Reaching the people: Isotype beyond the West

An overview of the work of the Isotype Institute in the Western Region of Nigeria in the 1950s.

The linguistic status of Isotype

It is ironic that Otto Neurath, one of those responsible for the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy of the twentieth century, should have been concerned during the last twenty years of his life with developing a ‘pictorial language’. By using simplified pictograms as components, the Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik (later called Isotype) bypassed verbal language to a great extent, creating the potential for universal understanding of biological, social and economic correlations. However, despite its consistency and rigour, Isotype was not a complete language, and Neurath knew that it never could be. This paper will examine the linguistic characteristics of Isotype and describe the deliberate resistance on the part of its creators to develop a full theory behind it.

Safety and quality and stage of distribution

Let 0 denote the level of quality inherent in a food product that is delivered to some terminal market. In this paper, I characterize allocations over 0 and provide an economic rationale for regulating safety and quality standards in the food system. Zusman and Bockstael investigate the theoretical foundations for imposing standards and stress the importance of providing a tractable conceptual foundation. Despite a wealth of contributions that are mainly empirical (for reviews of these works see, respectively, Caswell and Antle), there have been relatively few attempts to model formally the linkages between farm and food markets when food quality and consumer safety are at issue. Here, I attempt to provide such a framework, building on key contributions in the theoretical literature and linking them in a simple model of quality determination in a vertically related marketing channel. The food-marketing model is due to Gardner. Spence provides a foundation for Pareto-improving intervention in a deterministic model of quality provision, and Leland, building on the classic paper by Akerlof, investigates licensing and minimum standards when the information structure is incomplete. Linking these ideas in a satisfactory model of the food markets is the main objective of the paper.

Control without deception

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect of making “others' behaviour” a controlled variable, but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute the pool of subjects. This paper proposes and implements a new experimental design, the Conditional Information Lottery, which offers all the benefits of deception without actually deceiving anyone. The design should be suitable for most economics experiments, and works by a modification of an already standard device, the Random Lottery incentive system. The deceptive scenarios of designs which use deceit are replaced with fictitious scenarios, each of which, from a subject's viewpoint, has a chance of being true. The design is implemented in a sequential play public good experiment prompted by Weimann's (1994) result, from a deceptive design, that subjects are more sensitive to freeriding than cooperation on the part of others. The experiment provides similar results to Weimann's, in that subjects are at least as cooperative when uninformed about others' behaviour as they are if reacting to high contributions. No deception is used and the data cohere well both internally and with other public goods experiments. In addition, simultaneous play is found to be more efficient than sequential play, and subjects contribute less at the end of a sequence than at the start. The results suggest pronounced elements of overconfidence, egoism and (biased) reciprocity in behaviour, which may explain decay in contributions in repeated play designs. The experiment shows there is a workable alternative to deception.

How “intuition” exploded

Recent decades have seen a surge in interest in metaphilosophy. In particular there has been an interest in philosophical methodology. Various questions have been asked about philosophical methods. Are our methods any good? Can we improve upon them? Prior to such evaluative and ameliorative concerns, however, is the matter of what methods philosophers actually use. Worryingly, our understanding of philosophical methodology is impoverished in various respects. This article considers one particular respect in which we seem to be missing an important part of the picture. While it is a received wisdom that the word “intuition” has exploded across analytic philosophy in recent decades, the article presents evidence that the explosion is apparent across a broad swathe of academia (and perhaps beyond). It notes various implications for current methodological debates about the role of intuitions in philosophy.

Expecting moral philosophers to be reliable

Are philosophers’ intuitions more reliable than philosophical novices’? Are we entitled to assume the superiority of philosophers’ intuitions just as we assume that experts in other domains have more reliable intuitions than novices? Ryberg raises some doubts and his arguments promise to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy once and for all. In this paper, I raise a number of objections to these arguments. I argue that philosophers receive sufficient feedback about the quality of their intuitions and that philosophers’ experience in philosophy plausibly affects their intuitions. Consequently, the type of argument Ryberg offers fails to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy.

How distinctive is philosophers’ intuition talk?

The word “intuition” is one frequently used in philosophy. It is often assumed that the way in which philosophers use the word, and others like it, is very distinctive. This claim has been subjected to little empirical scrutiny, however. This article presents the first steps in a qualitative analysis of the use of intuition talk in the academy. It presents the findings of two preliminary empirical studies. The first study examines the use of intuition talk in spoken academic English. The second examines the use of intuition talk in written academic English. It considers what these studies tell us about the distinctiveness of philosophical language and methods and considers some implications for evaluative and ameliorative methodology.

Predicating from an early age: edusemiotics and the potential of children’s preconceptions

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce’s semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W 8:15; Pietarinen in Signs of logic, Springer, Dordrecht, 2006; Stjernfelt in Diagrammatology. An investigation on the borderlines of phenomenology, ontology and semiotics, Springer, Dordrecht, 2007) and relational logic. Constructivism was traditionally developed within psychology and sociology and, therefore, some incompatibilities can be expected between these two schools. While acknowledging the differences, we explain that constructivism and semiotics share the assumption of realism that knowledge can only be developed upon knowledge and, therefore, an epistemological collaboration is possible. The semiotic analysis performed confirms the constructivist results and provides a further insight into the teacher-student relation. Like the constructivist approach, Peirce’s doctrine of agapism infers that the personal dimension of teaching must not be ignored. Thus, we argue for the importance of genuine sympathy in teaching attitudes. More broadly, the article also contributes to the development of postmodern humanities. At the end of the modern age, the humanities are passing through a critical period of transformation. There is a growing interest in semiotics and semiotic philosophy in many areas of the humanities. Such a case, on which we draw, is the development of a theoretical semiotic approach to education, namely edusemiotics (Stables and Semetsky, Pedagogy and edusemiotics: theoretical challenge/practical opportunities, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2015).

Abduction by philosophers: reorienting philosophical methodology

A reorientation is needed in methodological debate about the role of intuitions in philosophy. Methodological debate has lost sight of the reason why it makes sense to focus on questions about intuitions when thinking about the methods or epistemology of philosophy. The problem is an approach to methodology which gives a near exclusive focus to questions about some evidential role that intuitions may or may not play in philosophers' arguments. A new approach is needed. Approaching methodological questions about the role of intuitions in philosophy with an abductive model of philosophical enquiry in mind will help ensure the debate doesn't lose sight of what motivates the debate.