The relation of spatial language and spatial cognition is central to the debate over language and thought. Recent findings move this debate beyond the standard opposition between universalist and relativist (Whorfian) stances. Two such studies suggest that spatial language (Khetarpal et al., 2009) and the spatial cognition underlying it (Khetarpal et al., 2010) both reflect universal tendencies...

The ‘Whorfian’ debate over color naming and color cognition has been framed by two questions: (1) Is color naming across languages largely a matter of arbitrary linguistic convention? (2) Do cross-language differences in color naming cause corresponding differences in color cognition? In the standard rhetoric of the debate, a ‘relativist’ argues that both answers are Yes, and a ‘universalist’ t...

At first glance, a comparison between Nietzsche and Aristotle may seem improbable. If Nietzsche is indeed a moral relativist, as is often suggested, why is Nietzsche concerned with the development of human character? There are explicit instances of Nietzsche assessing the positive and negative, beneficial and injurious, traits of human character. In “What is Noble” of Beyond Good and Evil, Niet...

Recent international policy literature on Education for Sustainable Development puts forward utopian concepts of sustainable development and transformed learning as objects for educational thinking and practice. This paper, drawing on three illustrative educational investigations with youth in a South African context, critically examines how we might engage with utopian concepts such as those p...

We take two paradigms for information systems development, functionalism and social relativism, and apply their assumptions to the evaluation of ambient information systems. Ambient information Systems research, we posit, comes from two distinct paradigms and this has confounded a single evaluation framework from emerging. Instead, different groups of researchers have specific (if implicit) phi...

The Einstein‟s program enables a theoretical economy for quantum double slit experiment, in its wave-particle duality behavior, with the unification of first and second quantifications for light and matter. It introduces a space-like amplitude function u(r,t), which completes the usual time-like functions ψ(r,t) of quantum mechanics and quantum fields. The Einstein‟s program is founded upon a s...

Social Constructionism has been instrumental in remodeling grounded theory. In attempting to make sense of the social world, social constructionists view knowledge as constructed as opposed to created. This paper discusses how social constructionists construct knowledge and argues that social constructionism is concerned with the nature of knowledge and how it is created and as such, it is unco...

We use evidence from cognitive psychology and the history of science to examine the issue of the theory-ladenness of perceptual observation. This evidence shows that perception is theory-laden, but that it is only strongly theory-laden when the perceptual evidence is ambiguous or degraded, or when it requires a difficult perceptual judgment. We argue that debates about the theory-laden issue ha...

The recent emphasis on a realist ontology that cannot be overshadowed by subjectivist or relativist perspectives seems to have a number of consequences for psychology as well. My attempt here is to analyse the relationship between happiness as a state of the individual and the states of the external world and the brain events related to (or, in some hypotheses, causally responsible for) its occ...

The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably ’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appea...