Alan Miller offers a focused account of perceptual knowledge, the knowledge that we gain by means of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting. He explains perceptual knowledge in terms of general recognitional abilities, then situates that account within a broader perspective on epistemology and philosophical method more generally.

"When John Dewey died in 1952, he was memorialized as America's most famous philosopher, revered by liberal educators and deplored by conservatives, but universally acknowledged as his country's intellectual voice. Many things conspired to give Dewey an extraordinary intellectual eminence: He was immensely long-lived and immensely prolific; he died in his ninety-third year, and his intellectual productivity hardly slackened until his eighties." "Professor Alan Ryan offers new insights into Dewey's many achievements, his character, and the era in which his (...) scholarship had a remarkable impact. He investigates the question of what an American audience wanted from a public philosopher - from an intellectual figure whose credentials came from his academic standing as a philosopher, but whose audience was much wider than an academic one." "Ryan argues that Dewey's "religious" outlook illuminates his politics much more vividly than it does the politics of religion as ordinarily conceived. He examines how Dewey fit into the American radical tradition, how he was and was not like his transatlantic contemporaries, why he could for so long practice a form of philosophical inquiry that became unfashionable in England after 1914 at the latest."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Neo-Fregeans argue that substantial mathematics can be derived from a priori abstraction principles, Hume's Principle connecting numerical identities with one:one correspondences being a prominent example. The embarrassment of riches objection is that there is a plurality of consistent but pairwise inconsistent abstraction principles, thus not all consistent abstractions can be true. This paper considers and criticizes various further criteria on acceptable abstractions proposed by Wright settling on another one—stability—as the best bet for neo-Fregeans. However, an analogue of the embarrassment of (...) riches objection resurfaces in the metatheory and I conclude by arguing that the neo-Fregean program, at least insofar as it includes a platonistic ontology, is fatally wounded by it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Both Constant and Spencer are moralists who want to encourage individual human perfection. But for Constant, politics has moral value even in a laissez-faire state, whereas for Spencer political participation has no moral value in itself. For Constant, from a moral perspective the historical change from an ancient to a modern conception of liberty is not absolute, and he wishes to retain, in a subordinate role, certain aspects of ancient liberty in modern societies. For Spencer, the historical evolution from (...) militant to industrial society involves the complete separation of politics from any positive moral good. In an industrial society, altruism has no connection with politics, and attempt to bring altruism into politics are not only doomed to failure but iare unjust and therefore immoral. Spencer is a leading figure in the separation of classical liberal thought from perfectionist morality that flourishes in the twentieth century. The separation between classical and modern liberalism that takes place in the fin de siècle is not just a matter of economics – as is shown by the fact that both Spencer and Constant are ardent apostles of laissez-faire – it is above all a question of different attitudes to morality. (shrink)

Although workplace bullying is common and has universally harmful effects on employees’ outcomes, little is known about workplace bullies. To address this gap in knowledge, we draw from the tenets of social exchange and displaced aggression theories in order to develop and test a model of workplace bullying that incorporates the effects of employees’ individual differences, perceptions of their work environments, and perceptions of supervisory treatment on their tendencies to bully coworkers. The results of mediated moderation analyses that examine responses (...) from two samples of working adults support our hypotheses. Specifically, we find evidence of an indirect relationship between entitlement and coworker bullying through perceptions of abusive supervision that is stronger for employees who report lower levels of felt accountability than employees who report higher levels of felt accountability. This study makes important theoretical and practical contributions to abusive supervision research, bullying research, and organizational efforts to promote ethical work environments devoid of interpersonal mistreatment by providing novel insight into how employees’ entitlement and felt accountability combine to influence their tendencies to perceive themselves as victims of abusive supervision and culprits of coworker bullying. (shrink)

This paper targets the constitutive basis of social cognition. It begins by describing the traditional and still dominant cognitivist view. Cognitivism assumes internalism about the realisers of social cognition; thus, the embodied and embedded elements of intersubjective engagement are ruled out from playing anything but a basic causal role in an account of social cognition. It then goes on to advance and clarify an alternative to the cognitivist view; namely, an enactive account of social cognition. It does so first by (...) articulating a diachronic constitutive account for how embodied engagement can play a constitutive role in social cognition. It then proceeds to consider an objection; the causal-constitutive fallacy (Adams & Aizawa 2001, 2008; Block 2005) against enactive social cognition. The paper proceeds to deflate this objection by establishing that the distinction between constitution and causation is not co-extensive with the distinction between internal constitutive elements and external causal elements. It is then shown that there is a different reason for thinking that an enactive account of social cognition is problematic. We call this objection the ‘poverty of the interactional stimulus argument’. This objection turns on the role and characteristics of anticipation in enactive social cognition. It argues that anticipatory processes are mediated by an internally realised model or tacit theory (Carruthers 2015; Seth 2015). The final part of this paper dissolves this objection by arguing that it is possible to cast anticipatory processes as orchestrated as well as maintained by sensorimotor couplings between individuals in face-to-face interaction. (shrink)

One of the most pressing challenges facing virtue theorists is the conflation problem. This problem concerns the difficulty of explaining the distinction between different types of virtue, such as the distinction between moral virtues and intellectual virtues. Julia Driver has argued that only an outcomes-based understanding of virtue can provide an adequate solution to the conflation problem. In this paper, I argue against Driver’s outcomes-based account, and propose an alternative motivations-based solution. According to this proposal, intellectual virtues can be identified (...) by the shared motivation for cognitive contact with reality, while moral virtues are identified by appeal to the characteristic motivations of kindness and justice. I defend the proposal by demonstrating that it produces plausible verdicts concerning the virtue status of candidate moral and intellectual virtues. (shrink)

Honesty is widely accepted as a prime example of a moral virtue. And yet, honesty has been surprisingly neglected in the recent drive to account for specific virtuous traits. This paper provides a framework for an increased focus on honesty by proposing success criteria that will need to be met by any plausible account of honesty. It then proposes a motivational account on which honesty centrally involves a deep motivation to avoid deception. It argues that this account satisfies the required (...) success criteria and discusses why (and when) honesty can be accepted as a moral virtue. Finally, it highlights some implications of accepting a motivational account of honesty for future work on encouraging the development of honesty, and on the relationship between different types of virtue. (shrink)

Studies of the prevalence and contents of codes of conduct in the private sector show that their use to define an ethical environment or culture, and their effective implementation, must be as part of a learning process that requires inculcation, reinforcement and measurement. Consequently, the public sector must realise it cannot look solely to formal codes to revive and sustain public sector values. Alan Doig is Professor of Public Services Management, and John Wilson is Principal Lecturer and Head of (...) the Centre for Public Services Management, at Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword*Alan D. SokalAlas, the truth is out: my article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which appeared in the spring/summer 1996 issue of the cultural-studies journal Social Text, is a parody. 1 Clearly I owe the editors and readers of Social Text, as well as the wider intellectual community, a non-parodic explanation of my motives and my true views. One (...) of my goals here is to make a small contribution toward a dialogue on the Left between humanists and natural scientists—“two cultures” which, contrary to some optimistic pronouncements (mostly by the former group), are probably farther apart in mentality than at any time in the past fifty years.Like the genre it is meant to satirize—myriad exemplars of which can be found in its reference list—my article is a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever. (Sadly, there are only a handful of the latter: I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn’t have the knack.) I also employed some other strategies that are well-established (albeit sometimes inadvertently) in the genre: appeals to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories passed off as established science; strained and even absurd analogies; rhetoric that sounds good but whose meaning is [End Page 338] ambiguous; and confusion between the technical and everyday senses of English words (for example: linear, nonlinear, local, global, multidimensional, relative, frame of reference, field, anomaly, chaos, catastrophe, logic, irrational, imaginary, complex, real, equality, choice).I should emphasize that all works cited in my article are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented. Indeed, the most hilarious passages in my article were not written by me: they are direct quotes from the Masters.But why did I do it? I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. (If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be “true,” why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it? I don’t aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory.)But my main concern isn’t to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit. Rather, my concern is explicitly political: to combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist/social-constructivist discourse—and more generally a penchant for subjectivism—which is, I believe, inimical to the values and future of the Left. 2 Alan Ryan said it well:It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth.... Once you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power, you’ve had it.... But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess. 3Likewise, Eric Hobsbawm has decriedthe rise of “postmodernist” intellectual fashions in Western universities, particularly in departments of literature and anthropology, which imply that all “facts” claiming objective existence are simply intellectual constructions. In short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction. But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly antipositivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental. 4 [End Page 339](Hobsbawm goes on to show how rigorous historical scholarship can refute the fictions propounded by reactionary nationalists in India, Israel, the Balkans and elsewhere.) And as the acerbic sociologist Stanislav Andreski noted long ago,So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of... (shrink)

What is health policy for? In Health and the Good Society, Alan Cribb addresses this question in a way that cuts across disciplinary boundaries. His core argument is that biomedical ethics should draw upon public health values and ethics; specifically, he argues that everybody has some share of responsibility for health, including a responsibility for promoting greater health equality. In the process, Cribb argues for a major rethink of the whole project of health education.

Samuel Golubchuk was unwittingly at the center of a medical controversy with important ethical ramifications. Mr. Golubchuk, an 84-year-old patient whose precise neurological level of function was open to debate, was being artificially ventilated and fed by a gastrostomy tube prior to his death. According to all reports he was neither brain dead nor in a vegetative state. The physicians directly responsible for his care had requested that they be allowed to remove the patient from life support against the wishes (...) of the patient's family. Concurrently the Manitoba College of Physicians and Surgeons released a statement which states that the final decision to withdraw life support lies with the physician. In our opinion the statement is ethically problematic for a number of reasons. 1. It is an affront to the guiding principles of Western medical ethics: patient autonomy and human freedom. 2. The position of Samuel Golubchuk's physicians and the new statement lack cultural sensitivity towards other traditions. 3. In modern society there exists an erosion of a basic attitude towards the value of life. 4. The ability of physicians to predict life expectancy in terminally ill patients has been shown repeatedly to be quite limited. (shrink)

Günter Wagner’s Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation collects and synthesizes a vast array of empirical data, theoretical models, and conceptual analysis to set out a progressive research program with a central theoretical commitment: the genetic theory of homology. This research program diverges from standard approaches in evolutionary biology, provides sharpened contours to explanations of the origin of novelty, and expands the conceptual repertoire of evolutionary developmental biology. I concentrate on four aspects of the book in this essay review: the genetic (...) theory of homology and character identity networks; the implications for how we explain evolutionary novelties; the expanded set of concepts surrounding homology, and the epistemological conflicts between Wagner’s viewpoint and functionally-oriented evolutionary biology, as well as differences with other Evo–devo researchers. Together these have ramifications for how we interpret different explanatory approaches to evolutionary phenomena and understand relationships between the usefulness of concepts and the reality they represent. (shrink)

Sustainable investment, which integrates social, environmental and ethical issues, has grown from a niche market of individual ethical investors to embrace institutional investors resulting in £764 billion in assets under management in the UK alone [Eurosif, 2008: ‘European SRI Study 2008’ ]. Explaining this growth is complex, involving shifts in personal and collective values, reactions to corporate scandals, scientific and media pronouncements about climate change, Government initiatives, responses from financial markets and the influence of SI innovators in The City of (...) London. The article examines the influence of human agency through interviews with 14 SI champions who have variously been responsible for launching SI funds and changing investment processes and organisational structures in order to enhance SI. Interviewees were asked about their motivations and persuasive strategies, the obstacles they faced and how they overcame them as well as broader implications of SI for financial markets. The following key categories inform the results and the discussion: Values; Conservatism, Antipathy and Incredulity; Optimism and Sympathy from Insiders; The Social and Political Context; The Business Case; Organisational Constraints; Inappropriate forms of Remuneration; Short-termism; The Nature of Capitalism. Three discourses were also identified. The first is the necessity to make a business case for SI; the second is the benefits that SI can bring to the quest of overcoming short-termism; the third is a belief that for SI to have a significant influence, greater government intervention is required. (shrink)

The late 1960s are remembered today as the last time wholesale social upheaval shook Europe and the United States. College students during that tumultuous period—epitomized by the events of May 1968—were as permanently marked in their worldviews as their parents had been by the Depression and World War II. Sociology was at the center of these events, and it changed decisively because of them. The Disobedient Generation collects newly written autobiographies by an international cross-section of well-known sociologists, all of them (...) "children of the ’60s." It illuminates the human experience of living through that decade as apprentice scholars and activists, encountering the issues of class, race, the Establishment, the decline of traditional religion, feminism, war, and the sexual revolution. In each case the interlinked crises of young adulthood, rapid change, and nascent professional careers shaped this generation’s private and public selves. This is an intensely personal collective portrait of a generation in a time of struggle. (shrink)

This article questions the commonly held view that professional ethics is grounded in general ethical principles, in particular, respect for client (or patient) autonomy and beneficence in the treatment of clients (or patients). Although these are admirable as general ethical principles, we argue that there is considerable logical difficulty in applying them to the professional-client relationship. The transition from general principles to professional ethics cannot be made because the intended conclusion applies differently to each of the parties involved, whereas the (...) premise is a general principle that applies equally to both parties. It is widely accepted that professionals are required to recognize that clients or patients possess rights to autonomy that are more than the general rights to personal autonomy accepted in ordinary social life, and that professionals are expected to display beneficence toward their clients that is more than the beneficence expected of anyone in ordinary social life. The comparative component of professional ethics is an intrinsic feature of the professional situation, and thus it cannot be bypassed in working out a proper professional ethics. Thus, we contend, the proper professional treatment of clients or patients has not been explained by appeal to general ethical principles. (shrink)

Occupational fraud frequently involves the direct or indirect participation of professional accountants. To reduce fraud, companies often focus on the incentive/pressure and opportunity legs of the fraud triangle, perhaps believing that rationalization is beyond their control. We argue that rationalization reduction is necessary to minimize occupational fraud. We propose that educators and PA consider incorporating fences as controls to reduce rationalization. Because they focus on compliance and risk avoidance and are non-negotiable, fences appeal to accountant’s Myers Briggs personalities and conventional (...) level of moral development. Educators can teach students about the fences used in practice, and explain how they help new professionals resist pressures and temptations. By adding fences to existing professional guidance, accountants can reduce the likelihood that they will be a party to fraud. (shrink)

This paper is a systematic investigation of motion expressions in programmatic music description. To address issues with defining the Source MOTION and the Target MUSIC, we utilize Gestalt models (Figure-Ground and Source-Path-Goal) while also critically examining the ontological complexity of the Target MUSIC. We also investigate music motion descriptions considering the role of the describer’s perspective and communicative goals. As previous research has demonstrated, an attentional Goal-bias is common in physical motion description, yet this has been found also to lessen (...) due to audience accommodation effects. We investigate whether this also occurs in music description. Using cognitive linguistic frameworks, we conducted an analysis of 21 English speakers’ written descriptions of dynamic orchestral excerpts. All participants gave a description of one excerpt reporting their own personal experiences and the other excerpt reporting the events of the excerpt for a fictional future participant. We find that addressee accommodation shapes the choice of the ontological types of Figures used from being more subjective and creative in describing music for oneself versus being more objective in describing music for others. However, our investigation does not find sufficient evidence for a Goal-bias in music like there is in physical motion event descriptions. (shrink)

Alan Millar; V*—The Idea of Experience, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 75–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

The widespread confusion of Nature with God and "natural" with holy has far-reaching negative consequences, from misinformation about everyday food and health choices to mistaken justifications of sexism, racism, and flawed economic policies.

1.1. A major purpose in nationalizing the provision of health care in the UK was to affect its distribution between people, and, in particular, to minimize the impact of willingness and ability to pay upon that distribution. It has never been clear, however, what alternative distribution rule is to apply. There is no shortage of rhetoric about ‘equality’ and ‘need’, but most of it is vacuous, by which I mean it does not lead to any clear operational guidelines about who (...) should get priority and at whose expense. The closest we have got so far to such explicit guidelines has been the formulae which determine the geographical distribution of NHS funds, the driving force behind which is a notion of need based on relative mortality rates and on the demographic structure. The avowed objective is to bring about equal access for equal need irrespective of where in the UK you happen to be. (shrink)

Studies of the prevalence and contents of codes of conduct in the private sector show that their use to define an ethical environment or culture, and their effective implementation, must be as part of a learning process that requires inculcation, reinforcement and measurement. Consequently, the public sector must realise it cannot look solely to formal codes to revive and sustain public sector values. Alan Doig is Professor of Public Services Management, and John Wilson is Principal Lecturer and Head of (...) the Centre for Public Services Management, at Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University. (shrink)