The Monty Hall dilemma is a notorious probability problem with a counterintuitive solution. There is a strong tendency to stay with the initial choice, despite the fact that switching doubles the probability of winning. The current randomised experiment investigates whether feedback in a series of trials improves behavioural performance on the MHD and increases the level of understanding of the problem. Feedback was either conditional or non-conditional, and was given either in frequency format or in percentage format. Results show that (...) people learn to switch most when receiving conditional feedback in frequency format. However, problem understanding does not improve as a consequence of receiving feedback. Our study confirms the dissociation between behavioural performance on the MHD, on one hand, and actual understanding of the MHD, on the other. We discuss how this dissociation can be understood. (shrink)

In recent years, interest has increased in regenerative practices as a strategy for transforming food systems and solving major environmental problems such as biodiversity loss and climate change. However, debates persist regarding these practices and how they ought to be defined. This paper presents a framework for exploring the regenerative potential of food systems, focusing on how food systems activities and technologies are organized rather than the specific technologies or practices being employed. The paper begins with a brief review of (...) debates over sustainable food systems and the varying ways that regenerative food systems have been defined and theorized. Then, it provides the theoretical backing of the framework—the conservation of change principle—which is an interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics and theories of adaptive change as relevant to the regenerative capacity of living systems. Next, the paper introduces the framework itself, which comprises two independent but intersecting dimensions of food systems organization: resource diversity and livelihood flexibility. These two dimensions result in four archetypical regimes for food systems: degenerative, regenerative, impoverished, and coerced. The paper defines each and offers real-world examples. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of pathways for transforming food systems and opportunities for additional research. (shrink)

Many advances in public health and medical technology have contributed to the improved wellbeing and overall longevity of Americans. Such benefits, however, have been offset by a change in the nature and prolongation of the dying process. Daniel Callahan offers a challenge to caregivers in his observation of violent death by technological attenuation, and he sets an agenda to identify a more appropriate approach to the needs of the dying.Over the past quarter century, hospice has increasingly been used as a (...) resource for care at the end of life. However, according to 1995 estimates by the National Hospice Organization, hospice care presently accounts for only about 15 percent of the care of terminally ill patients in the United States. We will review issues of access and use of hospice services and examine the various institutional, professional, societal, and cultural barriers to hospice principles of care, and consider various options to promote optimal care at the end of life. (shrink)

Many advances in public health and medical technology have contributed to the improved wellbeing and overall longevity of Americans. Such benefits, however, have been offset by a change in the nature and prolongation of the dying process. Daniel Callahan offers a challenge to caregivers in his observation of violent death by technological attenuation, and he sets an agenda to identify a more appropriate approach to the needs of the dying.Over the past quarter century, hospice has increasingly been used as a (...) resource for care at the end of life. However, according to 1995 estimates by the National Hospice Organization, hospice care presently accounts for only about 15 percent of the care of terminally ill patients in the United States. We will review issues of access and use of hospice services and examine the various institutional, professional, societal, and cultural barriers to hospice principles of care, and consider various options to promote optimal care at the end of life. (shrink)

Empirismus und Ästhetik werden in den Schriften von Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke und Henry Home zu einer empiristischen Ästhetik verbunden. Sie argumentiert induktiv, psycho- oder physiologisch, evolutionär und demokratisch und lässt sich als frühe Form der empirischen Ästhetik verstehen. Ihr Transfer nach Deutschland in Rezensionen, Übersetzungen und Anschlussforschungen geht mit unwillkürlichen Anpassungen einher. Für die empiristische Ästhetik in der deutschsprachigen Aufklärung stehen nicht nur Namen wie Lichtenberg, Mendelssohn und Kant, Hamann, Herder und Merck, sondern auch die Übersetzer Dusch, (...) Resewitz und Meinhard, die physiologisch Interessierten Haller, Platner, Lossius und Hißmann sowie die Leipziger Engel, Garve und Riedel, der Prager Meißner oder auch Enzyklopädisten wie Herz, Eschenburg und Schneider. (shrink)

When considering Bentham’s cosmopolitanism in its legal aspect, scholars often focus on his international jurisprudence, to the neglect of his universal jurisprudence. This article contributes to a growing understanding of the role of universal jurisprudence by providing a close examination of both its expository and censorial modes, with particular attention to their cosmopolitan qualities. Section one parses the concept of jurisprudence itself. Section two describes the censorial mode of universal jurisprudence, which lays down the principles for determining what should be (...) law in all countries. Section three then analyses the principles of expository jurisprudence, which are used to define fundamental legal concepts. I there argue that the suite of expository tools are also useful for analysing the substance of law in any country, and that Bentham hoped such analysis would be the precursor to a global comparison and exchange of laws between all countries. (shrink)

Since the seminal 1955 habilitation by Heidegger's pupil, Walter Schulz, it has become an open secret that Schelling's philosophy, more than that of any of the other German Idealists, is an immediate antecedent to Heidegger's thought. For this reason, it is all the more fascinating that to this day research is still lopsidedly concerned with the interpretation of Heidegger's reading of Schelling's Freedom Essay and that a thorough and overarching investigation into the idealistic inheritance of Martin Heidegger's thought remains wanting. (...) The same applies to the debates that Heidegger's students began in the twentieth century. The traditions of modern nature ethics and the criticism of technology, which derive from Schelling, were interpreted and mediated through Heidegger to his students Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, and Günther Anders. This essay attempts to delineate some of the basic features of a more bilateral or dialogical relationship between these two philosophers and to more fully appreciate Heidegger's relationship to German Idealism in general and Schelling in particular. (shrink)

Western society is steeped in a legacy of white supremacy and colonialism--a worldview that pits humans against nature and that has created numerous pressing social and environmental challenges. So great are these challenges that many of us have come to believe that our species is fundamentally flawed and that our story is destined to be nasty, brutish, and short. In Finding Our Niche I explore these tragedies of western society while offering the makings of an alternative: a set of metaphors (...) and examples that can guide us in reconciling our settler-colonial histories in favor of a new and more sustainable vision for humanity and our natural world. Drawing on a variety of compelling stories from my personal life and research experiences around the world, I bring the reader through the difficult journey of reconciliation, a journey that leads to a more optimistic understanding of human nature and the prospects for our future. Drawing from my fifteen years of experience as an anthropologist and ecologist working with people around the world, I share exceptional stories of local people rejecting the oppressive, industrial logic of progress and creating win-win scenarios, where both people and nature thrive together. These stories include cattle ranching on the Burren in Ireland, clam gardening in coastal British Columbia, and the conservation of an accidental wetland in Northwest Mexico. I structure my telling of these stories with a series of ecological metaphors--including keystone, engineer, and sentinel--that collectively provide a basis for more sustainable ways of living. In tandem with these stories, I weave a series of personal vignettes, drawing from my own struggle to reconcile my identity as a white settler on stolen Indigenous lands. As a whole, the book develops a thesis about how we can reimagine our nature and identity, and in so doing, address issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity by building more healthful and fulfilling relationships with our neighbors and the land- and seascapes around us. Finding our Niche is a timely piece that offers confidence in a time when the realities of ecological disaster are becoming a daily reminder that something has to give. It engages with the critical but thorny problems of sustainability, white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism in a fresh and productive way, making it a perfect fit for Fernwood's portfolio and critical readership. At once a primer on paradigm shift, it is an accessible and personal book that seeks to offer tangible examples of hope to the countless people who are concerned about the sustainability and future of our societies and planet. (shrink)

The article approaches the attempts at theoretical reduction of the mental and the social and mantains that the reductionist projects are based on ontological and epistemological presuppositions that relate to an atomist vision of the world that grounds untenable humean conceptions of causality a..

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The underrepresentation of women politicians in the media is a persistent feature in many contemporary democracies. Gender bias in election coverage makes it harder for women to reach positions of power in politics. Drawing on the special circumstances in Austria during the 2019 election campaign which saw the first female top candidate of a major party and a caretaker government containing equal numbers of men and women and which was led by the country’s first woman as chancellor, we examine the (...) effect of these developments on women politicians’ representation in campaign coverage. We draw on quantitative content analysis of Austrian newspaper articles (N = 16,125) during four national parliamentary election campaigns (2008, 2013, 2017 and 2019). We show that for women politicians the media ceiling is slowly lifting at best, but that positions of power provide the most promising ways to evade gendered media bias. (shrink)

Für die Romantiker wäre es ein Schritt in die falsche Richtung, wollte man die diesem Prozeß innewohnende Spannung auflösen und die ihn unterhaltende Dynamik stillstellen. Das Paradox einer permanent sich selbst durchstreichenden und dergestalt sich um den eigenen Erfolg bringenden Vollzugsform -- »ewigen Suche und nie ganz finden können« -- heben die Romantiker indes nicht auf, sondern werten es einfach nur ins Positive um.

Für die Romantiker wäre es ein Schritt in die falsche Richtung, wollte man die diesem Prozeß innewohnende Spannung auflösen und die ihn unterhaltende Dynamik stillstellen. Das Paradox einer permanent sich selbst durchstreichenden und dergestalt sich um den eigenen Erfolg bringenden Vollzugsform -- »ewigen Suche und nie ganz finden können« -- heben die Romantiker indes nicht auf, sondern werten es einfach nur ins Positive um.

Tactile perception is often impaired during movement. The present study investigated whether such sensory suppression also occurs during back movements, and whether this would be modulated by attention. In two tactile detection experiments, participants simultaneously engaged in a movement task, in which they executed a back-bending movement, and a perceptual task, consisting of the detection of subtle tactile stimuli administered to their upper or lower back. The focus of participants’ attention was manipulated by raising the probability that one of the (...) back locations would be stimulated. The results revealed that tactile detection was suppressed during the execution of the back movements. Furthermore, the results of Experiment 2 revealed that when the stimulus was always presented to the attended location, tactile suppression was substantially reduced, suggesting that sensory suppression can be modulated by top-down attentional processes. The potential of this paradigm for studying tactile information processing in clinical populations is discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze a sample of 46 ethnic boundaries drawn from the literature. The principal aim is to test whether there is a universal syndrome of ethnocentrism, the idea that ethnic relations can be characterized along a single dimension of differences, or, whether there are instead multiple types of ethnic relations. The latter hypothesis is based on a cultural evolutionary perspective that suggests that there may be competing forces leading to the evolution of ethnic markers, and hence to (...) the possibility that ethnicity is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. These competing forces may yield a variety of types of ethnic boundaries, not all of which may be conflictual. Thus, we also examine what factors do most closely correlate with violent conflict. (shrink)

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman’s 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism’s past that is steeped (...) in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were ‘a time when everything seemed possible’. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which ‘fear corrodes even the young’. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms’ pasts. (shrink)

Bipedalism in the earliest hominid specimens is always accompanied by the reduction of projecting canine teeth. Body size is smaller than chimpanzees or humans, but molar teeth are markedly larger. Use of a pointed stick for defensive purposes on the one hand, and digging for USOs on the other, may be why bipedalism was selected for. Passing such learned behavior to the next generation may have played a role in selecting for language.

This book presents a survey of the molecular basis for the genetic control of living organisms and their evolution. The authors consider four dimensions of control over what shapes life forms: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic/cultural. They pay particular attention to the epigenetic realm, and they defend a view recognizing the genetic incorporation of acquired characteristics – a neo-Lamarckian tack.