Search results for " rational"
showing 10 items of 125 documents
Rational vs historical reconstructions. A note on Blaug
2003
The paper focuses on Blaug's distinction between rational and historical reconstruction within the historiography of economics. Blaug's distinction is shown to be sterile and misleading and his definitions of no avail to clear thinking. Historical reconstruction (as defined by Blaug) is en empty box for reasons which are basically theoretical and not simply practical (as Blaug seems to hold). Moreover, Blaug's primary polemical target is Whig historiography and not rational reconstruction: the two concepts coincide only by means of an ad hoc definition. Blaug's criticism does not apply to other uses of the concept of rational reconstruction such as that proposed by Lakatos.
A metabolism of Adam and Eve: Damien Hirst meets Edvard Munch
2016
Sari Kuuva, University of Jyvaskyla Sari Kuuva, PhD (in cognitive science, 2007 and art history, 2010) is a post-doctoral researcher who works at the Department of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Jyvaskyla. She has studied the relationship between art, aesthetics and psychology, particularly the concept of the symbol and the problematics of experiencing and creating visual art. Among Kuuva’s main publications relating to the art of Edvard Munch are: Symbol, Munch and Creativity: Metabolism of Visual Symbols (University of Jyvaskyla 2010); ‘Emotional creativity in art: case scream’ in Mind and Matter: Selected Papers of Nordic 2009 Conference for Art Historians (Helsinki, Socie…
La Ley General de Educación y la Pedagogía. Reencuentro y señal
2021
espanolEl articulo presenta una amplia perspectiva historica sobre las consideraciones pedagogicas que caracterizan y se proponen en la reforma de la educacion basica en la Espana de 1970. Para ello el texto desarrolla una descripcion e interpretacion de documentos legislativos, politicos y tecnicos; y precisa los contextos, las innovaciones, las contradicciones y las insuficiencias de la Ley Villar Palasi. Basicamente el autor trata de identificar y mostrar las caracteristicas que presenta la racionalidad cientifica o modelo tecnico de la reforma, la falta de correspondencia o conexion entre la pedagogia defendida, el contexto social y cultural, y las politicas concretas que debian activar…
Religious Exiting and Social Networks: Computer Simulations of Religious/Secular Pluralism
2021
Statistical models attempting to predict who will disaffiliate from religions have typically accounted for less than 15% of the variation in religious affiliations, suggesting that we have only a partial understanding of this vital social process. Using agent-based simulations in three “artificial societies” (one predominantly religious; one predominantly secular; and one in between), we demonstrate that worldview pluralism within one’s neighborhood and family social networks can be a significant predictor of religious (dis)affiliation but in pluralistic societies worldview diversity is less important and, instead, people move toward worldview neutrality. Our results suggest that there may …
Belief in God, Confidence in the Church and Secularization in Scandinavia
2021
We used the three latest rounds of the religion module of International Social Survey Programme to study secularization in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, focusing on belief in God. We restricted our sample to the affiliated with the majority Protestant churches and the unaffiliated and analyzed the trends toward disaffiliation and disbelief in God. Then, we studied the association between confidence in churches, religious/secular upbringing, and demographic controls with belief in God using multinomial logistic regression models. Our treatment of belief in God as a nominal variable allowed the inclusion of both the element of doubt and different images of God in the analyses. The trends towar…
Modeling the Effects of Religious Belief and Affiliation on Prosociality
2021
To what extent do supernatural beliefs, group affiliation, and social interaction produce values and behaviors that benefit others, i.e., 'prosociality'? Addressing this question involves multiple variables interacting within complex social networks that shape and constrain the beliefs and behaviors of individuals. We examine the relationships among some of these factors utilizing data from the World Values Survey to inform the construction of an Agent-Based Model. The latter was able to identify the conditions under which – and the mechanisms by which – the prosociality of simulated agents was increased or decreased within an “artificial society” designed to reflect real world parameters. …
Post-Supernatural Cultures: There and Back Again
2020
The abandonment of supernatural religious beliefs and rituals seems to occur quite easily in some contexts, but post-supernaturalist cultures require a specific set of conditions that are difficult to produce and sustain on a large scale and thus are historically rare. Despite the worldwide resurgence of supernaturalist religion, some subcultures reliably produce people who deny the existence of supernatural entities. This social phenomenon has evoked competing explanations, many of which enjoy empirical support. We synthesize six of the most influential social-science explanations, demonstrating that they provide complementary perspectives on a complex causal architecture. We incorporate t…
From causal thinking to wisdom and spirituality: some perspectives on a growing research field in adult (cognitive) development
2015
This article concentrates on the latest international trends in the research on psychological development of adults, and especially on the development of cognition. The field of research has been very fragmented, and researchers have kept creating new models one after another to describe their own lines of thought and also seeking for empirical evidence for their models. This has created a rather equivocal picture of the phenomenon itself. The present article attempts to identify the historical roots of the field, and introduces descriptive factors that could conceptually determine the gist of the phenomenon. In this context we will discuss, mainly, research going back to Piaget and Perry, …
Cognitive and Affective Consequences of Information and Choice Overload
2021
When interviewed in 1992 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon described a paradox at the heart of living in an economy that made every effort to design and produce ever more “choice alternatives” but that simultaneously allocated very little energy to encouraging people to devote the attention and time actually required to choose. He gave the example of a decision to buy a new house, commenting: “Before you even start the choice process, somebody has presented you with this, and this, and this house” (UBS, 1992). The overabundance of alternatives was lamented by Simon in 1992, when computing power was slower. It is all the more alarming in the modern and constantly …
Post-Secular Identity? Developing a New Approach to Religion in International Relations and IR Studies
2021
In spite of the increasing presence of religion in international relations with various publications observing this presence and numerous authorities calling for the inclusion of religion into mainstream research, there is no universal consent to recognize religion’s role in IR. In our opinion, the only way to reconcile IR with the international reality in which religion has been and will remain present in the foreseeable future is for the researchers themselves to construct—especially those oriented towards broad, non-Western perspective—a new face of the discipline, the face which in this article we call the post-secular identity of IR study. Assuming that identity is first and foremost a…