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What form might truth take in a theoretical frame which precludes notions of origin and telos? Catherine Malabou's theory of 'plasticity' is such a frame, as it takes the accumulation of life and not the search for eternal truths to be a central premise of philosophy. I conduct a close reading of central texts of Malabou's to conceptualise truth as a plastic phenomenon over three stages: conception, gestation, and nativity. The conception of truth involves its coming-into-shape; gestation its consolidation of shape; nativity the precariousness of being alive. 'Plastic truth' represents a meeting of negotiations, accidents, history, and morality, in constant motion; an epistemic modality with moral and political consequences for education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is time for anthropology to reclaim truth and speak it to capitalist power more forcefully. The rise of post-truth and the truth of our planetary socioecological predicaments demand this. How to do so is not straightforward. Recalibrating deconstruction and finding a new balance between epistemic solidities and shifting sands is only part of the task. The greater anthropological challenge is reorienting ethnography from frictions (how "global connections" fragment) to tensions (how and why contradictory global connections came about and endure or not). To explore this reorientation, I propose a political ecology of truth and the cultivation of a planetary ethnography. Both aspire to do anthropological justice to the dramatic transformations in our dominant planetary consciousness and the contradictory socioecological predicaments this is mired in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian state and much of the settler polity maintain an unresolved contradiction between fully acknowledging Indigenous people and upholding a system predicated on the assumption of their socio-political inferiority. This tension inflects a public sphere in which Indigenous people frequently deploy truth-telling as an epistemic strategy, albeit one that involves a balance between challenging cultivated silences and/or colonial triumphalism and the costs of repetitive epistemic labour. The landscape of communicative exchange thus outlined suggests the need for a more nuanced assessment of the decolonial potential of truth-telling about colonial violence in Australia, given a contemporary context wherein settler individuals and institutions increasingly attempt to elicit such testimony from Indigenous people. Discourse analysis of media items published in 2020 about 26 January, Australia's national day, reveals Indigenous people's resistance against both colonial untruths and the racialised epistemic power differential enabling their circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a question of practical ethics: To which values do historians appeal when they come under sustained attack from political power? An important instrument of historians living in closed societies to express their values is the open letter, defined as an unauthorized public statement cast in epistolary form and addressed to either political leaders or fellow historians, but always with the general public as a silent reader in the background. Limited to the post‐1945 period, a search for such open letters yielded 106 examples from 39 countries in closed and open societies. Four types of open letters were identified: those describing repression effects, those rebutting official historical views, those defending basic principles, and those presenting transitional historiography. Nine telling cases from six closed societies were then reviewed in detail and analyzed from a variety of angles (authorship, rhetoric, audience, impact, criticism, regime stage, and regime type). When these cases were examined in light of the initial question, it was found that most letters contained a great diversity of values but focused on how the human rights of historians were threatened. Invariably, their theme was historical writing in its full breadth, including its documentary infrastructure and its ramifications in education and the public sphere. Respect for historical truth was invoked more than any other value. It was a minimalist truth conception, however, understood as the absence of historical lies and falsification. The reason for this emphasis on an integrity‐oriented conception of historical truth may lie in an old and deep‐seated professional fear: the fear that the dictator's corrupted and divisive version of history survives and triumphs as the final verdict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Newly powerful large language models have burst onto the scene, with applications across a wide range of functions. We can now expect to encounter their outputs at rapidly increasing volumes and frequencies. Some commentators claim that large language models are bullshitting, generating convincing output without regard for the truth. If correct, that would make large language models distinctively dangerous discourse participants. Bullshitters not only undermine the norm of truthfulness (by saying false things) but the normative status of truth itself (by treating it as entirely irrelevant). So, do large language models really bullshit? I argue that they can, in the sense of issuing propositional content in response to fact-seeking prompts, without having first assessed that content for truth or falsity. However, I further argue that they need not bullshit, given appropriate guardrails. So, just as with human speakers, the propensity for a large language model to bullshit depends on its own particular make-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some years now, the significance of truth for politics has been intensely debated under the buzzword "post-truth." However, this cannot hide the fact that political theory and philosophy have systematically neglected the relationship between truth and politics throughout their history. This article intends to remedy this desideratum by differentiating the various modes in which truth is referred to and invoked in the political field. To this end, the main strands of the post-truth debate are reconstructed and their shortcomings are pointed out. Second, based on a contrasting reading of Habermas and Foucault, possible starting points for systematizing the relationship between truth and politics are discussed. Third, and as a prolegomenon to such a systematization, the article proposes a cartography of political truth forms and relations along five fault lines: truth as foundation and de-foundation, truth as coercion and freedom, truth as virtue and scandal, truth as secret and transparency, and truth as knowledge and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional semantic segmentation techniques rely heavily on the availability of substantial ground-truth data. However, this prerequisite often proves infeasible in real-world scenarios, particularly with the labeling complexities inherent in remote sensing images. In this manuscript, a semi-supervised approach has been investigated towards semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images by addressing the challenge of limited availability of ground-truth information. For this purpose, a hybrid integration of a standard semantic segmentation model and an adversarial model has been proposed under semi-supervised setting. The former predict the masks for the unlabelled images when fine-tuned with the available labelled training images (however limited they may be); whereas the latter aids the reconstruction of original input images from the predicted soft(masks) through an adversarial mechanism. This reconstruction, further validated through a reconstruction score, assist in the identification of 'most-confident' image-mask pairs to be strategically integrated into the training set. The contribution ultimately is to utilise the unannotated images to meaningfully augment the limited training set to obtain an enhanced one. The proposed technique showcases a significant improvement, with an 11–34% enhancement over existing approaches in terms of mean intersection over union, precision, and F1-score across both the minifrance and dense labeling remote sensing dataset datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate data annotation is essential to successfully implementing machine learning (ML) for regulatory compliance. Annotations allow organizations to train supervised ML algorithms and to adapt and audit the software they buy. The lack of annotation tools focused on regulatory data is slowing the adoption of established ML methodologies and process models, such as CRISP-DM, in various legal domains, including in regulatory compliance. This article introduces Ant, an open-source annotation software for regulatory compliance. Ant is designed to adapt to complex organizational processes and enable compliance experts to be in control of ML projects. By drawing on Business Process Modeling (BPM), we show that Ant can contribute to lift major technical bottlenecks to effectively implement regulatory compliance through software, such as the access to multiple sources of heterogeneous data and the integration of process complexities in the ML pipeline. We provide empirical data to validate the performance of Ant, illustrate its potential to speed up the adoption of ML in regulatory compliance, and highlight its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American citizens face an epistemic crisis that threatens their liberal-democratic political order: They lack a shared standard of truth for distinguishing facts from falsehoods. Schools have an obvious role to play in solving the problem, for teaching the truth about the world and how to find it are at the heart of their mission. Careful curriculum decision-making is needed to accomplish this aim, and my contribution to this symposium is to suggest that Durkheim and Bernstein’s sociology of education, as articulated by Young and Muller in the two keynote articles and across the past twenty-five years, takes us in a useful direction. I briefly sketch two curricula that are responsive to the crisis and will serve, in substance and method, as specimens of that direction. I then reflect on them and make a civic argument for centring disciplinary content and skills in the curriculum. Next, I join Young, Muller, and their colleagues in suggesting that a popular ‘critical’ discourse limits educators’ ability to accomplish the aim of teaching truth and truth-finding because it turns their attention away from knowledge and curriculum. I conclude with an Arendtian warning of what is at stake in this crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn the face of global crises – physical, economic, political, and environmental – Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings provide vital wisdom and strategies. His philosophy as in Hind Swaraj, challenges violence and exploitation, critiquing unchecked modernity, while advocating for sustainable practices aligned with human values. This article explores the relevance of Gandhi’s concept of Swaraj in addressing contemporary issues like poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. By reviewing three key texts on Gandhian philosophy, it underscores the enduring significance of his principles of nonviolence and ethical governance, aiming to inspire societies to adopt his framework for a more just and sustainable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the issue of compliance with the general principle of competitiveness of criminal proceedings with the right of the court to instruct a representative of the probation body staff to prepare a pre-trial report on the identity of the accused, which the court implements at the stage of preparatory proceedings, both on its own initiative and at the request of the parties to the criminal legal dispute. It has been found that the principle of competitiveness imposes on the court the obligation, on the one hand, to facilitate the implementation of the procedural rights granted to the parties and not to interfere in the process of proving their own legal position. However, on the other hand, it obliges the court to fully, comprehensively and impartially investigate the circumstances of the commission of a criminal offense to achieve the truth in a criminal case. It has been established that in the case of instructing a representative of the staff of the probation body to prepare a pre-trial report on his own initiative, the court actually goes to the side of the prosecution, since, even before the investigation in the conditions of the trial of any evidence of the person's guilt, it appoints a pre-trial report with a conclusion on the necessary type and extent punishing the accused for committing an incriminated, but as yet unproven, criminal offense. It was emphasized that the refusal of the court to grant the request of the party to the criminal proceedings regarding the necessity of appointing a pre-trial report is also incompatible with the requirements of the principle of competitiveness, because additional information about the identity of the accused can help the parties defend their legal positions before the court, since they can indicate the presence of circumstances that aggravate or mitigate the defendant's punishment, or exclude his criminal responsibility. On the basis of the conducted research, a conclusion was formulated, according to which, the resolution on instructing a representative of the probation body staff to prepare a pre-trial report based on the request of a party to a criminal legal dispute will fully comply with the principle of adversarial criminal proceedings, since: 1) it will assist the parties in proving the circumstances before the court, which are included in the subject of proof; 2) will be an additional way to ensure the achievement of the objective truth in a criminal case; 3) will testify to the impartiality and impartiality of the court, which, in the absence of prosecution evidence, will leave to the discretion of the parties the necessity of appointing a pre-trial report with a conclusion on the possibility of correction of the accused without the application of imprisonment or restriction of liberty for a certain period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gene regulatory networks are powerful tools for modeling genetic interactions that control the expression of genes driving cell differentiation, and single-cell sequencing offers a unique opportunity to build these networks with high-resolution genomic data. There are many proposed computational methods to build these networks using single-cell data, and different approaches are used to benchmark these methods. However, a comprehensive discussion specifically focusing on benchmarking approaches is missing. In this article, we lay the GRN terminology, present an overview of common gold-standard studies and data sets, and define the performance metrics for benchmarking network construction methodologies. We also point out the advantages and limitations of different benchmarking approaches, suggest alternative ground truth data sets that can be used for benchmarking, and specify additional considerations in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we deliberate with citizens who entertain post-truth beliefs in democratic societies? This is a central question for those interested in wielding the epistemic potential of democratic deliberation against post-truth. Yet, the strength of proposed deliberative solutions depends on the accuracy with which post-truth is diagnosed. Taking seriously the connection between epistemic diagnosis and deliberative remedy, this paper looks at the motivations provided by non-vaccinating parents for their beliefs and argues for an understanding of post-truth as misplaced distrust in testimony, as against a standard view of post-truth as indifference to fact. Second, the paper argues this new diagnosis of post-truth renders ineffective deliberative strategies aiming to harness the power of impersonal reason and accuracy, of the kind recently defended by Simone Chambers. Instead, combating post-truth as the paper defines it is effectively accomplished through employing bridging rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Placing myself as a rejected doctoral student (2010–2022), this paper examines the emergent nature of identity formation across time and space. While presenting a layered account of my lived experience in seeking pathways of pursuing doctoral study, each reading experience leads me to produce my identity(ies) and situated knowledge(s) as an outsider. To illustrate the complexity of one's lived experience, I choose to present my work in an unconventional format of scholarship. By giving voice to an academic outsider, this paper adds to the nascent literature on the non-linear becomingness of academic identity. Further, this form of scholarship advocates for writing -differently as a means to empower minorities to articulate their diverse epistemology. The implication of writing up this public letter helps me mitigate feelings of vulnerability and rebuild self-confidence, creating a space of being and its potential to reconstitute the self in their becomingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selectively integrating new information contributes to belief polarization and compromises public discourse. To better understand factors that underlie biased belief updating, I conducted three pre-registered studies covering different controversial political issues. The main hypothesis was that cognitively devaluing new information hinders belief updating. Support for this hypothesis was found in only one of the three issues. The only factor that consistently influenced belief updating across issues was the discrepancy between prior beliefs and new information. These results suggest that usually people do use evidence to correct their beliefs, but may refuse to do so if doubts about its generalizability arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US populace appears to be increasingly polarized on partisan lines. Political fissures bifurcate the country even on empirical matters like vaccine safety and anthropogenic climate change. There now exists an ever-expanding interdisciplinary research program in which theorists attempt to explain increases in political polarization and myriad other phenomena collected under the "post-truth" heading by appeal to social-epistemic structures, like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, that affect the flow and uptake of information in various communities. In this paper, I critically analyze C. Thi Nguyen's important and popular analysis of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. As I demonstrate, the explanatory mechanisms on which Nguyen focuses are, arguably, overly cognitive and obscure significant effects of social-epistemic structures on our affective lives. The broader lesson to draw from my discussion is the following: commonly used expressions intended to refer to social-epistemic problems, like "political polarization", possess no univocal definition across theorists, and various ways of making the terms precise are differentially successful in characterizing verifiable phenomena. Theorizing about social-epistemic structures should be responsive to relevant empirical work on various phenomena that we have good reason to believe constitute real and substantive problems that result from the flow and uptake of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through analysing the cinematic language, this essay wants to find out if there is a stereotype in the representation of the Northern village landscape in the films Bến không chồng (Luu Trong Ninh) and Cuộc đời của Yến (Dinh Tuan Vu) or not. From there, this research will show that that stereotype expressed a sense of nostalgia for and created regimes of truth about the Northern village. The essay also studies the discourse overlapping in these two films about the same historical period, with the same theme about women's misery. This writing will point out that despite filming about the same landscape, Bến không chồng presents a sad, gloomy landscape; on the contrary, Cuộc đời của Yến shows a beautiful but simple landscape like in a tourism promotional video. Then, the author will give her opinions on the reasons for that discourse overlapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ibn Rushd presents different methods of reasoning. Each method differs in terms of its construction, level of assent, and the cognitive state it ultimately produces. Despite these technical variations, notable authors suggest that they are all equally valid and sound. I analyse this claim, and argue that although demonstrative and dialectical arguments are both valid and sound, there is a theoretical discrepancy between the two. Subsequently, I explore how underscoring this issue would motivate a non-classical/many-valued logic and a plurality of truth in being able to make sense of the theoretical discrepancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newsworkers have utilised the game format to create innovative storytelling through newsgames, a hybrid form of journalism. Newsgames blend journalism's pursuit of truth with the fictional elements of video games, creating a tension between “fact” and “fiction”. Existing literature lacks sufficient exploration of how this tension is managed in the production and consumption of newsgames. This study addresses this gap by examining how newsgame practitioners navigate truth claims and how players engage with these claims. Through semi-structured interviews with practitioners (n = 27) and gaming sessions with players (n = 28), the study reveals that practitioners take deliberate steps to justify newsgames, while players employ various strategies to evaluate their truth claims. These findings underscore the performative dimension of truth negotiation in newsgames, positioning audiences as active participants at the heart of this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article distinguishes between two historical ways of presenting the catchphrase "Once true, always true" (semel verum, semper verum), associated with the twelfth-century logical school of the nominales. Within the Time-Jumping Model, a hypothetical tenseless propositional content (enuntiabile) is treated as the common significate of differently tensed statements, such as "Socrates will die" and "Socrates died," uttered before and after Socrates's death. This hypothetical enuntiabile is "always true" thanks to its tenseless nature. By contrast, the Fixed-Present Model preserves the tensed character of enuntiabilia. By revealing an implicit temporal index, the nominales could apply "Once true, always true" to enuntiabilia such as Christum venisse (that Christ has come), which not only is true and will always be true but also – paradoxically – has always been true. It has always been true because it amounts to the propositional content that Christ came before this instant , where "this instant" rigidly denotes the present moment. The Fixed-Present Model alleviates the worry that the nominales confused truth-bearers with truthmakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populists employ truth as a tool for aligning the people against the elite. Citizenship education rarely takes up critiques of liberal democracy, discussions of populism, or conversations about what truth is. This paper provides an alternative pragmatist vision of truth that builds on the populist call for democracy to better reflect the will of the people, while also pushing back against the harms potentially caused by populism. Students today need to learn how populism works performatively and through discourse. But more importantly, they also need to learn how to engage with populism by taking up some of the real challenges it poses in their communities today. Citizenship education that overtly talks about how truth operates and demonstrates how inquiry can be used to determine "what works" better prepares students for the flawed democracy we see at play today and provides pathways for improving it in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narratives around devadasi are historically constructed to glorify the dedication of young girls as dancers to various temples across India. Traditionally, a devadasi assumed a pivotal role in executing significant rites and festivities within temple precincts, thereby representing an indispensable contributor to the cultural milieu inherent to these sacred edifices. This side of the devadasi legacy is quite popular and known even in the present times, but a discreet silence prevails about the flip side of this picture, a side that is characterised by systemic oppression, exploitation, and enduring bondage, constituting a narrative often hushed up. The present paper investigates the profoundly complex and concealed aspects of the devadasi tradition through a study of narratives by Gogu Shyamala, William Darlymple and Sudha Murthy using a post-truth lens and Baudrillard's 'simulacra' to deconstruct the coordinated distortion/asymmetry of/in knowledge/reality of devadasi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates pro-vax discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Expert and political discussions about the pandemic are abundant, commonly focusing on anti-vax and science-skeptic politics and further connecting them with post-truth and populism. However, research on pro-vax discourse remains largely overlooked. The article focuses on the case of Cyprus which received little scholarly attention in the context of the pandemic, especially by political science and media and communication scholarship. Applying discourse analysis to 120 media units that connect the articulations of scientific experts, politicians and journalists, empirical findings show that the discursive management of the pandemic takes place in the name of science, reason and responsibility, with key mechanisms of persuasion being the moralistic and fear-mongering narratives that place the responsibility for the return to normality on individual citizens. This highlights that communication about COVID-19 is not merely about healthcare and science. Rather, it is politicized and disciplinary in nature. The examination of the case of Cyprus alongside existing theories and debates reveals the internationally salient character of discursive features and patterns including the hegemony of techno-scientific objectivism, epistemological elitism and anti-populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-truth relates to the combination of tactics of influence and opinion manipulation orchestrated by powerful economic and political interests, principally targeting initiatives or ideas with a transformative potential. Post-truth strategies express themselves in multiple tactics, which happen synchronously at varied levels and through different channels. Scientifically valid information is forced to compete with narratives which are designed to create doubt or skepticism. Disinformation weakens efforts to implement policies intended to support transformative goals. The distortion, discrediting, or ignoring of scientific evidence has become a threat to our societies. This article starts by defining the post-truth phenomenon, first discussing the roots, tactics, and contextual conditions supporting its expansion. Then it explores what stance evaluators can adopt to work in this new era where people are polarized and disinformation is widespread. This article aims to raise awareness of this disruptive phenomenon and brings evaluators together to consider promising practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary psychoanalysis, while diversified into various theories, fundamentally bifurcates into resistance analysis (analysis of ego) and the creation of narrative truth (analysis of drives/Id) in terms of methodology. Ego analysis, the core goal and method of ego psychology, focuses on defense and resistance analysis, aiming for maturation and development of ego functions by collaborating with a patient’s ego. On the other hand, the creation of narrative truth as a methodology primarily relies on drive analysis, which bypasses patients’ ego and focuses on aspects of drives. All psychoanalysts, including Freud, tend to oscillate ambiguously between these two methodologies, moving from drive analysis to ego analysis and returning to drive analysis again. When psychoanalysts do not clearly distinguish between these opposing approaches and fail to recognize our stances, the psychoanalytic process can become confusing, leading to a lack of effective therapeutic changes for patients. Therefore, the author suggests that we should acknowledge our position of bifurcation between analysis of resistance and defense, create narrative truth, and integrate usefulness and limitations of both approaches in a complementary manner so that a higher level of therapeutic effectiveness in psychoanalysis could be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian complicity in colonialism and the need for truth telling and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples have been a central focus of academic theological research shared at the Canadian Theological Society in recent years. Many Canadian churches have offered official apologies and made formal commitments to right relations with Indigenous peoples. This paper considers the experience of "people in the pews." Taking a diffuse visual art installation of white ceramic feathers as a starting point, it traces the contours of how local congregations in the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa are engaged with truth and reconciliation intellectually, emotionally, and actively. It names the need to bridge the gaps between academic theology and lived theology, and official church statements and everyday practices in congregations. It invites academic theologians to consider the questions: To whom are we listening? Who is listening to us? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note is a critical response to Kentaro Fujimoto's new conservativeness argument about truth, which centres on the notion of finite conjunction. We argue that Fujimoto's arguments turn on a specific way of formalizing the notions of finite collection and finite conjunction in first-order logic. In particular, by instead formalizing these concepts in a natural way in set theory or in second-order logic, Fujimoto's new conservativeness argument can be resisted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the contemporary, mainstream human rights movement rose to prominence in the late-1970s, both knowing about and doing human rights has been marked by a very particular mode of activism, information politics, which mobilises 'brute' facts with the aim of shaming governments into reform. However, this article suggests that the global rise of the far-right has intertwined with reactionary forms of digital culture, engendering both the retreat of shame as an operative concept in global affairs and nourished a growing 'post-truth' suspicion of facts. The article theorises this problem as a conjunctural shift that represents both a political and epistemological crisis for human rights. Following the lead of debates within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and media studies, I contend that the present conjuncture requires us to consider what comes after information politics by re-imagining its epistemological basis. The article brings together Donna Haraway's theoretical work on 'Situated Knowledges', with Maurizio Lazzarato's political epistemology to develop a more perspectival, combative approach to human rights knowledge-making. I argue this epistemic framework is able not only to navigate key problems posed by the digital-authoritarian present but also to address many issues with information politics identified by earlier critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews anthropological explorations of conspiracy theories—in dialogue with insights from other disciplines, primarily political science, philosophy, and social psychology—to frame conspiracy theories as productive social practices. While conspiracy theories are often depicted through their epistemological shortcomings and associated with social and political margins, this article traces the nascent threads across anthropological scholarship to reach an emic understanding of those narratives and their sociopolitical reverberations and proposes approaching conspiracy theories through their style, agentive implications, and political effects. Conspiratorial style, the article argues, pertains not to the content of the narrative but to its incessant seeking of covert operations beyond readily visible forms as well as a growing flexibility regarding the narrator's belief in the narrative's veracity. The agentivizing dynamic generated through conspiracism differentiates contemporary conspiracism from its predecessors and involves an empowering current. Finally, the article focuses on how contemporary conspiracism is intricately linked to political contestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to raise awareness about foreign disinformation might accidentally increase distrust towards legitimate media. We argue that state discourse on disinformation is comparable to strategic framing in journalists' coverage of political events, and that it might imbue audiences with cynicism. Furthermore, in contrast to an experimental paradigm that depicts disinformation audiences as passive, we suggest that news consumers actively appropriate and produce content themselves. Conceptualising media content as 'strategic' rather than sincere might influence audiences to share and produce media content strategically. This Machiavellian tendency leads to similar effects on bias as motivated reasoning. Most accounts of motivated reasoning assume that limits of psychological processing are the reasons for biased judgements of what is true and fake, however, we argue that biases can also be due to culturally acquired second-order beliefs about knowledge. To explain this, we build on ideas about 'folk epistemology' and propose the term 'strategic epistemology towards media'. Resistance-building efforts against disinformation risk promoting such a strategic epistemology towards media and this can have harmful effects on democratic dialogue. To avoid this, educational interventions should be premised on social epistemology rather than experimental psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst many studies have explored academic identity construction, very few take a comparative perspective to examine the various ways of constructing academic identities within and across different disciplines. This paper analyses a key policy document used for evaluating academics' performance along with semi-structured interviews with 37 academics from Chemical Sciences, Medical Sciences, Nursing and Education working in a research-intensive New Zealand university. The use of Foucault's theoretical construct of games of truth provides a novel perspective to investigate the ways in which academics in different disciplines play the academic 'game' and how this might affect their construction of an academic identity. Our analysis suggests that the path into academia is a key factor in their trajectory of academic formation. The study suggests three types of 'valid' academics. It problematises the standardised definition and evaluation of academics and offers contextualised, multiple, dynamic and agential understandings of being and becoming set up through the interplay of forces arising from disciplinary, institutional, professional and personal spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of post-truth and disinformation, the crucial relationship between journalists and politicians is under increasing pressure. Some politicians publicly question the media's role in spreading inaccurate and false information, and journalists have reason to be critical of politicians too, as they can easily disseminate falsehoods online. This study deals with how politicians and journalists perceive each other's role in spreading disinformation, drawing on surveys with political journalists (N = 148) and local politicians (N = 452) in Belgium. We find that 33 percent of politicians, in particular right-wing politicians, blame journalists for spreading "fake news". Journalists, in turn, are even more critical of politicians: 58 percent of the journalists blame politicians in general, 75 percent blame radical left politicians, and 90 percent blame radical right politicians for spreading disinformation. Importantly, journalists' views of politicians' role in spreading disinformation impact their relationship. Although journalists who believe politicians add to the spread of disinformation are not necessarily less likely to interact with politicians, they are significantly more negative about their interactions with politicians. Such perceptions potentially add to the tense relationship between journalists and politicians we are increasingly observing and could have important ramifications for political news-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political polarisation, e.g. following the refugee movements of 2015 or the Covid pandemic, is often explained by emotions. The latter are widely exploited as a political strategy, while points of view are often discredited as based on mere emotion rather than "rational" thought. This development challenges the idea of participants being moved by the "unforced force of the better argument" (Habermas 2001) or the idea that consent was the goal of debating. Not only has this resulted in an environment of "post-truth" (Hyvönen 2018), but the motivation of participants to take issue with political questions can be described more interestingly than as a search for truth or a better reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the sixty years since the publication of Jürgen Habermas' magnum opus, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the public sphere now faces a new threat in the era of "post-truth" politics. The preponderance of lies, mis/disinformation, "fake news", "alternative facts", conspiracy theories, and the general breakdown of trust in established sources of knowledge and information has led to the fragmentation and deepening polarisation of the public sphere - a situation deliberately promoted by right wing populist forces intent on fighting the "culture wars". At the same time, the political space is being disrupted, in a different way, through new social movements and radical activism particularly around issues of climate change, inequality, racial injustice, and police violence. My aim is to show how these contemporary forms of dissent are engendering a new "structural" transformation of the public sphere. They create autonomous and critical spaces of collective engagement that call into question the legitimacy of dominant power structures. Understanding this process requires an alternative rendering of the relationship between truth and politics - something I develop through Michel Foucault's rethinking of the critical impulse of the Kantian Enlightenment and his later work on parrhesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expression transfer is an important task in computer graphics and vision. Existing 3D face models constructed on registered meshes or shapes with corresponding vertices cannot transfer expression over practical data. While recent learning-based works achieved pose transfer between 3D unorganized point clouds, they cannot transfer 3D face expressions well because of weak geometry-perceiving ability and lack of ground truth expression faces for training. To solve the problems, we propose an effective framework that can transfer expressions on non-corresponding and topology-free 3D faces for the first time. The framework includes a novel autoencoder that directly processes unordered point clouds to extract identity and expression features and fuse them to generate desired target faces. Multiple geometry-perception operators are introduced to the autoencoder's encoders to obtain 3D faces' valuable geometry information without repetitive modulations in previous methods. Besides, our decoder utilizes cross-attention's powerful interactive perception capability to fuse extracted features and deform target faces in feature space. To train the autoencoder in a supervised manner, we present a submodule that generates pseudo-ground truth expression faces using pre-trained deep models and their latent operations. The experiments demonstrate the proposed method's outstanding 3D face expression transfer performances. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SEULSH/Non-corresponding-and-Topology-free-3D-Face-Expression-Transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Mental fictionalism holds that folk psychology should be regarded as a kind of fiction. The present version gives a Lewisian prefix semantics for mentalistic discourse, where roughly, a mentalistic sentence “p” is true iff “p” is deducible from the folk psychological fiction. An eliminativist version of the view can seem self‐refuting, but this charge is neutralized. Yet a different kind of “self‐effacing” emerges: Mental fictionalism appears to be a mere “parasite” on a future science of cognition without contributing anything substantial. The paper then rebuts the objection, illustrating that prefix semantics resolves a lingering problem for eliminativism from Boghossian. The problem is that eliminativists seem unable to adopt realism about neuroscience, for such realism implies that neuroscientific statements represent reality accurately. However, a deflationary version of prefix semantics allows the eliminativist to draw an ontologically relevant distinction (roughly) between truths that have a storytelling prefix and those that do not. (Deflationism means there is no implication that the unprefixed sentences robustly represent reality). The overarching lesson is that eliminativists need to approach ontology carefully so as to avoid self‐refutation; however, prefix‐semantical mental fictionalism provides the resources for them to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crop type maps are essential in informing agricultural policy decisions by providing crucial data on the specific crops cultivated in given regions. The generation of crop type maps usually involves the collection of ground truth data of various crop species, which can be challenging at large scales. As an alternative to conventional field observations, street view images offer a valuable and extensive resource for gathering large-scale crop type ground truth through imaging the crops cultivated in the roadside agricultural fields. Yet our ability to systematically retrieve crop type labels at large scales from street view images in an operational fashion is still limited. The crop type retrieval is usually at the pixel level with uncertainty seldom considered. In our study, we develop a novel deep learning-based CropSight modeling framework to retrieve the object-based crop type ground truth by synthesizing Google Street View (GSV) and PlanetScope satellite images. CropSight comprises three key components: (1) A large-scale operational cropland field-view imagery collection method is devised to systematically acquire representative geotagged cropland field-view images of various crop types across regions in an operational manner; (2) UncertainFusionNet, a novel Bayesian convolutional neural network, is developed to retrieve high-quality crop type labels from collected field-view images with uncertainty quantified; (3) Segmentation Anything Model (SAM) is fine-tuned and employed to delineate the cropland boundary tailored to each collected field-view image with its coordinate as the point prompt using the PlanetScope satellite imagery. With four agricultural dominated regions in the US as study areas, CropSight consistently shows high accuracy in retrieving crop type labels of multiple dominated crop species (overall accuracy around 97 %) and in delineating corresponding cropland boundaries (F1 score around 92 %). UncertainFusionNet outperforms the benchmark models (i.e., ResNet-50 and Vision Transformer) for crop type image classification, showing an improvement in overall accuracy of 2–8 %. The fine-tuned SAM surpasses the performance of Mask-RCNN and the base SAM in cropland boundary delineation, achieving a 4–12 % increase in F1 score. The further comparison with the benchmark crop type product (i.e., cropland data layer (CDL)) indicates that CropSight is a promising alternative to crop type mapping products for providing high-quality, object-based crop type ground truth of diverse crop species at large scales. CropSight holds considerable promise to extrapolate over space and time for operationalizing large-scale object-based crop type ground truth retrieval in a near-real-time manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As human life progresses with the development of advanced civilisation, people's perceptions of various things tend to often change. One of them is the notion of exclusivism. Postmodernists say that truth is subjective, that is, it is based on oneself. Truth is determined by the individual, which is one's personal human right. Similarly, relativists say that truth, including Christian faith, is also relative. If it is relative, it means that the word of God is no longer the absolute truth, that Jesus is not the only Saviour because there are other ways to be saved. This thinking is contrary to the Holy Bible, which declares that God is the absolute truth. One of the negative effects of the many changes that are taking place is, for example, the attack or rejection of the truth of God's Word. Even the servants of God today are less selective in accepting changes. Based on this, the purpose of this research is to see how the perception of churches in the postmodern era is changing towards exclusivism the understanding of religious pluralism. The religious pluralism model promotes the belief that there is indeed virtue in all religions, just as all religions are good and are of relatively equal value. The research approach adopted a descriptive quantitative methodology. The scale used for measurement a Likert scale. The questionnaire was distributed through a link on google forms to communities in some areas around Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, and Tangerang. The amount of data obtained was from 187 respondents of Protestant churches comprising 51% males and 49% females. The results of the research demonstrate that the general understanding of religious pluralism in Protestant Christianity is still at a very low level. The reasons are 1) Church sermons that do not mention ideas such as pluralism, 2) The church is more focused on soul winning, 3) The church is complacent in the routine of its worship, 4) The church lacks information about religious pluralism, 5) The church lacks servants of God who are knowledgeable about emerging theology, 6) Churches are competing for the souls of other churches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Etkileşim: Academic Journal of Uskudar University Faculty of Communication is the property of Etkilesim and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article establishes a framework for understanding human existence as a moral endeavor. However, human society has a division between truth and lies, good and evil, and justice and injustice; people are discriminated against by money, threatening the sustainable development of humanity; the question is, how can humanity develop sustainably? To clarify this purpose, the author uses qualitative methods to analyze, synthesize, compare, and contrast the moral life of species, in which human philosophy and social philosophy are used as the methodology. The results affirm the development process from survival instinct to a complex system of social values towards sustainable development through the foundation of morality. However, in modern society, morality is increasingly dominated by social products, especially goods and money, leading to a situation where morality is misunderstood and exposed, causing a part of society to be deformed. The article concludes that survival instinct is the daily basis of all life, but social factors, products, and goods strongly affect the sustainable development of humanity. While competition is driven by money, ethical considerations emphasize cooperation and dialogue in performing social roles to achieve sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examination malpractice represents a pervasive challenge that has deeply compromised the integrity of education in Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria. This persistent issue contributes to the annual emergence of graduates at various educational levels whose certifications are mere facades, misrepresenting the actual knowledge and competencies they possess. Consequently, this leads to a workforce ill-equipped to significantly contribute to the socio-economic development of the continent. Given that truth is a central tenet in African traditional thought systems, often imbued with moral significance, the prevalence of examination malpractice, which is fundamentally rooted in falsehood, starkly contradicts the core values of honesty and truth within African societies. This paper seeks to address the following critical questions: What constitutes examination malpractice? How is truth conceptualized, particularly within the African context? In what ways does examination malpractice contravene the traditional African notion of truth? This study offers a hermeneutic exploration of examination malpractice, the concept of truth, and the traditional African ethos, with a specific emphasis on the Igbo people of Southeastern Nigeria. The findings indicate that the moral dimension inherent in the African understanding of truth renders examination malpractice a profound violation of societal values. The paper concludes by advocating for heightened awareness of the long-term consequences of examination malpractice in Africa and calls for a re-education and reorientation of the populace on the fundamental moral principles that underpin African society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suppose I assert "Jim is rich". According to negotiated contextualism, my assertion should be understood as a proposal to adopt a standard of wealth such that Jim counts as "rich" by that standard. Furthermore, according to negotiated contextualism, this is so in virtue of the semantic properties of the word "rich". Defenders of negotiated contextualism (Khoo & Knobe in Noûs 52(1):109–143, 2016; Khoo in Philos. Phenomenol. Res. 100(1):26–53, 2020) claim that this view is uniquely well-placed to account for certain disagreement data; for example, that if your standard for the application of the word "rich" is more constraining than mine, you can sensibly assert "no, Jim is not rich" without thereby making an incompatible claim. This paper outlines a simpler explanation of the data: speakers can sensibly reject a given assertion provided that they think that the asserted sentence is false in the context which they take to be relevant to that sentence's interpretation. I argue that, combined with standard semantic tools, this explanation can account for the original data and for new empirical results. Along the way, I present new empirical data to argue against negotiated contextualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video diaries are an innovative tool for ethnographic research, contributing to the quality of fieldwork and ethnographic data by giving additional attention to participant voices. Grounded in two fieldwork periods in secondary and higher education, this paper illustrates three key qualities through which video diaries contributed to ethnographic research: (1) Building trusting relationships with participants, (2) providing a space for participant autonomy, and (3) being a medium of self-explication and truth-telling. In video diaries, participants exercised free speech, providing a widely unmediated, personal perspective on their professional identity, roles, and relationships. This personal perspective allowed participants to contribute to trusting on their own terms, which mitigated face-work – especially when talking about conflicts and challenges – and provided additional entry points for conversations, enabling deep dialogue and understanding. Ultimately, the use of video diaries significantly strengthened the researcher-participant relationship and enriched the ethnographic data and the quality of interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, some thoughts are collected regarding the role of performance as a way of getting in touch with reality. Even as fictions, these performative actions exist in reality, and rather peculiar formats 'come into existence' for demarcating these fictions from reality: applause, whistle blows, frames... What is the role of these demarcations when thinking about the relation between fiction and reality? And what if the demarcations become part of the to-be-demarcated fictions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]