The tertiary industry development has increased researches on service relationship and professional skills needed in relational professions. Universities and education fields have also adapted their programs to ensure students acquire these new skills. However, knowledge on the topic is still incomplete. At the same time, professions are required to rationalize their outputs. To meet this requirement, the use of reflexive approaches has become common. Despite the increase of these approaches, few data are available on how they are conceived and used. (...) In order to identify the current perspectives, this article presents the results of a scientific literature analysis on reflexivity in four relational professions : social work, education, nursing and psychology. After presenting these perspectives, the results will be then discussed. (shrink)

What, if anything, is epistemically wrong with beliefs involving accurate statistical generalizations about demographic groups? This paper argues that there is a perfectly general, underappreciated epistemic flaw which affects both ethically charged and uncharged statistical generalizations. Though common to both, this flaw can also explain why demographic statistical generalizations give rise to the concerns they do. To identify this flaw, we need to distinguish between the accuracy and the projectability of statistical beliefs. Statistical beliefs are accompanied by an implicit representation (...) of the statistic's modal profile. Their modal profile determines the circumstances in which they can legitimately be projected to unobserved instances. Errors in that implicit content can be compatible with the accuracy of the “bare” statistic, whilst systematically leading to downstream errors in reasoning, in a manner which reveals an epistemic flaw with an important aspect of the belief state itself. (shrink)

In this chapter, we consider a posthumanist critique of international law in relation to the material world. Our perspective on posthumanism and international law is framed by a monument of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the so-called ‘founding father’ of the colony of South Australia. Centering the monument in our dialogue, we discuss two types of materialism: New materialism and historical materialism. We argue that an engagement with new and old materialism opens possibilities for a critical engagement with posthumanism. Central to this (...) critical engagement are themes of materiality, settler colonialism, agency, and exploitation – themes that are key for understanding the operation of international law. By identifying where the materialist theories differ, and also where they converge, we ultimately seek to identify the utility of a posthumanist critique for destabilising international law’s imperialist, capitalist, racialized and patriarchal structures. (shrink)

It is an apparent truism about visual perception that we can see only what is visible to us. It is also frequently accepted that visual perception is dynamic: our visual experiences are extended through, and can evolve over time. I argue that taking the dynamism of visual experience seriously renders certain simplistic interpretations of the first claim, that a subject at a given time can see only what is visible to her at that time, false: we can be meaningfully said (...) to see invisible objects. This counterintuitive result in turn focuses our attention on the relationship between perception and memory. I show that it is difficult to draw a clear or simple distinction between the two. Memory and perception rely on, and blend with, one another. Together, these claims point us away from understanding visual perception as a simple reflection of the environment, and instead as closer to a process of dynamic modelling that draws together occurrent stimulation and stored information. (shrink)

Amidst broad debates about the “New Green Revolution” in Africa, input-intensive agriculture is on the rise in some parts of Africa. This paper examines the underlying drivers of the recent and rapid adoption of herbicides and genetically modified seeds in the Burkina Faso cotton sector. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Houndé region, this article contends that economic and cultural dynamics—often considered separately in analyses of technology adoption—have co-produced a self-reinforcing technological treadmill. On the one hand, male (...) farmers seek to increase cotton production in response to an economic squeeze. At the same time, broader cultural shifts toward individualism have created labor shortages as a result of families splitting apart, parents putting their children in school, and some women and young men refusing to provide free labor. Male cotton farmers thus increase production by turning to labor-saving inputs like herbicides, but these inputs create more debt, further locking farmers into intensive production. This article thus expands on the classic concept of the technological treadmill, demonstrating how economic and cultural processes intersect within a process of agrarian change to drive labor-saving agricultural technology adoption in the Burkinabè cotton sector. This expanded treadmill concept illuminates the complex dynamics compelling farmers’ choices to opt into input-intensive agriculture, and also helps explain rising farmer differentiation, as poorer farmers struggle to stay afloat and wealthier farmers expand. (shrink)

We commonly evaluate search engines and the results they return, but what grounds those evaluations? One straightforward way of evaluating search engines appeals to their ability to satisfy the goals of the user. Are there, in addition, user-independent norms, that allow us to evaluate search engines in ways that may come apart from their ability to satisfy the individuals who use them? One way of grounding such norms appeals to moral or political considerations. I argue that in addition to those (...) norms, there are also distinct user-independent epistemic norms that apply to search engines. Evaluating search engines relative to them, however, requires us to appreciate the impact search engines have on our practices and norms of inquiry more broadly: by systematically altering the accessibility of information, search engines don’t just give us information but shape our collective imagination, and the categories it operates over. (shrink)

What does it take to be prejudiced against a particular group? And is prejudice always epistemically problematic, or are there epistemically innocent forms of prejudice? In this paper, I argue that certain important forms of prejudice can be wholly constituted by the differential accessibility of certain pieces of information. These accessibility relations constitute a salience structure. A subject is prejudiced against a particular group when their salience structure is unduly organised around that category. This is significant because it reveals that (...) prejudice does not require the presence of any explicit cognitive or emotive attitude, nor need it manifest in behaviour: it can be solely constituted by the organisation of information, where that information may be accurate and well-founded. Nonetheless, by giving an account of ‘undue organisation’ in epistemic terms, I show that this account is compatible with an understanding of prejudice as a negatively valenced epistemic category. (shrink)

The recent wave of same-sex marriage legalization marks the most significant human rights progress in decades. Nevertheless, the valuation effects on corporate America are unclear. While the arguments supporting marriage equality are largely in the domain of law and sociology, many prominent business leaders are actively engaged in campaigns advocating marriage equality. This suggests that the LGBT civil rights movement of our generation might have valuation implications for corporate America beyond human rights equality. This paper investigates the market perception of (...) state-level same-sex marriage legalization by examining the short-window market reactions to firms headquartered in a state. We find positive market reactions to firms headquartered in states that legally recognize marriage equality. Further, we find that the market views companies more favorably in: first-mover states before the Supreme Court ruling of United States v. Windsor, and states that have stronger anti-discrimination laws for the LGBT community. Our findings complement prior research that focuses on the economic consequences of firm-level LGBT human rights policies by examining the state/nation-level legal impact, adding a new dimension to ethical practices that can have economic consequences. (shrink)

Visual perception relies on stored information and environmental associations to arrive at a determinate representation of the world. This opens up the disturbing possibility that our visual experiences could themselves be subject to a kind of racial bias, simply in virtue of accurately encoding previously encountered environmental regularities. This possibility raises the following question: what, if anything, is wrong with beliefs grounded upon these prejudicial experiences? They are consistent with a range of epistemic norms, including evidentialist and reliabilist standards for (...) justification. I argue that we will struggle to locate a flaw with these sorts of perceptual beliefs so long as we focus our analysis at the level of the individual and her response to information. We should instead broaden our analysis to include the social structure within which the individual is located. Doing so lets us identify a problem with the way in which unjust social structures in particular “gerrymander” the regularities an individual is exposed to, and by extension the priors their visual system draws on. I argue that in this way, social structures can cap perceptual skill. (shrink)

What kind of content must visual states have if they are to offer direct (noninferential) justification for our external world beliefs? How must they present that content if the degree of justification they provide is to reflect the nuance of our changing visual experiences? This paper offers an argument for the view that visual states comprise not only a content, but a confidence relation to that content. This confidence relation lets us explain how visual states can offer noninferential perceptual justification (...) of differing degrees for external world beliefs. These confidence relations let visual states justify beliefs in a way that is sensitive to subtle differences in the character of our visual experiences, while still allowing that visual states give us direct access to the external world in virtue of their content. (shrink)

I identify three aspects to the puzzle of the speckled hen: A general puzzle, an epistemic puzzle, and a puzzle for the representationalist. These puzzles rely on an underlying “pictorialist” assumption, that we visually perceive general, determinable properties only in virtue of determinate properties or more specific, local features of our visual experience. This assumption is mistaken: Visual perception frequently starts from a position of uncertainty, and is routinely able to acquire information about general properties in the absence of more (...) specific information. Acknowledging that visual indeterminacy is structured this way resolves all three puzzles of the speckled hen. (shrink)

From Chaos to Creativity is a book that teaches readers how to build a productivity system that works with their art and with their lifestyle. Author Jessie Kwak helps readers tame the chaos that often surrounds a creative career and further enhance readers' creative output.

By confronting variable use, the variationist method can reveal patterns of subjectification of grammatical morphemes. Applying this method to the analysis of salir(se) ‘go out’ variation in Mexican Spanish oral data, we conclude that subjectification is manifested structurally in the tendency for middle-marked salirse to co-occur with first-person singular or referents close to the speaker, positive polarity and the past tense. Further comparative dialectal and diachronic data indicate the origins of the se -marked form in physical spatial deviation. Usage of (...) the form then extends to situations that denote deviation from social norms. We thus propose that the locus of subjectification of this counter-expectation marker is an increasingly speaker-based construal of expectation. This semantic change appears to proceed via absorption of contextual meaning in the frequently occurring + de ‘from’ construction. (shrink)

Wouldn’t it be nice if hateful people were invariably stupid to boot, if their prejudiced attitudes could be attributed to some kind of irrationality? Tempting though this prospect is, Endre Begby warns us against it. Philosophers have tended, he writes, to assume that prejudiced beliefs are always ‘a symptom of some kind of breakdown of epistemic rationality’ (p. 2). This view is Begby's target. There can, he claims, be epistemically unimpeachable instances of prejudicial belief. That claim comes bound up with (...) a broader account of what prejudice is, and of the epistemic framework we should adopt when evaluating agents. The result is a thought-provoking account of prejudice, and a case study of the tensions inherent in the non-ideal project. By intertwining discussion of prejudice with a discussion of the appropriate epistemological framework for its evaluation, the book encourages reflection on a series of important methodological questions, and ultimately a broader interrogation of the role of philosophy in the study of prejudice. (shrink)

Just War scholarship has adapted to contemporary crises and situations. But its adaptation has spurned debate and conversation--a method and means of pushing its thinking forward. Now the Just War tradition risks becoming marginalized. This concern may seem out of place as Just War literature is proliferating, yet this literature remains welded to traditional conceptualizations of Just War. Caron E. Gentry and Amy E. Eckert argue that the tradition needs to be updated to deal with substate actors within the (...) realm of legitimate authority, private military companies, and the questionable moral difference between the use of conventional and nuclear weapons. Additionally, as recent policy makers and scholars have tried to make the Just War criteria legalistic, they have weakened the tradition's ability to draw from and adjust to its contemporaneous setting. The essays in The Future of Just War seek to reorient the tradition around its core concerns of preventing the unjust use of force by states and limiting the harm inflicted on vulnerable populations such as civilian noncombatants. The pursuit of these challenges involves both a reclaiming of traditional Just War principles from those who would push it toward greater permissiveness with respect to war, as well as the application of Just War principles to emerging issues, such as the growing use of robotics in war or the privatization of force. These essays share a commitment to the idea that the tradition is more about a rigorous application of Just War principles than the satisfaction of a checklist of criteria to be met before waging "just" war in the service of national interest. (shrink)

Are there ever good epistemic reasons to neglect base rates? Assuming an empiricist modal epistemology, I argue that we face an interesting tension between some very plausible epistemic norms: a norm requiring us to proportion our beliefs to the evidence may facilitate knowledge of the actual world, whilst inhibiting our acquisition of modal knowledge—knowledge of how things could be, but are not. The potential for this tension in our epistemic norms is a significant result in its own right. It can (...) also rationalize certain forms of demographic base-rate neglect. (shrink)

This paper provides a discussion of Jacques Rancière’s former teacher at École Normale Supérieure, then famous for fashioning Marxism with the philosophical gauge of structuralism, Louis Althusser. Perhaps a brief discussion on the relation between the two would render context to the origins of Rancière's philosophico-political praxis, specifically the humble beginnings of conceptualizing an egalitarian method out of his philosophical rupture with Althusserianism. Meanwhile, to reduce the philosophical enterprise of Althusser into its practical shortcomings and silence during the revolutionary events (...) of May 1968 in France would do an injustice to the magnitude of his contribution to contemporary French political theory and his major revisions in the theoretical direction of the Parti communiste français. Thus, the following discussions focus on sketching Althusser's theoretical foundations, which possibly clarifies the political decision he has made during May '68: a demand for organization over spontaneous revolutionary activity based on the authority of theoretical practice over the ideological activities—a decision that became the point of departure for Rancière's subversion of both mastery and the structural inequality Althusserianism entail. The whole piece is guided by the following two-fold question—a question, perhaps, akin to Badiou's inquiry: What were the philosophico-political interventions of Louis Althusser, and why did Rancière move away from his direction? (shrink)

This book focuses on six key practices for engaged learning: acknowledging and building on students' prior knowledge and experiences; facilitating relationships; offering feedback; framing connections to broader contexts; fostering reflection and metacognition; and promoting integration and transfer of knowledge and skills.

Recent scholarship has focused on the provocative suggestion that there is a deep unity linking the philosophical projects of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. In addition to providing scholars with the opportunity to consider what these four shared, the unanimity story also offers an occasion to reflect on what is distinctive about each. Whereas Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley each turn to broadly Aristotelian resources for developing an alternative to the dominant non‐cognitivism of their day, Murdoch turns (...) to Platonic ones. The nature of Murdoch's Platonism, however, is not always well understood and has been identified as a “recurring question.” This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing attempt to understand Murdoch's distinctive, Platonic alternative to the ethical non‐cognitivism of her day. I contend that Murdoch's philosophical method, especially its transcendental elements, is an unexplored resource for better understanding the character of her Platonism as a modest one. (shrink)

Engaging feminist and queer of color theory as well as work emerging from social movements, this piece critically examines narratives of impasse between Black Studies and Native Studies in the US, particularly assertions of incommensurability between the goals of Black freedom and Native sovereignty. The article outlines some of the theoretical debates between Black and Indigenous Studies that have calcified into impasses, focusing particularly on Afropessimist and Settler Colonial Studies’ framings of either slavery/anti-Blackness or settler colonialism as the foundational violence (...) around which a racist/settler modernity is structured. This article argues that approaches that emphasize relationality and the co-determination of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism can help us to think beyond a Black/Native impasse and towards a mutual futurity for both Black and Indigenous people in living in the place we currently call the United States. (shrink)

Gordon Belot argues that Bayesian theory is epistemologically immodest. In response, we show that the topological conditions that underpin his criticisms of asymptotic Bayesian conditioning are self-defeating. They require extreme a priori credences regarding, for example, the limiting behavior of observed relative frequencies. We offer a different explication of Bayesian modesty using a goal of consensus: rival scientific opinions should be responsive to new facts as a way to resolve their disputes. Also we address Adam Elga’s rebuttal to Belot’s analysis, (...) which focuses attention on the role that the assumption of countable additivity plays in Belot’s criticisms. (shrink)

Scholars who have attempted to explain Iris Murdoch’s moral realism have done so in widely divergent ways, some characterizing her as a classical moral realist, others as a pragmatic moral realist, and still others as a “reflexive realist.”See, e.g., respectively, Fergus Kerr, “Back to Plato with Iris Murdoch,” in Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1997), 68–88; Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defence (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005); and Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The (...) Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the purpose of this article, I follow Maria Antonaccio’s characterization of these realisms. See pages 3–4. None of these attempts, however, capture adequately Murdoch’s distinctive position. In an effort to improve upon these accounts, this article argues that a proper characterization of Murdoch’s view must regard her as developing a version of m. (shrink)

This title examines captive animal welfare past to present including zoos and marine parks. Legislation regulating the process is discussed as are opposing viewpoints and alternatives such as virtual reality parks. A timeline, glossary, index, and historic and color photos supplement easy-to-read text. An infographic shows how the reader can learn more and get involved"--Publisher's website.

This title examines farm animal rights past to present from small farms to industrial production. Legislation regulating the process is discussed as are opposing viewpoints and solutions such as local and organic farming and alternative diets. A timeline, glossary, index, and historic and color photos supplement easy-to-read text. An infographic shows how the reader can learn more and get involved"--Publisher's website.

IntroductionInformation and communication technologies are becoming an integral part of medical practice, research and administration and their use will grow as telemedicine and electronic medical record use become part of routine practice. Security in maintaining patient data is important and there is a statuary obligation to do so, but few health professionals have been trained on how to achieve this. There is no information on the use of computers and email by doctors and nurses in South Africa in the workplace (...) and at home, and whether their current computer practices meets legal and ethical requirements. The aims of this study were to determine the use of computers by healthcare practitioners in the workplace and home; the use and approach to data storage, encryption and security of patient data and patient email; and the use of informed consent to transmit data by email.MethodsA self-administered questionnaire was administered to 400 health care providers from the state and private health care sectors. The questionnaire covered computer use in the workplace and at home, sharing of computers, data encryption and storage, email use, encryption of emails and storage, and the use of informed consent for email communication.Results193 doctors and 207 nurses in the private and public sectors completed the questionnaire. Forty (10%) of participants do not use a computer. A third of health professionals were the only users of computers at work or at home. One hundred and ninety-eight respondents (55%) did not know if the data on the computers were encrypted, 132 (36.7%) knew that the data were not encrypted and 30 (8.3%) individuals knew that the data on the computers they were using were encrypted. Few doctors, 58 (16%), received emails from patients, with doctors more likely to receive emails from patients than nurses (p = 0.0025). Thirty-one percent of individuals did not respond to the emails. Emails were saved by 40 (69%) recipients but only 5 (12.5%) doctors encrypted the messages, 19 (47.5%) individuals knowingly did not encrypt and 16 (40.0%) did not know if they encrypted the data. While 20% of health professionals have emailed patient data, but only 41.7% gained consent to do so.ConclusionsMost health professionals as sampled in South Africa are not compliant with the National Health Act or the Electronic Communications Transactions Act of South Africa or guidelines from regulatory bodies when managing patient data on computers. Many appear ignorant or lack the ability to comply with simple data security procedures. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Seekers I have been asked by the author to say a word by way of introduction to this very interesting record Of conversations and inquiries. On the whole, I feel my word to be superfluous; for the book speaks for itself, and every reader will form his own opinion. But since the author has asked for my co-operation, I gladly Offer what little I can. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic (...) books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)