According to Niklas Luhmann, causality is both an impossibility and a necessity in education. On the one hand, the task of the teacher is an impossible one, because teaching as communication is a closed system that cannot determine the learning of pupils' psychical system in any causal sense. On the other hand, one cannot practice as a teacher without a belief in causality, i.e., in a causal connection between teaching and learning. In his article “The Child as the Medium of (...) Education,” Luhmann focuses on the enablement of education, despite its impossibility. His answer is that one thing that makes education possible is the emergence of the symbolically generalized medium “the child.” In this article, Lars Qvortrup focuses on Luhmann's understanding of causality. According to Luhmann, causality is not a simple, ontological fact, but the result of the attribution of certain causes to certain effects. The conclusion is that causality as an attribution category — and not causality as an ontological fact — is another thing that makes education possible. Qvortrup also concludes, however, that Luhmann is not alone in criticizing the traditional, mechanical concept of causality. Other contemporary philosophers and sociologists have pointed out that in order to analyze causality in complex social systems, one has to select some causal factors and ignore others. While others do this based on seemingly pure scientific and statistical criteria, Luhmann focuses on attribution as a social construction of causality. (shrink)

Currently there is a clear trend towards questioning the traditional sovereign human self which for two hundred years has had an undisputed central status within European culture and philosophy. This challenges the tradition of anthropocentrism which in a Scandinavian computer science context has had two theoretical foundations: the workoriented design theory represented by the Scandinavian participatory design philosophy, and the idea of the computer to a rather passive medium for human communication. The process, reducing the computer to a rather passive (...) medium for human communication. The paper firstly examines these two theoretical anthropocentric positions. Secondly it outlines the trend towards challenging the status of the human self within different research contexts. This trend represents a challenge for Human-centred systems design. Finally, it discusses the new demands for conceptualising basic IT research phenomena created by this development, with particular focus on the issue of human-centredness as a systems design strategy. (shrink)

A fundamental assumption of theories of decision-making is that we detect mismatches between intention and outcome, adjust our behavior in the face of error, and adapt to changing circumstances. Is this always the case? We investigated the relation between intention, choice, and introspection. Participants made choices between presented face pairs on the basis of attractiveness, while we covertly manipulated the relationship between choice and outcome that they experienced. Participants failed to notice conspicuous mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome (...) they were presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. We call this effect choice blindness. (shrink)

In contrast to standardized guidelines, personalized medicine and person centered care are two notions that have recently developed and are aspiring for more individualized health care for each single patient. While having a similar drive toward individualized care, their sources are markedly different. While personalized medicine stems from a biomedical framework, person centered care originates from a caring perspective, and a wish for a more holistic view of patients. It is unclear to what extent these two concepts can be combined (...) or if they conflict at fundamental or pragmatic levels. This paper reviews existing literature in both medicine and related philosophy to analyze closer the meaning of the two notions, and to explore the extent to which they overlap or oppose each other, in theory or in practice, in particular regarding ethical assumptions and their respective practical implications. (shrink)

The legacy of Nisbett and Wilson’s classic article, Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes , is mixed. It is perhaps the most cited article in the recent history of consciousness studies, yet no empirical research program currently exists that continues the work presented in the article. To remedy this, we have introduced an experimental paradigm we call choice blindness [Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. . Failure to detect mismatches between intention and (...) outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116–119.]. In the choice blindness paradigm participants fail to notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. In this article, we use word-frequency and latent semantic analysis to investigate a corpus of introspective reports collected within the choice blindness paradigm. We contrast the introspective reasons given in non-manipulated vs. manipulated trials, but find very few differences between these two groups of reports. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze what effects indicators of a shared situation have on a speaker’s persuasiveness by investigating how a robot’s advice is received when it indicates that it is sharing the situational context with its user. In our experiment, 80 participants interacted with a robot that referred to aspects of the shared context: Face tracking indicated that the robot saw the participant, incremental feedback suggested that the robot was following their actions, and comments about, and gestures towards, the (...) shared physical situation and linguistic references to the dialog history indicated to participants that the robot had learned from the interaction and perceived its surroundings. The results show that especially the linguistic and gestural references to the shared context have a significant influence on participants’ compliance with the robot’s suggestions. Thus, indicating that it is ‘in the same boat’ with the user, i.e. that it is sharing the situational context, increases a robot’s persuasiveness during advice giving. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic account of ethical issues actualised in different areas, as well as at different levels and stages of health care, by introducing organisational and other procedures that embody a shift towards person centred care and shared decision-making (PCC/SDM). The analysis builds on general ethical theory and earlier work on aspects of PCC/SDM relevant from an ethics perspective. This account leads up to a number of theoretical as well as empirical and practice oriented issues that, in view (...) of broad advancements towards PCC/SDM, need to be considered by health care ethics researchers. Given a PCC/SDM-based reorientation of health care practice, such ethics research is essential from a quality assurance perspective. (shrink)

Great hope has been placed on biobank research as a strategy to improve diagnostics, therapeutics and prevention. It seems to be a common opinion that these goals cannot be reached without the participation of commercial actors. However, commercial use of biobanks is considered morally problematic and the commercialisation of human biological materials is regulated internationally by policy documents, conventions and laws. For instance, the Council of Europe recommends that: “Biological materials should not, as such, give rise to financial gain”. Similarly, (...) Norwegian legislation reads: “Commercial exploitation of research participants, human biological material and personal health data in general is prohibited”. Both articles represent kinds of common moral intuitions. A problem, however, is that legislative documents are too vague and provide room for ample speculation. Through the use of focus group interviews with Norwegian biobank donors, we have tried to identify lay intuitions and morals regarding the commercial use of biobanks. Our findings indicate that the act of donation and the subsequent uses of the samples belong to two different spheres. While concerns around dignity and commodification were present in the first, injustice and unfairness were our informants’ major moral concerns in the latter. Although some opposition towards commercial actors was voiced, these intuitions show that it is possible to render commercial use of biobanks ethically acceptable based on frameworks and regulations which hinder commodification of the human body and promote communal benefit sharing. (shrink)

Fronto-parietal activity has been frequently observed in fMRI and PET studies of attention, working memory, and episodic memory retrieval. Several recent fMRI studies have also reported fronto-parietal activity during conscious visual perception. A major goal of this review was to assess the degree of anatomical overlap among activation patterns associated with these four functions. A second goal was to shed light on the possible cognitive relationship of processes that relate to common brain activity across functions. For all reviewed functions we (...) observed a consistent and overlapping pattern of brain activity. The overlap was most pronounced for the bilateral parietal cortex , and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex . The common fronto-parietal activity will be discussed in terms of processes related to integration of distributed representations in the brain. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has become of great interest to both researchers and practitioners alike with much discussion on whether the costs outweigh the performance implications. CSR has become a firm strategic tool as firms recognize that the customer value proposition and CSR is integrated with the focus on how to differentiate the firm from the view of the customer. We utilized market orientation theory as our foundation for our research as it explains how organizations adapt to their customer environment to (...) develop competitive advantages. With the current customer focus on CSR, MO assists the field in identifying a possible firm differentiation. Our research found that firms that ranked high on CSR correlated positively to performance. We also found our theoretically developed constructs of firm customer orientation and firm market orientation correlated with the firm adopting CSR. The results also indicated that CSR positively mediates CO and MO to firm performance. As past research had mixed results over the direct relation of MO to performance, our research suggests that CSR may be the missing variable to explain the MO/performance relationship. (shrink)

Transparency has achieved a mythical status in society. Myths are not false accounts or understandings, but deep-seated and definitive descriptions of the world that ontologically ground the ways in which we frame and see the world around us. We explore the mythical nature of transparency from this perspective, explain its social-historical underpinnings and discuss its influence on contemporary organizations. In doing so, we also theorize in a more general sense about the relationship between myth, as a foundational understanding and description (...) of the world, and the constellation of metaphors, as specific ways of framing and seeing organizational reality, to which it gives rise. While observations and evidence can always be adduced to challenge a particular set of metaphors, the endogenous force of the myth may sustain the overall project. This process is explained with a detailed analysis of the transparency myth. (shrink)

Moral sensitivity and moral reasoning are essential competencies biomedical researchers have to develop to make ethical decisions in their daily practices. Previous research has shown that these competencies can be developed through ethics education. However, it is unclear which underlying mechanisms best support the development of these competencies. In this article we argue that the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning can be fostered through teaching strategies that tap into students’ moral imagination. We describe how moral imagination can stimulate (...) the development of these competencies through three different merits of moral imagination. Moral imagination can help students to 1) transfer and apply abstract moral concepts to concrete situations and contexts, 2) explore the perspective of others, 3) explore and foresee the moral consequences of different decisions and actions. We explain these three merits of moral imagination in the context of biomedical research and present a theoretical model for how these merits can be used to stimulate the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning. Furthermore, we describe multiple teaching strategies for biomedical curricula that tap into the three merits of moral imagination. These teaching strategies can inspire teachers to design ethics education that activates students’ moral imagination for the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning. (shrink)

Studying teaching behavior in controlled conditions is difficult. It seems intuitive that a human learner might have trouble reliably recreating response patterns over and over in interaction. A robot would be the perfect tool to study teaching behavior because its actions can be well controlled and described. However, due to the interactive nature of teaching, developing such a robot is not an easy task. As we will show in this review, respective studies require certain robot appearances and behaviors. These mainly (...) should induce teaching behavior in humans, be interactive, match the study design, and be realizable in terms of effort. We discuss how remote controlling of the robot or simulating robot capabilities is used as an option. With this review, we introduce the field of research on studying human teaching behavior with robots as a tool in the experimental design. We will provide a structured overview of existing work, and identify main challenges of employing robots in such studies. (shrink)

Corporate sustainability is an important strategy and value orientation for marketing, but scarce research addresses the organizational drivers and barriers to including it in companies’ marketing strategies and processes. The purpose of this study is to determine levels of commitment to corporate sustainability in marketing, processes associated with sustainability marketing commitment, drivers of sustainability marketing at the functional level of marketing, and its organizational context. Using survey data from 269 managers in marketing, covering a broad range of industries in Sweden (...) and Denmark, we took a structural modelling approach to examine construct relationships, mediation, and moderation effects. Overall, the findings show that marketing capabilities associated with the innovation of new products, services, and business models constitute a strong driver to leverage sustainability marketing commitment. In conjunction with insights into processes related to the enactment of sustainability marketing, this result indicates that companies’ marketing departments have a propensity to drive corporate sustainability. The study provides substance to the idea of aligning substantive marketing capabilities closer to dynamic capabilities. Accordingly, the study reveals that reliance on market orientation alone does not lead to greater sustainability commitment. (shrink)

Experiments on choice blindness support von Hippel & Trivers's (VH&T's) conception of the mind as fundamentally divided, but they also highlight a problem for VH&T's idea of non-conscious self-deception: If I try to trick you into believing that I have a certain preference, and the best way is to also trick myself, I might actually end up having that preference, at all levels of processing.

We are living in a world which is severely crisis-ridden and faces some major challenges. The fact that we are currently facing a genuine global pandemic brings about even more uncertainty. The social and political institutions, which emerged and consolidated during the 20th century, and which created stability, have become fragile. The young generation born in the 1990s and onwards have experienced 9/11 and the ‘war against terrorism’, the financial crisis of 2008, changes to climate, environmental degradation, and most recently (...) the COVID-19 pandemic. The generation born between 1960 and 1990 have had the same experiences along with severe economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s and the Cold War. Some of these challenges are in different ways intertwined with capitalism and its crises, while others are linked to the rapid development of new technologies, in particular innovations within communication and information technologies. This introduction lists the most important grand challenges facing the world as they have emerged more recently. The five articles following this introduction address some of these challenges, with particular attention to the problems of capitalism and democracy and the relation between these two areas. Most authors agree that climate change and the destruction of the environment are the biggest and most pertinent problems to address, but it is their stance that we can only meet these challenges if democracy is functioning well. (shrink)

Der Band Bildung als Kunst beleuchtet die Bildungskonzepte Fichtes, Schillers, Humboldts und Nietzsches.

Macroeconomic fluctuations in interest rates, exchange rates, and inflation can be considered sources of good or bad “luck” for corporate performance if management is unable to adjust operations to these fluctuations. Based on a sample of 2,091 US firms, we decompose the impacts of macroeconomic fluctuations on three measures of CEO compensation. Our study provides empirical support for the importance of considering macroeconomic fluctuations in designing CEO incentive schemes. It adds to the managerial power literature on moral hazard and CEO (...) compensation by pinpointing the obvious risk that the CEO in an asymmetric and non-linear reward system will be inclined to prioritize his/her own cash flow at the expense of fulfilling an assumed agency role. The policy conclusion for remuneration committees and board of directors is to filter out macroeconomic influences on performance to be rewarded whenever an asymmetric compensation scheme has been opted for. (shrink)

A large body of evidence supports the idea that a common fronto-parietal network is activated across a range of diverse cognitive functions. Jung & Haier's (J&H's) review demonstrates a very similar pattern of activity, which correlates with individual differences in intelligence. We propose that these converging lines of evidence are best interpreted as a general role of the fronto-parietal network in integration and control.

The growing recognition by cognitive neuroscientists that areas of vertebrate brains may be reused for multiple purposes either functionally during development or during evolution echoes a similar realization made by neuroscientists working on invertebrates. Because of these animals' relatively more accessible nervous systems, neuronal reuse can be examined at the level of individual identified neurons and fully characterized neural circuits.

Latent variable modeling has revealed important conundrums in the DSM classification system. We agree that the network perspective has potential to inspire new insights and resolve some of these conundrums. We note, however, that alone it cannot really help us understand etiology. Etiology, not comorbidity, is the fundamental question.

ABSTRACTThe concept of need is often proposed as providing an additional or alternative criterion to cost‐effectiveness in making allocation decisions in health care. If it is to be of practical value it must be sufficiently precisely characterized to be useful to decision makers. This will require both an account of how degree of need for an intervention is to be determined and a prioritization rule that clarifies how degree of need and the cost of the intervention interact in determining the (...) relative priority of the intervention. Three common features of health care interventions must be accommodated in a comprehensive theory of need: the probabilistic nature of prognosis ; the time course of effects; and the fact that the most effective treatments often combine more than one intervention. These common features are problematic for the concept of need. We outline various approaches to prioritization on the basis of need and argue that some approaches are more promising than others. (shrink)

Cognitive models propose that both, negative interpretations of ambiguous social situations and ruminative thoughts about social events contribute to the maintenance of social anxiety disorder. It has further been postulated that ruminative thoughts fuel biased negative interpretations, however, evidence is rare. The present study used a multi-method approach to assess ruminative processing following a social interaction and negative interpretation bias in a student sample screened for high and low social anxiety. Results support the hypothesis that group differences in negative interpretations (...) of ambiguous social situations in HSAs vs. LSAs are mediated by higher levels of post-event processing assessed in the questionnaire. Exploratory analyses highlight the potential role of comorbid depressive symptoms. The current findings help to advance the understanding of the association between two cognitive processes involved in social anxiety and stress the importance of ruminative post-event processing. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze what effects indicators of a shared situation have on a speaker’s persuasiveness by investigating how a robot’s advice is received when it indicates that it is sharing the situational context with its user. In our experiment, 80 participants interacted with a robot that referred to aspects of the shared context: Face tracking indicated that the robot saw the participant, incremental feedback suggested that the robot was following their actions, and comments about, and gestures towards, the (...) shared physical situation and linguistic references to the dialog history indicated to participants that the robot had learned from the interaction and perceived its surroundings. The results show that especially the linguistic and gestural references to the shared context have a significant influence on participants’ compliance with the robot’s suggestions. Thus, indicating that it is ‘in the same boat’ with the user, i.e. that it is sharing the situational context, increases a robot’s persuasiveness during advice giving. (shrink)

This paper discusses evaluations of distributive justice in two different situations. Focal point is the so-called equity axiom which lies at the heart of Rawls’ second principle of justice, the maximin rule. Our investigation which was run at a German university spans over a period of fifteen years. It seems to us that consideration for the worst-off (group) in society has become considerably weaker over the years. This and related observations are tested by using a probit model including several demographic (...) characteristics of the probands. The supposed time trend proves to be statistically robust. Several reasons for this observation are given. Obviously, depending on the underlying context, evaluations are to some degree influenced by current topics, including the ongoing discussion about the German educational system as well as about recent economic problems. We also briefly refer to findings that we obtained in the Baltics and in Israel. (shrink)

Dil felsefesi ilk bakışta XX. yüzyılda ortaya çıkmış oldukça yeni bir felsefe dalıymış gibi görünmekle birlikte, henüz felsefe dalları arasında bugünkü anlamda bir bölünmenin söz konusu olmadığı Platon ile Aristoteles'e dek uzanan "geleneksel felsefe"nin hemen bütün filozofları, dili felsefi araştırmanın es geçilemez, değme bir konusu olarak görmüşlerdir. Nitekim dil üstüne düşünüşün tarihi başta mantık tarihi olmak üzere bir bütün olarak felsefe tarihinden ayrılamaz.