Paul F. A. Bartha
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195325539
- eISBN:
- 9780199776313
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195325539.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Logic/Philosophy of Mathematics
This chapter selectively reviews computational theories of analogical reasoning from Evans, Gentner, Holyoak and Thagard, Ashley, Carbonell, and Hofstadter. While these theories provide insight into ...
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This chapter selectively reviews computational theories of analogical reasoning from Evans, Gentner, Holyoak and Thagard, Ashley, Carbonell, and Hofstadter. While these theories provide insight into the processes involved in analogical reasoning, many of them operate with a perceptual model of analogical reasoning and appear to neglect normative questions. It is argued that most of the computational theories do, at least implicitly, incorporate normative principles and that those principles need to be examined critically. In particular, the chapter takes a close look at Gentner's systematicity principle. It is alleged that systematicity per se neither produces nor explains the plausibility of analogical arguments.Less
This chapter selectively reviews computational theories of analogical reasoning from Evans, Gentner, Holyoak and Thagard, Ashley, Carbonell, and Hofstadter. While these theories provide insight into the processes involved in analogical reasoning, many of them operate with a perceptual model of analogical reasoning and appear to neglect normative questions. It is argued that most of the computational theories do, at least implicitly, incorporate normative principles and that those principles need to be examined critically. In particular, the chapter takes a close look at Gentner's systematicity principle. It is alleged that systematicity per se neither produces nor explains the plausibility of analogical arguments.
Samuel DeCanio
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780300198782
- eISBN:
- 9780300216318
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300198782.003.0007
- Subject:
- Law, Constitutional and Administrative Law
This chapter examines the impact of silver policy on American politics by focusing on the demonetization of the silver dollar in the Coinage Act of 1873 and the claims made by the free silver ...
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This chapter examines the impact of silver policy on American politics by focusing on the demonetization of the silver dollar in the Coinage Act of 1873 and the claims made by the free silver movement in the 1870s and 1880s that were subsequently adopted by the Populist Party and William Jennings Bryan. It first considers the passage of the Coinage Act, denounced by the Populists as the “Crime of '73,” and goes on to discuss the politics of silver and its relevance to general issues involving popular comprehension of democratic politics. It then explores Richard Hofstadter's reaction to the Populists' conspiratorial view of the silver issue and the studies echoing his arguments. It supports the Populists' contention that William Chapman Ralston, president of the Bank of California, bribed Henry Linderman, the official who wrote the Coinage Act of 1873, to influence silver policy. It suggests that silver had been demonetized to protect not only Ralston's business empire but also the gold standard and the public debt.Less
This chapter examines the impact of silver policy on American politics by focusing on the demonetization of the silver dollar in the Coinage Act of 1873 and the claims made by the free silver movement in the 1870s and 1880s that were subsequently adopted by the Populist Party and William Jennings Bryan. It first considers the passage of the Coinage Act, denounced by the Populists as the “Crime of '73,” and goes on to discuss the politics of silver and its relevance to general issues involving popular comprehension of democratic politics. It then explores Richard Hofstadter's reaction to the Populists' conspiratorial view of the silver issue and the studies echoing his arguments. It supports the Populists' contention that William Chapman Ralston, president of the Bank of California, bribed Henry Linderman, the official who wrote the Coinage Act of 1873, to influence silver policy. It suggests that silver had been demonetized to protect not only Ralston's business empire but also the gold standard and the public debt.
Peppino Ortoleva
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190900250
- eISBN:
- 9780190900298
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190900250.003.0009
- Subject:
- Political Science, Democratization
Fake news has been cyclically surfacing in the history of journalism and public opinion. In the vein of some classic authors, the chapter identifies ideas that are surprisingly useful in the present ...
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Fake news has been cyclically surfacing in the history of journalism and public opinion. In the vein of some classic authors, the chapter identifies ideas that are surprisingly useful in the present media environment. It interweaves three historical threads relevant to today’s fake news: (1) the growth of canards in 19th-century Paris, observed by both Honoré de Balzac and Gérard de Nerval as the habitual invention of news when facts were not sufficiently attractive for readers; (2) the diffusion of fausses nouvelles during the Great War, described by Marc Bloch and propelled by the tendency, in times of crisis, to search for oracles more than information proper; (3) the propensity, suggested by Richard Hofstadter, to spread conspiracy theories, notably in the development of McCarthyism.Less
Fake news has been cyclically surfacing in the history of journalism and public opinion. In the vein of some classic authors, the chapter identifies ideas that are surprisingly useful in the present media environment. It interweaves three historical threads relevant to today’s fake news: (1) the growth of canards in 19th-century Paris, observed by both Honoré de Balzac and Gérard de Nerval as the habitual invention of news when facts were not sufficiently attractive for readers; (2) the diffusion of fausses nouvelles during the Great War, described by Marc Bloch and propelled by the tendency, in times of crisis, to search for oracles more than information proper; (3) the propensity, suggested by Richard Hofstadter, to spread conspiracy theories, notably in the development of McCarthyism.
Thierry de Duve
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226546568
- eISBN:
- 9780226546872
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226546872.003.0012
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
The book’s last chapter reinterprets Kant’s distinction between a determining and a reflecting judgment in modern, cybernetic terms: a reflecting judgment is a feedback loop of the mind. It further ...
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The book’s last chapter reinterprets Kant’s distinction between a determining and a reflecting judgment in modern, cybernetic terms: a reflecting judgment is a feedback loop of the mind. It further argues that Kant’s perforce ignorance of the concept of feedback led him to place the “as if” of reflection in the human mind rather than in nature, the way modern scientists routinely do when they say, for example, that it is as if natural selection had chosen this or that biological solution to a species’s survival. More radically, this last chapter argues that the discovery of the concept of feedback has made the Critique of Teleological Judgment obsolete. The fact that living nature apparently orients itself according to goals has been explained, and explained away, by cybernetics and neo-Darwinism. But far from disqualifying the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, this leaves the realm of art alone to bear the weight of having to answer Kant’s third fundamental question, “What are we allowed to hope?”Less
The book’s last chapter reinterprets Kant’s distinction between a determining and a reflecting judgment in modern, cybernetic terms: a reflecting judgment is a feedback loop of the mind. It further argues that Kant’s perforce ignorance of the concept of feedback led him to place the “as if” of reflection in the human mind rather than in nature, the way modern scientists routinely do when they say, for example, that it is as if natural selection had chosen this or that biological solution to a species’s survival. More radically, this last chapter argues that the discovery of the concept of feedback has made the Critique of Teleological Judgment obsolete. The fact that living nature apparently orients itself according to goals has been explained, and explained away, by cybernetics and neo-Darwinism. But far from disqualifying the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, this leaves the realm of art alone to bear the weight of having to answer Kant’s third fundamental question, “What are we allowed to hope?”
David Harrington Watt
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780801448270
- eISBN:
- 9781501708541
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801448270.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter explores three different attempts to write a fitting obituary for Protestant fundamentalism. The first, Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, portrays fundamentalism as a ...
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This chapter explores three different attempts to write a fitting obituary for Protestant fundamentalism. The first, Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, portrays fundamentalism as a reactionary movement whose intellectual bankruptcy was dramatically revealed in a famous trial about the teaching of evolution. The other two obituaries—Norman F. Furniss' The Fundamentalist Controversy, (1954) and Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)—were both written by professional historians. Both books present fundamentalism as a form of Christianity that in the past blocked Americans' search for knowledge; both assert that religious fundamentalism's influence peaked in the 1920s and then went into steep decline.Less
This chapter explores three different attempts to write a fitting obituary for Protestant fundamentalism. The first, Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, portrays fundamentalism as a reactionary movement whose intellectual bankruptcy was dramatically revealed in a famous trial about the teaching of evolution. The other two obituaries—Norman F. Furniss' The Fundamentalist Controversy, (1954) and Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)—were both written by professional historians. Both books present fundamentalism as a form of Christianity that in the past blocked Americans' search for knowledge; both assert that religious fundamentalism's influence peaked in the 1920s and then went into steep decline.
David S. Brown
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226076409
- eISBN:
- 9780226076379
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226076379.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) was America's most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a ...
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Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) was America's most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a vigorous champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. During his nearly thirty-year career, Hofstadter fought public campaigns against liberalism's most dynamic opponents, from McCarthy in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater and the Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s. His opposition to the extreme politics of postwar America—articulated in his books, essays, and public lectures—marked him as one of the nation's most important and prolific public intellectuals. This biography explores Hofstadter's life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. A fierce advocate of academic freedom, racial justice, and political pluralism, Hofstadter charted in his works the changing nature of American society from a provincial Protestant foundation to one based on the values of an urban and multiethnic nation. Hofstadter presciently saw in rural America's hostility to this cosmopolitanism signs of an anti-intellectualism that he believed was dangerously endemic in a mass democracy. By the end of a life cut short by leukemia, Hofstadter had won two Pulitzer Prizes, and his books had attracted international attention. Yet the Vietnam years culminated in a conservative reaction to his work that is still with us. Whether one agrees with Hofstadter's critics or with the noted historian John Higham, who insisted that Hofstadter was “the finest and also the most humane intelligence of our generation,” the importance of this seminal thinker cannot be denied.Less
Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) was America's most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a vigorous champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. During his nearly thirty-year career, Hofstadter fought public campaigns against liberalism's most dynamic opponents, from McCarthy in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater and the Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s. His opposition to the extreme politics of postwar America—articulated in his books, essays, and public lectures—marked him as one of the nation's most important and prolific public intellectuals. This biography explores Hofstadter's life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. A fierce advocate of academic freedom, racial justice, and political pluralism, Hofstadter charted in his works the changing nature of American society from a provincial Protestant foundation to one based on the values of an urban and multiethnic nation. Hofstadter presciently saw in rural America's hostility to this cosmopolitanism signs of an anti-intellectualism that he believed was dangerously endemic in a mass democracy. By the end of a life cut short by leukemia, Hofstadter had won two Pulitzer Prizes, and his books had attracted international attention. Yet the Vietnam years culminated in a conservative reaction to his work that is still with us. Whether one agrees with Hofstadter's critics or with the noted historian John Higham, who insisted that Hofstadter was “the finest and also the most humane intelligence of our generation,” the importance of this seminal thinker cannot be denied.
Herbert Hovenkamp
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199782796
- eISBN:
- 9780190261351
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199782796.003.0007
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, History of Economic Thought
This chapter examines the decline of the antitrust movement in the United States. It analyzes Richard Hofstadter's What Happened to the Antitrust Movement? that concerns the disappearance of the ...
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This chapter examines the decline of the antitrust movement in the United States. It analyzes Richard Hofstadter's What Happened to the Antitrust Movement? that concerns the disappearance of the movement just as it attained greater power as a regulator of industry structure and conduct. It considers the two arguments that Hofstadter believed to had happened that led to the decline: businesses had fit much more comfortably into the landscape of public opinion, and antitrust became much more technical and began to speak the language of economists.Less
This chapter examines the decline of the antitrust movement in the United States. It analyzes Richard Hofstadter's What Happened to the Antitrust Movement? that concerns the disappearance of the movement just as it attained greater power as a regulator of industry structure and conduct. It considers the two arguments that Hofstadter believed to had happened that led to the decline: businesses had fit much more comfortably into the landscape of public opinion, and antitrust became much more technical and began to speak the language of economists.
Robin Marie Averbeck
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469646640
- eISBN:
- 9781469646664
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469646640.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Political History
Chapter 1 analyses the postwar body of political thought known as pluralism. It explores the work of key contributors to this body of thought such as David Riesman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel ...
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Chapter 1 analyses the postwar body of political thought known as pluralism. It explores the work of key contributors to this body of thought such as David Riesman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Bell, organizing the chapter by the different themes or memes they participated in and articulated. Chapter 1 presents the argument that pluralism deeply shaped postwar liberalism and infused it with the conviction that American political institutions were the best in the world and truly open to all who wanted to participate. However, pluralists also feared the poor, who they associated with ignorance and authoritarianism.Less
Chapter 1 analyses the postwar body of political thought known as pluralism. It explores the work of key contributors to this body of thought such as David Riesman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Bell, organizing the chapter by the different themes or memes they participated in and articulated. Chapter 1 presents the argument that pluralism deeply shaped postwar liberalism and infused it with the conviction that American political institutions were the best in the world and truly open to all who wanted to participate. However, pluralists also feared the poor, who they associated with ignorance and authoritarianism.
