This paper investigates how talk and practical action are coordinated during one type of activity involving professional communication: the service-­assessment sequence in hair salons. During this activity, a practical inspection of the haircut must be coupled with sequentially produced verbal acts. Our analysis of four examples reveals that there is no fixed relationship between the organization of talk and practical action. Instead, people manipulate this relationship on a moment-by-moment basis, often coordinating the two into a single, integral package, or relying (...) on one stream of action to achieve progress in the other. These findings imply that some multimodal activities that are brought into alignment may have their own, separate and independent procedural logic and sequencing patterns and that these can be brought into play to create or deal with constraints in each other. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I present a novel account of the components that have a peculiar epistemic role in our scientific inquiries, since they contribute to establishing a form of coordination. The issue of coordination is a classic epistemic problem concerning how we justify our use of abstract conceptual tools to represent concrete phenomena. For instance, how could we get to represent universal gravitation as a mathematical formula or temperature by means of a numerical scale? This problem is particularly pressing when (...) justification for using these abstract tools comes, in part or entirely, from knowledge which is not independent from them, thus leading to threats of circularity. Achieving coordination between some abstract conceptual tools and the concrete phenomena that they are supposed to represent is usually a complex process, which involves several epistemic components. Some of these components eventually provide stable conditions for applying those abstract representations to concrete phenomena. It is in this sense of providing certain conditions of applicability that different philosophical traditions, as well as some contemporary reappraisals, view these components as constitutive or a priori. In this work, I present a new gradualist, contextualist, and relational approach to understand these constitutive components of scientific inquiry. It is gradualist inasmuch as the degree to which some component is constitutive depends on three quantifiable features: quasi-axiomaticity, generative potential, and empirical shielding. Since the quantification of these three features impinges on the history and practice of using these components in a scientific context, my approach is a contextualist one. Finally, my approach is relational in a double sense: first, it identifies ordinal relationships among epistemic components with respect to their constitutive character; second, these relationships are relative to a scientific framework of inquiry. After introducing my account and a classic example of constitutively a priori principles, i.e., Friedman’s (2001) analysis of Newtonian mechanics, I turn to my own case studies to demonstrate the advantages of my approach. Firstly, I discuss Okasha’s (2018) view of endogenization as a pervasive theoretical strategy in evolutionary biology and suggest that the constitutive character of the core Darwinian principles progressively increases with endogenization. Secondly, I apply a conceptual distinction between two varieties or scopes of coordination – general coordination and coordination in measurement – to Ohm’s work on electrical conductivity. This distinction allows me to pinpoint to what extent components along different dimensions (e.g., instrumentation, measurement, theorising, etc.) were constitutive of the forms of coordination which Ohm relied on. Thirdly, I discuss the epistemic function of the Hardy-Weinberg principle in the history and practice of population genetics. I assess this principle in terms of my account and identify approximation and stability as two components that are highly constitutive, in that they contribute to justifying its use in population genetics. Finally, applying my account to these case studies enables me to identify at least three qualitatively different types of constitutive components: domain-specific theoretical principles, material components, and domain-independent assumptions underlying reasoning abilities. In the light of my results, I draw some general conclusions on epistemic justification and scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This paper draws on a study of numeracy coordinators in primary schools in the UK in the second year of the implementation of the National Numeracy Strategy (NNS). It identifies them as working between three main tasks: embedding the Strategy, sustaining teacher collegiality and auditing accountability. We identify tensions in 'being a coordinator' in relation to these tasks, especially for discourse and identity. We assess the usefulness of the metaphor of 'brokering' in 'communities of practice' (Wenger, 1998) to theorise (...) such tensions. We conclude with some reservations about the metaphor, especially in the way the tensions are discursively performed in relation to the rate of change, complexity of notions of professional identity, and the problematic 'community' status of audit in the educational context. (shrink)

Nurse practitioners can ease increased pressure on primary care shortage while providing a cost-effective and high-quality alternative to certain physician services. However, scope-of-practice laws are restrictive and their modification remains a source of controversy. Clearly, there is a need for new thinking around the scope of practice debate. This article conducted a review of literature and laws concerning the nursing scope of practice, as well as the outcomes of nurse-led care coordination models. It also examined different manifestations (...) of the controversy that arises in scope of practice debates. We argue that improved care coordination is necessary to improve outcomes and “bend the cost curve downward.” Allowing nurse practitioners and other providers to practice to the full extent of their licenses will result in improved care coordination. This can be accomplished by expanding nursing and other providers' scopes of practice. But any health care reform strategy, particularly with respect to chronic care management, must also serve to activate the patient herself as the keystone in the coordinated care process. Focusing first on the patient's need for coordinated care may be what is necessary to move beyond the existing impasse between physicians and nurses on scope of practice expansion. (shrink)

This paper draws on a study of numeracy coordinators in primary schools in the UK in the second year of the implementation of the National Numeracy Strategy. It identifies them as working between three main tasks: embedding the Strategy, sustaining teacher collegiality and auditing accountability. We identify tensions in 'being a coordinator' in relation to these tasks, especially for discourse and identity. We assess the usefulness of the metaphor of 'brokering' in 'communities of practice' to theorise such tensions. We (...) conclude with some reservations about the metaphor, especially in the way the tensions are discursively performed in relation to the rate of change, complexity of notions of professional identity, and the problematic 'community' status of audit in the educational context. (shrink)

Next SectionEvidence based medicine is rightly at the core of current medicine. If patients and society put trust in medical professional competency, and on the basis of that competency delegate all kinds of responsibilities to the medical profession, medical professionals had better make sure their competency is state of the art medical science. What goes for the ethics of clinical trials goes for the ethics of medicine as a whole: anything that is scientifically doubtful is, other things being equal, ethically (...) unacceptable. This particularly applies to so called orphaned fields of medicine, those areas where medical research is weak and diverse, where financial incentives are lacking, and where the evidence regarding the aetiology and treatment of disease is much less clear than in laboratory and hospital based medicine. Examples of such orphaned fields are physiotherapy, psychotherapy, medical psychology, and occupational health, which investigate complex syndromes such as RSI, whiplash, chronic low back pain, and chronic fatigue syndrome. It appears that the primary ethical problem in this context is the lack of attention to the orphaned fields. Although we agree that this issue deserves more attention as a matter of potential injustice, we want to argue that, in order to do justice to the interplay of heterogeneous factors that is so typical of the orphaned fields, other ethical models than justice are required. We propose the coordination model as a window through which to view the important ethical issues which relate to the communication and interaction of scientists, health care workers, and patients. (shrink)

Recent developments in the health care industry have precipitated a new wave of interest in expanding the scope of practice for nursing. This is because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, broadly designed to increase access to health insurance, will inevitably result in increased demand for primary care providers. And with compensation for primary care physicians already lagging far behind that of specialists, the role of nurse practitioners is once again receiving increased attention as a viable means by (...) which to ease the pressure for access to health care.But the economics of this trade-off are controversial. On one hand, it sets primary care physicians at odds with specialists; namely, if the ultimate goal is to “bend the cost curve downward,” should specialist compensation be reduced in order to increase spending on primary care? (shrink)

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of “conceptual pacts,” or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner than an (...) uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts. (shrink)

In his early work on the problem of coordination, Hans Reichenbach introduced axioms of coordination to describe the relationship between theory and observation. His insistence that these axioms are determinable a priori, however, causes him to ignore the normative dimensions of scientific inquiry and, in turn, generates a misleading interpretation of the theory-observation relationship. In response, I propose an alternative approach that describes this relationship through the framework of scientific practices. My argument will draw on two examples that have not (...) been explored by the philosophical literature in the context of coordination problems: the clinical definition of death and Stanley Prusiner’s prion hypothesis. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a distinction between two scales of coordination in scientific inquiry, through which I reassess Georg Simon Ohm’s work on conductivity and resistance. Firstly, I propose to distinguish between measurement coordination, which refers to the specific problem of how to justify the attribution of values to a quantity by using a certain measurement procedure, and general coordination, which refers to the broader issue of justifying the representation of an empirical regularity by means of abstract mathematical (...) tools. Secondly, I argue that the development of Ohm’s measurement practice between the first and the second experimental phase of his work involved the change of the measurement coordination on which he relied to express his empirical results. By showing how Ohm relied on different calibration assumptions and practices across the two phases, I demonstrate that the concurrent change of both Ohm’s experimental apparatus and the variable that Ohm measured should be viewed based on the different form of measurement coordination. Finally, I argue that Ohm’s assumption that tension is equally distributed in the circuit is best understood as part of the general coordination between Ohm’s law and the empirical regularity that it expresses, rather than measurement coordination. (shrink)

This study belongs to the ethnomethodological tradition of identifying the everyday practices accounting for the oiled machinery of social organization and applies this approach to understanding direction light usage. We observe a set of episodes videorecorded in North-East Italy in the urban traffic. We first unpack the meaning of direction light usage from a pragmatic perspective and then test our interpretation against the cases in our collection that seem to deviate from it. We argue that direction lights’ usage works as (...) an announcement to some road users and a request to a subset of them; in both cases, direction lights convey contextualized (indexical) coordinates about the vehicle’s prospective trajectory. We then explain the cases in which signaling is omitted and draw some implications for traffic coordination and safety. (shrink)

The collection and classification of data into meaningful categories is a key step in the process of knowledge making. In the life sciences, the design of data discovery and integration tools has relied on the premise that a formal classificatory system for expressing a body of data should be grounded in consensus definitions for classifications. On this approach, exemplified by the realist program of the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry, progress is maximized by grounding the representation and aggregation of data on (...) settled knowledge. We argue that historical practices in systematic biology provide an important and overlooked alternative approach to classifying and disseminating data, based on a principle of coordinative rather than definitional consensus. Systematists have developed a robust system for referring to taxonomic entities that can deliver high quality data discovery and integration without invoking consensus about reality or “settled” science. (shrink)

This is a chapter about changing the desires of others. People often have to coordinate their actions in order to get what they want. The need for coordination produces a practical problem and a philosophical problem. The difference between the problems is that in dealing with the practical one he/she does not have to get hung up about rationality. Different coordination problems generalize in different ways to more than two people or more than two actions. The prisoner's dilemma has received (...) more attention than these other situations because it has seemed to present the most intractable problems. If one can show how agents faced with prisoner's dilemmas can find their way to cooperation, then it will no longer seem implausible that people pursuing their individual good can achieve stable and mutually satisfactory social arrangements. (shrink)

Temporality underpins how living systems coordinate and function. Unlike measures that use mathematical conventions, lived temporalities grant functional cohesion to organisms-in-the-world. In foxtail grasses, for example, self-maintenance meshes endogenous processes with exogenous rhythms. In embrained animals, temporalities can contribute to learning. And cowbirds coordinate in a soundscape that includes conspecifics: social learning allows them to connect copulating with past events such that females exert ‘long-distance’ control over male singing. Using Howard Pattee’s work, we compare the foxtail’s self-maintenance, gender-based cowbird learning (...) and how humans manage multi-scalar activity. We argue that, while all living things coordinate, temporal ranging is typical of vertebrates. As primates, humans too use temporal ranging – they can draw on social learning, anticipate winter and manage coordinated action. However language behaviour grants new control over the scales of time. People connect the impersonal to lived experience in narratives, as they draw on autobiography and enact cultural practices. Humans become singular individuals who use temporal experience to manage affect, relationships, beliefs, fictions, and knowledge. Individual subjectivity permits collaborative and competitive activity based on linking events with quite different histories. As a result, alone of the vertebrates, we claim that humans become time-rangers. (shrink)

In computer-mediated communication, users cannot ensure that responsive postings are placed in a directly adjacent position. Yet, paired actions are discernible in which a first pair part makes a second pair part conditionally relevant. While previous studies of short messaging service communication show that users usually send clusters of FPPs and that SPPs are ordered in the same chronology, little is known about sequential practices of dealing with multiple FPPs in text-based WhatsApp communication. This article shows that in German WhatsApp (...) dialogues, users apply a chronological as well as a reversed ordering of SPPs. It is argued that this result can only be partly attributed to the affordances of the mobile messenger. Rather, users arrange SPPs in order to foreground particular topics in extended, chat-like dialogues. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate the process of coordination between three ‘bodies’ of surgery: the patient-ensemble(s) constructed in pre-operative activities; the surgeon-body constructed with these ensembles in the operating room; and the body-world inhabited by the surgeon. This investigation is done through an ethnography of a neurosurgical clinic, with an analytical focus on the relationship between the spatial configuration of the body of the surgeon and the embodied practices of operating that this configuration demands. My argument is that coordination between (...) those three bodies is organized in the layered space into which the multiple ensembles of surgery are assembled. This relationship, I suggest, lies at the core of the power and technical expertise held by surgeons, and constitutes a challenge for explorations of other forms of articulation between subject body-worlds and the embodiment of power in subject-bodies. (shrink)

Human interactions are often improvised rather than scripted, which suggests that efficient coordination can emerge even when collective plans are largely underspecified. One possibility is that such forms of coordination primarily rely on mutual influences between interactive partners, and on perception–action couplings such as entrainment or mimicry. Yet some forms of improvised joint actions appear difficult to explain solely by appealing to these emergent mechanisms. Here, we focus on collective free improvisation, a form of highly unplanned creative practice where (...) both agents' subjective reports and the complexity of their interactions suggest that shared intentions may sometimes emerge to support coordination during the course of the improvisation, even in the absence of verbal communication. In four experiments, we show that shared intentions spontaneously emerge during collective musical improvisations, and that they foster coordination on multiple levels, over and beyond the mere influence of shared information. We also show that musicians deploy communicative strategies to manifest and propagate their intentions within the group, and that this predicts better coordination. Overall, our results suggest that improvised and scripted joint actions are more continuous with one another than it first seems, and that they differ merely in the extent to which they rely on emergent or planned coordination mechanisms. (shrink)

The current study highlights individual differences in the joint articulation strategies used by novices practicing a hip-hop dance movement, the wave. Twelve young adults, all naive regarding hip-hop dance performance, practized the wave in 120 trials separated into four blocks with the order of internal or external attentional focus counterbalanced across subjects. Various kinematic analyses were analyzed to capture performance success while exploiting the observed individual differences in order to establish the reliability of the proposed performance indicators. An external focus (...) of attention marginally facilitated the smooth transfer of a wave motion across neighboring limb segments as characterized by a constant propagation speed combined with large wave amplitudes. Systematic correlations between the success indicators were found, exemplifying the various degrees of joint articulation that novices prove capable of during an initial practicing session to try and perform a novel complex motor task. (shrink)

Traditional lore holds that there is only one way to represent local symmetry, leading to practically unique gauge theories. However there is more than one path to local symmetry. Here I discuss expressing the theory of dressed quarks, gluons and other particles using new variables. The gauge sector is expressed with fields ea μ which transform homogeneously like matter fields under the gauge group. Consistency requires further embedding in a larger global group. Many interesting topics of gauge theories, from the (...) elementary nature of the Coulomb field to magnetic monopoles, serve as illustrations. Geometrical invariants forbidden in the standard coordinates become available in the new approach. I argue that these are natural, and useful, in the description of an effective theory. For example, in a covariant derivative expansion, one can express a massively propagating gauge invariant effective theory in four space-time dimensions. (shrink)

Can rational agents coordinate in simultaneous interactions? According to standard game theory they cannot, even if there is a uniquely best way of doing so. To solve this problem we propose an argument in favor of ‘belief-less reasoning’, a mode of inference that leads to converge on the optimal solution ignoring the beliefs of the other players. We argue that belief-less reasoning is supported by a commonsensical Principle of Relevant Information that every theory of rational decision must satisfy. We show (...) that this principle can be used to justify (some versions of) team reasoning, as well as other schemes of practical reasoning that do not involve sophisticated meta-representation. (shrink)

The characteristic features of ensemble dance improvisation (EDI) make it an interesting case for theories of intentional collective action. These features include the high degree of freedom enjoyed by each individual, and the lack of fixed hierarchical roles, rigid decision procedures, or detailed plans. In this article, we present a “reductive” approach to collective action, apply it to EDI, and show how the theory enriches our perspective on this practice. We show, with the help of our theory of collective (...) action, that EDI (as typically practiced) constitutes a significant collective achievement, one that manifests an impressive, spontaneous, jointly cooperative and individually highly autonomous activity that meets demanding aesthetic standards. Its being good in this way is not a mere extrinsic feature of the artwork, but part of its aesthetic value. We end by discussing how this value is easily missed by classic aesthetics, but is revealed by more contemporary frameworks like social aesthetics. (shrink)

The performance and the success of a group working as a team on a common goal depends on the individuals’ skills and the collective coordination of their abilities. On a perceptual level, individual gaze behavior is reasonably well investigated. However, the coordination of visual skills in a team has been investigated only in laboratory studies and the practical examination and knowledge transfer to field studies or the applicability in real-life situations have so far been neglected. This is mainly due to (...) the fact that a methodological approach along with a suitable evaluation procedure to analyze the gaze coordination within a team in highly dynamic events outside the lab, is still missing. Thus, this study was conducted to develop a tool to investigate the coordinated gaze behavior within a team of three human beings acting with a common goal in a dynamic real-world scenario. This team was a basketball referee team adjudicating a game. Using mobile eye-tracking devices and an indigenously designed software tool for the simultaneous analysis of the gaze data of three participants, allowed, for the first time, the simultaneous investigation of the coordinated gaze behavior of three people in a highly dynamic setting. Overall, the study provides a new and innovative method to investigate the coordinated gaze behavior of a three-person team in specific tasks. This method is also applicable to investigate research questions about teams in dynamic real-world scenarios and get a deeper look at interactions and behavior patterns of human beings in group settings. (shrink)

Big data is opening new angles on old questions about scientific progress. Is scientific knowledge cumulative? If yes, how does it make progress? In the life sciences, what we call the Consensus Principle has dominated the design of data discovery and integration tools: the design of a formal classificatory system for expressing a body of data should be grounded in consensus. Based on current approaches in biomedicine and systematic biology, we formulate and compare three types of the Consensus Principle: realist, (...) contextual-best, and coordinative. Contrasted with the realist program of the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry, we argue that historical practices in systematic biology provide an important and overlooked alternative based on coordinative consensus. Systematists have developed a robust system for referring to taxonomic entities that can deliver high quality data discovery and integration without invoking consensus about reality or “settled” science. (shrink)

Evidence is mounting that nature-based learning (NBL) enhances children’s educational and developmental outcomes, making this an opportune time to identify promising questions to carry research and practice in this field forward. We present the outcomes of a process to set a research agenda for NBL, undertaken by the Science of Nature-Based Learning Collaborative Research Network, with funding from the National Science Foundation. A literature review and several approaches to gathering input from researchers, practitioners and funders resulted in recommendations for (...) research questions and methodological improvements to increase the relevance and rigor of research in this field. Some questions seek to understand how learning in nature affects what children learn, how they learn, and how it varies based on age, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnic background, special needs and individual differences. Outcomes of interest cover academic performance, practical skills, personal development, and environmental stewardship. Other questions seek to find causal explanations for observed outcomes. To create optimal conditions for NBL, the research agenda includes practical questions about how to prepare teachers to work successfully in nature and how to support their adoption of this approach. Not least, the research agenda asks whether learning in nature can address major societal issues by moderating the effect of socioeconomic disadvantage on children’s academic achievement, personal development and wellbeing, and how these benefits might be attained at reasonable costs. A deeper understanding of how, why and for whom different forms of nature contact enhance learning and development is needed to guide practice and policy decision-making. (shrink)

We discuss the criteria for deriving new information from coordinate transformations, focusing on the property of implementability, or measurability in practice. We contrast the role of coordinate transformations in classical and quantum physics, and demonstrate that many well-known applications fail to meet the criteria for new information. Finally, we discuss some mathematical properties of the coordinate transformations, and then relate these properties to a practical measurement scheme.

Cet article analyse la transformation des modes de coordination associée à la modernisation des entreprises. Nous observons que l'adoption massive et transversale des technologies de l'information et de la communication et que la mise en oeuvre de nouvelles pratiques d'organisation du travail conduisent à l'intensification de la communication des salariés, l'élargissement de leur périmètre de communication et plus largement au développement de réseaux de communication non hiérarchiques. Dans cette optique, nous envisageons la communication interpersonnelle comme un mécanisme de coordination privilégié (...) dans les firmes qui se modernisent.This article analyzes the transformation of modes of coordination associated with the modernization of enterprises. We observe that the mass adoption and transverse information technology and communication and the implementation of new practices of work organization lead to increased communication workers, expanding their scope of communication, and more broadly to the development of non-hierarchical communication networks. In this context, we consider the interpersonal communication as a coordination mechanism in privileged firms modernize. (shrink)

When is an indirect report of what a speaker meant correct? The question arises in the law. The Contract Law case of Spaulding v. Morse is a good example. Following their 1932 divorce, George Morse and Ruth Morse entered into a trust agreement in 1937 for the support of their minor son Richard. In that agreement, George promised to “pay to [Spaulding as] trustee in trust for his said minor son Richard the sum of twelve hundred dollars per year, payable (...) in equal monthly installments on the first day of each month until the entrance of Richard D. Morse into some college, university or higher institution of learning beyond the completion of the high school grades, and thereupon, instead of said payments, amounting to twelve hundred dollars yearly, he shall and will then pay to the trustee payments in the sum of twenty-two hundred dollars per year for a period of said higher education but not more than four years.” Richard graduated from high school on February 5, 1946 and, in the post-WWII continuation of the draft, was inducted into the army the following day. The question in the case is whether George, by the words of the trust agreement, meant that he would pay $1,200 per year for Richard’s support while he was in the army. Is that a correct indirect report of what George meant?The explanation I offer assumes Gricean analysis of speaker meaning, and it emphasizes the role of speaker meaning typically plays in solving coordination problems. A coordination problem is a situation “in which each person wants to participate in a group action but only if others also participate.” A classic example is a political protest: “each person might want to take part in an antigovernment protest but only if there are enough total protesters to make arrests and police repression unlikely.” Coordination problems arise in more mundane settings as well – in Spaulding v. Morse, for example. Ruth and George want to mutually agree on Richard’s support: Ruth wants to commit to an arrangement only if George does, and vice versa for George. In 1937, George and Ruth solved the problem through speaker meaning. By signing the trust agreement, George, with Ruth as his audience, meant that he obligated himself to a particular support agreement. When Ruth signed, she, with George as her audience, meant that she accepted the agreement. In general, parties often solve coordination problems through speaker meaning. If, for example, enough people can communicate their commitment to participate in the protest to enough people, the protest will take place.The account assigns a central role to the fact that speaker meaning facilitates coordination by creating relevant common knowledge. Common knowledge is “the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum.” Common knowledge facilitates coordination: “Actors coordinate when they have evidence for common knowledge, and refrain from coordinating when they do not.”. (shrink)

This article aims to advance the discussion of how multinational companies manage the tension between global integration and local responsiveness in their corporate social responsibility. In particular, it studies the relationships between headquarters and subsidiaries in a transnational CSR strategy and the types of coordination mechanisms used. Building on a qualitative study of a multinational bank, we find that in addition to formal and informal coordination mechanisms, a transnational CSR strategy cannot be fully understood without considering lateral learning and participatory (...) decision making. Further, we suggest that discussions about the transnational approach to CSR should not be disentangled from the question about a company's CSR orientation. Finally, we propose some characteristics of transnational CSR and discuss its theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

This theoretical paper addresses issues associated with the hierarchical concept of the “pyramid of wisdom” to suggest that progressive organisations can implement management systems that capture and apply personal and organisational talents at various levels. A phenomenological hermeneutic approach is used to re-conceptualise components of practical wisdom in organisations. After briefly examining what constitutes Western and Eastern wisdom traditions, the paper provides various hierarchies associated with a postulated model of the pyramid of wisdom. It is argued that understanding how wisdom (...) develops in an organisation can lead to new approaches to strategic reflection, to alternative notions of leadership, and to more holistic and democratic ways of expressing authority. Without understanding of, and practice within, the pyramid of wisdom, the personal and organisational roads to success are likely to be bleak, illusions overpowering, and accomplishments short-lived. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the characteristics of the transportation system and constructs a multidimensional urban public transportation evaluation index system from the perspective of basic network evaluation. The DEA efficiency evaluation model is constructed based on the perspective of environmental and social issues in transportation systems. Environmental and social issues in transportation systems refer to the differences in the average number of people carried and their technical indicators such as environmental pollution and energy consumption for different modes of transportation, which will (...) also lead to different consumption of natural resources per unit of transportation capacity. The multidimensional public transportation system efficiency evaluation system for different evaluation scenarios provides useful technical ideas and implementation methods. To provide a basis for decision-making for transportation system planning, the operation management can help to further promote the research results in practice. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples possess enormously rich and articulated knowledge of the natural world. A major goal of research in anthropology and ethnobiology as well as ecology, conservation biology, and development studies is to find ways of integrating this knowledge with that produced by academic and other institutionalized scientific communities. Here I present a challenge to this integration project. I argue, by reference to ethnographic and cross-cultural psychological studies, that the models of the world developed within specialized academic disciplines do not map (...) onto anything existing within traditional beliefs and practices for coping with nature. Traditional ecological knowledge is distributed across a heterogeneous array of overlapping practices within Indigenous cultures, including spiritual and ritual practices that invoke categories, properties, and causal-explanatory models that do not in general converge with those of the academic sciences. In light of this divergence I argue that we should abandon the integration project, and conclude by sketching a notion of knowledge coordination as a possible successor framework. (shrink)

The paper confronts the disagreement argument for relativism about matters of taste, defending a specific form of contextualism. It is first considered whether the disagreement data might manifest an inviariantist attitude speakers pre-reflectively have. Semantic and ontological enlightenment should then make the impressions of disagreement vanish, or at least leave them as lingering ineffectual Müller-Lyer-like illusions; but it is granted to relativists that this does not fully happen. López de Sa’s appeal to presuppositions of commonality and Sundell’s appeal to metalinguistic (...) disagreement are discussed, and it is argued that, although they help to clarify the issues, they do not fully explain why such impressions remain under enlightenment. To do it, the paper develops a suggestion that other writers have made, that the lingering impression of disagreement is a consequence of a practical conflict, appealing to dispositions to practical coordination that come together with presuppositions of commonality in axiological matters. (shrink)

Implicit coordination is an important research topic in the field of social cognition. Previous studies have studied implicit coordination behavior from the perspective of team mental model but ignored the internal mechanism of individual status competition motivation on implicit coordination behavior. Based on the differences of status competition motivation, the individual status competition motivation is divided into prestige-type and dominant-type. With knowledge sharing as the mediating variable and psychological safety as the moderating variable, this research constructed a process model of (...) the influence of status competition motivation on implicit coordination behavior. The empirical study was carried out with a sample of 367 employees of 44 enterprises. The research results show the following findings: Status competition has a differentiated impact on implicit coordination. Prestige-type status competition has a significant positive impact on implicit coordination behavior, while dominant-type status competition has a significant negative impact on implicit coordination behavior. Knowledge sharing plays a mediating role between status competition and implicit coordination. Psychological safety positively moderates the relationship between prestige-type status competition, dominant-type status competition, and knowledge sharing. The research results provide a new perspective for the field of implicit coordination; reveal the mechanism of status competition motivation in implicit coordination, which is of great significance to the practice of enterprise team management and human resource management. (shrink)

Innovative practice occurs when a clinician provides something new, untested, or nonstandard to a patient in the course of clinical care, rather than as part of a research study. Commentators have noted that patients engaged in innovative practice are at significant risk of suffering harm, exploitation, or autonomy violations. By creating a pathway for harmful or nonbeneficial interventions to spread within medical practice without being subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation, innovative practice poses similar risks to the (...) wider community of patients and society as a whole. Given these concerns, how should we control and oversee innovative practice, and in particular, how should we coordinate innovative practice and clinical research? In this article, I argue that an ethical approach to overseeing innovative practice must encourage the early transition to rigorous clinical research without delaying or deferring the development of beneficial innovations or violating the autonomy rights of clinicians and their patients. (shrink)

In theory and practice, the notion of fairness is far from simple. The principle is often elusive and subject to confusion, even in institutions of law, usage, and custom. In Fairness, Nicholas Rescher aims to liberate this concept from misunderstandings by showing how its definitive characteristics prevent it from being absorbed by such related conceptions as paternalistic benevolence, radical egalitarianism, and social harmonization. Rescher demonstrates that equality before the state is an instrument of justice, not of social utility or (...) public welfare, and argues that the notion of fairness stops well short of a literal egalitarianism. Rescher disposes of the confusions arising from economists' penchant to focus on individual preferences, from decision theorists' concern for averting envy, and from political theorists' sympathy for egalitarianism. In their place he shows how the idea of distributive equity forms the core of the concept of fairness in matters of distributive justice. The coordination of shares with valid claims is the crux of the concept of fairness. In Rescher's view, this means that the pursuit of fairness requires objective rather than subjective evaluation of the goods being shared. This is something quite different from subjective equity based on the personal evaluation of goods by those laying claim to them. Insofar as subjective equity is a concern, the appropriate procedure for its realization is a process of maximum value distribution. Further, Rescher demonstrates that in matters of distributive justice, the distinction between new ownership and preexisting ownership is pivotal and calls for proceeding on very different principles depending on the case. How one should proceed depends on context, and what is adjudged fair is pragmatic, in that there are different requirements for effectiveness in achieving the aims and purposes of the sort of distribution that is intended. Rescher concludes that fairness is a fundamentally ethical concept. Its distinctive modus operandi contrasts sharply with the aims of paternalism, preference-maximizing, or economic advantage. Fairness will be of interest to philosophers, economists, and political scientists. "[Fairness is] one of the most forceful conceptual analysis of fairness yet produced." -Ludwig Beckman, The Review of Metaphysics Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy and vice chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written more than seventy books in various areas of philosophy, including Complexity: A Philosophical Overview and Inquiry Dynamics, both published by Transaction. (shrink)

RESUMEN Analizar el papel del centro universitario en la articulación con la universidad médica en la búsqueda de entornos saludables y su contribución al desarrollo local en el municipio Yaguajay, constituye el propósito fundamental del presente trabajo, para el que se realizó una revisión documental de numerosos documentos y entrevistas a los principales líderes y a la población. El fomento de prácticas y estilos de vida sanos, la integración y capacitación de actores sociales, el desarrollo de la ciencia, la innovación (...) tecnológica y del potencial científico productivo, junto a la sostenibilidad ambiental, fueron algunos de los resultados evidenciados. Se constató que la universidad en el territorio trabajó por incentivar una cultura saludable, por unificar esfuerzos, coordinar acciones, involucrar sectores, consolidar alianzas interinstitucionales dentro y fuera de la esfera sanitaria, con lo que se demostró la fortaleza de la promoción de salud dentro de los procesos de desarrollo local. ABSTRACT To analyze the role of the university center in the coordination with the medical university in the search of healthy environments and its contribution to the local development in the municipality Yaguajay, constitutes the fundamental intention of the present work, for which a documentary review of numerous documents was carried out and interviews to the principal leaders and the population. The promotion of practices and healthy life styles, the integration and training of social actors, the development of the science, the technological innovation and of the productive scientific potential, along with the environmental sustainability, were some of the demonstrated results. It was stated that the university at the territory was employed for encouraging a healthy culture, for unifying efforts, coordinating actions, involving sectors, consolidating inter-institutional alliances inside and out of the sanitary sphere, with what there was demonstrated the fortitude of the promotion of health inside the processes of local development. (shrink)

This article lays out the “functionalist” view according to which justice is a social technology for adjudicating competing claims, then defends the claim that any functional principles of justice must effectively coordinate the expectations of diverse members of society. From there, it argues that within the functionalist framework there cannot be any adequate conception of justice for society’s basic institutional structure or constitution under conditions of reasonable pluralism. It concludes by discussing the theoretical place of emergent legal and constitutional principles (...) within a functionalist theory. (shrink)

This article begins by pointing out the difficulties involved by the insertion of freedom in economics: It poses epistemological problems that are not satisfactorily solved by the standard theories. The article suggests that the Aristotelian epistemological frame of practical rationality may be an apt position from which one can deal with freedom in economics. Aristotle's concepts of society and economics are first introduced. The role of virtues in achieving economic coordination is exposed. Then the corresponding concept of practical science is (...) described, showing its main characteristics and how they fit in with traditional political economy. The concept of value neutrality receives special attention in the article: A reinterpretation of the meaning of it is proposed. The article concludes that Aristotle's broad concepts of practical reason and science leave room for a more comprehensive notion of economics. (shrink)

The intentions of others often enter into your practical reasoning, even when you’re acting on your own. Given all the agents around you, you’ll come to grief if what they’re up to is never a consideration in what you decide to do and how you do it. There are occasions, however, when the intentions of another figure in your practical reasoning in a particularly intimate and decisive fashion. I will speak of there being on such occasions a practical intersubjectivity of (...) intentions holding between you and the other individual. I will try to identify this practical intersubjectivity, and to take some preliminary steps toward giving a philosophical account of it. Occasions of practical intersubjectivity are usually those where individuals share agency, or do things jointly, such as when they walk together, kiss, or paint a house together. I will not assume that all instances of practical intersubjectivity are instances of shared agency. But the converse is true: any instance of shared agency involves a practical intersubjectivity holding between the participants. An account of shared agency is inadequate if it fails to handle practical intersubjectivity. The paper is structured as follows. In section 1, I present an example to illustrate this idea of practical intersubjectivity, at least as it appears in the context of shared agency. Practical intersubjectivity is a normative phenomenon, and it is on this basis that in section 2 I distinguish it from the mere coordination of intentions some have recognized as essential for shared activity. The task of section 3 is to show how practical intersubjectivity cannot be adequately described in terms of ordinary intentions familiar from the study of individual agency. Such approaches fail to handle the rational dynamics of intention revision when practical.. (shrink)

Cycling in traffic requires a combination of motor and perceptual skills while interacting with a dynamic and fast-changing environment. The inferior perceptual-motor skills in individuals with developmental coordination disorder may put them at a higher risk for accidents. A key skill to navigate in traffic is to quickly detect hazardous situations. This perceptual-cognitive skill was investigated in young adults with DCD using simulated traffic situations in a hazard perception test in cycling. Nine individuals with DCD and nine typically developing individuals (...) participated in the study and completed the test while their gaze was tracked using a remote eye tracking device. A questionnaire was used to determine cycling experience and the perception of cycling and anticipation skill in traffic. Despite a longer period to master the motor skill of cycling, individuals with DCD reported to be able to safely cycle in traffic around the same age as TD young adults. In the hazard perception test, individuals with DCD fixated the hazards later, less frequently and for a shorter duration than the TD participants, however, the participants with DCD did not wait longer to react to the hazard than the TD participants. Interestingly, individuals with DCD rated the traffic situations in the test as significantly more dangerous than the TD participants. In conclusion, the differences exposed in the hazard perception test may imply an increased risk of accidents in individuals with DCD. In further research and practice it is recommended that both the motor and the perceptual aspects of cycling are addressed. (shrink)

The positions Ross & Spurrett (R&S) take on issues of information, causality, functionalism, and emergence are actually implicit in the theory and practice of statistical physics, specifically in the way it relates macroscopic collective coordinates to microscopic physics. The reasons for taking macroscopic physical variables like temperature or magnetization to be real apply equally to mental properties like pain.

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: (i) faster, lower-level coordination processes of behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring (...) at timescale t1; (ii) mid-range collaborative processes which re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; (iii) cooperative processes involved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and (iv) cultural processes and practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales (t1, t2, t3, t4). (shrink)

Ethical problems surrounding organ donation have been discussed since before technologies supported the procedure. In addition to issues on a societal level (e.g. brain-stem death, resource allocation), ethical concerns permeate the clinical practice of health care staff. These latter have been little studied. Using qualitative methods, this study, focused on transplant co-ordinators and their descriptions of dilemmas, ethical concerns and actions in response to them. Interviews with three co-ordinators in Japan and two in the UK revealed five areas in (...) which dilemmas occurred: aspects of discrimination; conditions placed on who should be the recipient and the related issues of directed donation; respect for a person's right to make a decision and the extent of information provided and understood by donors and recipients; potential issues of coercion, compensation and rewards in live-related and live-unrelated donations; and potential conflicts in duties. This study describes the dilemma areas revealed. Their meaning for co-ordinators will be presented in a subsequent report. (shrink)

The last thirty years of scholarship in western medieval philosophical historiography have seen a number of reflections on the methodological paradigms, schools, trends, and dominant approaches in the field. As a contribution to this ongoing assessment of the existing methods of studies in medieval philosophy and theology and a supplement to classifications offered by M. Colish, J. Inglis, C. König-Pralong, J. Marenbon, A. de Libera, and others, the article offers another explanatory tool. Here is a description of an imaginary system (...) of methodological coordinates that systematizes the current tendencies by placing them in a three-dimensional system of axes. Every axis corresponds to a certain aspect of the historical and systematic research in medieval thought and symbolizes a possible movement between two extremes representing opposite methodological values and directions. The methods and approaches practiced in recent studies in medieval philosophy and theology might be schematically located inside this general system of argumentational, focal (or objectival), and (con)textual axes with their intersection identified with what some scholars call the “integral” model of study. This explanatory tool allows one to see how current approaches and methods form a panoply of axes that belong together in one complex grid and helps to visualize the tapestry of existing approaches in medieval philosophical historiography. (shrink)

Interpersonal coordination is a key factor in team performance. In interactive team sports, the limited predictability of a constantly changing context makes coordination challenging. Approaches that highlight the support provided by environmental information and theories of shared mental models provide potential explanations of how interpersonal coordination can nonetheless be established. In this article, we first outline the main assumptions of these approaches and consider criticisms that have been raised with regard to each. The aim of this article is to define (...) a theoretical perspective that integrates the coordination mechanisms of the two approaches. In doing so, we borrow from a theoretical outline of group action. According to this outline, group action based on a priori shared mental models is an example of how interpersonal coordination is established from the top down. Interpersonal coordination in reaction to the perception of affordances represents the bottom-up component of group action. Both components are inextricably involved in the coordination of interactive sports teams. We further elaborate on the theoretical outline to integrate a third, constructivist approach. Integrating this third approach helps to explain interpersonal coordination in game situations for which no shared mental models are established and game situations that remain ambiguous in terms of perceived affordances. The article describes how hierarchical, sequential and complex dimensions of action organization are important aspects of this constructivist perspective and how mental models may be involved. A basketball example is used to illustrate how top-down, bottom-up and constructivist processes may be simultaneously involved in enabling interpersonal coordination. Finally, we present the implications for research and practice. (shrink)

Music is a natural human expression present in all cultures, but the functions it serves are still debated. Previous research indicates that rhythm, an essential feature of music, can enhance coordination of movement and increase social bonding. However, the prolonged effects of rhythm have not yet been investigated. In this study, pairs of participants were exposed to one of three kinds of auditory stimuli (rhythmic, arrhythmic, or white‐noise) and subsequently engaged in five trials of a joint‐action task demanding interpersonal coordination. (...) We show that when compared with the other two stimuli, exposure to the rhythmic beat reduced the practice effect in task performance. Analysis of the behavioral data suggests that this reduction results from more temporally coupled motor movements over successive trials and that shared exposure to rhythm facilitates interpersonal motor coupling, which in this context serves to impede the attainment of necessary dynamic coordination. We propose that rhythm has the potential to enhance interpersonal motor coupling, which might serve as a mechanism behind its facilitation of positive social attitudes. (shrink)