Neuroscience communication is increasingly taking place on multidirectional social media platforms, creating new opportunities but also calling for critical ethical considerations. Twitter, one of the most popular social media applications in the world, is a leading platform for the dissemination of all information types, including emerging areas of neuroscience such as optogenetics, a technique aimed at the control of specific neurons. Since its discovery in 2005, optogenetics has been featured in the public eye and discussed extensively on social media, but (...) little is known about how this new technique is portrayed and who the users participating in the conversation are. To address this gap, we conducted content analysis of a sample of 1000 tweets mentioning “optogenetics” over a one-year period between 2014 and 2015. We found that academic researchers are the largest group contributing to the conversation, that the tweets often contain links to third-party websites from news organizations and peer-reviewed journals, and that common thematic motifs include the applications of optogenetics specifically for the control of brain activity and the treatment of disease. We also found that the majority of the tweets are neutral in their tone regarding optogenetics. As Twitter serves as a current and dynamic forum for exchange about advances in neuroscience, the conversation about optogenetics on this engaging platform can inform socially-responsive knowledge dissemination efforts in this area. (shrink)

Augmented reality (AR) technologies function to ‘augment’ normal perception by superimposing virtual objects onto an agent’s visual field. The philosophy of augmented reality is a small but growing subfield within the philosophy of technology. Existing work in this subfield includes research on the phenomenology of augmented experiences, the metaphysics of virtual objects, and different ethical issues associated with AR systems, including (but not limited to) issues of privacy, property rights, ownership, trust, and informed consent. This paper addresses some epistemological issues (...) posed by AR systems. I focus on a near-future version of AR technology called the Real-World Web, which promises to radically transform the nature of our relationship to digital information by mixing the virtual with the physical. I argue that the Real-World Web (RWW) threatens to exacerbate three existing epistemic problems in the digital age: the problem of digital distraction, the problem of digital deception, and the problem of digital divergence. The RWW is poised to present new versions of these problems in the form of what I call the augmented attention economy, augmented skepticism, and the problem of other augmented minds. The paper draws on a range of empirical research on AR and offers a phenomenological analysis of virtual objects as perceptual affordances to help ground and guide the speculative nature of the discussion. It also considers a few policy-based and designed-based proposals to mitigate the epistemic threats posed by AR technology. (shrink)

Personal and social norms are well-established predictors of proenvironmental behavior, and past research often discusses the motivational properties of different norms. However, less research has examined how individuals feel after conforming to, or deviating from, a norm. We suggest that emotions may function as norm enforcement tools that reward conformity and punish deviance. As a starting point, we outline the emotions that individuals may experience when conforming to, or deviating from, different norms (i.e., personal norms, descriptive social norms, injunctive social (...) norms), and how these emotions can influence proenvironmental behavior. More research is needed to clarify how emotions facilitate, and possibly mediate, the influence of norms on proenvironmental behavior. (shrink)

Philosophy of language has been witnessing for the last fifteen years or so, if not a turn, at least the rising of a new trend, with its usual methods applied to new non-semantic phenomena linked to language use in the context of politics, and with new methods arising from the distinctive features of the new subject matter. Among these phenomena, dogwhistles have taken somewhat of a center stage (other phenomena include ethnic slurs, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, propaganda and gender-inclusive language, (...) among others). This special issue is devoted to their study. In this brief introduction, we seek to succinctly review the key aspects of the phenomenon. First, we present some intuitive examples; second, we put forward a preliminary characterization of dogwhistles; then we discuss some of the main issues raised by these examples, as well as some basic notions found in the literature. We close by presenting an overview of the articles to be found in the current issue. (shrink)

Do Russellian propositions have their constituents as parts? One reason for thinking not is that if they did, they would generate apparent counterexamples to plausible mereological principles. As Frege noted, they would be in tension with the transitivity of parthood. A certain small rock is a part of Etna but not of the proposition that Etna is higher than Vesuvius. So, if Etna were a part of the given proposition, parthood would fail to be transitive. As William Bynoe has noted (...) (speaking of facts rather than propositions), they would seem to violate certain supplementation principles. Consider the singular proposition, concerning identity, that it is identical with itself. Given the relevant form of Russellianism, this proposition would have identity as a proper part, but it would not have any parts disjoint from identity, and indeed it would not have even a single pair of disjoint parts, in violation of various supplementation principles. This chapter offers a unified solution to the problems about transitivity and supplementation. One key ingredient in the solution is the view that parthood is a four-place relation expressed by ‘x at y is a part of z at w’. Another key ingredient is the view that the semantic contents of predicates and sentential connectives have ‘slots’ or ‘argument positions’ in them. (Both ingredients are independently motivated elsewhere.) Four-place analogues of the transitivity and supplementation principles are set out, and it is argued that these are not threatened by the examples from Frege and Bynoe. (shrink)

Environmental philosophy is one of the exciting new fields of philosophy to emerge in the last forty years. "Understanding Environmental Philosophy" presents a comprehensive, critical analysis of contemporary philosophical approaches to current ecological concerns. Key ideas are explained, placed in their broader cultural, religious, historical, political and philosophical context, and their environmental policy implications are outlined. Central ideas and concepts about environmental value, individual wellbeing, ecological holism and the metaphysics of nature set the stage for a discussion of how to (...) establish moral rules and priorities, and whether it is possible to transcend human-centred views of the world. The reader is also helped with an annotated guide to further reading, questions for discussion and revision as well as boxed studies highlighting key concepts and theoretical material. A clear and accessible introduction to this most dynamic of subjects, "Understanding Environmental Philosophy" will be invaluable for a wide range of readers. (shrink)

We wholeheartedly agree with Schmidt and colleagues’ efforts to promote equity in intensive care unit triage. We also take issue with their characterisation of the New Jersey allocation framework for ICU beds and ventilators, which is modelled after the multi-principle allocation framework we developed early in the pandemic. They characterise it as a two-criterion allocation framework and claim—without evidence—that it will ‘compound disadvantage for black patients’. However, the NJ triage framework—like the model allocation policy we developed—actually contains four allocation criteria: (...) the two criteria that the authors mentioned and two criteria that they failed to mention which we included to promote equity: giving priority to frontline essential workers and giving priority to younger patients. These omissions are problematic both for reasons of factual accuracy and because the two criteria they failed to acknowledge would likely mitigate rather than exacerbate racial disparities during triage. (shrink)

“[A] murder prosecution is a poor way to design an ethical and moral code for doctors,” observed the California Court of Appeal in 1983. Yet, physicians who have chosen to help terminally ill patients to commit suicide have trespassed on illegal ground. When skilled medical care fails to relieve the pain of terminally ill patients, some people believe that physicians may assist in these suicides. Others reject any kind of physician involvement. The debate on assisted suiczide and active euthanasia has (...) focused on whether these acts can ever be acceptable. We propose to shift the debate to a less divisive issue: whether a caring physician who provides a suffering and ill patient with a prescription for a lethal dose of medication should be prosecuted as a felon. Even assisted suicide's opponents may object to such criminal prosecution. We propose to modify existing criminal laws to give physicians who assist their terminally ill patients in suicide, under carefully defined circumstances, a legal defense against criminal charges. (shrink)

Through a selection of primary sources, this article demonstrates the political and legal languages which articulated monarchist ideas in interwar Yugoslavia. Variations on the theme emerged in different periods. First, the national and so democratic character of the monarch and monarchy was a prevalent image at the end of the First World War and in the first decade of the Yugoslav state’s existence. During the domestic political crises in the second half of the 1920s, the language of monarchism shifted toward (...) discourses of stability and public order. After the declaration of the royal dictatorship in January 1929, the language of monarchism became fully invested in expressing the monarch’s absolute political authority, legally inviolable character, and the resulting ‘unity of state and nation’. For the political Right, the king embodied the spirit of integral Yugoslavism. While the language of monarchism could serve disparate political ideologies – as in the liberal monarchist emigration after spring 1941 – it was rather primarily linked to the political visions of the Right in the final decade of interwar Yugoslavia. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a significant increase in stakeholder pressure on firms to be not only economically sustainable but also from an environmental and social perspective. Besides operational changes in practices and products companies have reacted toward this increased pressure from a strategic perspective through structural changes of their top management team. A recent addition to the TMT has been the appointment of the chief officer of corporate social responsibility. In this paper, we take a behavioral perspective and investigate how (...) the employment of a chief officer of CSR to the TMT impact on firm performance. Specifically, we explore how certain characteristics of the newly appointed chief executive of CSR impact on a firm’s financial performance. We collected secondary, longitudinal data of listed companies in the United States. Results indicate that appointing a chief executive of CSR does under certain conditions and characteristics result in financial performance benefits. Furthermore, the greatest financial performance benefits can be achieved if the appointee is female and has a CSR functional background. (shrink)

Man's belief in God is often contrasted with man's disbelief, Atheism; but the nature of human belief is contrastable with the nature of the belief of demons. A point of contrast lies in the consequences of the different sort of reasons men and demons must be understood to have. One consequence has to do with the vision of the world, seeing the world as God's creation, which men are expected to achieve and demons are not. The logic of the ?seeing (...) as? formula is explored and found wanting even though it seems inescapable in connection with human belief. In the end human belief appears more peculiar than demonic. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBecause negative emotional memories are often disruptive, we conducted two experiments to reduce these memories by using a retroactive interference paradigm. In both experiments, participants were presented with highly negative pictures followed by highly negative, moderately negative, or neutral pictures or a rest period. Then, following a filler task, participants took a surprise free recall test, recalling pictures from List 1 in Experiment 1 and from both List 1 and List 2 in Experiment 2. In both experiments, recall of List (...) 1 was reduced by List 2, indicating that RI was present. Furthermore, in Experiment 1, RI was similar between moderately negative and highly negative List 2 whereas in Experiment 2, RI was greater for highly negative List 2 than moderately negative List 2. These results showed that RI can be used to reduce negative emotional memories by making these memories inaccessible. (shrink)

We review four constraints we judge to be necessary to the high-fidelity apprehension and description of inner experience: cleaving to specific moments, cleaving to pristine inner experience, ….

The following article proposes an empirical study to explore communication strategies in the Cosa Nostra. Psychological studies on the characteristics of the language within the criminal organization are undoubtedly recent, but crucial to thoroughly understand the characteristics of implicit and explicit communication it adopts in the various contexts it works, as well as the power and value they assume. The data we have obtained from some videos concerning interviews and police interrogations to men of honor have been analyzed through a (...) method that refers to the grounds of qualitative research in clinical psychology, the Grounded Theory by Glaser and Strauss. The analysis we have carried out and its relevant data show us a world of the Mafia where the care for linguistic choices, for both form and contents, is characterized as a crucial activity, even when words are replaced by silence or gestures. (shrink)

Moderate epistemic akrasia is the state a subject is in when she believes that p and suspends judgment about whether her evidence supports p. In this article it is argued that, given a certain understanding of the attitude of suspension of judgment, moderate epistemic akrasia is doxastically irrational. The paper starts with a brief introduction that makes explicit some background notions and clarifies the dialectics of the debate. Second, the well-known distinction between propositional and doxastic rationality is introduced and some (...) cases of improper basing are discussed. Third, two different cases are considered in which one might argue that moderate epistemic akrasia is doxastically rational, and it is argued that none is successful. Fourth, several objections are presented and answered. Finally, some conclusions are drawn. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Metafictive utterances raise a kind of intuitions that pose a problem for a view that combines a referentialist approach to proper names with an antirealist stance on fictional characters. In this article I attempt to provide a solution to this problem within the framework of mental files. According to my position, metafictive utterances literally express an incomplete proposition while pragmatically conveying a complete one, which accounts for the intuitions of truthfulness. The proposition pragmatically conveyed is ‘metarepresentational', I'll argue, in (...) the sense that it is about a mental representation or mental file. RESUMO As emissões metafictivas despertam intuições de verdade, as quais representam um problema para uma teoria que combine uma posição referencialista quanto aos nomes próprios com um compromisso antirrealista quanto às personagens de ficção. O objetivo deste artigo é proporcionar uma solução para este problema no âmbito da teoria de arquivos mentais. De acordo com a posição desenvolvida, enquanto as emissões metafictivas expressam literalmente uma proposição incompleta, comunicam pragmaticamente uma proposição completa, a qual explica as intuições de verdade. A proposição pragmaticamente comunicada, argumentarei, é "metarrepresentacional", no sentido de que é sobre uma representação mental ou arquivo mental. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article advances a multidimensional semantics for slurs, according to which they express a standard at-issue content along with a conventional implicature. By contrast with existent conventional implicature accounts (McCready, 2010), it is argued that the not at-issue content of slurs is a property, instead of a proposition. When complemented with a dynamic pragmatic framework (Portner, 2004), the view implies that an utterance containing a slur carries two different discursive functions, that is, it updates two different components of context: (...) the at-issue content updates the common ground; the not at-issue content updates the To-Do List. It is then showed how the view explains the way in which uses of slurs are capable of modifying permissibility facts and hence of bringing harm to their targets. Finally, the article shows how the present account deals with different conversational moves that slurs make available like those of propaganda, attack, complicity or appropriation. (shrink)

I formulate a theory of persistence in the endurantist family and pose a problem for the conjunction of this theory with orthodox versions of special or general relativity. The problem centers around the question: Where are things?

The article addresses the question of how should scientific peers revise their beliefs (if at all) upon recognized disagreement. After presenting the basics of peer disagreement in sections 1 and 2, we focus, in section 3, on a concrete case of scientific disagreement, to wit, the dispute over the evidential status of randomized control trials in medical practice. The examination of this case motivates the idea that some scientific disagreements permit a steadfast reaction. In section 4, we support this conclusion (...) by providing a normative argument in the same direction; if we are correct, typical reasons for conciliation are absent in this kind of scientific disagreements. (shrink)

Existing puzzles about coinciding objects can be divided into two types, corresponding to the manner in which they bear upon the endurantism v. perdurantism debate. Puzzles of the first type, which involve temporary spatial co-location, can be solved simply by abandoning endurantism in favor of perdurantism, whereas those of the second type, which involve career-long spatial co-location, remain equally puzzling on both views. I show that the possibility of backward time travel would give rise to a new type of puzzle. (...) The new puzzles confront perdurantists and can be solved just by shifting to endurantism. (shrink)

Relativity theory is often said to support something called ‘the four-dimensional view of reality’. But there are at least three different views that sometimes go by this name. One is ‘spacetime unitism’, according to which there is a spacetime manifold, and if there are such things as points of space or instants of time, these are just spacetime regions of different sorts: thus space and time are not separate manifolds. A second is the B-theory of time, according to which the (...) past, present, and future are all equally real and there is nothing metaphysically special about the present. A third is perdurantism, according to which persisting material objects are made up of different temporal parts located at different times. We sketch routes from relativity to unitism and to the B-theory. We then discuss some routes to perdurantism, via the B-theory and via unitism. (shrink)

Slot theory is the view that (i) there exist such entities as argument places, or ‘slots’, in universals, and that (ii) a universal u is n-adic if and only if there are n slots in u. I argue that those who take properties and relations to be abundant, fine-grained, non-set-theoretical entities face pressure to be slot theorists. I note that slots permit a natural account of the notion of adicy. I then consider a series of ‘slot-free’ accounts of that notion (...) and argue that each of them has significant drawbacks. (shrink)

Forms of collective leadership, such as Distributed Leadership, have become increasingly important. The need for measurement of the variables involved in the delegation processes, represents a new challenge for organizations that want to ensure high-level working. The present research aimed to validate the Italian version of the Distributed Leadership Agency (DLA) and verify its applicability in different contexts. The study involved all the employees of an Italian public Hospital, which were selected to complete a survey on organizational perceptions. The sample (...) comprised 704 employees (doctors, nurses, clerks, staff workers, healthcare assistants, consultants, management). Multiple Confirmatory Factor Analyses (Maximum Likelihood) have been computed to explore the factorial structure of the DLA, along with associations with other work outcomes. Results clarified that the Italian DLA respects the tri-factorial structure of the construct, suggested by Yukl (2002), with good fit indexes and reliability; moreover, in line with the literature, DLA was strongly related to satisfaction, commitment, and trust. Results contribute to underline the robustness of the construct of distributed leadership agency in different cultural sectors, and provide a useful tool to be adopted in the Italian context. (shrink)

Concepts related to the nature of science have been considered an important part of scientific literacy as reflected in its inclusion in curriculum documents. A significant amount of science education research has focused on improving learners’ understanding of NOS. One approach that has often been advocated is an explicit and reflective approach. Some researchers have used the history of science to provide learners with explicit and reflective experiences with NOS concepts. Previous research on using the history of science in science (...) instruction has approached HOS in many different ways and consequently has led to inconsistent findings regarding its utility for improving learning. One promising method for overcoming this inconsistency and teaching NOS with more traditional science content is using stories based in the history of science. A mixed method approach was used to determine whether and how the use of science stories influences undergraduates’ understanding of NOS. Particular attention was paid to the explanations that students used for their understandings. Intervention and control groups completed the Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry instrument. The intervention group was taught using two historical narratives while the control group was taught using minimal history. A subset of both groups was also interviewed regarding their SUSSI responses and their experiences in the course. Results indicated that the introduction of science stories helped participants gain a better understanding of the role of imagination and creativity in science. Participants mentioned science stories in their explanations for why they changed towards more informed views on SUSSI items related to imagination and creativity. The current study adds to a growing body of literature regarding the use of stories in the science classroom. (shrink)

Informed by Critical Race Theory, this quantitative study supports civic educators in understanding the role of classroom climate and racial identity in students’ civic engagement during a statewide middle school civics mandate (n = 4707). Findings reveal that students of color experience higher civic engagement and lower civic attitude scores than white-identifying peers, after controlling for school, classroom, and affluence indicators. Students’ perception of whiteness (or perhaps majority status) appeared to correlate with positive civic knowledge and civic attitude, but relative (...) civic inaction. These findings suggest differences in civic outcomes as early as middle school between white-identifying students and students of color. Such differences offer implications for civic education interventions that address not only effective instruction, but civic inequities, students’ perceived agency, and curricular content. (shrink)

La fascinante vida intelectual y espiritual de Gastón Soublette Asmussen lo ha vuelto un renombrado filósofo en Chile, quien fue galardonado recientemente con el Premio Nacional de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales año 2023. Hoy, con sus 97 años, este musicólogo, esteta y experto en filosofía oriental y teología cristiana es uno de los referentes más importantes en el acontecer intelectual chileno. En esta entrevista se exploraron las diversas facetas de su vida, desde el inicio de su actividad docente y académica, (...) hasta las motivaciones existenciales que lo llevaron a explorar los temas de su investigación –como la cultura tradicional indígena, el folclore, la música, la teología y las espiritualidades orientales–. Con más de una docena de libros publicados, Soublette ha dejado una profunda huella en centenares de alumnos y alumnas. En esta ocasión, Soublette compartió sus experiencias y aprendizajes a lo largo de los años, y destacó la importancia de la cultura tradicional indígena y su valor para la sociedad contemporánea. Nos explicó cómo estas culturas ancestrales pueden ofrecer una visión profunda y significativa de la existencia humana, alentando un mayor respeto por la naturaleza y una conexión más profunda con nuestra diversidad espiritual humana. El papel de la espiritualidad ocupó un lugar destacado en la conversación, y Soublette resaltó la importancia de preservar estas expresiones espirituales como una forma de mantener viva la identidad y la historia de un pueblo. Además, señaló cómo la búsqueda espiritual puede ser una herramienta poderosa para la transformación personal y el despertar de saberes, más allá del academicismo dominante. En cuanto a la filosofía oriental, Soublette compartió su profundo conocimiento sobre estas tradiciones. Habló sobre conceptos como el zen, el taoísmo y el budismo, y cómo pueden brindar una perspectiva única sobre la existencia humana y el propósito de la vida. En resumen, la entrevista con Gastón Soublette fue un viaje fascinante a través de su vida y su amplio conocimiento sobre filosofía oriental, cultura tradicional indígena, folclore, música, teología cristiana y espiritualidades orientales. Sus palabras ofrecieron una valiosa perspectiva sobre la importancia de estas disciplinas y cómo pueden enriquecer nuestras vidas, fomentando una conexión más profunda con nosotros mismos, los demás y el mundo que nos rodea. (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that the problem of personal identity over time is not metaphysically deep. Perhaps the debate between the rival theories is somehow empty or is a ‘merely verbal dispute’. Perhaps questions about personal identity are ‘nonsubstantive’ and fit more for conceptual analysis and close attention to usage than for theorizing in the style of serious metaphysics, theorizing guided by considerations of systematicity, parsimony, explanatory power, and aiming for knowledge about the objective structure of the world. I discuss (...) a thesis about consciousness according to which there are perfectly natural phenomenal properties. Although I do not argue for this thesis, I believe that it is plausible, whether or not physicalism is true. Given the thesis, there are deep, substantive questions about which individuals or pluralities instantiate the relevant phenomenal properties. Equally substantive questions can then be asked about the duration and other spatiotemporal characteristics of those individuals or pluralities, both in actual cases and in hypothetical puzzle cases adapted from the personal identity literature. I suggest that, at least prima facie, these questions interact with our future-directed egoistic concern in much the same way that the personal identity question is often thought to. As a slogan: “you give me substantive, determinate facts about consciousness; I give you substantive, determinate facts about personal identity”. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 51, Issue 5, Page 42-47, September‐October 2021.

Endurantism, the view that material objects are wholly present at each moment of their careers, is under threat from supersubstantivalism, the view that material objects are identical to spacetime regions. I discuss three compromise positions. They are alike in that they all take material objects to be composed of spacetime points or regions without being identical to any such point or region. They differ in whether they permit multilocation and in whether they generate cases of mereologically coincident entities.

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to Schneiderman and colleagues’ opinions on the recent Multiorganization Policy Statement, “An Official ATS/AACN/ACCP/ESICM/SCCM Policy Statement: Responding to Requests for Potentially Inappropriate Treatments in Intensive Care Units”. We will first point out three areas in which Schneiderman and colleagues seem to perceive a disagreement where there is none, then we will respond to their main criticisms of the Multiorganization Policy Statement. In doing so, we will point out areas in which we believe Schneiderman and (...) colleagues have either misunderstood or misrepresented the statement. First, we agree with Schneiderman and... (shrink)

This research aims to examine access to medical treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic for people living with disabilities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the practical and ethical problems of allocating limited medical resources such as intensive care unit beds and ventilators became critical. Although different countries have proposed different guidelines to manage this emergency, these proposed criteria do not sufficiently consider people living with disabilities. People living with disabilities are therefore at a higher risk of exclusion from medical treatments as physicians (...) tend to assume they have poor quality of life, whereas access to medical treatment should be based on several parameters, including clinical data and prognosis. However, the COVID-19 pandemic shifts the medical paradigm from person-centred medicine to community-centred medicine, challenging the main ethical theories. We reviewed the main guidelines and recommendations for resources allocation and examined their position toward persons with disabilities. Based on our findings, we propose criteria for not discriminating against people with disabilities in allocating resources. The shift from person-centred to community-centred medicine offers opportunities but also risks sacrificing the most vulnerable people. The principle of reasonable accommodation must always be considered to guarantee the rights of persons with disabilities. (shrink)

The evolutionary origins of deception and its functional role in our species is a major focus of research in the science of human origins. Several hypotheses have been proposed for its evolution, often packaged under either the Social Brain Hypothesis, which emphasizes the role that the evolution of our social systems may have played in scaffolding our cognitive traits, and the Foraging Brain Hypothesis, which emphasizes how changes in the human dietary niche were met with subsequent changes in cognition to (...) facilitate foraging of difficult-to-acquire foods. Despite substantive overlap, these hypotheses are often presented as competing schools of thought, and there have been few explicitly proposed theoretical links unifying the two. Utilizing cross-cultural data gathered from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), we identify numerous (n = 357) examples of the application of deception toward prey across 145 cultures. By comparing similar behaviors in nonhuman animals that utilize a hunting strategy known as aggressive mimicry, we suggest a potential pathway through which the evolution of deception may have taken place. Rather than deception evolving as a tactic for deceiving conspecifics, we suggest social applications of deception in humans could have evolved from an original context of directing these behaviors toward prey. We discuss this framework with regard to the evolution of other mental traits, including language, Theory of Mind, and empathy. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Armstrong’s account of attachment-based claims to natural resources, the kind of rights that follow from attachment-based claims, and the limits we should impose on such claims. We hope to clarify how and why attachment matters in the discourse on resource rights by presenting three challenges to Armstrong’s theory. First, we question the normative basis for certain attachment claims, by trying to distinguish more clearly between different kinds of attachment and other kinds of claims. Second, we (...) highlight the need to supplement Armstrong’s account with a theory of how to weigh different attachment claims so as to establish the normative standing that different kinds of attachment claims should have. Third, we propose that sustainability must be a necessary requirement for making attachment claims to natural resources legitimate. Based on these three challenges and the solutions we propose, we argue that attachment claims are on the one hand narrower than Armstrong suggests, while on the other hand they can justify more far-reaching rights to control than Armstrong initially considers, because of the particular weight that certain attachment claims have. (shrink)

concepts typically are defined in terms of lacking physical or perceptual referents. We argue instead that they are not devoid of perceptual information because knowledge of real-world situations is an important component of learning and using many abstract concepts. Although the relationship between perceptual information and abstract concepts is less straightforward than for concrete concepts, situation-based perceptual knowledge is part of many abstract concepts. In Experiment 1, participants made lexical decisions to abstract words that were preceded by related and unrelated (...) pictures of situations. For example, share was preceded by a picture of two girls sharing a cob of corn. When pictures were presented for 500 ms, latencies did not differ. However, when pictures were presented for 1,000 ms, decision latencies were significantly shorter for abstract words preceded by related versus unrelated pictures. Because the abstract concepts corresponded to the pictured situation as a whole, rather than a single concrete object or entity, the necessary relational processing takes time. In Experiment 2, on each trial, an abstract word was presented for 250 ms, immediately followed by a picture. Participants indicated whether or not the picture showed a normal situation. Decision latencies were significantly shorter for pictures preceded by related versus unrelated abstract words. Our experiments provide evidence that knowledge of events and situations is important for learning and using at least some types of abstract concepts. That is, abstract concepts are grounded in situations, but in a more complex manner than for concrete concepts. Although people's understanding of abstract concepts certainly includes knowledge gained from language describing situations and events for which those concepts are relevant, sensory and motor information experienced during real-life events is important as well. (shrink)