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ABSTRACT There is currently a great deal of enthusiasm for projects known sometimes as “amelioration” and sometimes as “conceptual engineering.” Such projects advocate either the revision of existing concepts, or the intentional creation of new concepts. It is held by advocates ofamelioration that projects of this sort are necessary for the accomplishment of a variety of social justice goals. So, for example, many feminist theorists hold that the concept WOMAN must be revised if we are to properly (...) characterize and struggle against women’s oppression. With regard to these projects, I will argue for three theses: 1)Amelioration/Conceptual Engineering is impossible, because there is no conception of concepts which satisfies all the prerequisites for either change or intentional replacement; 2)Amelioration/Conceptual Engineering is undesirable, because if it were possible it would amount to pernicious thought-control; and 3)Amelioration/Conceptual Engineering is unnecessary, because our political goals can be conceived using existing concepts – having a concept of WOMAN does not commit us to any particular beliefs about women. (shrink)

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Words change meaning, usually in unpredictable ways. But some words’ meanings are revised intentionally. Revisionary projects are normally put forward in the service of some purpose – some serve specific goals of inquiry, and others serve ethical, political or social aims. Revisionist projects can ameliorate meanings, but they can also pervert. In this paper, I want to draw attention to the dangers of meaning perversions, and argue that the self-declared goodness of a revisionist project doesn’t suffice to avoid meaning perversions. (...) The road to Hell, or to horrors on Earth, is paved with good intentions. Finally and more importantly, I want to demarcate what meaning perversions are. This, I hope, can help us assess the moral and political legitimacy of revisionary projects. (shrink)

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Feminist analyses of gender concepts must avoid the inclusion problem, the fault of marginalizing or excluding some prima facie women. Sally Haslanger’s ‘ameliorative’ analysis of gender concepts seeks to do so by defining woman by reference to subordination. I argue that Haslanger’s analysis problematically marginalizes trans women, thereby failing to avoid the inclusion problem. I propose an improved ameliorative analysis that ensures the inclusion of trans women. This analysis yields ‘twin’ target concepts of woman, one concerning gender as class and (...) the other concerning gender as identity, both of which I hold to be equally necessary for feminist aims. (shrink)

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Ameliorative projects design and propagate new linguistic content for some expressions we use for political or social justice purposes. These projects are often driven by an anti-essentialist agenda: they aim to debunk the idea that social categories such as “woman,” “man,” or “race” are constituted by natural essences. But critics argue that nouns tend to trigger essentialist thinking. And because ameliorative projects typically retain nouns, it is argued that these projects cannot achieve their anti-essentialist goals. In response, I argue that (...) the psychological effects of noun use tend to support, rather than hinder, the anti-essentialist goals of ameliorators. (shrink)

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In this paper I argue against Simion’s (2018) Epistemic Limiting Procedure for conceptual engineering and put forward a more permissive alternative, according to which epistemic losses do not systematically blockamelioration, but merely provide reasons against it. On this less restrictive view, epistemic losses will be permissible, provided that they are compensated by the non-epistemic gains of theamelioration. After fleshing out the details of my proposal, I discuss two case studies in relation to which Simion’s restrictive procedure (...) seems to yield the wrong predictions. I argue that my alternative accommodates these cases significantly better. (shrink)

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As Helen Longino's overview of Hypatia's engagement with feminist epistemology suggests, the last twenty-five years’ contributions to this field reveal a strong focus on the topic of knowledge. In her short outline, Longino questions this narrow focus on knowledge in epistemological inquiry. The main purpose of this article is to provide a framework for systematically taking up the questions raised by Longino, one that prevents us from running the risk of becoming unreflectively involved in sexist, racist, or otherwise problematic inquiry. (...) I argue that a specific form of the method of Reflective Equilibrium, as it is widely discussed in moral epistemology, logic, and theories of rationality, enables us to cope with the problems of traditional epistemology, which feminist theorizers such as Sally Haslanger have pointed to. With the account of Reflective Equilibrium I am offering—drawing in many respects on the model provided by Catherine Z. Elgin—we have an ameliorative method that allows us to rethink epistemological values, goals, and standards in a systematic way, and that largely avoids implicit and explicit biases in epistemology. (shrink)

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R. S. Peters and a small group of contemporaries set the foundations for analytic philosophy of education in the 1960s, a field which continues to this day. This article asks about the value of analytic philosophy of education today, and proposes alterations to its initial aims and methods to make its value clearer. I outline some critiques of analytic philosophy of education, and respond by clarifying its aims. The key insight is that if analytic philosophy of education is explicitly aligned (...) with recent trends in social philosophy to focus on ameliorative analysis, then its value and relevance as a method in educational studies becomes clearer. Ameliorative analysis starts with the social role that a concept plays, and analyses it with this purpose in mind. I illustrate how R. S. Peters analysis of education would be approached differently with ameliorative analysis in mind, and conclude by pointing to some interesting points of discussion that arise from this approach. (shrink)

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Abstract“Freedom” is a fundamental political concept: contestations or endorsements of freedom-conceptions concern the fundamental normative orientation of sociopolitical orders. Focusing on “freedom,” this article argues that the project of bringing about emancipatory sociopolitical orders is both aided by efforts at engineering fundamental political concepts as well as required by such ameliorative ambitions. I first argue that since the absence of ideology is a constituent feature of emancipatory orders, any attempt at bringing about emancipation should leverage genealogical approaches in order to (...) debunk existing ideological freedom-concepts, which can occur only by exposing the discursive functions these have come to serve for the (re-)production of dominant power relations. I then suggest that establishing and sustaining an alternative, ideology-free conception of “freedom” is a steeper task. Ensuring widespread uptake of any ameliorated concept is contingent on effective change in the relevant social environment. Where fundamental political concepts such as “freedom” are concerned, effective intervention in the relevant social environment requires radical sociopolitical change. But if such change can be brought about and enables the widespread uptake of an “improved” freedom-concept, the concept's content comes to reflect changed social facts, thereby stabilizing the particular emancipatory sociopolitical order which has newly arisen. (shrink)

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Recently, some work in feminist epistemology has received more uptake from mainstream western analytic epistemology than it had in the past. There has been recognition of the importance of topics like epistemic injustice, standpoint epistemology, and epistemologies of ignorance, for instance. But these discussions are often seen as orthogonal to core epistemic theorizing - they have not received uptake as fundamental contestations of the ways we understand epistemic value, or core normative epistemic concepts. I suggest that one reasons for this (...) is the perception that insofar as feminist theorizing is responsive to moral and political concerns, it is not doing epistemology because it is not theorizing about epistemic value. This assumes a specific kind of epistemic value monism - a view whose popularity, I argue, derives at least partly from features of the methodologies that are popular in mainstream epistemology. I show that by using a different type of methodology - ameliorative inquiry - we see that there is a principled reason to doubt epistemic value monism. We can thus understand feminist theorizing in ways that are richer, more accurate, and that contribute to our understanding of the ways in which our practical, moral, and epistemic agency are intertwined. (shrink)

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Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly adopted to make decisions in domains such as business, education, health care, and criminal justice. However, such algorithmic decision systems can have prevalent biases against marginalized social groups and undermine social justice. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is a recent development aiming to make an AI system’s decision processes less opaque and to expose its problematic biases. This paper argues against technical XAI, according to which the detection and interpretation of algorithmic bias can be handled (...) more or less independently by technical experts who specialize in XAI methods. Drawing on resources from feminist epistemology, we show why technical XAI is mistaken. Specifically, we demonstrate that the proper detection of algorithmic bias requires relevant interpretive resources, which can only be made available, in practice, by actively involving a diverse group of stakeholders. Finally, we suggest how feminist theories can help shape integrated XAI: an inclusive social-epistemic process that facilitates theamelioration of algorithmic bias. (shrink)

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This chapter introduces the three central features of the epistemological framework that guides the prescriptions of Ameliorative Psychology. It is argued that this framework offers a new way to think about applied epistemology. In particular, it suggests that there are four and only four ways for people to improve their reasoning.

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A distinction often drawn is one between conservative versus revisionary conceptions of philosophical analysis with respect to commonsensical beliefs and intuitions. This paper offers a comparative investigation of two revisionary methods: Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis as developed by S. Haslanger. It is argued that they have a number of common features, and in particular that they share a crucial political dimension: they both have the potential to serve as instrument for social reform. Indeed, they may produce improved versions of (...) key concepts of everyday life, for example those pertaining to social categories such as gender and race, which in turn may lead to social change. The systematic comparison of these two frameworks offered here, where similarities as well as differences are discussed, is likely to provide useful guidance to practitioners of both approaches, as it will highlight important aspects of each of them that tend to remain implicit and under-theorized in existing applications of these methodologies to specific questions. (shrink)

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It is difficult to accommodate compulsive drug use that destroys regulation by consequences in a unitary framework of melioration or maximization, especially as both are strategies of behavioral regulation. The “contradiction” of addictive behavior despite aversive consequences is an illusory issue because consequences that do not decrease addictive behavior cannot be considered punishing.

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Les recherches sur le travail comme valeur au Moyen Âge se sont principalement attardées sur la malédiction prononcée lors de l'expulsion du jardin d'Eden, négligeant l'activité à laquelle se livrait Adam avant la chute (Gn 2,15). A la suite de Philon d'Alexandrie, Augustin a proposé une lecture littérale de ce premier travail, qui a eu un fort impact dans la culture médiévale, certains auteurs (franciscains) comprenant ce verset au sens d'une mission d'améliorer encore la création.

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À une métaphysique fermée prétendant découvrir ou identifier des essences fixes et chercher une formule de la nature qui n’aurait pas d’histoire, Goodman oppose une métaphysique ouverte. Les gens font les mondes dans lesquels ils interagissent et habitent et ils les font en utilisant des outils représentationnels. Si l’abandon du point de vue du spectateur suppose que nous œuvrons, en tant que locuteurs et producteurs d’outils symboliques, à la forme du monde que nous habitons, et si l’amélioration de ces outils (...) est à notre portée, il s’agit d’imaginer des améliorations qui conduisent à des transformations efficaces, à la fois cognitivement et politiquement. Cet article entraîne la théorie goodmanienne du worldmaking du côté de l’ingénierie conceptuelle. En dernière analyse, il entreprend de montrer ce que l’ingénierie conceptuelle aurait à gagner à redéployer la théorie goodmanienne de la projectibilité (degrés de projectibilité, implantation, projectibilité héritée). (shrink)

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In 1814, Jane Austen published Mansfield Park, which, despite being one of her lesser-known works raised important discussions about the depiction of its historical context. Having one of the characters as a landowner in Antigua, the novel prompted readings from post-colonialist perspectives, such as Edward Said’s interpretation of the “dead silence” scene, and George Boulukos’ discussion aboutamelioration. These approaches to the text have probably led Patricia Rozema into using the slave-dependency as central to the Bertrams’ lives in her (...) 1999 adaptation of the book. From this point of view, this article intends to compare Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Patricia Rozema’s film taking into account their different approaches to slavery.Keywords: Slavery. Adaptation. Jane Austen. Patricia Rozema. Mansfield Park. ResumoEm 1814, Jane Austen publicou Mansfield Park que, apesar de ser uma de suas obras menos conhecidas, gerou importantes discussões acerca da representação de seu contexto histórico. O fato de uma das personagens ser um proprietário de terras na colônia britânica de Antigua levou a uma série de interpretações a partir de estudos pós-colonialistas, como Edward Said, em sua análise da cena do silêncio profundo, e George Boulukos, em sua discussão sobreamelioration. Essas leituras podem ter influenciado Patricia Rozema a fazer da dependência da escravidão uma marca da vida moral dos Bertram em sua adaptação do livro para o cinema. Nesse sentido, este artigo busca analisar as diferentes interpretações da escravidão no romance e no filme.Palavras-chave: Escravidão. Adaptação. Jane Austen. Patricia Rozema. Mansfield Park. (shrink)

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Building Better Health Care Leadership for Canada explains the development and implementation of the Executive Training in Research Application program. Managed and funded by the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation in partnership with the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Nursing Association, and the Canadian College of Health Care executives, EXTRA is a two-year national fellowship program that uses the principles of adult learning theory as well as practical projects to educate senior health care leaders in making more consistent use of (...) research evidence in their management roles. Fellows apply the theory learned in residency sessions and educational activities to projects within their home organizations. The authors identify the imperative for better use of evidence, outline the core elements of the curriculum, and capture the real-world experience of regional leaders and fellows involved in making specific changes informed by research-based evidence within their organization. Contributors include Jean-Louis Denis, Terrence Sullivan, Owen Adams, Malcolm Anderson, Lynda Atack, Robert Bell, Sam G Campbell, Sylvie Cantin, Ward Flemons, Dorothy Forbes, J. Sonja Glass, Paula Goering, Karen Golden-Biddle, Jeffrey S. Hoch, Paul Lamarche, Ann Langley, John N. Lavis, Jonathan Lomas, Margo Orchard, Raynald Pineault, Brian D. Postl, Christine Power, Trish Reay, Jean Rochon, Denis A. Roy, Andrea Seymour, Samuel B. Sheps, Micheline Ste-Marie, Nina Stipich, David Streiner, Carl Taillon, and Muriah Umoquit. (shrink)

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Recent works by feminist and social epistemologists have carefully mapped the contours of epistemic injustice, including gaslighting and prejudicial credibility deficits, prejudicial credibility excesses, willful hermeneutical ignorance, discursive injustices, contributory injustice, and epistemic exploitation. As we look at this burgeoning literature, attention has been concentrated mainly in four areas in descending order of emphasis: phenomena of epistemic injustice themselves, including the nature of wrongdoings involved, attendant consequences and repercussions, individual and structural changes for prevention or mitigation, and restorative, restitutive, or (...) retributive responses. This project urges greater attention to the last of these, and to that end offers a relational approach to epistemic justice drawing upon Margaret Walker’s work on moral repair and reparative justice. In developing and enacting better epistemic practices, how can such practices be made meaningfully restorative: not only recognizing the prospects for epistemic improvement, but responding to the perpetration and experience of epistemic injustice with effective epistemicamelioration? (shrink)

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Supporters of conceptual engineering often use Haslanger’s ameliorative project as a key example of their methodology. However, at face value, Haslanger’s project is no cause for optimism about conceptual engineering. If we interpret Haslanger as seeking to revise how people in general use and understand words such as ‘woman’, ‘man’, etc., then her project has been unsuccessful. And if we interpret her as seeking to reveal the meaning of those words, then her project does not involve conceptual engineering. I develop (...) and defend an alternative interpretation of Haslanger’s project and argue that, so interpreted, it is a successful conceptual engineering project after all. In so doing, I develop what I call a particularist account of the success conditions for conceptual engineering. (shrink)

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Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have largely focused on generics and essentialism, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Even ameliorated nouns can continue to underpin essentialist thinking. I conclude by arguing that representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather it reveals that would-be ameliorators ought to attend to the (...) propensities for our representational devices to essentialize and to the complex relationship between essentialism and prejudice. (shrink)

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This paper suggests that the contemporary feminist debate on relational autonomy is best understood as an attempt at ameliorative inquiry—the concept of autonomy is defined in order to secure political and theoretical advantages. Most theorists adopt some sort of constructionist, or relational, account precisely because of the political and theoretical advantages relational accounts are meant to offer. But there are also significant drawbacks to this approach. I argue that there are reasons to be skeptical of ameliorative inquiries into the concept (...) of autonomy: first, the goals of inquiry have not been made explicit and may not be shared; second, because ameliorative inquiries are guided by unclear and unshared goals, the debate will continue to pull feminists in conflicting directions; and finally, the normative and aspirational nature of ameliorative inquiry unacceptably threatens the exclusion of some women from the category of autonomous agents. (shrink)

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In this dissertation, I examine our mental health concepts to see what work they are currently doing as well as what work they could be doing. In 1976, Christopher Boorse stated that the mental health literature is a “web of obscurities” (p. 51). To resolve some of this confusion, I argue that we need to consider the goals we should have for our mental health concepts and then give accounts of those concepts that meet our stated goals. I argue that (...) our goals for our mental health concepts should be twofold: first, we need concepts that will work to alleviate the stigmatization of mental disorder as this stigmatization gets in the way of providing and receiving medical help, and second, we need concepts that will be useful tools for medical practitioners to use in their diagnosis and treatment practices. -/- I begin by arguing that our mental disorder concept is not currently a useful tool for medical practitioners. Moreover, I argue that our mental disorder concept is confused in such a way that it is unlikely that it could ever be a useful tool for medical practitioners. If we cannot give an account of the mental disorder concept that is a useful tool for medical practitioners, then perhaps we can give an account of the mental disorder concept that can be used toward our goal of alleviating the stigmatization of mental disorder. Before we can do that, however, we need an account of the stigmatization concept so that we can understand what our mental disorder concept needs to be alleviating. -/- I argue that stigmatization is a process whereby some entity becomes marked as disgraceful or shameful. This stigmatization process includes (1) an attitude against the entity for reasons found in the social ideology, and (2) acts against the entity. I then argue that acts of stigmatization take two forms: direct stigmatization (where stigmatizors take acts against the stigmatized entity) and indirect stigmatization (where potential victims of stigmatization take acts to avoid becoming victims of stigmatization). With that in mind, we learn that if we are to alleviate the stigmatization of mental disorder, we need to work on alleviating both direct and indirect stigmatization. It is at this point that I argue for a new account of our mental disorder concept that can be utilized to alleviate the direct and indirect stigmatization of mental disorder. With our mental disorder concept redesigned to achieve that goal, I turn to the goal of providing medical help for persons that need that help. I argue that we need to reconceptualize what it means to be a ‘diagnosable condition’ so that we can develop a new framework for diagnosis and treatment that will be more efficacious than our current system. In conclusion, I suggest that we can untangle the current confusion that is the mental health literature by imbuing our mental health concepts with specific purposes and then utilizing them to achieve those purposes as I outline in this dissertation. (shrink)

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This review article discusses Erin McKenna’s pragmatist theory concerning the ethical treatment of companion animals, which she lays out in Pets, People and Pragmatism. McKenna develops a middle-ground view between the two opposite positions that frame the current debate on companion animals, focussing on the relationship between human and nonhuman animal beings. I suggest that the question of whether the domestication of nonhuman animals is not only a natural process, but also a desirable one, still remains unclear.

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In his article ‘An Ameliorative Analysis of the Concept of Education’, Jack Marley-Payne sets out to provide an ameliorative analysis of the concept ‘education’. Marley-Payne draws an important distinction between what he labels the ‘Broad’ and the ‘Narrow’ account of education. His conclusion is that an ameliorative conceptual analysis of education favours the narrow account. The main argument is that a narrow approach, tightly connected to formal schooling, provides a better basis for pursuing an egalitarian agenda. Contrary to Marley-Payne, I (...) will argue that anamelioration of the concept education need not favour either a wide notion or a narrow notion. I believe that there are other alternatives to choose from, that in fact leads to anamelioration of what education can and ought to mean. The problem with Marley-Payne’s conclusion is thus, not only that it builds upon a false dichotomy but also that it is not emancipatory enough. We need anamelioration that is inclusive rather than exclusive. (shrink)

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This paper presents the results of a research work that aims to determine whether the upstream OCR correction can significantly improve the results of the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. The experiments were applied to the ELTeC and Very Big Library (TGB) corpora. Our objective is to establish (i) a typology of OCR contaminations from the Kraken and Tesseract tools and (ii) a typology of errors in the automatic correction produced by the JamSpell tool. As part of our evaluation, we (...) study the intersections between the NEs detected by the spaCy tool in the reference texts and the two OCR versions on the one hand, and on the other hand the cosine similarity used to measure the textual distance between these versions. Our results show that automatic correction introduces biases in the textual data and that filtering the output NEs seems to be a more promising approach. Finally, we find that incorrect NEs are overwhelmingly short and hapax entities in corpus, and that the entity length and document frequency are the discriminatory criteria to exclude candidate NEs with a precision of over 98%. (shrink)

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In the current digital environment, people can visit every corner of the world without leaving their homes. New media technology compresses distance and time, but it also subverts the traditional mode of audience presence. Many traditional, offline content expression modes are also moving toward the digital field, and digital art is among them. Digital new media is a new art form that requires its audience to have a new media literacy; this literacy is necessary for esthetic experience and for audience (...) participation. At present, the relatively lack of objective methodology for scientific research on aesthetic and media literacy has limited our current understanding. Therefore, we need to develop a new model and conduct empirical research with college students as the audience. Empirical research was conducted with an audience of college students. The study had the following purposes: to add a new dimension to the esthetic model, namely new media literacy, to align the model with the current digital environment, and to test the moderating effect of new media literacy on esthetic emotion as represented by interest and confusion. The experiment verified the study’s hypothesis that higher new media literacy was associated with higher esthetic interest and lower confusion. By contrast, has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, lower new media literacy was associated with lower esthetic interest and higher confusion. New media literacy is an essential quality for contemporary audiences. This knowledge may be useful for effective design. It provides a traditional and favorable learning environment and empirical reference for the subsequent improvement of digital aesthetics and media literacy. (shrink)

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My dissertation is in three parts. In “Evidentialism and Belief Polarization,” I consider the epistemic import of a belief revision process known as belief polarization, in which exposure to a mixed batch of evidence reliably causes people to increase confidence in whatever their antecedent belief was. I argue against Tom Kelly's claim that the beliefs that result from this process are justified on evidentialist grounds, and I take stock of what the phenomenon can teach us about evidentialism as a theory (...) of justification. In “Access Is Not Necessary for Justification,” I focus on a debate between mentalism and accessibilism, as internalist theories of epistemic justification. I argue against the received view that mentalism, as distinct from accessibilism, is not worth defending. In “Epistemic Oppression and Ameliorative Epistemology,” I offer an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic oppression. It occurs when members of a social group are subject to a systematic and unfair disadvantage within a social epistemic structure, resulting from the operation of a capacity to control exercises of their epistemic agency, thus systematically and unfairly limiting their epistemic flourishing. I argue that the concept of epistemic oppression helps us to identify and understand the kind of wrong that happens in these cases where an agent's capacity for epistemic flourishing is unfairly impeded. (shrink)

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This discussion of Sally Haslanger’s recent book, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford 2012), investigates how her theory of race and gender handles the problem of intersectionality; that is, the problem of how to understand the ways in which one’s location in multiple socially constructed categories affects one’s lived experiences, social roles, and relative privilege or disadvantage. Haslanger defines race and gender as locations within hierarchical social structures. This high-level structural analysis allows her to find commonality without claiming (...) that, for example, all women share social roles or psychological characteristics. However, race-based oppression seems sometimes to cancel out gender-based privilege; thus raising the question of how, on Haslanger’s model, we are to understand race and gender working together. (shrink)

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This article presents the preliminary results of a research that aims to document the journey of novice preschool and elementary teachers, to understand the evolution of their identity development and establish their profile that takes well-being into account in order to promote their perseverance. and better professional integration.Based on the principles of a new field in the sciences of education, the psychopedagogy of well-being, the study of the elements of well-being and the strengths of character in novices will make it (...) possible to explore how a development of their full potential during coaching sessions, can help them develop a positive professional identity, in order to face the multiple challenges of the profession. (shrink)

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Social constructionist analysis of kind terms such as ‘women’ are often criticized as counterintuitive. In response, Haslanger claims that such charges are moot once the distinctions between different types of philosophical analyses and their corresponding concepts are in place. I argue that even with the said distinctions, the Haslangerian definition of ‘women’ is problematic. Drawing on recent discussions on contextualism, metalinguistic negotiation, and the crucial role solidarity plays in politically significant terms, I claim that Haslanger’s replies would lead to consequences (...) contrary to the stated goal of her project. Moreover, I offer a new proposal that takes seriously the aim of ameliorating ‘women.’ My account draws on a dynamic understanding of solidarity based on feminist reconceptualization and makes recourse to Mikkola’s model of trait/norm covariance. Based on the vision that a proper ameliorative analysis in the positive moment should be forward-looking to enhance our coordination in a more just society, my construal elucidates what ‘women’ can and ought to be. (shrink)

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O artigo desenvolve uma hermenêutica comparativa dos “mundos da vida” da América do Norte continental e do círculo Pacífico do Japão Meiji através de uma interface das articulações protopragmáticas de Ralph Waldo Emerson e Fukuzawa Yukichi. Ainda relevante no mercado de ideias atuais, The Young American, de Emerson, e Outline of a Theory of Civilization, de Fukuzawa, foram possibilidades melhorativas pioneiras da modernidade meritocrática na civilização pós-patriarcal e pós-feudal.

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Though centuries old, Islamophobia has increased in intensity as it is extensively documented by surveys and reports published by various governmentaland non-governmental organizations. This dislike towards Islam and Muslims is, due, amongst other factors, to an increasing number of Muslim citizens and asylum seekers in the West bent upon preserving their own identity giving rise to the perception of “us” versus “them.” Such negative evaluations by the in-group may be due to the conflicting values, beliefs and the actual or perceived (...) threat posed by Muslims. This is also attributed to the negative messages transmitted by the national media and the powerful elite. The strategy for countering Islamophobia must concentrate on “unlearning intolerance” by focusing on removing negative perceptions through education, reforming the media and reshaping the foreign policy of Western powers. (shrink)

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Conceptual Engineering (CE) is thought to be generally aimed at ameliorating deficient concepts. In this paper, we challenge this assumption: we argue that CE is frequently undertaken with the orthogonal aim of _conceptual adaptation_. We develop this thesis with reference to the interplay between technology and concepts. Emerging technologies can exert significant pressure on conceptual systems and spark ‘conceptual disruption’. For example, advances in Artificial Intelligence raise the question of whether AIs are agents or mere objects, which can be construed (...) as a CE question regarding the concepts AGENT and OBJECT. We distinguish between three types of conceptual disruption (conceptual gaps, conceptual overlaps, and conceptual misalignments) and argue that when CE occurs to address these disruptions, its primary aim is not to improve concepts, but to retain their functional quality, or to prevent them from degrading. This is the characteristic aim of CE when undertaken in philosophy of technology: to _preserve_ the functional role of a concept or conceptual scheme, rather than _improving_ how a concept fulfills its respective function. (shrink)

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This article critically looks at the challenges that are incumbent in the deployment of married soldiers who work for the South African National Defence Force. The SANDF previously deployed soldiers outside the borders of South Africa for a period of 6 months or less. But currently, the SANDF has a deployment period of 12 months. This period is twice that of the earlier period, which means that soldiers and their families have to spend 12 months apart from one another. This (...) has an adverse effect on the marriages of soldiers and makes the SANDF appear as an uncaring institute because its military operations tend to impact family lives. Using a qualitative research approach, this article explores the emic experiences of married soldiers who were deployed, and concludes by suggesting some pastoral guidelines that may prove useful for a multi-professional team handling the issues of deployment. (shrink)

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Enseigner une langue étrangère en milieu guidé implique des contraintes spatiales et temporelles imposées par l’institution quand l’enseignement se déroule dans une classe ordinaire. Or, l’apprentissage d’une langue mobilise le corps tout entier dans la communication et l’interaction avec des conséquences sur les plans non seulement cognitifs mais aussi émotionnels, relationnels et culturels. En Chine, la culture éducative est fondée sur la transmission de savoirs essentiellement linguistiques, peu de place est accordée à l’oral. Beaucoup d’étudiants ont des difficultés en compréhension (...) comme en production, notamment dans le domaine de la fluidité prosodique. Des émotions et certains actes de langage ne s’expriment pas de la même manière en Orient et en Occident, ils peuvent être source de malentendus. L’introduction de pratiques théâtrales permet une nette amélioration de l’oral et une meilleure confiance en soi pour la prise de parole et l’interaction. Ces pratiques demeurent encore marginales, l’aspect ludique étant souvent considéré par les étudiants chinois eux-mêmes comme un travail manquant de sérieux. En revanche, les enseignants constatent une nette amélioration de l’oral chez les étudiants motivés. (shrink)

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Work on the conceptualamelioration of race concepts is usually negative or critical: it uncovers social features that contribute to racial hierarchies. Much less focus has been placed on how ameliorative accounts contribute to positive change. Using an account of race developed by Steve Biko during South African apartheid, I will argue that we can extract a novel account of positiveamelioration in which racial categories can have normative or aspirational force, contributing to positive change.

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This chapter contains section titled: Wisdom: Theory of Dialectical Logic: Theory Transformed into Method Freedom: Theory Transformed into Virtue.

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The modern concept of ‘family’ in the United States recognizes many types of social groups as families, a conceptual shift which was largely helped along by advancements in assisted reproductive technologies enabling those formerly unable to biologically reproduce to have children, as well as by social movements aimed at garnering recognition for these emergent nonbiologically related social groups spearheaded by LGBTQ+ and adoption activists. That these social groups are now recognized as types of families is unquestionably an improvement to the (...) concept, though there are still defects in the concept that preclude these nonnuclear families from achieving the same social–ontological status as nuclear families. Drawing from the nascent philosophical field of conceptual engineering, I analyze our current conception of ‘family’ and argue that it is tacitly exclusionary of nonnuclear families, which can be attributed to a combination of widespread genetic essentialism and linguistic practices that unduly cast the nuclear family as a more desirable type of family by emphasizing genetic relatedness as a valuable quality. I then offer proposals to ameliorate these defects, such as educational interventions to reduce genetic essentialism and the introduction of new terminology that does not connote one type of family as being superior to another. In doing so, my hope is to reveal and begin to resolve an overlooked defect in the concept of ‘family’ in order to bolster the movement to view all families as equal. (shrink)

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