Animal welfare science and ecology are both generally concerned with the lives of animals, however they differ in their objectives and scope; the former studies the welfare of animals considered ‘domestic’ and under the domain of humans, while the latter studies wild animals with respect to ecological processes. Each of these approaches addresses certain aspects of the lives of animals living in the world though neither, we argue, tells us important information about the welfare of wild animals. This paper argues (...) for the development of a new scientific discipline ‘welfare biology’ to address these issues and more, given the deficiencies of pre-existing life science disciplines to research the subject. Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of all living beings who have a welfare, with a value orientation toward promoting that welfare, regardless of the beings’ situation or relationship to humans and our activities. (shrink)

Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, helps us shift our perspective on this seemingly irrational phenomenon because it points out how being susceptible to dupery is linked to the enjoyment of fiction itself. This insight also highlights the importance of (...) epistemological failure in the recent “return to aesthetics” in literary studies, where the positive dimension of unconsciously “willing one’s dupery” directly links aesthetic form to politics. The logic that connects aesthetics to unconscious enjoyment is then elaborated in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Helene Deutsch and others to raise particular questions about how and why the enjoyment of being duped has been associated with feminine sexuality. Reading Melville’s novel while considering psychoanalytic concepts such as the “as if” personality, imposture, and interpassivity illuminates how confidence games play upon the ruses of sexuality, which have profound implications for why the public remains in thrall to the workings of known deceivers. (shrink)

Over the last decade, successive New Zealand governments have instituted social, political and economic changes that have fundamentally challenged nurses’ sense of themselves and their position in society. Major upheavals in the health service have occurred as a result of reforms promoting competition and contestability. This paper deals with the impact of one aspect of the reforms, that of the deregulation of the labour market through the Employment Contracts Act 1991. More specifically, the way in which discussions and decisions regarding (...) the withdrawal of nursing labour are shaped by the language available to those involved are considered. The intersection of ethics and union discourses may exacerbate feelings of ambiguity and confusion in nurses facing strike action. The result can be unnecessary and unproductive division and conflict: among nurses, between employers and employees, between unions, between nurses and the public, and between nursing organizations and the Government. An examination of some of the discourses of strike action may serve as a tool to elucidate the way nurses see themselves and their clients in the context of social change and social action. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence (AI) thrives and propagates through modern life, a key question to ask is how to include humans in future AI? Despite human involvement at every stage of the production process from conception and design through to implementation, modern AI is still often criticized for its “black box” characteristics. Sometimes, we do not know what really goes on inside or how and why certain conclusions are met. Future AI will face many dilemmas and ethical issues unforeseen by their (...) creators beyond those commonly discussed (e.g., trolley problems and variants of it) and to which solutions cannot be hard-coded and are often still up for debate. Given the sensitivity of such social and ethical dilemmas and the implications of these for human society at large, when and if our AI make the “wrong” choice we need to understand how they got there in order to make corrections and prevent recurrences. This is particularly true in situations where human livelihoods are at stake (e.g., health, well-being, finance, law) or when major individual or household decisions are taken. Doing so requires opening up the “black box” of AI; especially as they act, interact, and adapt in a human world and how they interact with other AI in this world. In this article, we argue for the application of cognitive architectures for ethical AI. In particular, for their potential contributions to AI transparency, explainability, and accountability. We need to understand how our AI get to the solutions they do, and we should seek to do this on a deeper level in terms of the machine-equivalents of motivations, attitudes, values, and so on. The path to future AI is long and winding but it could arrive faster than we think. In order to harness the positive potential outcomes of AI for humans and society (and avoid the negatives), we need to understand AI more fully in the first place and we expect this will simultaneously contribute towards greater understanding of their human counterparts also. (shrink)

Over the last decade, successive New Zealand governments have instituted social, political and economic changes that have fundamentally challenged nurses’ sense of themselves and their position in society. Major upheavals in the health service have occurred as a result of reforms promoting competition and contestability. This paper deals with the impact of one aspect of the reforms, that of the deregulation of the labour market through the Employment Contracts Act 1991. More specifically, the way in which discussions and decisions regarding (...) the withdrawal of nursing labour are shaped by the language available to those involved are considered. The intersection of ethics and union discourses may exacerbate feelings of ambiguity and confusion in nurses facing strike action. The result can be unnecessary and unproductive division and conflict: among nurses, between employers and employees, between unions, between nurses and the public, and between nursing organizations and the Government. An examination of some of the discourses of strike action may serve as a tool to elucidate the way nurses see themselves and their clients in the context of social change and social action. (shrink)

An unprecedented level of confidence has recently crystallized around a new hypothesis of how living placental mammals share a pattern of common descent. The major groups are afrotheres (e.g., aardvarks, elephants), xenarthrans (e.g., anteaters, sloths), laurasiatheres (e.g., horses, shrews), and euarchontoglires (e.g., humans, rodents). Compared with previous hypotheses this tree is remarkably stable; however, some uncertainty persists about the location of the placental root, and (for example) the position of bats within laurasiatheres, of sea cows and aardvarks within afrotheres, and (...) of dermopterans within euarchontoglires. A variety of names for sub‐clades within the new placental mammal tree have been proposed, not all of which follow conventions regarding priority and stability. More importantly, the new phylogenetic framework enables the formulation of new hypotheses and testing thereof, for example regarding the possible developmental dichotomy that seems to distinguish members of the newly identified southern and northern radiations of living placental mammals. (shrink)

Extreme conditions like savantism, autism or synaesthesia, which have a neurological 2AH, UK basis, challenge the idea that other minds are similar to our own. In this paper we report a single case study of a man in whom all three of these conditions co-occur. We suggest, on the basis of this single case, that when savantism and synaesthesia co- occur, it is worthwhile testing for an undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). This is because savantism has an established association with (...) ASC, and the combination of ASC with synaesthesia may increase the likelihood of savantism. The implications of these conditions for philosophy of mind are introduced. (shrink)

A pair of spin-j particles, prepared in a singlet state, move away from each other and are examined by two distant observers. If the latter are able to discriminate between the2j+1 values of a component ofJ, there are pairs of observables whose correlation strongly violates Bell's inequality, for arbitrarily large j. However, if neighboring values are lumped together because of limited instrumental resolution, the observable correlations tend to those predicted by classical mechanics.

Philosophers have had an interest in language from the earliest times but the twentieth century, with its so-called 'linguistic turn' in philosophy, has seen a huge expansion of work focused specifically on language and its foundations. No branch of philosophy has been unaffected by this shift of emphasis. It is timely at the end of the century to review and assess the vast range of issues that have been developed and debated in this central area. The distinguished international contributors present (...) a clear, accessible guide to the fundamental questions raised by the philosophers about language. Contributions include Graeme Forbes on necessity, Susan Haack on deviant logics, Paul Horwich on truth, Charles Travis on Wittgenstein, L.J. Cohen on linguistic philosophy, Ruth Kempson on semantics and syntax and Christopher Hookway on ontology, to name but a few. A wide range of topics are covered from the metaphysics and ontology of language, language and mind, truth and meaning, to theories or reference, speech act theory, philosophy of logic and formal semantics. There are also articles on key figures from the twentieth century and earlier. Based on the foundation provided by the award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics this single volume provides a collection of articles that will be an invaluable reference tool for all those interested in the area of philosophy of language, and also to those in cognitive science and psychology. All the articles have been thoroughly revised and updated. This volume gives a unique survey of topics that are at the very core of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

RésuméJohn Searlea récemment soutenu que le cerveau ne peut pas être un ordinateur (non connexionniste). Son argument est que les vrais systèmes physiques comme les cerveaux fonctionnent à la causalité, tandis que les opérations computationnelles ne sont pas causales, mais sont plutôt des séquences formelles qui requièrent un interprète extérieur pour lew existence en tant que systèmes formels. Les vrais systèmes physiques, par contre, ne requièrent aucune interprétation pour lew existence comme systèmes physiques opérationnels.Contrairement à Searle, je soutiens qu'iln'y a (...) pas de démarcation nette entre notre application des formalismes mathématiques standard à des phénomènes physiques comme les oscillations, et notre application des formalismes computationnels aux divers phénomènes physiques qui sont, effectivement ou potentiellement, bien décrits et expliqués pas ces formalismes. (shrink)

This study is primarily a call to philosophers to attend the concerns raised by the increasing possibility of indefinitely extended human life. While these concerns are largely moral and socio-political, questions arising from this possibility are seen to involve other philosophical areas, including epistemology.Starting with the age-old desire for extended, enjoyable life, possible strategies for realizing such life are considered. Such realization is shown to conflict with the desire for children. Various reasons for choice between the alternatives of indefinitely extended (...) life and what is currently understood to be a normal life, including the possibility of offspring, are examined. Competing social visions are sketched for the purpose of resolving this dilemma. It is argued that humanity’s likely choice from among the competing social sketches favors the decision for extended life against that for limited lifespan with the possibility of children. Assuming that the extended life will be a life of learning leads to epistemological considerations regarding what is to be learned. (shrink)

Martin Buber’s political thought has enjoyed renewed attention lately, particularly his concept of “theopolitics,” a type of political practice that recognizes God as the ultimate political authority. In Buber’s biblical exegesis, theopolitics is a condition of everyday life in premonarchical Israel, but following the installation of the monarchy, it becomes a specialized activity of prophets, consisting chiefly in divinely commanded intercession against state actions. Buber suggests that a version of this prophetic activity is manifest in present-day socialist cooperatives, especially the (...) kibbutzim. Indeed, for Buber, these cooperatives can be seen as laying the groundwork for messianic redemption. This essay probes some potentially troubling implications of Buber’s theopolitical framework, taking objections raised in Walter Benjamin’s correspondence as an entry point. A central concern for Benjamin is Buber’s nationalist articulation of Jewish identity, which appears all the more problematic when considered in tandem with the teleological view of history evident in Buber’s framework. (shrink)

The study of the feeling of knowing may have implications for some of the metatheoretical issues concerning consciousness and control. Assuming a distinction between information-based and experience-based metacognitive judgments, it is argued that the sheer phenomenological experience of knowing (''noetic feeling'') occupies a unique role in mediating between implicit-automatic processes, on the one hand, and explicit-controlled processes, on the other. Rather than reflecting direct access to memory traces, noetic feelings are based on inferential heuristics that operate implicitly and unintentionally. Once (...) such heuristics give rise to a conscious feeling that feeling can then affect controlled action. Examination of the cues that affect noetic feelings suggest that not only do these feelings inform controlled action, but they are also informed by feedback from the outcome of that action. (shrink)

Dieses Buch untersucht Humes revolutionäre Theorie des begrifflichen Denkens.Das begriffliche Denken ist eine wichtige Tätigkeit des Geistes. Was genau geschieht im Geist, wenn wir diese Tätigkeit ausüben? Im Vergleich zu anderen Philosophen der Frühen Neuzeit hat Hume bei der Beantwortung dieser Frage eine grössere Schwierigkeit: Humesche Ideen sind (anders als bei Descartes und Locke) rein phänomenaler Natur. Sie sind geistige "Bildchen" ohne begriffliche Struktur. Wie soll das begriffliche Denken mit Hilfe derartiger Ideen möglich sein? Hume reagierte auf diese Herausforderung mit (...) einem völlig neuartigen Ansatz und wurde zum Bahnbrecher einer moderneren Theorie des Denkens. Eine klare Einsicht in diesen Teil der Humeschen Philosophie ist zudem unentbehrlich für ein adäquates Verständnis seines Agnostizismus bezüglich der kausalen Kraft und seiner Metaphysik der Existenz. (shrink)

Philosophy Lab: An Experiential Approach to Conceptual Analysis gives students the skills and strategies needed to do philosophical work in the Analytic tradition. They are presented with a step-by-step method for performing a preliminary conceptual analysis and practice examples to apply the method to standard philosophical problems. Students are introduced to the work of great thinkers including Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Wittgenstein, and Ryle. These works are complemented by contemporary empirical findings concerning perception, desire, emotion, moral intuition, and other basic elements (...) of explicit intentional cognition. Each chapter features primary source material, commentary, and activity instructions. The activities are designed to allow students to experience each mode of cognition in relative isolation, and then to see how they combine and interrelate in more complex contexts. Finally, students use the template model of conceptual analysis to explore the material. They identify and isolate the concept to be analyzed, determine whether it is simple or complex, and if complex, identify the constituent parts of the concept. Specific topics covered include causal power, sex and marriage, compassion, ambition, justice, and death. Through presentation and modeling the book not only enables student to do conceptual analysis with precision, it helps them understand and interpret philosophical issues. Philosophy Lab is a comprehensive, carefully designed text for first courses in philosophy. It may be used with first-year undergraduate students, advanced high-school students, or adult learners. Asher Walden holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and religion from Drew University. Dr. Walden is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. (shrink)

This article is intended to emphasize several ethical issues relating to the activities of the internal auditor. The points of view expressed relate mainly to the public sector of Israel. Beyond the discussion of the specific issues against its unique Israeli background (Internal Audit Law), the discussion throws light on general problems that have not yet been solved.

This paper draws upon Hannah Arendt's idea of the 'right to have rights' to critique the current protection gap faced by refugees today. While refugees are protected from refoulement once they make it to the jurisdiction or territory of a state, they face an ever-increasing array of non-entrée policies designed to stymie access to state territory. Without being able to enter a state capable of securing their claims to safety and dignity, refugees cannot achieve the rights which ought to be (...) afforded to them under international law. Drawing upon both legal theory and political philosophy, this paper argues that refugees today, just as the stateless in Arendt’s time, must be afforded the ‘right to have rights’, understood as a right to enter state territory. (shrink)

The relationship between metacognition and mindreading was investigated by comparing the monitoring of one’s own learning and another person’s learning . Previous studies indicated that in self-paced study judgments of learning for oneself are inversely related to the amount of study time invested in each item. This suggested reliance on the memorizing-effort heuristic that shorter ST is diagnostic of better recall. In this study although an inverse ST–JOL relationship was observed for Self, it was found for Other only when the (...) Other condition followed the Self condition. The results were interpreted in terms of the proposal that the processes underlying experience-based metacognitive judgments are largely unconscious. However, participants can derive insight from observing themselves as they monitor their own learning, and transfer that insight to Other, thus exhibiting a shift from experience-based to theory-based judgments. Although different processes mediate metacognition and mindreading, metacognition can inform mindreading. (shrink)