Social scripts, like A gives a compliment, B says ‘thank you’, pervade and shape natural language discourse and social interactions. Scripts usually promote cooperation between conversational participants, but not always. For example, if A pays B a ‘compliment’ like ‘nice legs’, A puts B in a double bind of either abiding by the compliment script by saying ‘thank you’ and being humiliated, or breaking the script and risking escalation. In this paper, I take a philosophical lens (...) to the notion of a social script. I give a theoretical overview of what it would mean to disrupt a social script and explain why and when it is prudential to do so. Then I give several examples of disruptions of social scripts. This essay makes four key contributions to the philosophical literature on social scripts: (1) it introduces a new distinction between interpersonal and structural scripts; (2) it illuminates how interpersonal social scripts can be pernicious by creating a double bind; (3) it analyzes what it is to disrupt a social script; and (4) in doing so, it challenges the orthodoxy about the relationship between cooperation and disruption in political action. (shrink)

Social scripts specify the normal way for people to interact in certain situations. For example, a social script for a restaurant conversation explains why the world over, these conversations take a similar form. I develop an account of how social scripts can structure people’s sexual agency—sometimes, for the worse. I show how people’s sexual agency can be constrained by the presence of a linear social script for heteronormative sexual encounters that escalate in intimacy and (...) terminate in male orgasm. By marking off certain sexual options as deviant, as breaches of social obligations, or as sanctionable, this script can combine with certain motivations and circumstances to explain why people voluntarily take part in sexual encounters that they would ideally like to avoid. I discuss how this situation could be ameliorated by alternative social scripts. For example, in conjunction with changes to ancillary social norms, people would be more empowered if they had social scripts for using safe words to end sexual encounters. (shrink)

This book argues that our success in navigating the social world depends heavily on scripts. Scripts play a central role in our ability to understand social interactions shaped by different contextual factors. -/- In philosophy of social cognition, scholars have asked what mechanisms we employ when interacting with other people or when cognizing about other people. Recent approaches acknowledge that social cognition and interaction depends heavily on contextual, cultural, and social factors that contribute (...) to the way individuals make sense of the social interactions they take part in. This book offers the first integrative account of scripts in social cognition and interaction. It argues that we need to make contextual factors and social identity central when trying to explain how social interaction works, and that this is possible via scripts. Additionally, scripts can help us understand bias and injustice in social interaction. The author’s approach combines several different areas of philosophy—– philosophy of mind, social epistemology, feminist philosophy—as well as sociology and psychology to show why paying attention to injustice in interaction is much needed in social cognition research, and in philosophy of mind more generally. -/- Scripts and Social Cognition: How we Interact with Others will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, social epistemology, social ontology, sociology, and social psychology. (shrink)

To explain how social cognition normally serves us in real life, we need to ask which factors contribute to specific social interactions. Recent accounts, and mostly pluralistic models, have started incorporating contextual and social factors in explanations of social cognition. In this paper, I further motivate the importance of contextual and identity factors for social cognition. This paper presents scripts as an alternative resource in social cognition that can account for contextual and identity (...) factors. Scripts are normative and context-sensitive knowledge structures that describe behavior in terms of corresponding events, situations, social roles, individuals, or mental state types in a way that guides action. The script approach presented here builds on recent accounts of social cognition but points out important differences and possible advantages it has over them: e.g., the script approach focuses even more strongly on context and identity. (shrink)

Some philosophical and psychological approaches to social interaction posit a powerful explanatory tool for explaining how we navigate social situations: scripts. Scripts tell people how to interact in different situational and cultural contexts depending on social roles such as gender. A script theory of social interaction puts emphasis on understanding the world as normatively structured. Social structures place demands, roles, and ways to behave in the social world upon us, which, in turn, (...) guide the ways we interact with one another and the ways we coordinate our behaviors. In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of coordinated behaviors in social interactions in humans. I argue that looking closely at everyday interactions, for which social coordination is central, strongly points to a fundamental role of scripts for social cognition and interaction. In order to explain some social interactions, like those based on social coordination, we do not need to recourse to mental state attribution. Rather, I argue, scripts are a powerful resource for explaining social interaction and especially coordinated behaviors. Scripts have been neglected in standard approaches to social cognition but are (re-)gaining attention via the normative turn in social cognition. (shrink)

Scripts and deception are alternative means, both imperfect, to the goal of simulating an environment that cannot be created readily. Under scripts, participants pretend they are in that environment, while deception convinces participants they are in that environment although they are not. With repeated trials, they ought to be unnecessary. But they are not, which poses challenges to behavioral sciences.

:This essay investigates the relationships among scripts, schemata, and social norms. The authors examine how social norms are triggered by particular schemata and are grounded in scripts. Just as schemata are embedded in a network, so too are social norms, and they can be primed through spreading activation. Moreover, the expectations that allow a social norm’s existence are inherently grounded in particular scripts and schemata. Using interventions that have targeted gender norms, open defecation, (...) female genital cutting, and other collective issues as examples, the authors argue that ignoring the cognitive underpinnings of a social norm can hamper the effectiveness of behavioral interventions. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the role of emotion scripts, and their entanglement with emotion concepts, has not been adequately treated in recent concept-focused and situated approaches to emotion perception. These approaches aim to emphasize the context-sensitive and interactive nature of emotion perception, and I argue that scripts have distinctive explanatory power when it comes to both of these features of emotion perception, and accordingly deserve to be taken more seriously by concept-focused and situated approaches. Situated perspectives on emotion (...) perception have long pointed out that, while the move toward understanding emotion perception as context-sensitive is needed, an individualistic and overly cognitive focus remains in context-sensitive accounts to emotion perception, particularly in accounts that emphasize emotion concepts (see Glazer 2022, Krueger 2014a, b). And while recent and influential context-sensitive approaches to emotion perception have emphasized emotion concepts (see Gendron and Barrett 2018), earlier work on emotion concepts that ties them to emotion scripts has been ignored in these recent views (e.g., Russell, 1991, 2003; Wierzbicka 1992; Fehr & Russell, 1984). Situated approaches that criticize recent context-sensitive views for their individualistic focus have also overlooked scripts, despite their potential to contribute to situated views. Overlooking scripts is a problem when arguing for a context-sensitive and situated understanding of emotion perception. Scripts describe contextually variable, normatively constrained moves between social agents; that is, they account for how social norms influence social interaction (including emotion perception) in context-sensitive ways. Thus, scripts are exceptionally well positioned to account for context-sensitive, interactive emotion perception. This paper aims to (1) explain what it means to understand emotion perception as both interactive and context-sensitive, making reference to situated approaches to emotion perception, and (2) bring scripts back into the debate on emotion perception. (shrink)

“Scripts and Revelations” argues that the gender reveal party is a creative response to the affordances of recent technologies: prenatal tests allow us to discern fetal sex before birth, and social media platforms allow us to share intimate moments for a potentially unlimited audience. Building on the work of scholars of gender (Astri Jack, Carli Gieseler) and disability (Robert McRuer, Tobin Siebers), and interpolating his experience as the father of a young woman with Down syndrome, the author argues (...) that gender and disability cannot be considered in separation, and that the ritual’s peculiarities are, in part, a reaction to prenatal tests that disclose both fetal sex and disability status; the gender reveal party strictly separates these—celebrating one, silencing the other—and thus tends to enforce strict norms around both disability and gender. Examining blog posts about gender reveal parties sponsored by prenatal testing companies, viral videos of catastrophic accidents, and compilations of “gender reveal fails,” the author considers the gender reveal party from multiple angles, including economic (the gender reveal is an expressive act within a system that monetizes expression) and technological (the ritual reveals the extent to which our lives are coextensive with digital technologies). The author then turns to personal experience, raising the question of how to publicly welcome children with disabilities and other differences, those for whom no script of welcome yet exists. (shrink)

Social prescriptions are one term commonly used to describe non-pharmaceutical approaches to healthcare and are gaining popularity in the community, with evidence highlighting psychological benefits of reduced anxiety, depression and improved mood and physiological benefits of reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and reduced hypertension. The relationship between human health benefits and planetary health benefits is also noted. There are, however, numerous barriers, such as duration and frequencies to participate in activities, access, suitability, volition and a range of unpredictable variables (...) impeding a comprehensive approach to their use on a wider scale. From a multidisciplinary perspective, this commentary incorporates a salutogenic and nature-based approach to health, we also provide a range of recommendations that can be undertaken at the patient level to assist in shifting the acknowledged systemic barriers currently occurring. These include using simple language to explain the purpose of health empowerment scripts, ensuing personal commitment to a minimum timeframe, enabling ease of access, co-designing a script program, providing ongoing motivational support and incorporating mindfulness to counter unexpected disruptions. (shrink)

Human cognition and behavior are guided by a myriad of norms which enable us to successfully navigate our social environment and our interactions with others. Many of these norms might be hard for us to articulate (e.g. how far to sit or stand from a stranger on the bus), and some of them differentiate between different hierarchies and roles, reflecting patterns of injustice. This paper addresses the fact that social norms, including gendered, ableist, adultist, and racist norms, influence (...) our perception of action possibilities, or affordances, making some actions possible for some agents and not for others. In particular, we propose an account of these interactions in terms of scripts, that is, expected sequences of actions that shape the landscape of the possible ways to interact with one another. Scripts can be learned implicitly, they are dynamic and flexible, and can regulate complex interactions by prescribing permissible actions and responses in specific situations. A script-based account can explain the way norms regulate which actions we perceive as possible in a representationalist way, and can help us explain how norm change occurs. (shrink)

Modern scripts for dying in hospice or by euthanasia are inapplicable to the dwindling of long old age, often experienced as social ‘death before death’. The article critiques the rhetoric of ‘death before death’ used of Alzheimer’s patients, and draws attention to an alternative valuation of death of self in the Christian tradition.

This article proposes a more culturalist and variegated conception of the individual than that presented by individualization theorists. Inspired by the approach of the individual advocated by Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons and John Meyers, it first outlines the general script of the individual-as-actor that informs modern individualism as well as the generic characteristics that are routinely attributed to persons such as agency and free will. It subsequently reconstructs three predominant interpretations of this general script, i.e. utilitarian, moral and expressive individualism. (...) For each variant, the intellectual genesis and overall definition of the institutionalization in specific societal domains and the dominant articulations in social theory are briefly presented. With this threefold distinction, the aim is to synthesize the extensive literature on individualism and to show the sociological strengths of approaching subjectivity in terms of institutionalized scripts. (shrink)

The manifestation of female policing by patriarchy takes nuanced forms and subtle dynamics that include references to sociocultural scripts and moral principles. Generally, the repression of the female gender has been condemned across the world, but such intriguing intellectual debates and calls have made little progress in altering the gender binary thinking and practices. The subject of gender remains a tenacious challenge because in some cases, even the undermined gender subscribes to lop-sided notions of femininity and masculinity. However, this (...) scenario is not odd because in a patriarchal society (such as among the Shona of Zimbabwe), women are culturally and socially “wired” to fit into the phallic scripts of mukadzi chaiye (a “real” or cultured woman). Similarly, the discourse of Ubuntu\Unhu in the hands of both patriarchy and de jure powers, functions as an instrument to muzzle subversive voices from the side-lined subaltern classes. This illuminates the ambivalence of Ubuntu/Unhu philosophy when it is fashioned as a male-controlled or dogmatic concept. In this study, I closely read Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s She no longer weeps as salient prisms to call for a reflective feminist interrogation of Ubuntu/Unhu philosophy that reveals the entrenched phallic quest for domination. While the perpetuation of patriarchy through misconstrued Ubuntu/Unhu muzzles women who are supposed to take an active role in the survival and development of the entire ecosystem, those in the corridors of power exploit its ethics to reconstruct differentiations that only serve their political interests. As I conclude, I reinforce the argument that Ubuntu can only be a liberative doctrine if systemic powers desist from the habit of scheming its selective use or application to gratify egotistical interests by suppressing those perceived to be the second-class inhabitants on the basis of their gender and class. (shrink)

In recent times, there have been different attempts to make an interesting use of the concept of script (as inherited from the fields of psychology and cognitive sciences) within argumentation theory. Although, in many cases, what we find under this label are computerized routines mainly used in e-learning collaborative proceses involving argumentation, either as an educational means or an educational goal, there are also other studies in which the concept of script plays a more theoretical role as the kind of (...) commonly human cognitive structure that could account for the way in which argumentation might develop in ordinary language and ordinary settings. We aim at exploring these latter possibilities, differentiating between the global ascription of the script concept to argumentation practices as procedural and regulated actions from the somewhat more suggestive association between socially shared scripts (expected narratives, plausible sequences, customary experiences, etc.) and the way some enthymemes work from an interactive, rhetorical perspective. The concept of script could help us understand some more procedural than propositional aspects of the cognitive sets shared by arguer and audience and account for the communicative success of apparently defective argumentation. (shrink)

Understanding the origins of human social cognition is a central challenge in contemporary science. In recent decades, the idea of a ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) has emerged as the most popular way of explaining unique features of human social cognition. This default view has been progressively undermined by research on ‘implicit’ ToM, which suggests that relevant precursor abilities may already be present in preverbal human infants and great apes. However, this area of research suffers from conceptual difficulties and (...) empirical limitations, including explanatory circularity, over-intellectualisation, and inconsistent empirical replication. Our article breaks new ground by adapting ‘script theory’ for application to both linguistic and non-linguistic agents. It thereby provides a new theoretical framework able to resolve the aforementioned issues, generate novel predictions, and provide a plausible account of how individuals make sense of the behaviour of others. Script theory is based on the premise that pre-verbal infants and great apes are capable of basic forms of agency-detection and non-mentalistic goal understanding, allowing individuals to form event-schemata that are then used to make sense of the behaviour of others. We show how script theory circumvents fundamental problems created by ToM-based frameworks, explains patterns of inconsistent replication, and offers important novel predictions regarding how humans and other animals understand and predict the behaviour of others. (shrink)

This study centers the experiences of Asian American and migrant high school youth who participated in a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)-informed summer camp, attending to how young people drew on and extended their lived experiences and transnational funds of knowledge through their own inquiries. Findings show that youth engaged as creators of expansive transnational knowledge, researchers across borders, and, at times, teachers of teachers as they shared their work with pre-service educators. Through investigating histories connected to their families and (...) communities and presenting their research, youth created opportunities to surface histories long absent from formal schooling. In doing so, they opened up spaces for future teachers to grapple with curricular silences and reimagine social studies learning in ways grounded in students’ familial, communal, diasporic, and cross-border knowledge. This work extends scholarship in social studies teacher education by foregrounding Asian and Asian American youth as knowledge creators and intellectual partners, challenging white-centric, Eurocentric, monolingual, and assimilationist paradigms. Ultimately, it calls on teacher education to recognize youth as co-constructors of knowledge and as teachers of teachers, flipping the script on who is positioned to teach and learn, and to build more just, equitable, and transformative educational futures with and alongside them. (shrink)

In the Shuowen, one of the earliest comprehensive character dictionaries of ancient China, when discussing where the Chinese characters derive their structural components, Xu Shen proposed the dual constitutive principle of “adopting proximally from the human body, and distally from things around.” This dual emphasis of “body” and “things around” corresponds largely to the phenomenological issues of body or corporeality on the one hand, and lifeworld on the other. If we borrow Heidegger’s definition of Dasein as Being-in-the world, we can (...) easily arrive at a reformulation of Xu Shen’s constitutive principle of the Chinese script as one that concerns “bodily Dasein.” By looking into various examples of script tokens we can further elaborate on how the Chinese make use not only of the body in general but various body parts, and how they differentiate their life world into material nature, living things, and a multifaceted world of equipment in forming a core basis of Chinese characters/components, upon which further symbolic manipulation such as “indication”, “phonetic borrowing”, semantic combination, and “annotative derivation”, etc. can be based. Finally, examples will be cited to show how in the Chinese scripts the human body (and its parts) might interact with other’s bodies (and their parts) or with “things around” (whether nature, living creatures, or artifacts) in various ways to cover the social, environmental, ritual, technical, economical, and even intellectual aspects of human experience. Bodily Dasein, so to speak, provides us with a new perspective of understanding and appreciating the entire scope of the Chinese script. (shrink)

As work regimes become global, social communication increasingly occurs across locations far apart. In the absence of a common national, ethnic, or organizational culture across continents, what makes communication possible among social worlds technologically integrated in real time? Taking India’s global call centers as the focus of analysis, this article attempts to solve the riddle of communication by showing how transnational business practices rely on the transmutation of cultural communication into global communication through the processes of neutralization and (...) mimesis. Neutralization refers to attempts at pruning unwanted cultural particulars, whereas mimesis refers to simulating desired cultural elements. (shrink)

The interventionist turn in science and technology studies increasingly involves researchers with practices of technology development and thus entails the need for appropriate methodologies. Based in software engineering, this article introduces the deconstructive technique of “mind scripting” as a method for analyzing processes of the co-materialization of gender and technology and as a tool to support cooperative, reflective work practices. Anchored in critical design approaches, “mind scripting” is a means for development teams to disclose discourses implicitly guiding work practices in (...) order to make negotiable the underlying value systems. After discussing its foundation in deconstructivist feminist theory, the author illustrates how the method is applied by drawing on selected empirical results. Generating insights into the reproduction of hegemonic social discourses in development processes, “mind scripting” enables the rethinking of established ways of doing. (shrink)

This paper explores alternative meanings and appropriations of the category colonial heritage. How do different categories of people practice and appropriatespaces that have been labelled as colonial heritage? How are these formely colonial spaces (re-) appropriated, contested, commodifed, in contemporary societies? My interest here is strongly influenced by Ann Stoler’s work on Imperial Debris, ruins and ruination (Stoler, 2008). Building upon her argument, I argue for a critical ethnography of how colonial spaces are practiced, experienced, inhabited, rescripted, by multiple agencies (...) and agents, in contemporary times. Based in ethnographic research, this text explores processes of labelling and circulating through spaces in Melaka (West Malaysia), explores linkages between nostalgia and alternative notions of heritage, and questions the local meanings ascribed to heritage (translatable as warisan, in bahasa melayu). Building upon Rosaldo’s (1989) notion of imperialist nostalgia and Hertzfeld’s (2005) concept of structural nostalgia, I end by discussing the production and consumption of colonial nostalgia in contemporary times. (shrink)

Over the past decade, the notion of affective affordances has gained some prominence, particularly in the context of 4E approaches to affectivity. One example of affective affordances, mostly mentioned in passing in 4E approaches to affectivity, are atmospheres. Notoriously difficult to pin down in general, it has so far also remained unclear what distinguishes atmospheres from other affective affordances and whether they are a distinctive type of solicitations. Intuitively, the atmosphere of a situation implies an affect-regulatory profile different to what (...) and how single objects solicit. Notably, as affective frames of sociocultural delineated situations they are relevant for coordinating social interactions and modulate personal concerns pertaining to a given situation. In accordance with paradigm cases of experiencing atmospheres, I will claim that they make salient how one is affectively disposed toward situation-specific feeling norms. I will clarify this claim by drawing on the concepts of social and emotion scripts as they have been developed in cognitive psychology and psychology of emotions. Atmospheres will thus be understood as solicitations to change situational emotion scripts. In this way, they represent a distinct avenue for changing fields of affordances over time, based on personal concerns for social and cultural belonging. Conversely, this account sheds light on the affective underpinnings of the perception of social norms. (shrink)

In this manuscript I explore an example of an over-privileged white woman who encounters two young Black men in a parking garage stairwell. Two related axioms are central to the oppressive script that lies before these subjects: the hetero-patriarchal axiom that women are not safe alone at night and the racist axiom that Black men, especially young ones, are dangerous. These axioms are intended to ensure a practical conclusion—white women and Black men are supposed to avoid each other—thereby conferring legitimacy (...) on the white male, hetero-patriarchal order. If this is a performance of oppression, we must ask, what is the performance of freedom? Freedom, I argue, is the practice of allowing and encouraging a subject's multiple selves to interact so that one may devise and pursue courses of action that have been strategically hidden by systems of domination designed to cultivate pliant agency. My project augments accounts of multiplicitous subjectivity wherein our multiple social worlds socially constitute persons as both oppressor and oppressed, empowered and pliant. The practice of freedom conceived here acknowledges multiplicity while positioning us to seek feminist and antiracist futures that are not configured by oppression. (shrink)

This paper argues that one of the most valuable insights that Muslim-Americans ought to bring into the political arena is our affective response to the government of the United States' internal and foreign policies regarding Muslims. I posit the concept of empathy as one such response that ought to inform our foreign policy in a manner inclusive of Muslim-Americans. The scope of our epistemic privilege encompasses the affective response that crosses borders of the nation-state in virtue of our propinquity to (...) the narratives of Muslims globally. Such an affective response is crucial to our selves remaining multiplicitous and whole. Furthermore, I argue that we ought to access and assess those aspects of our identity that make us subject to suspicions of disloyalty, because it is precisely those aspects that can inform our social and political discourse in a more morally adequate and responsive way. (shrink)

This volume takes stock and understands better what liberal ideas and institutions actually mean in the 21st century and why they are currently so heavily contested. It introduces the concept of “liberal script” to analyze but also problematize liberal thinking as much as its different components, linkages, and the tensions they produce. The edited volume integrates theoretical and methodological perspectives from different disciplines, including political science, sociology, law, history, philosophy, postcolonial studies, and educational science. In demonstrating the theoretical and empirical (...) added value of using “liberal script”, the volume presents a multifaceted and nuanced picture of what is at stake in the challenges of liberalism at the beginning of the 21st century. (shrink)

The use of slang, abusive, and offensive language has become common practice on social media. Even though social media companies have censorship polices for slang, abusive, vulgar, and offensive language, due to limited resources and research in the automatic detection of abusive language mechanisms other than English, this condemnable act is still practiced. This study proposes USAD, a lexicon-based intelligent framework to detect abusive and slang words in Perso-Arabic-scripted Urdu Tweets. Furthermore, due to the nonavailability of the standard (...) dataset, we also design and annotate a dataset of abusive, offensive, and slang word Perso-Arabic-scripted Urdu as our second significant contribution for future research. The results show that our proposed USAD model can identify 72.6% correctly as abusive or nonabusive Tweet. Additionally, we have also identified some key factors that can help the researchers improve their abusive language detection models. (shrink)

In England, throughout the early modern period and beyond, the Rape of Lucretia served as a central intertext for literary and non-literary works engaging with the subject of transgression. Not only did legal tracts and social pamphlets prescribe a woman to behave analogously to Lucretia after rape in order to contest the innocence of her soul through her bodily performance. Allegorically, the legend′s iteration within new cultural contexts in contemporary English historiography and drama provided a powerful subtext with which (...) national histories and identities were scripted according to a familiar plot structure in order to represent 'the Turk′ and thereby to interpret and control what was perceived to be a threat to English identity and sovereignty at a time of intensifying Anglo-Ottoman encounters. This paper not only demonstrates the re-staging of the Rape of Lucretia in different texts and contexts; it examines the way in which the national identities and cultural encounters are represented and performed through the legend in order to stage the self and the Other within the radical discourse of alterity in contemporary proto-orientalist contexts. (shrink)

The very beginning of collaborative research endeavors often lies in politically difficult and practically challenging entanglements. The purpose of this paper is to empirically capture and theoret...

The distinction between bottom-up and top-down control of action has been central in cognitive psychology, and, subsequently, in functional neuroimaging. While the model has proven successful in describing central mechanisms in cognitive experiments, it has serious shortcomings in explaining how top-down control is established. In particular, questions as to what is at the top in top-down control lead us to a controlling homunculus located in a mythical brain region with outputs and no inputs. Based on a discussion of recent brain (...) imaging experiments, we argue for the need to factor the interaction between the experimenter and the experimental participant into a realistic understanding of top-down control. We suggest these interactions involve a ‘sharing of scripts’ for perception and action that may be described as ‘top-top processes.’ We thereby expand the understanding of the homunculus to include elements of social cognition. This conceptual reconfiguration may grant some sort of asylum for a—not very omnipotent—homunculus. (shrink)

The review demonstrates that there are four main historiographical approaches to explanation of the role of Mendelssohn’s philosophy in the emergence of the Haskalah project: (1) traditional approach (created by the Jewish historiography in the second half of the 19th century; it stressed secular and culture-centered character of Haskalah, making it closer to German intellectual tradition); (2) social historiography (it treated Haskalah as a consequence of and reaction to the processes of global social and political modernization); (3) the (...) approach practiced by researchers of early Jewish proponents of Enlightenment’s (determination of the intellectual foundations of Haskalah in the early Maskilim projects); (4) the researches of Mendelssohn's Jewish texts, the concept of “Political Theology”, and the interpretation of Mendelssohn’s ideas in the works of Leo Strauss (new interpretation of the role of Mendelssohn in the creation of Haskalah). (shrink)

What are robots? Are they things or technological objects that we can use or even abuse as we decide and see fit? Or is it the case that robots can or even should be something like a person, i.e., another subject who would need to be recognized as a kind of Other with some legitimate claim on us? This chapter investigates and seeks to respond to these questions. It begins by demonstrating how we typically resolve such questions by way of (...) a moral and legal decision-making protocol that has deep roots. It then details how social robots and other seemingly intelligent artifacts effectively interrupt or resist efforts at both reification and personification, rendering robots and similarly situated interactive artifacts something other, i.e., something does not quite fit or easily accommodate the existing order of things. In response to these documented difficulties, the final part of the chapter evaluates three possible modes of response that can be taken-up and operationalized as we struggle to integrate these technologies into human society and culture. (shrink)

This chapter develops a more-than-legal concept of property. It starts from a discussion of three competing understandings of property: as a thing, as a person-thing relation and as a relation between people mediated by things. While each of these understanding have their merits, they also have specific drawbacks and blind spots and are usually formulated as mutually exclusive. The chapter argues that a synthesis between them is needed that allows to highlight different dimensions of property without defining what it is (...) made of from the outset. For this purpose, the notion of the ‘bundle of rights’ is introduced and subsequently expanded to also exclude social practices and technologies. Illustrating this conceptual expansion through the ethnographic example of a wheat harvest, the text makes the case for understanding property pragmatically: as a ‘bundle of scripts’, which are identified through their effects on property relations, subjects and objects, rather than their materiality as texts, practices or devices. (shrink)

“Philosophy isn’t useful for changing the world,” parents of philosophy students and Karl Marx tell us (at least about non-Marxist philosophy). Cristina Bicchieri’s new book Norms in the Wild provides an impressive antidote against this worry. It stands to change of social practices as Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare stands to political revolutions. Bicchieri combines hands-on advice on how to change social practices with compelling theoretical analyses of social norms. She draws heavily on her influential earlier work on (...) norms, but the book doesn’t presuppose familiarity with it. Many of her examples stem from her work with UNICEF and other NGOs; they include female genital cutting, open defecation, child marriage, and many more. I cannot do full justice to Bicchieri’s rich book here, but will instead focus on three points. 1. Bicchieri offers a detailed and helpful botanization of collective behavior. Purely behavioral definitions of the relevant categories are inadequate. We must look at preferences and beliefs in order to know, e.g., whether something is a social norm. 2. Intentionally changing social norms is a complex process that requires several steps and extensive diagnostics. Simple information campaigns or provision of resources are unlikely to be successful. 3. Trendsetters and scripts often play a crucial role in norm change. Any approach that doesn’t look at psychological mechanisms and variables that are unevenly distributed across the population is inadequate. (shrink)

This chapter argues that emotion recognition is a skill. A skill perspective on emotion recognition draws attention to underappreciated features of this cornerstone of social cognition. Skills have a number of characteristic features. For example, they are improvable, practical, and flexible. Emotion recognition has these features as well. Leading theories of emotion recognition often draw inadequate attention to these features. The chapter advances a theory of emotion recognition that is better suited to this purpose. It proposes that emotion recognition (...) involves scripts. Emotion scripts describe how people are likely to behave in different emotional contexts. Scripts can be improved with the addition of richer social knowledge, they are practical in that they describe and guide social interaction, and they are flexible because they must accommodate the fact that emotions have different behavioral impact depending on the agents involved and the circumstances at play. Learning to recognize emotions through scripts qualifies as a skill. (shrink)

Ethnicity reasoning offers one way of looking at social identity in the letter to the Hebrews. The context of socio-economic abuse and hardships of the audience creates a situation in which ethnicity in social identity becomes an important issue for the author of Hebrews to address. This article is a social-scientific study which explores how the author establishes the ethnic identity of the audience as people of God. While this ethnic identity indicates the more privileged position the (...) readers occupy in relation to the benefits of God accessible to them, it also provides the author with the appropriate social institutions and scripts by which his demand for appropriate response to God and the Christian group becomes appreciable and compelling. The article involves the definition of social-scientific criticism, ethnicity and social identity, and discusses the social context of the letter to the Hebrews. It then explains how some social scripts within specific ethnic institutions give meaning to the demands the author makes from his readers. (shrink)

Human–robot interactions are often affected by error situations that are caused by either the robot or the human. Therefore, robots would profit from the ability to recognize when error situations occur. We investigated the verbal and non-verbal social signals that humans show when error situations occur in human–robot interaction experiments. For that, we analyzed 201 videos of five human–robot interaction user studies with varying tasks from four independent projects. The analysis shows that there are two types of error situations: (...) social norm violations and technical failures. Social norm violations are situations in which the robot does not adhere to the underlying social script of the interaction. Technical failures are caused by technical shortcomings of the robot. The results of the video analysis show that the study participants use many head movements and very few gestures, but they often smile, when in an error situation with the robot. The results suggest that participants do not see the robot as a social interaction partner with comparable communication skills. Our findings have implications for builders and evaluators of human–robot interaction systems. The builders need to consider including modules for recognition and classification of head movements to the robot input channels. The evaluators need to make sure that the presence of an experimenter does not skew the results of their user studies. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the role of labels and generics referring to social kinds in mindshaping practices, arguing that they promote generalizations that foster essentialist thinking and carry a normative force. We propose that their cognitive function consists in both contributing to the formation and reinforcement of schemata and scripts for social interaction and in activating these schemata in specific social situations. Moreover, we suggest that failure to meet the expectations engendered by these schemata and (...) scripts leads to the activation of “reactive attitudes” embedded in feedback loops of reactive exchange that are constitutive of our mindshaping practices. (shrink)

This paper presents pretending as an enacted and fundamentally social activity. First, it demonstrates why we should think of pretense as inherently social. Then, it shows how that fact affects our theory in terms of what is needed in order to pretend. Standardly, pretense is seen as requiring a mechanism that allows one to bypass the “obvious” re- sponse to the environment in order to opt for a symbolic response; that mechanism is im- aginative and representational. This paper (...) shows that the Enactive Account of Pretense reconsiders the idea that one needs to respond to an absent environment when pretending, proposing instead that socially con- stituted perceptual affordances for play allow for non-obvious ways of responding to the present environment. The enactive account of pretense suggests that one need not posit special cognitive pretense mechanisms and mental scripts in order to account for pretend- ing, as available capacities for active perception and re-enactment of routines suffice. This paper concludes with suggestions for the kinds of cognitive skills that should be sought out to explain pretense. (shrink)

Background Social justice is recognized by reputable international organizations as a professional nursing value. However, there are serious doubts as to whether it is embodied in Catalan nursing education. Objectives To explore what nursing students take away from two teaching activities led by expert patients (one presentation and three expert patient illness narratives) on the topics of social justice, patient rights, and person-centered care. Research design Qualitative study using a content analysis approach. The research plan included (1) think-pair-share (...) activities (additional faculty-assisted presentation and three faculty-assisted, semi-structured scripted narratives); (2) paired reflections; (3) focus groups; and (4) content analysis of paired reflections and focus groups. Participants and research context Fourth-year nursing degree students at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Spain. Convenience sampling was used. Ethical considerations The UAB Research Ethics Committee did not deem it necessary to apply any specific measures. We fully explained to patients that they could decide what medical information they would share with the students that was relevant to their learning, and we provided students with guidelines about patient confidentiality, dignity, and respect. Findings/results The students engaged in reflection about their education (recognizing that it had been centered on the professional and not the patient) and their relationship with the patient, in which they reproduced low-involvement patient care by modeling behaviors of their nurse educator. Moreover, they valued a person-centered care model with an emphasis on the emotional part but left out decision-making as an individual right of people. Conclusions The think-pair-share activities were useful to spark self-reflection among students, who identified aspects to change in their own practice, and reflected about their own education process, both of which promote change. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch a socially situated account of responsible agency, the main tenet of which is that the powers that constitute responsible agency are themselves socially constituted. I explain in detail the constitution relation between responsibility-relevant powers and social context and provide detailed examples of how it is realized by focusing on what I call ‘expectations-generating social factors’ such as social practices, cultural scripts, social roles, socially available self-conceptions, and political and legal institutions. (...) I then bring my account to bear on the debate about the exculpatory potential of moral ignorance. I show that a prominent position in this debate – the position that denies that moral ignorance exculpates – is grounded on an individualistic and acontextualist conception of moral capacities, moral cognition, and blameworthiness, and that this conception leads those philosophers who endorse it to make a number of questionable claims regarding the ability of ordinary agents to overcome their moral ignorance and the culpability they bear for the latter. I conclude by indicating how my socially situated account addresses the issue of moral ignorance. (shrink)

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of (...) imperial logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics. (shrink)

In this chapter, I address the last constraint, asymmetric pressure. How is it that your inclination can put asymmetric pressure on your will? I argue that this is a deep and general problem, one that familiar theories of strength and weakness of will tend to elide. What, in principle, could pressure a free will? My Kantian claim is that the only thing that can pressure a free will is the burden of freedom itself. Inclinations, as such, cannot pressure the will. (...) But if their nature is as I have described, they provide us with the opportunity to flee our freedom, by providing us with an animal mind to flee into. Instead of humanizing our incentive, we dehumanize ourselves. Similarly, I argue, we can be weak in relation to our social environment. Social scripts do not pressure us directly, but they give us the opportunity to flee into automaticity. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a way to study the social dynamics of prejudice even in the absence of “prejudiced believers.” Stereotypes often serve to provide us with “social scripts.” We often comply with these scripts even though we don’t endorse their content, simply because we have reason to believe that others endorse them, and because they are typically backed up by sanctions. But others may be in the same situation. Accordingly, we could find ourselves in situations where (...) _nobody_ endorses the stereotypes encoded in our social scripts, even as these scripts continue to govern our mutual interactions. Reverting to notions of “collective” or “shared” epistemic responsibility provides no real traction on these kinds of situations, nor any novel perspectives on remedial action. As a case study, this chapter offers the paradox of “perceived electability,” where voters fail to support a preferred minority candidate because they believe others will not vote for her. (shrink)

This work documents how roboticists’ skilled conversational expertise is unavoidably constrained and guided as it is translated into rule-based robots through specific programming tools. To shed light on the social construction of “social” robots, it documents the (material) agency of tools used to script or program robots within the technology company Aldebaran (formerly Softbank Robotics Europe), which specialized in manufacturing and programming the social robots Pepper and NAO and their conversational AI. Conducted over the course of several (...) years among roboticists, this ethnography investigates how programming tools—their variables, publicly exposed events, hierarchy of information, available data streams, and documentation—facilitated the crafting of specific forms of talk (among many) for Pepper. Two types of constraints are examined: those encountered by roboticists when crafting disfluencies and filled pauses (“uhh”) in Pepper’s speech, and those faced when enabling the robot to “continue speaking” after a silence. These constraints produced “paths of least resistance” toward specific designs for the robot, which, in turn, impacted its competence in situated interaction with “end users”. Crucially, these constraints were not inevitable technical limits, but rather resulted from specific assumptions about language and, in particular, what “conversing with a robot” entails. In other words, roboticists’ tools led to the embedding of linguistic practices and a specific organization of talk into their robot. The study concludes with the continued significance of these “paths of least resistance” (and their underlying assumptions about “what conversing is”) in the era of chatbots based on generative AI. (shrink)

A qualitative research study examines what the use of drama in a seventh grade social studies class means to the students. The students use structured role-play and scripted play to examine social studies through the content of ancient history. The students exhibit problem solving, decision-making, empathizing, linking events, sharing ideas, and conceptualizing. Drama is another powerful method of teaching social studies calling on students to demonstrate knowledge skills, attitudes, and participation.

From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action—so-called practices—and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in (...) a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances whether individual or collective can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies have become more complex. Performances are successful only insofar as they can ‘“re-fuse” these increasingly disentangled elements. In a fused performance, audiences identify with actors, and cultural scripts achieve verisimilitude through effective mise-en-scène. Performances fail when this relinking process is incomplete: the elements of performance remain apart, and social action seems inauthentic and artificial, failing to persuade. Refusion, by contrast, allows actors to communicate the meanings of their actions successfully and thus to pursue their interests effectively. (shrink)

Various scholars argue that sexual desire is socially constructed. There is, however, little agreement surrounding the nature of social constructionism. Vance contrasts social constructionism here with a cultural influence model and distinguishes between degrees of social constructionism. There are, however, problems with this classification. These problems can similarly be found with Foucault whose arguments fail to support his claim that sexual desire is a social construction. Difficulties also appear in Simon and Gagnon's scripting theory of sexual (...) desire, a theory that is commonly applauded as establishing a social constructionist account. This is because scripting theory depends entirely on theatrical metaphors. But there is much inconsistency involved in applying such metaphors to everyday life. This does not, however, imply a biological essentialist view of sexual desire must be true. For there is the further alternative that sexual desire has its origin in existential features of human awareness. Sexual desire arises simply because we are aware of both our own gender and the genders of others, and that gender phenomenologically presents itself to us as something in need of completion. This awareness is something that is fundamental to the human condition and thus has little to do with social construction. (shrink)