There has been a lack of research examining how right-wing extremist groups justify their key claims online to reach a broader audience. This question is even more worrisome when considering a ...Canadian context, given Canada’s state policies on multiculturalism and intolerance of hateful rhetoric. My research draws on the gaps within the literature of right-wing extremism, online spaces, and justification of discourse by conducting a content analysis of 300 Facebook and Twitter posts from the accounts of three Canadian right-wing extremist groups, ID Canada, Soldiers of Odin BC, and Yellow Vests Canada. This article proposes the use of French theorist Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of critical capacity common worlds to help explain how right-wing extremist groups make arguments that are quite extreme to a broad audience of people on social media. Such claims include advocating for a homogenized Canadian identity and Canadian values, promoting a belief in social decay, and supporting authoritarianism. However, these claims are not overt; rather right-wing extremist groups discuss apolitical topics to mask controversial views.
The main purpose of this paper is to assess the validity of the contention that, over the past few decades, the public sphere has undergone a new structural transformation. To this end, the analysis ...focuses on Habermas’s recent inquiry into the causes and consequences of an allegedly ‘new’ or ‘further’
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structural transformation of the political public sphere. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part considers the central arguments in support of the ‘new structural transformation of the public sphere’ thesis, shedding light on its historical, political, economic, technological, and sociological aspects. The second part offers some reflections on the most important limitations and shortcomings of Habermas’s account, especially with regard to key social developments in the early twenty-first century. The paper concludes by positing that, although the constitution of the contemporary public sphere is marked by major—and, in several respects, unprecedented—structural transformations, their significance should not be overstated, not least due to the enduring role of critical capacity in highly differentiated societies.
Many features of synaptic connectivity are ubiquitous among cortical systems. Cortical networks are dominated by excitatory neurons and synapses, are sparsely connected, and function with ...stereotypically distributed connection weights. We show that these basic structural and functional features of synaptic connectivity arise readily from the requirement of efficient associative memory storage. Our theory makes two fundamental predictions. First, we predict that, despite a large number of neuron classes, functional connections between potentially connected cells must be realized with <50% probability if the presynaptic cell is excitatory and >50% probability if the presynaptic cell is inhibitory. Second, we establish a unique relation between probability of connection and coefficient of variation in connection weights. These predictions are consistent with a dataset of 74 published experiments reporting connection probabilities and distributions of postsynaptic potential amplitudes in various cortical systems. What is more, our theory explains the shapes of the distributions obtained in these experiments.
The objective was to determine the influence of the directed method in the development of the subject of Philosophy and the critical capacity of the students of a higher institution. The type of ...study was explanatory, with the quasi-experimental design being applied to the experimental group; The parametric statistic used was t Student, demonstrating the effectiveness of the method directed in the development of the Philosophy subject and the critical capacity of the students of higher education, the level of correlation between the directed method and the critical capacity of, 032 and the level of significance of, 711.
El objetivo fue determinar la influencia del método dirigido en el desarrollo de la asignatura de Filosofía y la capacidad crítica de los estudiantes de una institución superior. El tipo de estudio fue explicativo, siendo el diseño cuasi-experimental, al grupo experimental se les aplico sesiones de aprendizaje; el estadígrafo paramétrico utilizado fue t de Student, demostrándose la efectividad del método dirigido en el desarrollo de la asignatura de Filosofía y la capacidad crítica de los estudiantes de educación superior, el nivel de correlación entre el método dirigido y la capacidad crítica de ,032 y el nivel de significancia de ,711.
Today most of universities all over the world are facing an issue of large-scale student’s academic fraud. Despite multiple attempts to reveal reasons and circumstances behind academic dishonesty and ...efforts aimed at preventing academic misconduct no improvements seem to have been achieved. The article attempts to answer why the existing strategies to prevent academic dishonesty prove ineffective. In this regard, it is important to pay attention to the way the students perceive dishonest practices, in what cases they consider them appropriate, and in what cases they criticize them. Based on the Sociology of Critical Capacity by Boltanski and Thévenot applied to 23 semi-structured interviews conducted among the Russian and British students, the authors identify six regimes of criticism and justification where students publicly express their attitude towards academic fraud. Possible measures are proposed to tackle academic fraud taking into account the equivalence principles that students use to criticize or support such practices.
Abstract The writings of a sixteenth century French teenager may seem a stretch for a public health readership, but Etienne de la Boétie's treatise on Voluntary Servitude explains why unjust systems ...prevail and how they can be changed. They prevail, he shows, because we let them (the losers always vastly outnumber the winners); and they change when we retract our permission (as Ghandi demonstrated). These vital insights have inspired progress down the centuries – the enlightenment philosophers, the French Revolution, Tolstoy, the American civil rights movement as well as the Indian struggle against the British Empire. In an era when widening inequalities have become all too apparent, and the harm this does to the commonweal much better understood, this paper argues that La Boétie's analysis retains all its power and can inspire a new vision for public health.
Resumo A chamada “sociologia da capacidade crítica” de Luc Boltanski vem se tornando um dos principais paradigmas teóricos de interpretação das relações sociais. Contrário ao modo como a sociologia ...crítica à la Bourdieu entende a reflexividade humana, Boltanski propõe tratar os indivíduos como seres reflexivos, plenamente capazes de julgar e criticar o mundo. No entanto, essa “capacidade crítica” funciona em sua sociologia mais como premissa teórica do que como objeto concreto de investigação. Diante disso, este texto argumenta que uma sociologia interessada na capacidade crítica dos sujeitos não pode apenas “supô-la”, deve constituí-la em objeto de estudo sociológico. Para tal, propõe-se reconceituar a capacidade crítica como competência reflexiva, no sentido dado à expressão pela socióloga inglesa Margaret Archer. O recurso às categorias de Archer não apenas ajuda a identificar os limites da sociologia de Boltanski, mas, sobretudo, permite ampliar o seu alcance.
The impact of learning and long-term memory storage on synaptic connectivity is not completely understood. In this study, we examine the effects of associative learning on synaptic connectivity in ...adult cortical circuits by hypothesizing that these circuits function in a steady-state, in which the memory capacity of a circuit is maximal and learning must be accompanied by forgetting. Steady-state circuits should be characterized by unique connectivity features. To uncover such features we developed a biologically constrained, exactly solvable model of associative memory storage. The model is applicable to networks of multiple excitatory and inhibitory neuron classes and can account for homeostatic constraints on the number and the overall weight of functional connections received by each neuron. The results show that in spite of a large number of neuron classes, functional connections between potentially connected cells are realized with less than 50% probability if the presynaptic cell is excitatory and generally a much greater probability if it is inhibitory. We also find that constraining the overall weight of presynaptic connections leads to Gaussian connection weight distributions that are truncated at zero. In contrast, constraining the total number of functional presynaptic connections leads to non-Gaussian distributions, in which weak connections are absent. These theoretical predictions are compared with a large dataset of published experimental studies reporting amplitudes of unitary postsynaptic potentials and probabilities of connections between various classes of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the cerebellum, neocortex, and hippocampus.
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