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)
Machine generated contents note: Part I. Introduction: 1. Personal epistemology in the classroom: a welcome and guide for the reader Florian C. Feucht and Lisa D. Bendixen; Part II. Frameworks and Conceptual Issues: 2. Manifestations of an epistemological belief system in pre-k to 12 classrooms Marlene Schommer-Aikins, Mary Bird, and Linda Bakken; 3. Epistemic climates in elementary classrooms Florian C. Feucht; 4. The integrative model of personal epistemology development: theoretical underpinnings and implications for education Deanna C. Rule and (...) Lisa D. Bendixen; 5. An epistemic framework for scientific reasoning in informal contexts Fang-Ying Yang and Chin-Chung Tsai; Appendices; 6. Who knows what and who can we believe? Epistemological beliefs are beliefs about knowledge (mostly) to be attained from others Rainer Bromme, Dorothe Kienhues, and Torsten Porsch; Part III. Students' Personal Epistemology, its Development, and Relation to Learning: 7. Stalking young persons' changing beliefs about belief Michael J. Chandler and Travis Proulx; 8. Epistemological development in very young knowers Leah K. Wildenger, Barbara K. Hofer, and Jean E. Burr; 9. Beliefs about knowledge and revision of knowledge: on the importance of epistemic beliefs for intentional conceptual change in elementary and middle school students Lucia Mason; 10. The reflexive relation between students' mathematics-related beliefs and the mathematics classroom culture Erik De Corte, Peter Op 't Eynde, Fien Depaepe, and Lieven Verschaffel; 11. Examining the influence of epistemic beliefs and goal orientations on the academic performance of adolescent students enrolled in high-poverty, high-minority schools P. Karen Murphy, Michelle M. Buehl, Jill A. Zeruth, Maeghan N. Edwards, Joyce F. Long, and Shinichi Monoi; 12. Using cognitive interviewing to explore elementary and secondary school students' epistemic and ontological cognition Jeffrey A. Greene, Judith Torney-Purta, Roger Azevedo, and Jane Robertson; Part IV. Teachers' Personal Epistemology and its Impact on Classroom Teaching: 13. Epistemological resources and framing: a cognitive framework for helping teachers interpret and respond to their students' epistemologies Andrew Elby and David Hammer; 14. The effects of teachers' beliefs on elementary students' beliefs, motivation, and achievement in mathematics Krista R. Muis and Michael J. Foy; Appendices; 15. Teachers' articulation of beliefs about teaching knowledge: conceptualizing a belief framework Helenrose Fives and Michelle M. Buehl; Appendices; 16. Beyond epistemology: assessing teachers' epistemological and ontological world views Lori Olafson and Gregory Schraw; Part V. Conclusion: 17. Personal epistemology in the classroom: what does research and theory tell us and where do we need to go next? Lisa D. Bendixen and Florian C. Feucht. (shrink)
Studying the folk concept of intentional action, Knobe (2003a) discovered a puzzling asymmetry: most people consider some bad side effects as intentional while they consider some good side effects as unintentional. In this study, we extend these findings with new experiments. The first experiment shows that the very same effect can be found in ascriptions of intentionality in the case of means for action. The second and third experiments show that means are nevertheless generally judged more intentional than side effects, (...) and that people do take into account the structure of the action when ascribing intentionality. We then discuss a number of hypotheses that can account for these data, using reactions times from our first experiment. (shrink)
Recent empirical and conceptual research has shown that moral considerations have an influence on the way we use the adverb ‘intentionally’. Here we propose our own account of these phenomena, according to which they arise from the fact that the adverb ‘intentionally’ has three different meanings that are differently selected by contextual factors, including normative expectations. We argue that our hypotheses can account for most available data and present some new results that support this. We end by discussing the implications (...) of our account for folk psychology. (shrink)
Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes biased to give compatibilist answers by emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, we (...) investigated intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility in patients suffering from behavioural frontotemporal dementia. Patients suffering from bvFTD have impoverished emotional reaction. Thus, the ‘performance error model’ should predict that bvFTD patients will give less compatibilist answers. However, we found that bvFTD patients give answers quite similar to subjects in control group and were mostly compatibilist. Thus, we conclude that the ‘performance error model’ should be abandoned in favour of other available model that best fit our data. (shrink)
We use psychological concepts (e.g., intention and desire) when we ascribe psychological states to others for purposes of describing, explaining, and predicting their actions. Does the evidence reported by Knobe show, as he thinks, that moral evaluation shapes our mastery of psychological concepts? We argue that the evidence so far shows instead that moral evaluation shapes the way we report, not the way we think about, others' psychological states.
Sripada has recently advanced a new account for asymmetries that have been uncovered in folk judgments of intentionality: the ?Deep Self model,? according to which an action is more likely to be judged as intentional if it matches the agent's central and stable attitudes and values (i.e., the agent's Deep Self). In this paper, we present new experiments that challenge this model in two ways: first, we show that the Deep Self model makes predictions that are falsified, then we present (...) cases that it cannot account for. Finally, we discuss how the Deep Self model could be modified to accommodate these new data. (shrink)
We challenge an argument that aims to support Aesthetic Realism by claiming, first, that common sense is realist about aesthetic judgments because it considers that aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong, and, second, that becauseAesthetic Realism comes from and accounts for “folk aesthetics,” it is the best aesthetic theory available.We empirically evaluate this argument by probing whether ordinary people with no training whatsoever in the subtle debates of aesthetic philosophy consider their aesthetic judgments as right or wrong. Having shown (...) that the results do not support the main premise of the argument, we discuss the consequences for Aesthetic Realism and address possible objections to our study. (shrink)
The notion of harmony has played a pivotal role in a number of debates in the philosophy of logic. Yet there is little agreement as to how the requirement of harmony should be spelled out in detail or even what purpose it is to serve. Most, if not all, conceptions of harmony can already be found in Michael Dummett's seminal discussion of the matter in The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Hence, if we wish to gain a better understanding of the (...) notion of harmony, we do well to start here. Unfortunately, however, Dummett's discussion is not always easy to follow. The following is an attempt to disentangle the main strands of Dummett's treatment of harmony. The different variants of harmony as well as their interrelations are clarified and their individual shortcomings qua interpretations of harmony are demonstrated. Though no attempt is made to give a detailed alternative account of harmony here, it is hoped that our discussion will lay the ground for an adequate rigorous treatment of this central notion. (shrink)
Dans cet article, nous introduisons le lecteur à une énigme qui a émergé récemment dans la littérature philosophique : celle de l’influence de nos évaluations morales sur nos intuitions au sujet de la nature des actions intentionnelle. En effet, certaines données issues de la philosophie expérimentale semblent suggérer que nos jugements quant au statut intentionnel d’une action dépendent de notre évaluation de ladite action. De nombreuses théories ont été proposées pour rendre compte de ces résultats. Nous défendons la thèse selon (...) laquelle aucune des théories existantes n’est satisfaisante et que le mystère reste pour l’instant entier. (shrink)
The ‘Knobe effect’ is the name given to the empirical finding that judgments about whether an action is intentional or not seem to depend on the moral valence of this action. To account for this phenomenon, Scaife and Webber have recently advanced the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’, according to which people’s ascriptions of intentionality are driven by whether they think the agent took the outcome in consideration when taking his decision. In this paper, I examine Scaife and Webber’s hypothesis and conclude that (...) it is supported neither by the existing literature nor by their own experiments, whose results I did not replicate, and that the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’ is not the best available account of the ‘Knobe Effect’. (shrink)
According to Hempel’s raven paradox, the observation of one non-black non-raven confirms the hypothesis that all ravens are black. Bayesians such as Howson and Urbach (Scientific reasoning: the Bayesian approach, 2nd edn. Open Court, Chicago, 1993 ) claim that the raven paradox can be solved by spelling out the concept of confirmation in the sense of the relevance criterion. Siebel (J Gen Philos Sci 35:313–329, 2004 ) disputes the adequacy of this Bayesian solution. He claims that spelling out the concept (...) of confirmation in the relevance sense lets the raven paradox reappear as soon as numerous non-black non-ravens are observed. It is shown in this paper that Siebel’s objection to the Bayesian solution is flawed. Nevertheless, the objection made by Siebel may give us an idea of how Bayesians can successfully handle situations in which we observe more than one non-black non-raven. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: List of figures; List of tables; Editors; Contributors; Editors' acknowledgements; Part I. The Conceptual Challenge of Researching Trust Across Different 'Cultural Spheres': 1. Introduction: unraveling the complexities of trust and culture Graham Dietz, Nicole Gillespie and Georgia Chao; 2. Trust differences across national-societal cultures: much to do or much ado about nothing? Donald L. Ferrin and Nicole Gillespie; 3. Towards a context-sensitive approach to researching trust in inter-organizational relationships Reinhard Bachmann; 4. Making sense of trust across (...) cultural contexts Alex Wright and Ina Ehnert; Part II. Trust Across Different 'Cultural Spheres': Inter-Organizational Studies: 5. Examining the relationship between trust and culture in the consultant-client relationship Stephanos Avakian, Timothy Clark and Joanne Roberts; 6. Checking, not trusting: trust, distrust and cultural experience in the auditing profession Mark R. Dibben and Jacob M. Rose; 7. Trust barriers in cross-cultural negotiations: a social psychological analysis Roderick M. Kramer; 8. Trust development in German-Ukrainian business relationships: dealing with cultural differences in an uncertain institutional context Guido Möllering and Florian Stache; 9. Culture and trust in contractual relationships: a French-Lebanese cooperation Hèla Yousfi; 10. Evolving institutions of trust: personalized and institutional bases of trust in Nigerian and Ghanaian food trading Fergus Lyon and Gina Porter; Part III. Trust Across Different 'Cultural Spheres': Intra-Organizational Studies: 11. The role of trust in international cooperation in crisis areas: a comparison of German and US-American NGO partnership strategies L. Ripley Smith and Ulrike Schwegler; 12. Antecedents of supervisor trust in collectivist cultures: evidence from Turkey and China S. Arzu Wasti and Hwee Hoon Tan; 13. Trust in turbulent times: organizational change and the consequences for intra-organizational trust Veronica Hope-Hailey, Elaine Farndale and Clare Kelliher; 14. The implications of language boundaries on the development of trust in international management teams Jane Kassis Henderson; 15. The dynamics of trust across cultures in family firms Isabelle Mari; Part IV. Conclusions and Ways Forward: 16. Conclusions and ways forward Mark N. K. Saunders, Denise Skinner and Roy J. Lewicki; Index. (shrink)
1 This paper has been presented at the workshop “Time and Modality: A Round Table on Tense, Mood, and Modality”, Paris, December 2005, at a CUNY linguistics colloquium in May 2006, and at the 6th Workshop on Formal Linguistics in Florian´opolis, Brazil, August 2006. We thank the audiences at those presentations, in particular Orin Percus, Tim Stowell, Marcel den Dikken, Anna Szabolcsi, Chris Warnasch, Roberta Pires de Oliveira, Renato Miguel Basso, and Ana M¨uller. We thank Noam Chomsky, Cleo Condoravdi, (...) and Irene Heim for very helpful conversations about this material. We thank Bridget Copley for sharing with us her recent manuscript “What Should Should.. (shrink)
After reviewing the status of the concept of the phenomenon in Husserl’s phenomenology and the aim of successive attempts to reform, de-formalize, and to widen it, we show the difficulties of a method that, following the example of Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology, intends to connect the phenomenon directly to the revelation of an exteriority. We argue that, on the contrary, Marc Richir’s phenomenology, which strives to grasp the phenomenon as nothing-but-phenomenon, is more likely to capture the “meaning” of the phenomenological , (...) and hence to help us orient in the field of problems that phenomenology encounters without always knowing how to tackle them. Yet, this extension of the phenomenon’s domain does not thereby encompass everything: there may well be certain issues that require a phenomenology without phenomenon ; but the meaning of this cannot be determined before the complete reenvisioning of transcendental phenomenology. (shrink)
Sound can be listened to in various ways and with different intentions. Multiple factors influence how and what we perceive when listening to sound. Sonification, the acoustic representation of data, is in essence just sound. It functions as sonification only if we make sure to listen attentively in order to access the abstract information it contains. This is difficult to accomplish since sound always calls the listener’s attention to concrete—whether natural or musical—points of references. Important aspects determining how we listen (...) to sonification are discussed in this paper: elicited sounds, repeated sounds, conceptual sounds, technologically mediated sounds, melodic sounds, familiar sounds, multimodal sounds and vocal sounds. We discuss how these aspects help the listener engage with the sound, but also how they can become points of reference in and of themselves. The various sonic qualities employed in sonification can potentially open but also risk closing doors to the accessibility and perceptibility of the sonified data. (shrink)
The requirement of proof-theoretic harmony has played a pivotal role in a number of debates in the philosophy of logic. Different authors have attempted to precisify the notion in different ways. Among these, three proposals have been prominent in the literature: harmony–as–conservative extension, harmony–as–leveling procedure, and Tennant’s harmony–as–deductive equilibrium. In this paper I propose to clarify the logical relationships between these accounts. In particular, I demonstrate that what I call the equivalence conjecture —that these three notions essentially come to the (...) same thing—is erroneous. (shrink)
Do corporations have a duty to promote just institutions? Agreeing with Hsieh’s recent contribution, this article argues that they do. However, contrary to Hsieh, it holds that such a claim cannot be advanced convincingly only by reference to the negative duty to do no harm. Instead, such a duty necessarily must be grounded in positive obligation. In the search of a foundation for a positive duty for corporations to further just institutions, Stephen Kobrin’s notion of “private political authority” offers a (...) promising connecting point.Political authority implies political responsibility; Political obligation, however, includes more than merely not doing any harm—it is essentially positive obligation. The implications of the new political responsibilities of multinational corporations may even go far beyond the particular duty to promote just institutions; they may be symptomatic for a much more profound shift from an individual to a collective age. (shrink)
There is no doubt that emotions have an important effect on practices of moral reasoning such as clinical ethics consultation. Empathy is not only a basic human emotion but also an important and learnable skill for health care professionals. A basic amount of empathy is essential both in patient care and in clinical ethics consultation. This article debates the “adequate dose” of empathy in ethics consultations in clinical settings and tries to identify possible situations within the process of consultation in (...) which this crucial feeling is at risk. (shrink)
Neoliberal globalization has not yielded the results it promised; global inequality has risen, poverty and hunger are still prevailing in large parts of this world. If this devastating situation shall be improved, economists must talk less about economic growth and more about people’s rights. The use of the language of rights will be key for making the economy work more in favor of the least advantaged in this world. Not only will it provide us with the vocabulary necessary to reframe (...) such pressing global problems and to find adequate economic solutions; it will also deliver the basis for deriving according duties and duty-bearers – the language of rights is congruent with the language of justice and as such it is inevitably and at the same time the language of obligations. The language of obligations exposes the multinational corporation as one of the main agents of justice in the global economy. Taking distributive justice as a starting point for reflection, a consistent derivation of the multinational’s moral obligations must focus on capabilities rather than on causality. This will lead to a shift from merely passive to active duties and accordingly to a stronger emphasis on the corporation’s contribution to the realization of positive rights. (shrink)
This paper deals with the relation between Nicholas of Cusa and the Dutch philosopher Heymericus de Campo. Nicholas is celebrated for his rather positive attitude towards Islam. In De pace fidei (1453) he presents the vision of una religio in rituum varietate and in his Cribratio Alkorani (1460/61) Nicholas tries to prove Christian dogmas on the basis of the Koran. This idea he had discussed with his Dutch friend several decades earlier. In his Disputatio de potestate ecclesiastica (1433/34) Heymeric scrutinizes (...) the question, whether the highest authority in the church belongs to the pope or the council, on the basis of the Koran. He presents ten arguments in favour of the council and one in favour of the pope. This shows that Nicholas developed parts of his exceptional thought in conversation with Heymeric and suggests that a closer examination of Heymeric's texts will reveal a new side of the young Cusanus. (shrink)
Sociology has been often defined as a science of "social relations". The aim of this article is to contribute to the clarification of this concept. I take into account only two classic analytical sociologies — those developed by Max Weber and by Florian Znaniecki. These sociologies seem to me only partly useful for the analysis of macroscale (ethnic, racial, industrial, and international) problems. They refer to human individual interactions within social collectivities, and not between them. If we follow expressis (...) verbis the individualistic aspects of Weber's model and the analytical aspects of Znaniecki's theory, it would be difficult to base empirical investigations of social relations. The situation changes when we depart from the classics' ways of construction of the concepts of social relation and concentrate on the implication of the concept presented by the same authors. Fortunately, the research practices of both scholars encourage us to abandon a literal interpretation of their models. They present a variety of interesting typologies of social relations and social objects between which these relations can exist. (shrink)
This paper argues that logical inferentialists should reject multiple-conclusion logics. Logical inferentialism is the position that the meanings of the logical constants are determined by the rules of inference they obey. As such, logical inferentialism requires a proof-theoretic framework within which to operate. However, in order to fulfil its semantic duties, a deductive system has to be suitably connected to our inferential practices. I argue that, contrary to an established tradition, multiple-conclusion systems are ill-suited for this purpose because they fail (...) to provide a 'natural' representation of our ordinary modes of inference. Moreover, the two most plausible attempts at bringing multiple conclusions into line with our ordinary forms of reasoning, the disjunctive reading and the bilateralist denial interpretation, are unacceptable by inferentialist standards. (shrink)
Dans cet article, nous proposons de montrer expérimentalement que le "sens commun" n'est en matière moral ni complètement objectiviste ni complètement relativiste, mais qu'un même individu peut être tantôt objectiviste tantôt relativiste. De même, nous montrons que les jugements de goût portant sur le prédicat "dégoûtant" ne sont pas toujours relativiste mais peuvent varier selon le contexte entre objectivisme et relativisme.
We use large collections of online product reviews, in Chinese, English, German, and Japanese, to study the use conditions of expressives (swears, antihonorifics, intensives). The distributional evidence provides quantitative support for a pragmatic theory of these items that is based in speaker and hearer expectations.
Recent years have seen a surge in accounts motivated by information theory that consider language production to be partially driven by a preference for communicative efficiency. Evidence from discourse production (i.e., production beyond the sentence level) has been argued to suggest that speakers distribute information across discourse so as to hold the conditional per-word entropy associated with each word constant, which would facilitate efficient information transfer (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). This hypothesis implies that the conditional (contextualized) probabilities of linguistic units (...) affect speakers’ preferences during production. Here, we extend this work in two ways. First, we explore how preceding cues are integrated into contextualized probabilities, a question which so far has received little to no attention. Specifically, we investigate how a cue's maximal informativity about upcoming words (the cue's effectiveness) decays as a function of the cue's recency. Based on properties of linguistic discourses as well as properties of human memory, we analytically derive a model of cue effectiveness decay and evaluate it against cross-linguistic data from 12 languages. Second, we relate the information theoretic accounts of discourse production to well-established mechanistic (activation-based) accounts: We relate contextualized probability distributions over words to their relative activation in a lexical network given preceding discourse. (shrink)
Increasingly, global businesses are confronted with the question of complicity in human rights violations committed by abusive host governments. This contribution specifically looks at silent complicity and the way it challenges conventional interpretations of corporate responsibility. Silent complicity impliesthat corporations have moral obligations that reach beyond the negative realm of doing no harm. Essentially, it implies that corporations have a moral responsibility to help protect human rights by putting pressure on perpetrating host governments involved in human rights abuses. This is (...) a controversial claim, which this contribution proposes to analyze with a view to understanding and determining the underlying conditions that need to be met in order for moral agents to be said to have such responsibilities in the category of the duty to protect human rights. (shrink)
This study provides evidence for implicit learning in syntactic comprehension. By reanalyzing data from a syntactic priming experiment (Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008), we find that the error signal associated with a syntactic prime influences comprehenders' subsequent syntactic expectations. This follows directly from error-based implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming, but it is unexpected under accounts that consider syntactic priming a consequence of temporary increases in base-level activation. More generally, the results raise questions about the principles underlying the maintenance of implicit (...) statistical knowledge relevant to language processing, and about possible functional motivations for syntactic priming. (shrink)
Human rights have not played an overwhelmingly prominent role in CSR in the past. Similarly, CSR has had relatively little influence on what is now called the “business and human rights debate.” This contribution uncovers some of the reasons for the rather peculiar disconnect between these two debates and, based on it, presents some apparent synergies and complementarities between the two. A closer integration of the two debates, as it argues, would allow for the formulation of an expansive and demanding (...) conception of corporate human rights obligations. Such a conception does not stop with corporate obligations “merely” to respect human rights, but includes an extended focus on proactive company involvement in the protection and realization of human rights. In other words, the integration of the two debates provides the space within which to formulate positive human rights obligations for corporations. (shrink)
La philosophie expérimentale est un mouvement récent qui tente de faire progresser certains débats philosophiques grâce à l'utilisation de méthodes expérimentales. À la différence de la philosophie conventionnelle qui privilégie l'analyse conceptuelle ou la spéculation, la philosophie expérimentale préconise le recours aux études empiriques pour mieux comprendre les concepts philosophiques. Apparue il y a une dizaine d'années dans les pays anglo-saxons, cette approche constitue actuellement l'une des branches les plus dynamiques de la philosophie contemporaine. -/- L'objectif de cet ouvrage est (...) d'offrir un contact direct avec les travaux les plus connus et les plus discutés des philosophes expérimentaux. Il regroupe ainsi dix textes représentatifs de ce domaine jeune, mais déjà florissant, et couvre une large partie du champ philosophique contemporain (philosophie du langage, théorie de la connaissance, conscience, théorie de l'action, éthique et philosophie des sciences). (shrink)
À quoi les philosophes sont-ils bons ? Faire de la philosophie rend-il meilleur ? Les jugements esthétiques gardent-ils encore quelque secret, ou bien Kant a-t-il tout dit sur la question ? La culture et le statut socio-économique de votre professeur de philosophie a-t-il une influence sur ses options philosophiques ? Pourquoi avons-nous l'impression que la pensée ne saurait être un état de notre cerveau ? Que nous ne serions pas libres si nous n'étions qu'un tas de neurone ? C'est pour (...) répondre à ces questions (et à beaucoup d'autres) que philosophes et psychologues se sont alliés sous la bannière de la toute nouvelle « philosophie expérimentale ». Il s'agit de faire un peu de lumière sur ce qui se passe vraiment dans notre tête lorsque nous faisons de la philosophie et d'interroger l'origine de nos certitudes philosophiques. (shrink)
The historiography of life, work and visions of Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) has grew up during the last years. But up to now lifes of his important followers in science are still unknown. This article ist devoted to life and work of Lothar Gottlieb Tirala (1886–1974), who studied psychology and medicine in Vienna and started cooperation with Uexküll in 1914. They stayed in contact during the following decades, although Tirala began a career in race hygiene and neo-darwinistic scientific thought. He (...) organised the contact between Uexküll and Houston Stewart Chamberlain and got support from the Wagner-family in 1933 to become professor for race biology in Munich. After his booting out in 1936 because of massive faults in teaching Tirala changed his scientific interests and began to stretch Uexkülls “Reflexlehre” into healing of blood pressure diseases in men. He became a favourite researcher in German natural cure community after 1945. Even today his studies are integrated in efforts to fight hypertonia. (shrink)
Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)
