral content. The chapter provides a solution to the Many Attitudes Problem in all its aspects. The solution includes a recipe for assigning meanings to attitude verbs, which illustrates another area of application of the inferential expressivist approach to semantics. The chapter goes on to clarify what can be said from an inferential expressivist viewpoint about what it is to have attitudes and the nature of attitudes themselves.
The Art of the Filmmaker
Authors: Markham Peter
Published: November 2023

This book reveals the filmmaker’s art, principles, methods, and approaches for a range of readers: the student filmmaker; practicing filmmaker; student or scholar of film studies, theory, or history; and the student of media studies or scholar of arts programs, together with the informed cinephile. It conveys pragmatic information on the decision-making processes of film (and by inference all media) creators historically and in present practice, offering the reader highly informed textual analyses of specific films in order to explain the how and why of cinematic decision-making. The importance of practical aesthetics is proven in the clearly identified, detailed, and examined discussion of the decision-making that is involved in the creation of films, with carefully constructed and specific examples provided, the choice of recent films for analysis being a key element. Additional reference to classic films supports the book’s assertion that filmic planning and decision-making is a process that reflects an understanding and embracing of decades of cinematic practice along with the employment of continually evolving strategies reflecting technological change. Incorporating the author’s experience as a filmmaker, filmmaking educator, and film viewer, and considering cinematic language in the broad context of language, the book shows how the filmmaker’s art involves the conjuring and capture of the film’s fiction (story, characters, world), its representation on the screen, and the address to the audience through the practical aesthetics this constitutes—information, emotion (most importantly), and physical sensation are the constituent aspects of its engagement.
The Five Domains in Which a Film “Comes to Life”
Authors: Markham Peter
Published: November 2023

Five domains cover the aspects of a film’s fictionality, address, and response. The fiction “beyond the screen” is comprised of story, characters, emotions, and world (both physical and human), which must be credible within its genre and universe. The planarity of the screen is the conduit between fiction and audience—where the filmmaker captures and presents events and emotions—not neutral in its function but selective and modulatory, and served by practical aesthetics. The “screen of the mind” refers to the audience’s conjuring of the internal images not shown on the physical screen, whether excluded from the frame, suggested by an actual, different image, anticipatory of ongoing action (suspense), or prompted by sound (interior in its working, as opposed to the exterior quality of the image). Image as visual synecdoche, visual metaphor, or visual symbol, as image of absence, and as image of dissonance are illustrated. The hearts, minds, and guts of the audience section refers to their (most importantly) emotional, then cognitive, visceral, enteric, tactile, and neural responses. The ratio of fictional and audience emotion, the latter seen as immediate, cumulative, or delayed, is considered, as is the hierarchy of knowledge: who among characters and audience knows what, and when they know it. Physical sensations are considered more primal than emotions. The memory of the audience is posited as the domain in which a film may live on after its screening.
The Three Filmmakers
Authors: Markham Peter
Published: November 2023

The reasons for the inclusion of the three filmmakers and their films in the case studies are set out here. The three films have been chosen for the diversity of their filmmakers, for the variety of their genre and subject matter, for the outstanding cinematic art they demonstrate, and for their critical and commercial success. Screenplays are available for Hereditary and Moonlight that reveal significant differences from the completed works. The screenplay for Nomadland offers a mix of shooting script and transcript of the completed film that provides insights into its filmmaking art. Three sequences each from Hereditary and Moonlight are analyzed in detail, while the art of Nomadland is analyzed in three sections that observe specific aspects of the filmmaker’s approach.
Hereditary
Authors: Markham Peter
Published: November 2023

In this chapter Hereditary’s prelude is analyzed in the order of its sections. The opening caption (identified as one) is followed by the family and the setting: Steve and Peter, Steve and Annie, and Steve and Charlie (identified as two through four). The transition to the funeral is comprised of the Ellen Graham insert alone (identified as five). The funeral includes, Annie’s eulogy, Charlie and Ellen, Annie’s eulogy continued, and the final scene (identified as five through nine). Each section is structured as follows: summary, questions (for audience, for reader), commentary, and conclusion (incorporating information conveyed, emotion, visceral sensation, and vision). Screenshots and forensic commentary provide step-by-step critical insights into the art of the filmmaker, regarding both storytelling and address to the audience. The chapter considers both cinematic art in general and the filmmaker’s chosen discourse for his film: specific instances of his art related to universal principles. The notion of the filmmaker “activating” the audience is introduced. The chapter follows the introduction or “announcing” of the film’s four main characters and their character traits, together with Ellen, the deceased grandmother. Steve, the father, is the family manager and organizer; Annie the impatient, troubled mother; Peter the son in the throes of adolescence; and Charlie the discombobulated daughter and youngest child. The setting of house and treehouse is also established. There follows an analysis of the transition into the first act or movement and the structural punctuation it articulates.
Chloe Zhao
Authors: Markham Peter
Published: November 2023

This introduction to the Nomadland case studies describes how the film incorporates a metafictional discourse by interweaving nonfictional material with the fictional story of invented characters. Various elements of the film, the filmmaker’s unifying approach, and the contrasting aspects of the film’s sensibility are considered. The last two of the three case study chapters that follow do not repeat the format of those for the previous two films, Hereditary and Moonlight, but instead adopt an approach tailored to the manner of the film’s visual and narrative discourse. The note on the screenplay (which is available online) states that it would appear to be a transcription of an earlier cut of the film; several of its scenes are apparently transcripts of improvised dialogue from the movie’s actual people, while some scenes found on the page are absent on the screen. This latter factor is regarded as illustrating the importance of subtracting superfluous elements during the making of a film.
Nomadland
Authors: Markham Peter
Published: November 2023

The three sections of this chapter reveal differing narrative approaches on the part of the filmmaker: accounts of their lives given by nonfictional “characters,” the filmmaker’s rendering on screen through staging and shooting of Fern’s walk through the RTR encampment, and vignettes of the natural world included in the film. The heartfelt telling of stories by several of the people from the Nomadland book tends to be shot very simply, in CU, and at one point in a sequence set around a fire, which bolsters the sense of primal storytelling. Scenes of interaction between Fern, played by actor Frances McDormand, and nonactors such as Swankie are also shot simply so as not to inhibit those involved. Zhao’s precise approach to shooting elsewhere is illustrated by Fern’s morning walk, in which camera, pacing, staging, and background action—elements shown in accompanying screenshots—are meticulously coordinated. The mesmeric quality of the filmmaker’s imagery from nature, again shown in accompanying screenshots, forms an aspect of the filmmaker’s cinematic address that punctuates and informs the human interchanges she traces throughout her film while demonstrating the agility of dramatic narrative in the context of the art of the filmmaker. Finally, the author posits the contention that a filmmaker’s cultural foundations may inform the sensibility manifested in their approach to dramatic narrative and its representation on screen.
Legitimacy as an Existential Predicament
Authors: Fossen Thomas
Published: November 2023

The question of legitimacy is, in part, a question of who you are, both as a person and as a member of collectives: judging legitimacy is a matter of self-constitution and self-transformation. A struggle for legitimacy is a struggle over collective selfhood. After clarifying concepts of subjectivity, selfhood, and identity, the chapter surveys three ways of understanding the significance of identity for political legitimacy: the foundational, associative, and agonistic picture. No view persuasively captures the dilemmas of judgment in the face of disagreement and uncertainty about who “I” am and who “we” are. The chapter then proposes a composite, pragmatic picture. The pragmatic picture integrates rational, prudential, and ethical qualities of good judgment (consistency, integrity, and responsiveness) that were thus far associated with mutually exclusive ways of theorizing legitimacy. It also implies that the question of legitimacy cannot be resolved philosophically.
Growing Weary or Growing Wise?
Authors: Wicks Robert J. , Werdel Mary Beth
Published: November 2023

This chapter explores the area of posttraumatic growth and meaning-making as a road toward wisdom in times of stress and trauma. It provides updated information on posttraumatic growth, with special attention to self-renewal and the concept of vicarious posttraumatic growth that has been evidenced in clinicians. Using the metaphor of the clinician as lighthouse, the chapter explores ways that the clinician can also grow through providing a grounded safe harbor for clients experiencing stress and trauma and, through that stance, experience vicarious posttraumatic growth themselves. Through the experience of stress and trauma, the client and the clinician can work to make meaning of these situations and arrive at wisdom.
Sentencing Aboriginal Women Who Have Killed Their Partners
Authors: Cripps Kyllie
Published: November 2023

Drawing on 12 legal cases where Aboriginal women had killed their abusive male partners, this chapter reflects on whether the practice of law really hears women’s narratives of domestic violence. It explores the available defenses to homicide in New South Wales, Australia, and reviews how the practices of law and legal personnel hear or fail to hear women’s narratives of abuse. This chapter also explores the outcomes for Aboriginal women when the law fails to hear their experiences of abuse. This chapter concludes that while the legal system has developed the capacity to understand and explain the nuance of the circumstances reflected in the cases and introduced and developed a range of legal defenses that can potentially mitigate sentences for women who kill violent men, available evidence suggests that for some they can be ineffectual in practice.