Browsing by Subject "Testimony"
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Item Artistic expression, aesthetic value and the law(2011-05) Neilson, Jennifer A.; Higgins, Kathleen Marie; Malmgren, Anna-Sara; Martinich, Aloysius P.; Walton, Kendall; Woodruff, PaulThe aim of this project is to develop a legally relevant theory of artistic value, based on which a judge can reliably determine whether a work has sufficient such value to be granted constitutional protection, even though it would otherwise count as obscene. Within this framework I argue that a moral flaw can count as an aesthetic virtue in a narrative work, at least when the audience learns something from the immoral content of the work. Since expert testimony is sometimes required in legal cases about artistic value, I also develop a legally applicable theory of aesthetic testimony, such that expert testimony can be used to determine the valence of aesthetic properties, which is essential in determining a work‘s overall artistic value. My theory of which properties of works are relevant to their aesthetic evaluation depends both on which categories the work is appreciated in, and on the conventions of those categories. I address these issues within Canadian and American legal contexts.Item Critical thinking on a logical fallacy(2011-05) Shim, So Young, 1970-; Bonevac, Daniel A., 1955-; Asher, Nicholas; Juhl, Cory; Koons, Robert; Sosa, DavidAd hominem argument is an argument that attacks the defender of a claim rather than the claim in dispute. The purpose of my dissertation is to answer the question of whether ad hominem argument is fallacious. I search for the answer by exploring several areas of philosophy and discussing ad hominem argument from historical, logical, epistemological, and linguistic perspectives. I reach the following conclusions: First, since the conclusion of an ad hominem argument does not appear explicitly in actual argumentation, how to formulate the conclusion plays a crucial role in judging the legitimacy of ad hominem argument; Second, there is no type of logical fallacy unified under the name of “ad hominem” because, at least, some instances of so-called ad hominem fallacy are epistemically justifiable arguments; Third, since an ad hominem argument is used to refute a person’s testimony by attacking his trustworthiness, an ad hominem argument playing a role of undercutting defeater of a speaker’s testimony is legitimate from the perspective of epistemology of testimony; Fourth, since ad hominem argument can be treated as a speech act of argumentation, an ad hominem argument that satisfies the felicity conditions for argumentation is legitimate from the perspective of speech act theory and an ad hominem argument can be legitimately used to reveal the infelicity of the opponent’s argument.Item Detecting deception : the role of nonverbal behavior in children’s decisions of trust(2015-08) Ghossainy, Maliki Eyvonne; Woolley, Jacqueline D.; Church-Lang, Jessica; ten Brinke, Leanne; Bigler, Rebecca; McGlone, Matthew; Hixon, John GregA wealth of research has demonstrated that children possess mechanisms that guide from whom they prefer to learn (VanderBorght & Jaswal, 2009; Corriveau & Harris, 2009; Koenig & Harris, 2005a, Nurmsoo & Robinson, 2009). Nevertheless, understanding the mechanisms that protect children against deceptive speakers has received little attention (Mills, 2012; Sperber, Clément, Heintz, Mascaro, Mercier, Origgi, & Wilson, 2010). This study examines the development of children’s ability to modulate trust in verbal testimony as a function of nonverbal behavior. Four-, 5-, and 6-year-olds were tasked with locating a toy hidden in one of two boxes. Prior to deciding the location, children watched a video of an adult providing verbal and/or nonverbal testimony about the location of the toy. Sometimes these were consistent, but other times they were in conflict. Results revealed that, when sources were consistent, all children trusted the verbal testimony. However, when they were inconsistent, only 6-year-olds showed distrust towards verbal testimony and chose in favor of nonverbal testimony; 4- and 5-year-olds continued to trust verbal testimony. Thus, not until 6 years are children able to modulate their trust in verbal testimony as a function of nonverbal information. This is not because younger children are unaware of non-verbal behavior; indeed, when nonverbal testimony was offered exclusively, all ages used it to find the object. Children also completed four measures of cognitive functioning. A theory of mind scale was administered to measure the level of mental state reasoning (Wellman & Liu, 2004), a Day/Night task (Carlson & Moses, 2001) was used to measure inhibitory control, a backwards digit span task (Davis & Pratt, 1996) measured working memory, and a dimensional change card sorting task (Diamond, Carlson & Beck, 2005) was used to measure mental flexibility. After accounting for the effect of age, none of these cognitive measures had a significant effect on children’s performance when verbal and nonverbal testimony conflicted.Item Endemic trauma and the cross-cultural gap : a study of fiction about the 2003 American-Iraqi war(2021-01-26) Hadla, Halah Salman; Carton, Evan; Houser, Heather; Kevorkian, Martin; Cvetkovich, Ann; Ferreira-Buckley, LindaTrauma theories have acquired paradigmatic significance in the study of war and representations of violence and horrors. Theorists like Freud, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Kay Erikson and Judith Herman explore trauma through analyzing distinctions of victims-perpetrators-witnesses as well as themes of gender and female representations. War literature shares with trauma theories this interest in studying the methodology of expressing war from various perspectives, whether individualistic or collective. My project studies these aspects through intersectional narrative representations of war- trauma literature. I focus on narratives that are written by American and Iraqi writers in relation to 2003 invasion of the US on Iraq. In this study, I argue that positioning the events and the characters at an intersection between theories of psychological and cultural trauma is best in understanding cross-cultural traumatic connection resulting from war and violence. This study problematizes and recontextualizes the psychological, cultural, and cross-cultural relations of trauma in narrative. I attempt at demolishing cultural barriers through discussing analogous premises and igniting empathy in dealing with the other through reading trauma and victimhood. Each of my chapters responds to a definite problem stimulated through intercultural and transcultural connections resisting, at the same time, Eurocentric representations of the other. Gender, space, and testimony manage to destabilize significant traumatic-derived assumptions that identify common thematic foundations in characterizing the texts under discussion.Item Q’eqchi’ being and being a Víctima Q’eqchi’ : citizenship, victimhood, and personhood as sites of discipline and resistance in Guatemalan reparations politics(2014-12) Teague, Heather Kathleen; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-; England, Nora C.; Flores, Richard R; Ali, Kamran AThrough the activities of the National Reparations Program of Guatemala, a political economy of victimhood is created in which victim-survivors must perform their memories and personhood in particular ways in order to gain recognition from the State. I evaluate Q’eqchi’ victim-survivors’ experiences of the limits of this process from the perspective of Q’eqchi’ economic morality in a context of ongoing violence and limited structural change. I examine the long struggle to establish the National Reparations Program [Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento, PNR], and how victim-survivors from the Polochic Valley experienced and acted in that struggle. I thereby contextualize the Polochic victim-survivors’ involvement with reparations within local, departmental, and national political processes. This enables me to demonstrate how the struggle produces a certain kind of victim by inducing extreme and steady anxiety. Then, through an analysis of case studies of Q’eqchi’ Maya experiences in the two-part application process of proving identity and giving testimony, I demonstrate that the reparations application process is a performative textual and affective technology through which the post-conflict Guatemalan State works to reconstitute the indigenous person into a liberal citizen reconciled to ladino models of personhood, identity, and subjectivity, thereby further solidifying neoliberal multi-cultural social relations based on institutionalized differential access to resources as well as degree of suffering. I conclude that despite good efforts on the part of the Panzós PNR staff, the reparations process still has not been able to fully recognize Q’eqchi’ persons or their agency. It will not serve a truly reconciliatory function until there is a mechanism through which perpetrators also are identified and prosecuted and there is real structural change that addresses the severe structural inequalities in the country. In the epilogue I compare a recent series of violent evictions with the violence the victim-survivors experienced during the Internal Armed Conflict through a frame of President Colom’s political rhetoric and action. In this way I look at how the state continues to perpetrate violence at the same time it distributes reparations for those victimized in the past.Item "To know how to speak" : technologies of indigenous women's activism against sexual violence in Chiapas, Mexico(2012-08) Newdick, Vivian Ann; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Speed, Shannon; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Ghosh, Kaushik; Ballí, CeciliaBetween 1994 and 2012, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) established a contested zone of exception to neoliberal governance in southern Mexico and women's-rights-as-human-rights universalism reshaped international development and activist discourse. Within this context, Ana, Beatriz, and Celia González Pérez pressed claims against a group of Mexican Federal Army soldiers for rape at a military checkpoint in 1994. A rare instance of first-person denunciation of rape warfare, the Tseltal-Maya sisters' own powerful representation of the physical and procedural violations committed against them forms the starting point of this analysis, which proceeds from there, chapter by chapter, through communal, national, and international representations. Centering the women's speech, then moving to what are conventionally understood as broader fields of discourse produces new ways of understanding violence in relation to nation, culture, and gendered sociality. Though in 2001 the human rights commission of the Organization of American States upheld the women's claims, as of this writing (2012) the Mexican state has neither awarded reparations nor prosecuted the accused. I argue here that the women's unmet demands for collective and individual justice produce a novel language of protest which I call denuncia (denouncement) rather than testimony. Denuncia, I argue, puts the physical and the social body at the center of claims against sexual violation; enacts coraje (courage, rage) rather than petitions for recognition of truth; exposes the nationalist ideology of racial mixing that informs the production of testimony in Mexico, and establishes new audiences for its own reception despite the regimes of everyday violence it foregrounds. Formulated amid military occupation, denuncia exposes the gendered intimacy--control of the food supply, inhabitation of public-private architectural spaces, colonization of local enmities--that gave rise to military rape, which I call here "domestic violence." Denuncia emerges to refute the neoliberal discourse that links indigenous culture, gender, and violence just when the material basis of indigenous livelihood is under siege. This dissertation's method would not have been possible without almost twenty years' engagement with Tseltal and Tojolabal-Maya men and women who have formed part of the Zapatista movement. This long-range perspective has engendered a form of feminist scholarly accountability that cultivates listening to ground critique on the terrain of self-determination.