General

Immanuel Kant: Sapere aude! (Dare to think for yourself)

What Is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant (1784) Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding...

Prof. Noam Chomsky on the illegitimate arrest of Julian Assange

Phone Hackers: Britain’s Secret Surveillance

IMSI catchers (international mobile subscriber identity-catcher) are portable surveillance tools used for spying on thousands of phones in a targeted area, tracking their location...

Tu quoque fallacy- Appeal to hypocrisy (personal inconsistency)

Tu quoque (Latin for “you also”), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent’s argument by asserting the...

Power structure analysis

Power structure research is an approach to the study of power that highlights the unequal distribution of resources upon which power is based (e.g.,...

Internal vs. external coöptation

Coöptation (also co-optation) has two common meanings: It may refer to the process of adding members to an elite group at the discretion of...

Habituation & moral apathy

[cool_tag_cloud style=”silver” tooltip=”yes” animation=”yes”] Habituation is a form of non-associative learning in which an innate (non-reinforced) response to a stimulus decreases after repeated or...

Psychological Reactance

[cool_tag_cloud] Psychological Reactance is an unpleasant motivational arousal (reaction) to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs...

Nescience vs. ignorance (on semantics and moral accountability)

From a psycholinguistic vantage point, the term “ignorance” and the term “nescience” have very different semantic connotations. The term ignorance is more generally more...

Argumentum ad lapidem – Appeal to the stone

Argumentum ad lapidem (Latin: “appeal to the stone”) is a logical fallacy that consists in dismissing a statement as absurd without giving proof of...