Online research in philosophy

: This article examines the role of vision in the construction of Nature. It is suggested that how nature is 'seen' is inextricably tied to how such a space is named, traversed, and experienced at particular moments. A key contention is that the lens of modernity has for too long adversely impacted what it is possible to see, say, do, and feel with respect to Nature. The force of this statement is borne out with reference to orthodox (...) envisionings of forest conflict in Australia. The article concludes by calling for an environmental ethic(s) which puts into critical relief the discursive, trajective, and affective dimensions of vision. (shrink)

This is Part II of a reflection by Richard Paul on critical thinking, its theory and pedagogy, and on political and personal barriers to critical thinking education and practice. Part I of Paul’s reflection appeared in INQUIRY, Vol. 26 No. 3 (Fall 2011), pp. 5-24. In Part II Paul focuses on the concept of critical thinking, pointing out its unifying features as well as the many ways it can be contextualized in human thought and life. He lays out his basic (...) critical thinking theory and offers critical thinking polarities for use in assessing critical thinking approaches. He provides an overview of the work of the Foundation for Critical Thinking in advancing fairminded critical thought in education and in society. (shrink)

This chapter offers a critique of intelligent design arguments against evolution and a philosophical discussion of the nature of science, drawing several lessons for the teaching of evolution and for science education in general. I discuss why Behe’s irreducible complexity argument fails, and why his portrayal of organismal systems as machines is detrimental to biology education and any under-standing of how organismal evolution is possible. The idea that the evolution of complex organismal features is too unlikely to have occurred (...) by random mutation and selection (as recently promoted by Dembski) is very widespread, but it is easy to show students why such small probability arguments are fallacious. While intelligent design proponents have claimed that the exclusion of supernatural causes mandated by scientific methods is dogmatically presupposed by science, scientists have an empirical justification for using such methods. This justification is instructive for my discussion of how to demarcate science from pseudoscience. I argue that there is no universal account of the nature of science, but that the criteria used to judge an intellectual approach vary across historical periods and have to be specific to the scientific domain. Moreover, intellectual approaches have to be construed as practices based on institutional factors and values, and to be evaluated in terms of the activities of their practitioners. Science educators should not just teach scientific facts, but present science as a practice and make students reflect on the nature of science, as this gives them a better appreciation of the ways in which intelligent design falls short of actual science. (shrink)

This book, one of the first full-length studies of the modalities to emerge from the debate to which Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Ruth Marcus, and others are contributing, is an exploration and defense of the notion of modality de re, the idea that objects have both essential and accidental properties. Plantinga develops his argument by means of the notion of possible worlds and ranges over such key problems as the nature of essence, transworld identity, negative existential propositions, and the (...) existence of unactual objects in other possible worlds. He also applies his logical theories to the elucidation of two problems in the philosophy of religion: the problem of evil and the ontological argument. (shrink)

Jones (1990) described ten workplace behaviors of a dubious ethical nature and determined that the hierarchical position adopted by respondents influenced the perceived acceptability of these behaviors. This measure seems promising, and therefore the purpose of this investigation is two-fold: (1) to explore further the psychometric properties of these ten items; and (2) to examine the role of individual difference variables as correlates of perceived acceptability. In two samples of working people, the Jones items were found to be internally (...) consistent, not obviously subject to range restriction, modestly related to social desirability, largely orthogonal to age and managerial status, but clearly linked with Machiavellianism. The nature of the linkage between perceived acceptability and both sex and the Protestant work ethic differed across the two studies, which underscores the need for future research. Two additional variables worth investigating in such research may be locus of control and equity sensitivity. (shrink)

Science, and with it our understanding of evolutionary processes, is itself undergoing evolution. The evolutionary framework still most frequently used by the general public to describe and guide processes of societal development is erroneously grounded in Darwinian perspectives or, at the very least, draws facile analogies from biological evolution. The present inquiry incorporates fresh insights on the general systemic nature of developmental dynamics from the most recent advances in the transdisciplinary realm of the sciences of complexity (e.g., general evolution (...) theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics). The description of the evolutionary trajectory of complex dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear agrees with certain features of the historical processes of societal development. But there are additional features of the evolutionary dynamic of natural systems that are seldom portrayed as part of human developmental deportment. These features include elements such as the convergence of existing systems at progressively higher levels of organization, the increasingly efficient utilization of environmental energy, and the complexification of system structures in states that are progressively further removed from chemical and thermodynamic equilibria. The sciences of complexity offer insight into the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems across a variety of disciplinary areas of investigation. Through a study of the isomorphisms across disciplinary constructs in the theoretical analyses of the principles governing the evolution of human societies, it is possible to enrich the account of developmental dynamics at the socio-civilizational level. Such an account would further our understanding of the phenomenon of societal development and provide the means for the purposeful guidance of this phenomenon in accordance with general evolutionary principles. This article sets forth the type of considerations, and outlines a general research agenda, for inquiry toward an operational model of the evolutionary development of social systems. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss and evaluate different arguments for the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. I conclude that essentialist arguments from the nature of natural kinds fail to establish that essences are ontologically more basic than laws, and fail to offer an a priori argument for the necessity of all causal laws. Similar considerations carry across to the argument from the dispositionalist view of properties, which may end up placing unreasonable constraints on (...) property identity across possible worlds. None of my arguments preclude the possibility that the laws may turn out to be metaphysically necessary after all, but I argue that this can only be established by a posteriori scientific investigation. I therefore argue for what may seem to be a surprising conclusion: that a fundamental metaphysical question – the modal status of laws of nature – depends on empirical facts rather than purely on a priori reasoning. (shrink)

Many people throughout the course of human history, across all human cultures, have believed themselves to be distinct from their physical bodies, and have used this belief to ground a hope for some form of life after death. The nature of the mind examines whether, and if so how, such beliefs can be rationally grounded. Clearly written and rigorously presented, this book is intended for use in undergraduate courses in philosophy of mind. Main topics covered include: · the (...) problem of other minds, · the dualist/physicalist debate · the nature of personal identity and survival · mental-state concepts The book closes with a number of pointers towards more advanced work in the subject, especially concerning recent debates about intentionality and consciousness. (shrink)

Future Logic is an original and wide-ranging treatise of formal logic. It deals with deduction and induction, of categorical and conditional propositions, involving the natural, temporal, extensional, and logical modalities. This is the first work ever to strictly formalize the inductive processes of generalization and particularization, through the novel methods of factorial analysis, factor selection and formula revision. This is the first work ever to develop a formal logic of the natural, temporal and extensional types of conditioning (as distinct from (...) logical conditioning), including their production from modal categorical premises. (shrink)

The critical concern of the present volume is contemporary naturalism, both in its scientific version and as represented by newly emerging hopes for another, philosophically more liberal, naturalism.1 The papers collected here are state-of-the-art discussions that question the appeal, rational motivations, and presuppositions of scientific naturalism across a broad range of philosophical topics. As an alternative to scientific naturalism, we offer the outlines of a new non- reductive form of naturalism and a more inclusive conception of nature than (...) any provided by the natural sciences. Our authors collectively believe that holding scientific naturalism up for philosophical scrutiny and challenging its misconceptions is of the first importance both for understanding ourselves and our place in the world; and, also, for the future direction of philosophy itself. (shrink)

Background: Olfactory cues directly link the environment to gene expression. Two types of olfactory cues, food odors and social odors, alter genetically predisposed hormone-mediated activity in the mammalian brain. Methods: The honeybee is a model organism for understanding the epigenetic link from food odors and social odors to neural networks of the mammalian brain, which ultimately determine human behavior. Results: Pertinent aspects that extend the honeybee model to human behavior include bottom-up followed by top-down gene, cell, tissue, organ, organ-system, and (...) organism reciprocity; neurophysiological effects of food odors and of sexually dimorphic, species-specific social odors; a model of motor function required for social selection that precedes sexual selection; and hormonal effects that link current neuroscience to social science affects on the development of animal behavior. Conclusion: As the psychological influence of food odors and social orders is examined in detail, the socioaffective nature of olfactory cues on the biologically based development of sexual preferences across all species that sexually reproduce becomes clearer Keywords: behavior; development; evolution; odors; food; social; sexual; epigenetic; olfaction; pheromones; hormones; environment; animal; affect; effect; neuroscience (Published: 15 March 2012) Citation: Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2012, 2 : 17338 - DOI: 10.3402/snp.v2i0.17338. (shrink)

Across Europe, micro firms (SMEs with up to 10 employees) account for the vast majority of business activities. Supporting micro firms in the transition towards sustainability is essential: many small steps will result in a big leap. To this scope knowledge is needed on the specific challenges encountered by micro firms in the region they operate in. The research presented here offers a contribution to this knowledge. It explores the perception of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), its rewards and difficulties (...) by micro firms in Frisia, Groningen and Drenthe - the three Northern provinces of The Netherlands. (shrink)

Explorations of the boundaries between human culture and non-human nature have clear ethical dimensions. Developing both from philosophical arguments about the value of such boundaries and recent empirical work following the traffic across them, we seek to complement these discussions through a consideration of how these boundaries can be enacted by ourselves, as researchers, and the methods we employ. As part of an agenda seeking to reconsider organic agency within geographical narrative, we have been exploring different techniques (...) for documenting the ways in which such agencies are encountered. Specifically, we are interested in plants and the ways in which they might be researched in new ways by human geographers. Based on two particular pieces of research into human-plant dealings, our aim is one of exploring their lively presence as part of a performative environmental ethics enacted, in part, through the very practice of the research encounter. (shrink)

Is there a space of the sensory modalities? Such a space would be one in which we can represent all the actual, and at least some of the possible, sensory modalities. The relative position of the senses in this space would indicate how similar and how different the senses were from each other. The construction of such a space might reveal unconsidered features of the actual and possible senses, help us to define what a sense is, and provide grounds that (...) we might use to decide what is one token sense rather than multiple token senses. -/- In this paper, I explore, refine, and defend the idea that we can construct such a space—an idea that I briefly proposed in earlier work (Macpherson 2011a and 2011b). In doing so, I defend the idea from an objection that Richard Gray (2012) has voiced. Gray claims that the dimensions of the space of sensory modalities must generate a non-­‐arbitrary ordering of the senses. He argues that we cannot find dimensions that do so. I disagree. I identify different ways in which a space could be arbitrary but I argue that we can define a space of the sensory modalities in a non-arbitrary manner. I give examples of what the dimensions might be. (shrink)

Cognitive definitions cannot accommodate fear as it occurs in species incapable of sophisticated cognition. Some think that fear must, therefore, be noncognitive. This paper explores another option, arguably more in line with evolutionary theory: that like other "biological universals" fear admits of variation across and within species. A paradigm case of such universals is species: it is argued that they can be defined by ostension in the manner of Putnam and Kripke without implying that they must have an invariable (...) essence. Emotions can be defined in this way too, in principle, but the theoretical understanding of homology necessary to do so is lacking at present. (shrink)

In recent years, major disasters have figured prominently in the media. While corporate response to disasters may have raised corporate philanthropy to a new level, it remains an understudied phenomenon. This article draws on comparative research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate philanthropy to explore the geography of corporate philanthropic disaster response. The study analyzes donation announcements made by Fortune Global 500 firms from North America, Europe and Asia to look for regional patterns across three recent disasters: the (...) South Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Kashmiri earthquake. The results reveal inter-regional differences in the overall likelihood of donations and in their cash value, in addition to the identification of home-region- and local presence effects. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed. (shrink)

Many of the arguments for neuroeconomics rely on mistaken assumptions about criteria of explanatory relevance across disciplinary boundaries and fail to distinguish between evidential and explanatory relevance. Building on recent philosophical work on mechanistic research programmes and the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation, we argue that explaining an explanatory presupposition or providing a lower-level explanation does not necessarily constitute explanatory improvement. Neuroscientific findings have explanatory relevance only when they inform a causal and explanatory account of the psychology of human (...) decision-making. (shrink)

The practice of business ethics is a constant concern for both business and academics. Thus this study attempts both to explore the effective performance of business ethics and to provide a learned reference. The researcher has gathered relevant literature, developed a notion of business ethics operation which have been put to the test within four selected enterprises across the Taiwan Strait. The findings reveal that different types of ethical leadership and catalytic mechanism precipitated four operations and a swathe of (...) different approaches to business ethics. The study has, it is hoped, justified academic interest in business ethics by obtaining experimental results which demonstrate the merits of promoting their practice. (shrink)

Ancient Chinese philosophers were inclined to preserve the doctrine of a unified body and mind rather than to engage in a discussion on the separation of the two. In addition, most traditional Chinese philosophers stressing in particular the function of mind. Based on the tradition of believing in the concept of qi, they traced the cause of their spiritual activities to the natural effect of the qi. The modalities display a phenomenological characteristic that looks at mental activities lightly, and examines (...) language and action as a natural revelation of material force, qi. (shrink)

One current version of the internalism/externalism debate in evolutionary theory focuses on the relative importance of developmental constraints in evolutionary explanation. The received view of developmental constraints sees them as an internalist concept that tend to be shared across related species as opposed to selective pressures that are not. Thus, to the extent that constraints can explain anything, they can better explain similarity across species, while natural selection is better able to explain their differences. I challenge both of (...) these aspects of the received view and propose a hierarchical view of constraints. (shrink)

Marc Lange’s new book on laws offers a restatement and development of the account he proposed in Natural Laws and Scientific Practice (Oxford University Press, 2000), henceforth NLSP, and the new material is helpfully summarized in the preface. Laws and Lawmakers presents the key idea from NLSP in a rather more reader-friendly manner – this idea being roughly that the difference between laws and accidents is that laws, unlike accidents, form a ‘stable’ set, i.e. a logically closed set of truths (...) such that they would all still hold under any counterfactual supposition consistent with the set. So, for example, the natural laws all still hold under counterfactual suppositions such as ‘had this match been struck …’, ‘had Bill Gates wanted to build a gold cube one mile across’ and so on; thus this set is stable. But the set of laws plus the accidental claim ‘there is no gold cube one mile across’ fails to hold under such counterfactual suppositions because had Bill Gates wanted to build a gold cube one mile across, such a cube might well have come into existence; thus this set is not stable. While the basic outline and defence of this idea is provided in Chapter 1, those wishing to delve into the intricate …. (shrink)

��This paper investigates how an evolutionary al- gorithm with an indirect encoding exploits the property of phenotypic regularity, an important design principle found in natural organisms and engineered designs. We present the first comprehensive study showing that such phenotypic regularity enables an indirect encoding to outperform direct encoding con- trols as problem regularity increases. Such an ability to produce regular solutions that can exploit the regularity of problems is an important prerequisite if evolutionary algorithms are to scale to high-dimensional (...) real-world problems, which typically contain many regularities, both known and unrecognized. The indirect encoding in this case study is HyperNEAT, which evolves artificial neural networks (ANNs) in a manner inspired by concepts from biological development. We demonstrate that, in contrast to two direct encoding controls, HyperNEAT produces both regular behaviors and regular ANNs, which enables HyperNEAT to significantly outperform the direct encodings as regularity increases in three problem domains. We also show that the types of regularities HyperNEAT produces can be biased, allowing domain knowledge and preferences to be injected into the search. Finally, we examine the downside of a bias toward regularity. Even when a solution is mainly regular, some irregularity may be needed to perfect its functionality. This insight is illustrated by a new algorithm called HybrID that hybridizes indirect and direct encodings, which matched HyperNEAT’s performance on regular problems yet outperformed it on problems with some irregularity. HybrID’s ability to improve upon the performance of HyperNEAT raises the question of whether indirect encodings may ultimately excel not as stand-alone algorithms, but by being hybridized with a further process of refinement, wherein the indirect encoding produces patterns that exploit problem regu-. (shrink)

The study of ethical leadership has emerged as an important topic for understanding the effects of leadership in organizations. In a study with 845 working adults across multiple organizations, the relationships between ethical leadership with positive employee outcomes were examined. Results suggest that ethical leadership is related to both psychological well-being and job satisfaction in employees, but the processes are different. Employee voice mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and psychological well-being. Feelings of psychological ownership mediated the relationship between (...) ethical leadership and job satisfaction. A discussion of theoretical and practical implications concludes the article. (shrink)

Ecologists use a remarkable range of methods and techniques to understand complex, inherently variable, and functionally diverse entities and processes across a staggering range of spatial, temporal and interactive scales. These multiple perspectives make ecology very different to the exemplar of science often presented by philosophers. In Philosophical Foundations for the Practices of Ecology, designed for graduate students and researchers, ecology is put into a new philosophical framework that engages with this inherent pluralism while still placing constraints on the (...) ways that we can investigate and understand nature. The authors begin by exploring the sources of variety in the practice of ecology and how these have led to the current conceptual confusion. They argue that the solution is to adopt the approach of constrained perspectivism and go on to explore the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological aspects of this position and how it can be used in ecological research and teaching. (shrink)

Individualism leading to more consumerism seems to be a bit of truism nowadays in the media. The USA is particularly indicted for being too individualistic and consumerist. Past research has mostly indicated a positive relationship between the two. However, past research has not suggested a negative association between individualism and consumerism. This paper offers support for such a negative relationship by showing that an individual’s ethical values can temper the consumerist nature of individualists. Data were collected in the USA (...) and Taiwan. Structural equation models demonstrate that our hypothesized model fits our data well. A key result over the global sample is the stability of the linear path from individualism to work ethic to consumer ethic to consumerism. The two-nation comparison also supports differences in how Taiwanese and Americans differ in their belief that consumption benefits society. (shrink)

To better illuminate aspects of stress that are relevant to the moral domain, we present a definition and theoretical model of “moral stress.” Our definition posits that moral stress is a psychological state born of an individual’s uncertainty about his or her ability to fulfill relevant moral obligations. This definition assumes a self-and-others relational basis for moral stress. Accordingly, our model draws from a theory of the self (identity theory) and a theory of others (stakeholder theory) to suggest that this (...) uncertainty arises as a manager faces competing claims for limited resources from multiple stakeholders and/or across multiple role identities. We further propose that the extent to which the manager is attentive to the moral aspects of the claims (i.e., moral attentiveness) moderates these effects. We identify several consequences of managerial moral stress and discuss theoretical, empirical, and practical implications of our approach. Most importantly, we argue that this work paves an important path for considering stress through the lens of morality. (shrink)

This study investigates measurement invariance of the 17-item-4-factor Love of Money Scale (LOMS) (Rich, Motivator, Success, and Important) across gender and college major among university students in People’s Republic of China. Results revealed configural (factor structures) invariance across gender. Metric (factor loadings) invariance across gender was not achieved based on chi-square change, but achieved based on fit indices change between unconstrained and constrained multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA). Both configural invariance and metric invariance (chi-square change and (...) fit indices change) were achieved across college major (law, sociology, and political science). Results of this study suggest that the Love of Money Scale, developed in the U.S., has achieved measurement invariance in this student sample in China. Future researchers will have some confidence in using this measurement when they examine the love of money in Chinese management and organizational studies. (shrink)

This study conducted an empirical survey of 126 Business Ethics students in business and management departments within two universities across the Taiwan Strait to evaluate the impact on these managers-to-be of receiving an education in Business Ethics. The results show that, after receiving that Business Ethics education, students in both universities demonstrated significant improvements in the ethical weighting of their individual values, their recognition of ethical issues and their performance as ethical decision-makers. However, in respect of ethical decision-making, the (...) behavior of these students is still sub-optimal, indicating a need for further improvements in the ethical education of managers-to-be across the Taiwan Strait. (shrink)

In his new book, The Grammar of Criminal Law: American, Comparative, and International, celebrated criminal law theorist George Fletcher excavates criminal law doctrine across a number of countries and cultures to reveal a small number of basic shared structures. Among these structures Fletcher argues that it is a criminal law justified by Kantian legal morality, in contrast to perfectionist or communitarian theories, that is legitimate. Thus, Fletcher proposes, along with legal positivists, that the validity of legal norms does not (...) turn on the moral claims that may underlie a perfectionist or virtue theory of law. Fletcher's claims about the shared structure of law do more than propose an analytical model of valid criminal law. Most importantly, Fletcher draws attention to the often under explored normative implications of proposed models of law in analytical jurisprudence. Virtue theories of law challenge Fletcher's view of legitimate criminal law by proposing a fundamentally different jurisprudential model of valid law. Rather than liberalism's commitment to preserving autonomy or the neutrality of the state as primary, virtue theories forward competing models of law grounded in preserving sound practical reason or the promotion of human flourishing. And while these models find a distinct and mediated role for morality to play in the determination of legitimate law, they ultimately deny Fletcher's claim that morality cannot be incorporated into law without being referenced by the law and that our political commitments must precede our moral commitments. This article places Fletcher's model of criminal law within the positivist jurisprudential landscape and connects that model of law to Kantian legal duties. The piece then explores the particular resources virtue theories of law forwarded by Lawrence Solum and Kyron Huigens have to address the role of political concerns within a virtue theory of law. It examines whether a sophisticated virtue theory finds a place for political concerns that are sufficient to defeat liberal philosophical critiques and undermine Fletcher's claims for criminal law. More importantly, rather than simply exploring the competing jurisprudential models, this article explores the important normative commitments that stem from competing jurisprudential models. Ultimately, the article concludes that understanding certain factors about the very nature of law generally and criminal law particularly leads one to affirm Fletcher's claims and limits the justification of law to our deontic duties. (shrink)

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows (...) how, from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death. (shrink)

Two-dimensional semantics is a theory in the philosophy of language that provides an account of meaning which is sensitive to the distinction between necessity and apriority. Usually, this theory is presented in an informal manner. In this thesis, I take first steps in formalizing it, and use the formalization to present some considerations in favor of two-dimensional semantics. To do so, I define a semantics for a propositional modal logic with operators for the modalities of necessity, actuality, and apriority that (...) captures the relevant ideas of two-dimensional semantics. I use this to show that some criticisms of two-dimensional semantics that claim that the theory is incoherent are not justified. I also axiomatize the logic, and compare it to the most important proposals in the literature that define similar logics. To indicate that two-dimensional semantics is a plausible semantic theory, I give an argument that shows that all theorems of the logic can be philosophically justified independently of two-dimensional semantics. (shrink)

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those (...) that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals’ communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.’s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky’s conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those (...) that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals’ communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.’s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky’s conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss some underlying motivations common to most strands of experimental philosophy, noting that most forms of experimental philosophy have a commitment to the claim that certain empirical evidence concerning the level of agreement on intuitive judgments across cultures, ethnic groups or socioeconomic strata impugns the role that intuitions play in traditional “armchair” philosophy. I then develop an argument to suggest that, even if one were to grant the truth of the data adduced by experimentalists regarding (...) the level of agreement—or lack thereof—regarding intuitive judgments among various groups, this would nevertheless not yet provide sufficient basis to reject the role of intuitions in traditional philosophical theorizing. Though this argument, if successful, will not prove fatal to all forms of experimental philosophy, it would limit the scope of experimental philosophical criticisms of traditional philosophical practice. (shrink)

We examine Carruthers’ proposal that sentences in logical form serve to create flexibility within central system modularity, enabling the combination of information from different modalities. We discuss evidence from aphasia and the neurobiology of input-output systems. This work suggests that there exists considerable capacity for interdomain cognitive processing without language mediation. Other challenges for a logical form account are noted.

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that there is no single influence (be it nature or nurture) on cognitive development. Cognitive abilities emerge as a result of interactions between gene expression, cortical and subcortical brain networks, and environmental influences. In recent years, our study of neurodevelopmental disorders has provided much valuable information on how genes, brain development, behaviour, and environment interact to influence development from infancy to adulthood. This is the first book to present evidence on development across the (...) lifespan across these multiple levels of description (genetic, brain, cognitive, environmental). In the book, the authors have chosen a well-defined disorder, Williams syndrome (WS), to explore the impact of genes, brain development, behaviour, as well as the individual's environment on development. WS is used as a model disorder to demonstrate the authors approach to understanding development, whilst being presented in comparison to other neurodevelopmental disorders - Autism, Developmental Dyscalculia, Down syndrome, Dyslexia, Fragile X syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, Specific Language Impairment, Turner syndrome - to illustrate differences in development across neurodevelopmental disorders. -/- Williams syndrome is particularly informative for exploring development: Firstly, it has been extensively researched at multiple levels: genes, brain, cognition and behaviour, as well as in terms of the difficulties of daily living and social interaction. Secondly, it has been studied across the lifespan, with many studies on infants and toddlers with WS as well as a large number on children, adolescents and adults. The authors also explore a number of domain-general and domain-specific processes in the verbal, non-verbal and social domains, across numerous neurodevelopmental disorders. This illustrates, among other factors, the importance of developmental timing, i.e. that the development of a cognitive skill at a specific timepoint can impact on subsequent development within that domain, but also across domains. In addition, the authors discuss the value of investigating basic-level abilities from as close to the infant start-state as possible, presenting evidence of where cross-syndrome comparisons have shed light on the cascading impacts of subtle similarities and discrepancies in early delay or deviance, on subsequent development. -/- Designed such that readers with an interest in any neurodevelopmental disorder can gain insight into the intricate dynamics of cognitive development, the book covers both theoretical issues and those of clinical relevance. It will be an invaluable reference for any researcher, clinician, student as well as interested parents or teachers wishing to learn about neurodevelopmental disorders from a developmental framework. -/- . (shrink)

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, (...) affective autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)

Background: By organizing and activating our passions with both hormones and experiences, the heart and mind of sexual behavior, sexual motivation, and sexual preference is the brain, the organ of learning. Despite decades of progress, this incontrovertible truth is somehow lost in the far-too-often biologically deterministic interpretation of genetic, hormonal, and anatomical scientific research into the biological origins of sexual motivation. Simplistic and polarized arguments are used in the media by both sides of the seemingly endless debate over sexual orientation, (...) equality, and human rights with such catch phrases as ‘‘born gay’’ contrasted against attempts of ‘‘reparative therapy’’ or ‘‘pray the gay away’’. Though long abandoned in practically every other area of psychology, this remnant of the nature-nurture controversy remains despite its generally acknowledged insufficiency in explaining any adult aspect of the human condition within the scientific community. Methods: This theoretical review article identifies three factors: 1) good intentions with regard to the argument from immutability; 2) false dichotomies limiting intellectual progress by oversimplification of theory and thus hypothesis, and most dangerously, interpretation and; 3) Tradition: a historical separation of the disciplines of biology and psychology, which, to this day, interferes with the effective translation of well-conducted science into good public understanding and policy. Results: Studies clearly demonstrate that progress toward sexual-orientation equality is being made, if slowly, despite the apparent irrelevance of the ‘‘born gay’’ argument from immutability. Evidence is further provided supporting the inadequacy of polarized, dichotic theories of sexual development, particularly those pitting ‘‘blank slate learning’’ against a fated, deterministic biological perspective. Results of this review suggest that an emerging interactionist perspective will promote both better scientific progress and better public understanding, hopefully contributing to progress toward nondiscriminatory public policy. Conclusion: Accepting that the brain is a highly plastic, modularly dimorphic, developmentally biased organ of learning, one which is organized and activated by both hormones and experiences across the lifespan, is essential for doing ‘‘good science’’ well. Interactionist theories of psychosexual development provide an empirically sound, strong, yet modifiable foundation for testable hypotheses exploring biologically biased sexual learning. Keywords: Brain; conditioning; controversy; dichotomy; differentiation; discrimination; equality; sex; sexual; orientation; learning; learned sexuality; born gay; hedonic evaluation; immutability; imprinting; incentive motivation; interactionism; predispositions; theory; therapy (Published: 15 March 2012) Citation: Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2012, 2 : 17334 - DOI: 10.3402/snp.v2i0.17334. (shrink)

Spanning 24 centuries, this anthology collects over thirty selections of important Western writing about melancholy and its related conditions by philosophers, doctors, religious and literary figures, and modern psychologists. Truly interdisciplinary, it is the first such anthology. As it traces Western attitudes, it reveals a conversation across centuries and continents as the authors interpret, respond, and build on each other's work. Editor Jennifer Radden provides an extensive, in-depth introduction that draws links and parallels between the selections, and reveals the (...) ambiguous relationship between these historical accounts of melancholy and today's psychiatric views on depression. This important new collection is also beautifully illustrated with depictions of melancholy from Western fine art. (shrink)

A needs assessment survey of ethics review committees (ERCs) across Africa was conducted in order to establish their major needs and areas of weaknesses in terms of ethical review capacity. The response rate was 84% (31 of 37 targeted committees), and committees surveyed were located in 18 African countries. The majority of the responding committees (61%) have been in existence between 5 and 10 years; approximately 74% of the respondents were institutional committees, with the remainder being either national (6/31) (...) or regional (2/31). In terms of the ethical review process, nine of the 31 committees that responded did not have standard operating procedures (SOPs), and seven of the 22 that did have SOPs had never revised them after their initial development (an average period of three years). Of the 31 committees, 10 operated without any ethical guidelines. Many of the committees (13/30) met once per month, and the number of proposals reviewed annually varied, ranging from five to over 100. All respondents relied on paper-based data management and archiving systems. Overall, the survey identified the major constraints on ERCs as lack of office equipment, outdated or lack of SOPs, lack of electronic data management systems, inadequate resources, lack of or insufficient expertise on the committees, and poor recognition of the importance of the role of the committees. Consequently, the authors are addressing the identified needs and weaknesses through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded capacity building project. The impact of the intervention project will be assessed during and at the end of the four-year longitudinal project. (shrink)

This article begins by tracing two issues to be kept in mind in discussing the theme of love as far back as Aristotle: on the one hand the polysemy of the term philia in Aristotle, and on the other hand the fact that there is a focal or core meaning of philia that provides order to that polysemy. Secondly, it is briefly suggested that the same issues are, mutatis mutandis , central for understanding the discussion of love or Liebe by (...) Hegel, the central classic reference in debates on recognition. Thirdly, by pointing out a certain ambiguity in Harry Frankfurt’s recent work on love, the article focuses more closely on the thought that love in the simple sense which Aristotle had pinpointed as the focal meaning of philia , which is arguably at the core of Hegel’s discussion of Liebe , and which still forms at least one of the core senses of the term, is a ‘personifying’ attitude of recognition. Finally, drawing on the above points the article addresses the question whether love as a form of recognition is restricted to intimate relations such as those between family-members, ‘lovers’, close friends and so on, or whether it has applications in interhuman relations more broadly. The answer to this question, it is suggested, is essential for the viability of ethically substantial notions of solidarity beyond circles of close acquaintances, whether within the civil society, across nations, or towards future generations. (shrink)

My paper is a reaction to the articles in the newsletter Inquiry, and additional articles by others, especially Mark Weinstein, the Acting Director of the Institute for Critical Thinking at Montclair State College. Weinstein and his colleagues are engaged in a most ambitious program, as they put it, of educational reform through critical thinking across the disciplines. Without doubt, the ideologue of this school is Weinstein, and it is on his writings that I have concentrated.

Jakob von Uexküll's theories of life -- Biography and historical background -- Nature's conformity with plan -- Umweltforschung -- Biosemiotics -- Concluding remarks -- Marking a path into the environments of animals -- The essential approach to the organism -- Heidegger and the biologists -- Paths to the world -- Disruptive behavior : Heidegger and the captivated animal -- The worldless stone -- The poor animal -- For example, three bees and a lark -- Animal morphology -- A shocking (...) wealth -- A fine line in the rupture of time -- An affected body -- The theme of the animal melody : Merleau-Ponty and the umwelt -- The structure of behavior -- A pure wake, a quiet force -- A leaf of being -- Interanimality -- The-animal-stalks-at-five-oclock : Deleuze's affection for Uexküll -- Problematic organisms -- Uexküll's ethology of affects -- The body without organs, the embryonic egg, and prebiotic soup -- Nature's refrain sung across milieus and territories -- The animal stalks. (shrink)

Temporal binding via 40-Hz synchronization of neuronal discharges in sensory cortices has been hypothesized to be a necessary condition for the rapid selection of perceptually relevant information for further processing in working memory. Binocular rivalry experiments have shown that late stage visual processing associated with the recognition of a stimulus object is highly correlated with discharge rates in inferotemporal cortex. The hippocampus is the primary recipient of inferotemporal outputs and is known to be the substrate for the consolidation of working (...) memories to long-term, episodic memories. The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, is widely thought to mediate working memory processes, per se. This article reviews accumulated evidence for the role of a subcortical matrix in linking frontal and hippocampal systems to select and ''stream'' conscious episodes across time (hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds). ''Streaming'' is hypothesized to be mediated by the selective gating of reentrant flows of information between these cortical systems and the subcortical matrix. The physiological mechanism proposed for this temporally extended form of binding is synchronous oscillations in the slower EEG spectrum (< 8 Hz). (shrink)

My response to the commentaries highlights three main points. First, the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI) has demonstrated adequate reliability and validity across dozens of studies, and it deserves its reputation as a useful measure of basic human mating strategies. Second, the sampling limitations of the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP) do not negate the conclusion that sex differences in sociosexuality are likely universal across cultures. Third, the ISDP results support several theories of human sexuality, although some are based (...) on faulty assumptions that render them less viable than others. (shrink)

In the debate between those who hold the tensed theory and those who hold the tenseless theory of time, Arthur Prior’s famous “Thank Goodness Argument” has had a special place. Initially designed to help tensers, it has seen its fortune change many times. In this paper the focus is on a methodological aspect of the argument. The purpose is to defend the “new reading” of the argument, which is intended to resolve an ontological issue by focusing on an epistemic fact, (...) against a recent charge by Nathan Oaklander that such an argument can be valid only if it is trivial, i.e., if “ceases to exist” contained in one of the premises had been already understood in the tensed sense. However, whether the argument is trivial or not depends also on whether the tensed reading is directly invoked or obtained only through the substitution of an extensional equivalent whose truth is not based on the presupposed truth of the tensed account. A possible extensional equivalent needed for the intended substitution is offered. It is based on the concept of in-the-world-inherent-modalities. (shrink)

Although there are some common underlying mechanisms for many nonhuman behavioural asymmetries, the evidence at present is not compelling for commonalities in cerebral organisation across vertebrates. Phylogenetic analysis of detour behaviour in fish suggests that more closely related species are not particularly similar in the direction of turning; contingency and demands of ecological niches may better explain such asymmetries.

Descartes's view of modality is analyzed by contrast to two earlier models: the ancient realist one, defended by Boethius, where possibility and necessity are connected to natural potency, and the modern intensionalist one, which dissociates necessary and possible truths from any ontological foundation, treating them as conceptual, a priori given preconditions for any intellect. The emergence of this view is traced from Gilbert of Poitiers to duns Scotus, Ockham and Suarez. The Cartesian theory of the creation of eternal truths, it (...) is argued, involves a rejection of this idea of absolute conceivability and can be seen as a constructivist view of intelligibility and rationality. (shrink)

Business ethics attracts increasing attention from business practitioners and academic researchers. Concerns over fraudulent behavior keep attentionfocused on ethics in businesses. The accounting profession pays particularattention to matters of ethical judgment. The profession has adopted a strictcode of conduct and many states require the passage of an ethics exam to gaincertification. The more that is understood about the relationship of gender and ethics, the better chance of education and training programs will bedesigned to improve ethical awareness and sensitivity. Prior studies (...) have found that personal characteristics are an important aspect of cultural norms.This study analyzes the responses of students from eight different countries toquestions on their probable actions to an ethical dilemma. (shrink)

We present a semantic study of a family of modal intuitionistic linear systems, providing various logics with both an algebraic semantics and a relational semantics, to obtain completeness results. We call modality a unary operator on formulas which satisfies only one rale (regularity), and we consider any subsetW of a list of axioms which defines the exponential of course of linear logic. We define an algebraic semantics by interpreting the modality as a unary operation on an IL-algebra. Then we introduce (...) a relational semantics based on pretopologies with an additional binary relationr between information states. The interpretation of is defined in a suitable way, which differs from the traditional one in classical modal logic. We prove that such models provide a complete semantics for our minimal modal system, as well as, by requiring the suitable conditions onr (in the spirit of correspondence theory), for any of its extensions axiomatized by any subsetW as above. We also prove an embedding theorem for modal IL-algebras into complete ones and, after introducing the notion of general frame, we apply it to obtain a duality between general frames and modal IL-algebras. (shrink)

Most of professional ethics is grounded on the assumption that we can speak meaningfully about particular, insulated professions with aims and goals, that conceptually there exists a clear "inside and outside" to any given profession. Professional ethics has also inherited the two-part assumption from mainstream moral philosophy that we can speak meaningfully about agent-relative versus agent-neutral moral perspectives, and further, that it is only from the agent-neutral perspective that we can truly evaluate our professional moral aims, rules, and practices. Several (...) important changes that have occurred, or are currently taking place, in the structure of the health care professions, challenge those assumptions and signal the need for teachers of professional ethics to rethink the content of what we teach as well as our teaching methods. The changes include: influences and critique from other professions and from those who are served by the health professions, and influences and critique from professionals themselves, including increased activism and dissent from within the professions. The discussion focuses on changes that have occurred in the health-related fields, but insofar as similar changes are occurring in other professions such as law and business, these arguments will have broader conceptual implications for the way we ought to think about professional ethics more generally. (shrink)

Aristotle's observation that all human beings by nature desire to know aptly captures the spirit of "intellectualist" research in psychology and anthropology. Intellectualists in these fields agree that humans' have fundamental explanatory interests (which reflect their rationality) and that the idioms in which their explanations are couched can differ considerably across places and times (both historical and developmental). Intellectualists in developmental psychology (e.g., Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997) maintain that young children's conceptual structures, like those of scientists, are theories (...) and that their conceptual development--like the development of science--is a process of theory formation and change. They speculate that our explanatory preoccupations result, at least in part, from a natural drive to develop theories. Intellectualists in the anthropology of religion (e.g., Horton, 1970 and 1993) hold that, although it may do many other things as well, religion is primarily concerned with providing explanatory theories. They maintain that religion and science have the same explanatory goals; only the idioms of their explanations differ. The connections between the concern for explanation, the pursuit of science, the persistence of religion, and the cognitive processes underlying each clearly merit further examination. By considering both their cultural manifestations and their cognitive foundations, I hope to clarify not only how science and religion are related but some of the ways their explanatory projects differ. I shall argue that, despite their centuries' old antagonisms, no development in science will ever seriously threaten the persistence of religion or the forms of explanation religion employs or the emergence of new religions. (I strongly suspect that science will never seriously threaten the persistence of particular religions either, but I only aim to defend the weaker, collective claim here.) In this paper's fourth section I shall show that religion and its characteristic forms of explanation 1 are a natural outgrowth of the character and content of human association and cognition.. (shrink)

Discussions of free will have frequently centered on principles concerning ability, control, unavoidability and other practical modalities. Some assert the closure of the latter over various propositional operations and relations, for example, that the consequences of what is beyond one's control are themselves beyond one's control.1 This principle has been featured in the unavoidability argument for incompatibilism: if everything we do is determined by factors which are not under our control, then, by the principle, we are unable to act and (...) choose other than we actually did. A second family of principles concerns the fixity of the past and the laws of nature. If no one is able to alter the past or violate the laws it seems but a small step to conclude that no one can do anything such that if they did it then the past would be altered or the laws violated. Accordingly, if an agent's performing an act is necessitated by the past and laws, then the agent is unable to refrain from that act at that time. Generalizing, determinism precludes anyone from doing anything other than what he or she did.2. (shrink)

Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in cultural (...) evolution, which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. (shrink)

David Hume (1711-1776) is one of the greatest of philosophers. Today he probably ranks highest of all British philosophers in terms of influence and philosophical standing. His philosophical work ranges across morals, the mind, metaphysics, epistemology, religion, and aesthetics; he had broad interests not only in philosophy as it is now conceived but in history, politics, economics, religion, and the arts. He was a master of English prose. -/- The Clarendon Hume Edition will include all of his works except (...) his History of England and minor historical writings. It is the only thorough critical edition, and will provide a far more extensive scholarly treatment than any previous editions. This edition (which has been in preparation since the 1970s) offers authoritative annotation, bibliographical information, and indexes, and draws upon the major advances in textual scholarship that have been made since the publication of earlier editions--advances both in the understanding of editorial principle and practice and in knowledge of the history of Hume's own texts. -/- In this volume, Tom Beauchamp presents two essays from Four Dissertations (1757), the last philosophical work written by Hume, which was subsequently revised by the philosopher in the remaining years of his life. Whilst the bulk of A Dissertation on the Passions was extracted from passages in A Treatise of Human Nature, The Natural History of Religion was an original work when published in 1757, as well as the only major work devoted exclusively to the subject of religion that Hume published in his lifetime. Together with Hume's earlier work on religious topics, this essay drew considerable philosophical commentary from his contemporaries. -/- The last edition of the two works in this volume seen through the press by Hume himself appeared in 1772. It provides the copy-text for this critical edition. The Editor's primarily historical Introduction discusses the genesis, revision, and reception of these two dissertations, which went into ten editions at the author's hand. It will appeal to scholars across many disciplines. (shrink)

I have argued that the traditional free will debate has focused too much on whether free will is compatible with determinism and not enough on whether free will is compatible with specific causal explanations for our actions, including those offered by empirical psychology. If free will is understood as a set of cognitive and volitional capacities, possessed and exercised to varying degrees, then psychology can inform us about the extent to which humans (as a species and as individuals) possess those (...) capacities and manage to exercise them across various situations. While recent work on the role of consciousness in action has been misinterpreted to suggest its role is illusory, recent work in social psychology presents a more viable challenge to our free will. The extent to which we can act on reasons we would accept or can know why we are doing what we do appears to be much less than we presume. Further work is necessary, of course, and it will need to involve both philosophical analysis and psychological investigation. Questions regarding the nature of human freedom and responsibility clearly require the conceptual resources of philosophy and the empirical resources of psychology. (shrink)

This research investigates the efficacy of business ethics intervention, tests a theoretical model that the love of money is directly or indirectly related to propensity to engage in unethical behavior (PUB), and treats college major (business vs. psychology) and gender (male vs. female) as moderators in multi-group analyses. Results suggested that business students who received business ethics intervention significantly changed their conceptions of unethical behavior and reduced their propensity to engage in theft; while psychology students without intervention had no such (...) changes. Therefore, ethics training had some impacts on business students' learning and education (intelligence). For our theoretical model, results of the whole sample (N = 298) revealed that Machiavellianism (measured at Time 1) was a mediator of the relationship between the love of money (measured at Time 1) and unethical behavior (measured at Time 2) (the Love of Money → Machiavellianism → Unethical Behavior). Further, this mediating effect existed for business students (n = 198) but not for psychology students (n = 100), for male students (n = 165) but not for female students (n = 133), and for male business students (n = 128) but not for female business students (n = 70). Moreover, when examined alone, the direct effect (the Love of Money → Unethical Behavior) existed for business students but not for psychology students. We concluded that a short business ethics intervention may have no impact on the issue of virtue (wisdom). (shrink)

The outsourcing of medical research has become a strategic imperative in the global pharmaceutical industry. Spurred by the challenges of competition, the need for speed in drug development, and increasing domestic costs, pharmaceutical companies across the globe continue to outsource critical parts of their value chain activities, namely contract clinical research and drug testing, to sponsors across the globe, typically into emerging markets. While it is clear that important ethical issues arise with this practice, unraveling moral responsibility and (...) the allocation of responsibility is not so clear, considering that contracts, by their very definition transfer responsibility from the principal to the agent. This research provides a framework for exploring some of the ethical issues, including attributions of moral responsibility associated with Contract Medical Research. Using a theory of strategic and moral behavior, the research shows that both clients and sponsors in contract research have individual and collective responsibility to ensure that due care and diligence is exercised in the performance of clinical research. The research suggests some guidelines for stakeholder action. (shrink)

This paper argues that research on the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) must account for the path dependent nature of firm-stakeholderrelations, and develops the construct of stakeholder influence capacity (SIC) to fill this void. SIC helps to explain why the effects of CSR on corporate financial performance (CFP) vary across firms and across time, therein providing a missing link in the study of the business case. This paper distinguishes CSR from related and confounded corporate resource (...) allocations and from corporate social performance (CSP), then incorporates SIC into a model that explains how acts of CSR are transformed into CFP through stakeholder relationships. This paper also develops a set of propositions to aid future research on the contingencies that produce variable financial returns to investments in CSR. (shrink)

Some options to single out the foremost function of philosophy in culture are discussed. As any functioning part has to possess definite level of the internal unity, I begin by tracing out the main views on the unanimity of philosophical knowledge and demonstrate that the opposed variants can be reduced to well‐known contraposition between subject matter (a strong variant) and method (a weak one). I show further that at least one strong version, which identifies philosophical subject matter with the concrete (...) universal being, seizes on only one piece of metaphysics. As a result, the boundary line between strong and weak versions erodes and the strong version converges into the weak one. Finally, I argue that fundamental philosophical themes can be united on the base of three famous Kant’s questions: What can I know? What may I hope? What ought I to do? Difference across modalities testifies against the interpretation of these questions as synopsis. Moreover, these questions correlate well with the three core parts of the making‐decision situation. Such a situation includes a set of possible alternatives and a system or an aggregate of selection criteria for a choice of the variant desired. These two components are logically prior to goal setting. Clearly, to achieve desired object one is to determine what steps are necessary for success. It is no less clear that in the structure of an action, they represent something one ought to do. Thus, specific cultural mission of philosophizing lies in the design and justification of Weltanschauung. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a substantial amount of research on emotional intelligence (EI) across a wide range of disciplines. Also, this term has been receiving increasing attention in the popular business press. This article extends previous research by seeking to determine whether there is a relationship between emotional intelligence and ethical judgment among practicing managers with respect to questions of ethical nature that can arise in their professional activity. It analyzes the results of a survey of (...) 324 managers enrolled in executive MBA programs from five universities in the southeastern and northeastern United States. This study is based on a model presented by Forsyth showing two dimensions that play an important role in ethical evaluation and behavior. Respondents were classified into one of four groups according to their idealism and relativism levels—situationists, subjectivists, absolutists, and exceptionists. The four ideological group’s scores were compared. The results indicate significant differences between the situationists and absolutists on the one hand, and subjectivists and exceptionists on the other. The former’s emotional intelligence scores were significantly higher thus demonstrating a strong relationship between emotional intelligence and ethical ideology. The results raise important implications for practitioners and educators. (shrink)

Naturalism is currently the most vibrantly developing approach to philosophy, with naturalised methodologies being applied across all the philosophical disciplines. One of the areas naturalism has been focussing upon is the mind, traditionally viewed as a topic hard to reconcile with the naturalistic worldview. A number of questions have been pursued in this context. What is the place of the mind in the world? How should we study the mind as a natural phenomenon? What is the significance of cognitive (...) science research for philosophical debates? In this book, philosophical questions about the mind are asked in the context of recent developments in cognitive science, evolutionary theory, psychology, and the project of the naturalisation. Much of the focus is upon what we have learned by studying natural mental mechanisms as well as designing artificial ones. In the case of natural mental mechanisms, this includes consideration of such issues as the significance of deficits in these mechanisms for psychiatry. The significance of the evolutionary context for mental mechanisms as well as questions regarding rationality and wisdom is also explored. Mechanistic and functional models of the mind are used to throw new light on discussions regarding issues of explanation, reduction and the realisation of mental phenomena. Finally, naturalistic approaches are used to look anew at such traditional philosophical issues as the correspondence of mind to world and presuppositions of scientific research. (shrink)

This paper argues against the indeterminacy thesis that attempts to defeat traditional natural law by asserting that specific moral norms cannot be based on human nature. As put by Jean Porter (Nature as Reason 2005, 338): “the intelligibilities of human nature underdetermine their forms of expression, and that is why this theory does not yield a comprehensive set of determinate moral norms, compelling to all rational persons.” However, if this were so, one could adopt any morality with (...) impunity from nature’s sanctions. But I argue that nature punishes violators of the natural law in various ways. In addition, I argue that the indeterminacy thesis cannot be supported by appealing to the diversity of moral norms across the globe. Such diversity is required, for instance, both by the reliance of Thomistic natural law on the practical syllogism and by its reliance on practical reason’s ability to prescribe for the sake of the person in highly unique situations as required by Wojtyla’s Personalistic Norm and Aquinas’s norm of neighborly love. (shrink)

The contemporary age is approaching the downfall of human civilization due to the rapid collapse of the global ecology. As the popular obsession with industrial development, triggered by the Western modernization of the 18th century, expands across the entire world, minor regional environmental crises have merged intoan irremediable global ecological crisis. This suggests that human society has lost its ability to harmonize with nature and is driving itself to a crisis of survival, dangling on the brink of a (...) fatal cliff. The resolution of the global ecological crisis, which has been exacerbated primarily by Western civilization, requires an alternative thought paradigm that appeared in Korea over 100 years ago, one that can be characterized as ‘the ideology of Gaebyeok.’ This ideology proclaimsthat the global ecological crisis of our times is not simply a crisis of civilization sparked by energy over-consumption, but is rather an inevitable cyclical phenomenon stemming from a change in the universe’s natural order. The ideology of Gaebyeok, refined by a Korean Philosopher, Gim Il-Bu (1826-1898) in his work Jeongyeok (Right Change) and eventually brought to full blossom by Gang Jeung-San (1871-1909), suggests an excellent alternative way of thinking which offers a new hope to the citizens of the contemporary world who cannot ind an escape from their risky societies. My paper will discuss this enlightened vision of global hope. (shrink)

We examine initial public offering (IPO) holdings in the mutual funds of four large investment banks and five large non-investment banks during the period 1997 through 2002. Investment banks hold IPOs with different characteristics than IPOs held by non-investment banks, and they also tend to hold IPOs in different types of funds than non-investment banks. We classify holdings as to whether the IPO lies outside or inside the fund’s objective. Investment banks hold IPOs outside the fund objective in 27% of (...) the fund/IPO pairs while non-investment banks hold outside their objective in just 5.4% of fund/IPO pairs. We see significant differences in IPO underpricing for both groups as well. For example, when non-investment banks hold IPOs outside a large capitalization fund objective, they select IPOs with 52% higher underpricing as measured by first-day returns. (shrink)

A consensus view appears to prevail among academics from diverse disciplines that biological races do not exist, at least in humans, and that race-concepts and race-objects are socially constructed. The consensus view has been challenged recently by Robin O. Andreasen's cladistic account of biological race. This paper argues that from a scientific viewpoint there are methodological, empirical, and conceptual problems with Andreasen's position, and that from a philosophical perspective Andreasen's adherence to rigid dichotomies between science and society, facts and values, (...) nature and culture, and the biological and the social needs to be relinquished. DNA forensics is just one field of research that reveals how race remains both idea and object for human population biologists, an indication that it is premature to accept the existence of a no-race consensus across the disciplines. DNA forensics research also demonstrates ways in which race is reified by scientists by the representation of what is cultural or social as natural or biological, and of what is dynamic, relative, and continuous as static, absolute, and discrete. The philosophical analysis of foundational concepts of human population biology such as population, race, and ethnic group is best served by foregoing traditional objectivist approaches for a critical stance that recognises the inextricability of the biological and the social. Introduction Consensus view: biological races do not exist Andreasen's defence of the biological reality of races as clades Biological permutations of race Conclusion. (shrink)

Abstract Nominalists, denying the reality of anything over and above concreta, are committed to a reductive account of any law of nature, explaining its necessity?the fact that it not only holds for all actual instances, but would hold for any additional ones?in, for example, epistemic terms (its likelihood/certainty of holding beyond the already observed instances). Nominalists argue that the world would be no different without irreducible modalities. ?Modal realists? often object that this parallels a common phenomenalist argument against believing (...) in a mind?independent external world. However, phenomenalism without translatability into sensory language is incoherent, though any such translation is impossible. The ?as if philosophy is untenable as well. But it is quite possible to formulate inductive methodology's imperatives in non?modal terms. Modal realism purports to give a reason against inductive scepticism, but does not go beyond saying that there is one. (shrink)

Although it is now widely recognised by business leaders that their companies need to accept a broader responsibility than short-term profits, recent research suggests that as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social reporting become more widespread, there is little empirical evidence of the range of stakeholders addressed through their CSR programmes and how such programmes are reported. Through a CSR framework which was developed in an exploratory study, we explore the nature of stakeholder relationships reported across leading FTSE (...) companies and the importance they attach to communicating both social and business outcomes. It is evident from the hypotheses tested that the bigger FTSE companies, particularly extraction companies and telecoms, are more adept at identifying and prioritising their stakeholders, and linking CSR programmes to business and social outcomes. However, we draw the general conclusion that building stronger stakeholder relationships through CSR programmes – other than with customers – is not currently a priority for most companies. We also conclude that a limited sophistication in managing multiple stakeholders may compromise the impact of CSR upon business and social results. Finally, the managerial implications and the contribution of our study are discussed before closing with an acknowledgement of the limitations of this work and suggestions for further research. (shrink)

The article discusses principles that form part of evolutionary systems thinking in social sciences and humanities. It is argued that introducing the concept of self-organization relates agency and structures in a way that makes it possible to take up certain features of Critical Theory by which it can meet the demands for a critical social science. These principles are applied to the question of whether there is convergence or divergence in and by means of the Internet. It will be clarified (...) that the Internet is basically a social system and that it is a subsystem of the larger and overarching system of the whole society. It will be shown how the Internet can be perceived as a possible trigger for societal developments bringing about fundamental change in the nature of society. Thus the article cuts across philosophical, system theoretical, social theoretical, sociology of technology, and information society theory considerations. Key Words: dynamic • "mechanism" • self-organizaton • revolution • evolution • Critical Theory • information society • Internet. (shrink)

An -ever free relative is felicitous only when the speaker doesn’t know, or doesn’t care about, the identity of the entity denoted. In this paper we investigate what it means to identify an entity by examining the non-identification condition on -ever free relatives. Following Dayal (In A. Lawson (Ed.), Proceedings of SALT VII, 1997 ), we analyze -ever free relatives as definites with a modal dimension. We show that the variation in the identity of the entity across the possible (...) worlds in the modal dimension cannot be captured in a model where transworld identity is expressed using a single trivial principle of identity, and present an analysis within a model where transworld identity is relativized to noun meanings, which has been proposed in the philosophical literature for other reasons (Geach 1968 ; Gupta, The logic of common nouns: an investigation in quantified modal logic, 1980 ). The analysis thus shows that natural language semantics is sensitive to relative identity in the sense of Geach and Gupta; furthermore, it sets the stage for a new typology of referring expressions based on which expression types contribute principles of transworld identity. (shrink)

According to the free-will defence, the exercise of free will by creatures is of such value that God is willing to allow the existence of evil which comes from the misuse of free will. A well-known objection holds that the exercise of free will is compatible with determinism and thus, if God exists, God could have predetermined exactly how the will would be exercised; God could even have predetermined that free will would be exercised sinlessly. Thus, it is held, the (...) free-will defence cannot be used as a partial account of why God should have allowed evil to exist. I investigate this objection using Kripke's apparatus for treating modalities and natural kinds to explore the nature of the incompatibilism required by the free-will defence. I show why the objection fails even if the standard arguments for compatibilism are acceptable. This is because the modality involved in the incompatibilism needed by the free-will defence differs from the modality involved in the compatibilism that is supported by standard compatibilist arguments. Finally, an argument is sketched for a variety of incompatibilism of the kind needed by the free-will defence. (shrink)

What is the nature of our mental representation of quantity? We find that human adults show no performance cost of comparing numerosities across vs. within visual and auditory stimulus sets, or across vs. within simultaneous and sequential sets. In addition, reaction time and performance in such tasks are determined by the ratio of the numerosities to be compared; absolute set size has no effect. These findings suggest that modality-specific stimulus properties undergo a non-iterative transformation into representations of (...) quantity that are independent of the modality or format of the stimulus. q 2002 MIT Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Discover the truth about sex in the city (and the country). Mapping Desire explores the places and spaces of sexuality from body to community, from the "cottage" to the Barrio, from Boston to Jakarta, from home to cyberspace. Mapping Desire is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desires presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, (...) class='Hi'>exploring how the heterosexed body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. Editors David Bell and Gill Valentine have brought together contributors with a wealth of approaches to ways in which the spaces of sex and the sexes of space are being mapped out across contemporary culture. Among the many sexual geographies covered are: Lesbians at home and on the streets; gay men on fantasy islands; bisexual identities; The heterosexualization of the workplace; bachelor farmers and spinsters; surveillance and sexuality; prostitution; queer politics; sexual citizenship, and the transformation of intimacy. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualized spaces: global/local; sexualized spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature. Mapping Desire will be a valuable and accessible travelogue of information for anyone interested in social, cultural and political geography, lesbian and gay studies, cultural studies, or simply those who want to find out more about the sexual landscape of contemporary society. Contents: Part I: Cartographies/Identities; Resolving Riddles: The Sexed Body, Julia Cream ; Locating Bisexual Identities: Discourses of Bisexuality and Contemporary Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings; Of Moffies, Kaffiers and Perverts: Male Homosexuality and the Discourse of Moral Order in the Apartheid State, Glen Elder; Femme on the Streets, Butch in the Sheets (a Play on Whores), Alison Murray; Body Work: The Performance of Gendered and (Hetero)Sexualized Identities in City Workplaces, Linda McDowell; Part II: Sexualized Spaces: Global/Local; Whenever I Lay My Girlfriend That's My Home: The Performance and Surveillance of Lesbian Identities in Domestic Environments, Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine; The Lesbian Flaneur, Sally Munt; Fantasy Islands: Popular Topographies of Marooned Masculinities, Gregory Woods; Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis, Lawrence Knopp; Part III: Sexualized Spaces: Local/Global; "And She Told Two Friends...": Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space, Tamar Rothenberg; Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality and the Production of Queer Space, Jon Binnie; Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota, Jerry Lee Kramer; (Re)Constructing a Spanish Redlight District: Prostitution, Space and Power, Angie Hart; Part IV: Sites of Resistance; "Surveilliant Gays": HIV, Space and the Construction of Identities, David Woodhead; Sex, Scale and the "New Urban Politics": HIV-Prevention Strategies from Yaletown, Vancouver, Michael Brown; "Boom, Bye, Bye": Jamaican Ragga and Gay Resistance, Tracey Skelton; The Diversity of Queer Politics and the Redefinition of Sexual Identity and Community in Urban Space, Tim Davis; Perverse Dynamics, Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation of Intimacy, David Bell; Guide to Further Reading; Bibliography. (shrink)

Smell 'sensations' are among the most mysterious of conscious experiences, and have been cited in defense of the thesis that the character of perceptual experience is independent of the physical events that seem to give rise to it. Here we review the scientific literature on olfaction, and we argue that olfaction has a distinctive profile in relation to the other modalities, on four counts: in the physical nature of the stimulus, in the sensorimotor interactions that characterize its use, in (...) the structure of its intramodal distinctions and in the functional role that it plays in people's behaviour. We present two thought experiments in which we detail what would be involved in transforming sounds into smells, and also smells into colours. Through these thought-experiments, we argue that the experiential character of smell derives precisely from the structural features of olfaction, and that an embodied account of olfactory phenomenology is called for. (shrink)

During the past decades, research collaboration between researchers from different disciplines has become more frequent. However, there is a need to look into the generic modalities and challenges. The article explores a series of potential obstructions to cross-disciplinary collaboration of methodological and epistemological nature. Furthermore, a number of contextual, inhibiting factors are outlined. As means of overcoming the obstacles, the importance of mutual knowledge, allocation of adequate time and conducive research management is emphasised. New teams may benefit from tutoring (...) by facilitators, who can help to make problem areas explicit and negotiate solutions. Owing to the training background of the author, most of the examples are drawn from the interface between biomedicine/natural science and applied medical anthropology. However, the issues raised basically apply to all sorts of cross-disciplinary research collaboration in various combinations. (shrink)

A great deal of discussion in the recent literature has been devoted to the so-called 'McKinsey' paradox which purports to show that semantic externalism is incompatible with the sort of authoritative knowledge that we take ourselves to have of our own thought contents. In this paper I examine one influential epistemological response to this paradox which is due to Crispin Wright and Martin Davies. I argue that it fails to meet the challenge posed by McKinsey but that, if it is (...) set within an externalist epistemology, it may have application to a related paradox that concerns the problem of radical scepticism. (shrink)

This study examined more than 2,500 war images from U.S. television news, newspapers, news magazines, and online news sites during the first five weeks of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and found that only 10% showed injury or death. The paper analyzes which media platforms were most willing to show casualties and offers insights on when journalists should use gruesome war images or keep them secret.

Philip Kitcher's book begins with a familiar historical overview. In the 1940s and 50s a confident, optimistic vision of science was widely shared by philosophers and historians of science. The goal of science was to discover the truth about nature, and over the centuries science had advanced steadily towards that goal; science discerned the real kinds of things of which the world was composed and the causal relations between them; the methods of science were rational and its deliverances objective; (...) and so on. Only where science failed in some of these respects was there any need to provide external, that is social, political, or individual, explanations of scientific belief. In the late 50s, and especially subsequent to Kuhn's classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, all this started to change. Historians increasingly insisted that the development of science must be treated just like any other cultural process, which meant embedding the narrative of the growth of scientific knowledge fully in the social and political context in which it occurred. This suggested that the view of science as deriving from a uniquely rational process could no longer be sustained. And, notoriously, Kuhn argued that science could not be seen as cumulative across the most dramatic changes in scientific theory. Though philosophers have never given up entirely on the old optimistic picture ("Legend" as Kitcher refers to it), its influence has steadily waned. For various reasons philosophers have become increasingly concerned over whether one could believe scientific claims to be literally true. And influenced by Duhem's thesis, revived by Quine, that scientific theory must always be underdetermined by empirical evidence, they became more sympathetic to the possibility that scientific belief must be explained, at least in substantial part, by much more than the rational objective processes envisioned by Legend. These philosophical doubts existed in uneasy tension with more extreme tendencies toward thoroughgoing relativism or skepticism, and with the movement in the sociology of science to see the whole concern with truth and falsity as an irrelevant diversion. (shrink)

Modal conventionalism is the view that two crucial forms of sameness are mind-dependent. There is no phenomenon of sameness in kind, on this view, except in virtue of our conventions for individuating nature’s kinds; there is no phenomenon of numerical sameness across time, for an individual member of some natural kind, except in virtue of our conventions for individuating such members.1 Modal conventionalism has its realist opponents. These opponents have argued, following Kripke’s lead more than thirty years ago (...) (Kripke 1972), that the boundaries of at least many of nature’s kinds are carved out by nature itself, and not by our classifi catory practices (e.g., Millikan 2000: passim, e.g., pp. 25 and 72). But they have not generally argued, with anything approaching the same vigor, that modal conventionalism is wrong in its other main claim. They have not in general argued that the world-given connections among properties, that make those properties mind-independently be membership conditions for some natural kind, at the same time make those properties mind-independently be persistence conditions for the members of the kind—properties the departure of which constitutes a ceasing-to-exist for the object that formerly had them. On the contrary, opponents of modal conventionalism have.. (shrink)

Financial crises are now commonplace in the global economy. It was not always so. For over two decades after World War II, under the Bretton Woods system of capital controls, financial crises were relatively rare.[1] Since the early 1970’s the number and frequency of financial crises (currency crises, banking crises, sovereign debt crises, or combinations thereof) increased dramatically, culminating in the enormously destructive global crisis of 2008-2009. (By one count, there were at least 124 banking crises between 1970 and 2008. (...) During the postwar decades before 1970 the number is: two.[2]) What explains the post-1970 rise? The date suggests a natural explanation: capital liberalization. With the early 1970’s breakdown of Bretton Woods, governments increasingly removed controls on private capital movements across their borders. As capital flows dramatically increased, economically integrated countries became markedly more susceptible to financial crises as compared to the postwar years of careful controls. While each crisis has its own varying local causes, and leaves plenty of blame to go around, the general tendency for crises to become more numerous and more frequent is substantially (even if not wholly) explained by a major trend in government policy: the choice of governments to remove capital controls has created a global economic environment in which financial crises readily break out. It is difficult to overstate the profoundly consequential nature of this choice. More than most any adverse economic event—and import surge, downturn in the business cycle, a commodity price spike—financial crises cause severe and potentially irreparable harm on a large and even global scale. Developing countries from Argentina to Mexico to Japan to Malaysia have become familiar with crisis-induced ravages of high unemployment, reduced tax revenue, exploding public debt, and cuts in social services. The losses often fall to very poor people, though they would be significant for most anyone.. (shrink)

This paper considers the interpretive significance of the intersecting relationships between different conceptions of responsibility as they shift over space and time. The paper falls into two main sections. The first gives an account of several conceptions of responsibility: two conceptions founded in ideas of capacity; two founded in ideas of character, and one founded in the relationship between an agent and the outcome which she causes. The second main section uses this differentiated conceptual account to analyse and interpret certain (...) aspects of the contemporary criminal law of England and Wales. In conclusion, the paper considers a number of hypotheses about what the evidence of certain shifts in the relationship between the three families of responsibility-conception can tell us about the current state and significance of criminal law among other systems of social governance. (shrink)

Recent critiques have selected textual evidence for casting Hearne as a failed narrator, because he did not live up to the mercantile or imperialist expectations for late 18th-century explorers, or as a biased narrator, because he never fully moves beyond such valuations. But if we categorize phenomenologically Hearne's experiences as a student of the Arctic throughout his four-year journey, there is more textual evidence for reading it as the account of a civilized narrator's conflicted adaptation to an indigenous society as (...) his consciousness is more and more shaped by Arctic nature. Hearne's A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 (1795) is filled with patterns of experience in which Hearne is learning, often slowly and painfully, a culture of place through his body. Hearne is a developing narrator who moves from experiencing the Arctic as an alien, hostile, and unnatural place to responding directly to its actualities, adjusting over time to the demands the land and its people place on him. As Hearne eventually finds a temporary home in Arctic wilderness, his most significant accomplishment as a narrator is to move the locus of culture into it. As the phenomenologist Edward S. Casey puts it, this results in a 'thickening' between the antinomical oppositions of civilization and Arctic. Viewed in light of his own statements in his Preface, the commendation of contemporary reviewers, and the contrasting limitations of pre-Hearne sub-Arctic narratives, Hearne's Journey amounts to a reconfiguration of 18th-century civilized constructs into three roles grounded in Arctic phenomena: as a naturalist, as a traveler across northern terrain, and as a member of a Chipewyan war party. An ur-narrative of land-based Arctic exploration, Hearne's Journey finally demonstrates an integration with the land and the Chipewyans with whom he travels that establishes phenomenological precedents for the reading of all later accounts of land-based Arctic travel. (shrink)

This book offers the first sustained multi-disciplinary investigation of the question and status of ethics in light of the current "return to ethics" underway in a variety of critical fields. While the questions of ethics have become increasingly important in recent years for many fields within the humanities, there has been no single volume that seeks to address the emergence of this concern with ethics across the disciplinary spectrum. Given this lack in currently available critical and secondary texts, and (...) also the urgency of the issues addressed by the critics assembled here, the time is right for a collection of this nature. By assembling the work of nine critics from among these disciplines-including philosophy, women's studies, cultural studies, anthropology, literary studies, and history-this collection will help to frame the conversation on the status of ethics in the coming years. One of the great features of the book is the very high quality of work and the importance within the critical scene of many of its contributors. Contributors: Lowell Gallagher, Richard J. Golsan, David E. Johnson, Howard Marchitello, Kelly Oliver, Marshall Sahlins, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Tzvetan Todorov, Krzysztof Ziarek. (shrink)

Background: Cancer patients are at risk of developing blood clots in their veins - venous thromboembolism(VTE) - which often takes the form of a pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis. Therisk increases with advanced disease. Evidence based treatment is low molecular weightheparin (LMWH) by daily subcutaneous injection. The aim of this research is to explore thebarriers for doctors in the UK when diagnosing and treating advanced cancer patients withVTE.MethodQualitative, in-depth interview study with 45 doctors (30 across Yorkshire, England (...) and 15across South Wales). Doctors were from three specialties: oncology, palliative medicine andgeneral practice, with a mixture of senior and junior staff. Framework analysis was used. Results: Doctors opinions as to whether LMWH treatment was ethically appropriate for patients whowere symptomatic from VTE but at end of life existed on a shifting continuum, largelyinfluenced by patient prognosis. A lack of immediate benefit coupled with the discomfort of adaily injection had influenced some doctors not to prescribe LMWH. The point at whichLMWH injections should be stopped in patients at the end of life was ambiguous. Someperceived overcaution in their own and other clinicians treatment of patients. Viewpointswere divergent on whether dying of a PE was considered a "good way to go". Theinterventionalism and ethos of palliative medicine was discussed. Conclusions: Decisions are difficult for doctors to make regarding LMWH treatment for advanced cancerpatients with VTE. Treatment for this patient group is bounded to the doctors own moral andethical frameworks. (shrink)

We go on along the trend of [2] and [1], giving an axiomatization of S4 0 and proving its completeness and compactness with respect to the usual reflexive and transitive Kripke models. To reach this results, we use techniques from [1], with suitable adaptations to our specific case.

Many decisions involve multiple stages of choices and events, and these decisions can be represented graphically as decision trees. Optimal decision strategies for decision trees are commonly determined by a backward induction analysis that demands adherence to three fundamental consistency principles: dynamic, consequential, and strategic. Previous research (Busemeyer et al. 2000, J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 129, 530) found that decision-makers tend to exhibit violations of dynamic and strategic consistency at rates significantly higher than choice inconsistency across various levels of (...) potential reward. The current research extends these findings under new conditions; specifically, it explores the extent to which these principles are violated as a function of the planning horizon length of the decision tree. Results from two experiments suggest that dynamic inconsistency increases as tree length increases; these results are explained within a dynamic approach–avoidance framework. (shrink)

The volume presents a set of invited papers based on analyses of legal discourse drawn from a number of international contexts where often the English language ...

Measures of retrieval speed for recently presented events show a sharp dichotomy between representations in focal attention and representations that are recently processed but no longer attended. When information is presented over time, retrieval measures show that focal attention and rapid privileged access is limited to the most recently processed unit or chunk, not the last 3–5 chunks that Cowan estimates from various recall procedures.

: The purpose of this paper and its sister paper (Farrell and Hooker, b) is to present, evaluate and elaborate a proposed new model for the process of scientific development: self-directed anticipative learning (SDAL). The vehicle for its evaluation is a new analysis of a well-known historical episode: the development of ape-language research. In this first paper we outline five prominent features of SDAL that will need to be realized in applying SDAL to science: 1) interactive exploration of possibility space; (...) 2) self-directedness; 3) localization of success and error; 4) Synergistic increase in learning capacity; and 5) continuity of SDAL process across scientific change. In this paper we examine the first three features of SDAL in relation to the early history of ape-language research. We show that this history is readily explicated as a self-directed, ever-finer, delineation of possibility space that enables the localization of both success and error. Paper II examines the last two features against this history. (shrink)

Humans think and communicate in very flexible and schematic ways, and a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for the Amazon and associated information system ontologies should reflect this flexibility and the adaptive nature of human cognition in order to achieve semantic interoperability. In this paper I offer a conceptual investigation of SDI and explore the nature of cultural schemas as expressions of indigenous ontologies and the challenges of semantic interoperability across cultures. Cultural schemas are, in essence, our ontologies, (...) but they are markedly different than classical formal ontologies. They shape our ontological commitments to what exists in the world as well as the ways in which we approach and engage the world. And while they help structure our understanding of the world in which we are embedded, they are associative and flexible. They help to focus our attention to particular details of our experiences and give them salience, yet they cannot be simply reduced to a series of extracted features. They allow us to make meaning of the contextualized, cultural experience in which we are always immersed. An SDI is a shared social-technological-informational structure that, if it is to be useful and successful for sustainability in the Amazon, must incorporate and use indigenous cultural schemas. Indigenous communities must have the ability to contribute to the collection of geospatial data and their contributions recognized as legitimate forms of knowledge. In order for the SDI to work, it must recognize the larger cultural landscape to which cultural schemas can connect to the ready-to-hand elements of salient cultural experiences. (shrink)

With no precise boundaries, always on the move and too complex to be defined by space and time, is it possible to map the human subject? This book attempts to do just this, exploring the places of the subject in contemporary culture. The editors approach this subject from four main aspects--its construction, sexuality, limits and politics--using a wide ranging review of literature on subjectivity across the social and human sciences. The first part of the book establishes the idea (...) that the subject is constructed through detailed histories of the subject. The second part shows that sexuality cannot be assumed to be natural through the contributors' research on the place of sexuality in subjectivity and subjectivity in sexuality. The essays in the third part take issue with the idea of a singular, self-contained identity. Power relations and the effects of power are consistent themes throughout the book and the final section deals explicitly with relations of power, whether organized around gender, race, class or other kinds of difference. Contributors: Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift, Miles Ogborn, Carolyn Steedman, David Matless, David Sibley, David Bell, Julia Cream, Vic Seidler, Hester Parr, Chris Philo, Marcus Doel, Paul Rodaway, Nigel Rapport, Stephen Frosh, Valerie Walkerdine, Gillian Rose and Michael Keith. (shrink)

This is the first book to explore the cognitive science of effortless attention and action. Attention and action are generally understood to require effort, and the expectation is that under normal circumstances effort increases to meet rising demand. Sometimes, however, attention and action seem to flow effortlessly despite high demand. Effortless attention and action have been documented across a range of normal activities--from rock climbing to chess playing--and yet fundamental questions about the cognitive science of effortlessness have gone (...) largely unasked. -/- This book draws from the disciplines of cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, behavioral psychology, genetics, philosophy, and cross-cultural studies. Starting from the premise that the phenomena of effortless attention and action provide an opportunity to test current models of attention and action, leading researchers from around the world examine topics including effort as a cognitive resource, the role of effort in decision making, the neurophysiology of effortless attention and action, the role of automaticity in effortless action, expert performance in effortless action, and the neurophysiology and benefits of attentional training. -/- Contributors: Joshua M. Ackerman, James H. Austin, John A. Bargh, Roy F. Baumeister, Sian L. Beilock, Chris Blais, Matthew M. Botvinick, Brian Bruya, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Marci S. DeCaro, Arne Dietrich, Yuri Dormashev, László Harmat, Bernhard Hommel, Rebecca Lewthwaite, Örjan de Manzano, Joseph T. McGuire, Brian P. Meier, Arlen C. Moller, Jeanne Nakamura, Evgeny N. Osin, Michael I. Posner, Mary K. Rothbart, M. R. Rueda, Brandon J. Schmeichel, Edward Slingerland, Oliver Stoll, Yiyuan Tang, Töres Theorell, Fredrik Ullén, Robert D. Wall, Gabriele Wulf. (shrink)

The debate around Michels's "iron law of oligarchy" over the question of whether organizations inevitably become oligarchic reaches back almost a century, but the concept of oligarchy has frequently been left underspecified, and the measures that have been employed are especially inadequate for analyzing nonbureaucratically structured organizations. A conceptual model is needed that delineates what does and does not constitute oligarchy and can be applied in both bureaucratic and nonbureaucratic settings. Definitions found in the research are inadequate for two reasons. (...) First, treating oligarchy solely as a feature of organizational structure neglects the possibility that a powerful elite may operate outside of the formal structure. A democratic structure is a necessary precondition, but it does not guarantee the absence of oligarchy. Second, studies that equate oligarchy with goal displacement and bureaucratic conservatism cannot account for organizations with radical goals that are nonetheless dominated by a ruling elite. This article presents a model that distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of formal and informal power to define oligarchy as a concentration of illegitimate power in the hands of an entrenched minority. The model is intended for use in organizations that are nominally democratic to determine whether a formal or informal leadership has in fact acquired oligarchic control. By providing a common framework for tracking fluctuations in the distribution and legitimacy of both formal and informal power, it is hoped that this model will facilitate a more productive bout of research on the conditions under which various forms of democratically structured organizations may be able to resist oligarchization. (shrink)

Road traffic injury and deaths (RTID) are an important public health problem in Kenya, primarily affecting uneducated and disenfranchised people from lower socioeconomic groups. Studies conducted by Kenyan experts from police reports and surveys have shown that pedestrian and driver behaviors are the most important proximal causes of crashes, signifying that the occurrence of crashes results directly from human action. However, behaviors and risk factors do not fully explain the magnitude of RTID neither does it account for socioeconomic gradient in (...) RTID. Instead, a social justice approach to RTID highlights the need for emphasizing distal causal factors. They allow us to understand how social inequities determine risk for RTID. Hence, designing policies that focus on behaviors will simply mask the underlying systemic causes of this growing phenomenon. To eradicate the RTID and address the gradient, a broader policy framework that includes the social dimension of injury, a strong political will to address the underlying causes of RTID and an effective partnership with stakeholders needs to be developed. (shrink)

For millennia, human beings have believed that it is morally wrong to judge others by the fortuitous or unfortunate events that befall them or by the actions of another person. Rather, an individual’s own intended, deliberate actions should be the basis of his or her evaluation, reward, and punishment. In a series of studies, the authors investigated whether such rules guide the judgments of children. The first 3 studies demonstrated that children view lucky others as more likely than unlucky others (...) to perform intentional good actions. Children similarly assess the siblings of lucky others as more likely to perform intentional good actions than the siblings of unlucky others. The next 3 studies demonstrated that children as young as 3 years believe that lucky people are nicer than unlucky people. The final 2 studies found that Japanese children also demonstrate a robust preference for the lucky and their associates. These findings are discussed in relation to M. J. Lerner’s (1980) just-world theory and J. Piaget’s (1932/1965) immanent-justice research and in relation to the development of intergroup attitudes. (shrink)

This paper explores the specific questions raised for social epistemology encountered in code and software. It does so because these technologies increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment, and stretch across all aspects of our lives. The paper introduces and explores the way in which code and software become the conditions of possibility for human knowledge, crucially becoming computational epistemes, which we share with non-human but crucially knowledge-producing actors. As such, we need to take account of (...) this new computational world and think about how we live today in a highly mediated code-based world. Nonetheless, here I want to understand software epistemes as a broad concept related to the knowledge generated by both human and non-human actors. The aim is to explore changes that are made possible by the installation of code/software via computational devices, streams, clouds or networks. This is what Mitcham calls a ?new ecology of artifice?. By exploring two case studies, the paper attempts to materialise the practice of software epistemologies through a detailed analysis. This analysis is then drawn together with a notion of compactants to explore how studying tracking software and streams is a useful means of uncovering the agency of software and code for producing these new knowledges. (shrink)

International companies expanding and competing in an increasingly global context are currently discovering the necessity of sharing knowledge across geographical and disciplinary borders. Yet, especially in such contexts, sharing knowledge is inherently complex and problematic in practice. Inspired by recent contributions in science studies, this paper argues that knowledge sharing in a global context must take into account the heterogeneous and locally embedded nature of knowledge. In this perspective, knowledge cannot easily be received through advanced information technologies, but (...) must always be achieved in practice. Empirically, this paper draws from two contrasting initiatives in a major international oil and gas company for improving its current ways of sharing knowledge between geographically distributed sites and disciplines involved in well planning and drilling. The contrasting cases reveal that while a shared database system failed to improve knowledge sharing across contexts, a flexible arrangement supporting collaboration and use of different representation of knowledge was surprisingly successful. Based on these findings the paper underscores and conceptualizes various triangulating practices conducted in order to achieve knowledge across borders. More accurately these practices are central for individuals’ and communities’ abilities to: (i) negotiate ambiguous information, (ii) filter, combine, and integrate various heterogeneous sources of information, and (iii) judge the trustworthiness of information. Concerning the design and use of information technologies this implies that new designs need to facilitate triangulating practices of users rather than just providing advanced platforms (“digital junkyards”) for sharing information. (shrink)