This research extends our understanding of ethical decision making on the part of leaders by merging social role and self-construal perspectives. Interdependent self-construal is generally seen as enhancing concern for justice and moral values. Across two studies, we tested the prediction that non-leading group members’ interdependent self-construal would be associated with lower levels of unethical decision making on behalf of their group but that, in contrast, this relationship would be weaker for leaders, given their social role. These predictions were experimentally (...) tested by assigning participants to the role of leader or non-leading group member, and assessing the association between their interdependent self-construal and their unethical decision making. Across both studies, interdependence predicted less unethical decision making on behalf of one’s group for non-leading group members. However, the leader role was shown to weaken, and even reverse, this relationship. This research demonstrates that self-construal influences group-based ethical decision making, but that the nature of this influence is moderated by social role. (shrink)

As research focusing on stress-related growth proliferates, links between religion and growth are increasingly reported. However, little research has focused on the role that religious coping plays in subsequent growth from major stressful life events. Findings from three longitudinal studies that examined aspects of religiousness as determinants of stress-related growth, as well as the potential mediation by religious coping, are presented. Results suggest that the influences of religiousness on growth vary by sample and by type of stressor. Further, religious coping (...) was found to mediate influences of religious orientations on growth for students and for older adults dealing with a variety of problems, but was unrelated to growth following bereavement in a second sample of students. Together, these studies provide support for the notion that religiousness influences growth in complex ways, only some of which are mediated through religious coping. Future research considerations are discussed. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory has an unexpected application in philosophy of mind, where it is used by the so-called biosemantic program—also called the teleosemantic program— to account for the representational capacities of neural states and processes in a way that conforms to an overarching scientific naturalism. Biosemantic theories account for the representational capacities of neural states and processes by appealing in particular to their evolutionary function, as that function is determined by a process of natural selection. As a result, biosemantic theories have (...) distinct advantages over other theories of mental representation—e.g., Fodor’s causal theory. Foremost among the advantages of biosemantic theories is their ability to account for the possibility of mental misrepresentation. (shrink)

I present and evaluate the prospects of the biosemantic program, understood as a philosophical attempt to explain the mind’s origins by appealing to something that non-minded organisms and minded organisms have in common: representational capacity. I develop an analogy with ancient attempts to account for the origins of change, clarify the biosemantic program’s aims and methods, and then distinguish two importantly different forms of objection, a priori and a posteriori. I defend the biosemantic program from a priori objections on the (...) grounds that the standard of explanation presupposed by them is inappropriate and leads to absurdities if consistently applied. Once the way is cleared of a priori objections, the success of biosemantics turns on the strength of a posteriori objections, that is, on the program’s empirical adequacy. Here, its prospects are less clear, but I offer reasons, by analogy with chemical combination and other everyday phenomena, to think that minded beings and their representational capacities might well have their origin and explanation in non-minded beings. An evolutionary origin and explanation of mind is plausible, at least as far as naturalistic accounts and explanations go. (shrink)

I describe and articulate the merits of an elegant supplemental exercise that I call “Philosophy in the Wild” (PW), which has students initiating a philosophical dialogue outside the classroom and critically reflecting on the results. The PW exercise is especially effective if used to reinforce philosophic texts which have dialogue as their form or as their subject matter (or both)—for instance, Plato’s Apology and Meno. However, the PW exercise is also an engaging, effective way simply to introduce students to the (...) practice and the value of philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Consensus has it that Putnam-Burge style arguments for content-externalism do not strengthen the case for vehicle-externalism, i.e., the thesis that some mental states include as their parts notebooks, iPhones, and other extra-bodily phenomena. Rowlands and Sprevak, among others, argue that vehicle-externalism gets stronger support from Clark and Chalmers’s parity principle and functionalism, generally. I contest this assessment and thereby give reason to reconsider the support that content-externalism provides the extended mind thesis: although content-externalism does not entail vehicle-externalism, as Rowlands (...) argues, neither does functionalism. The functionalist cannot reject the content-externalist argument for vehicle-externalism on these grounds without undercutting her own.Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Historians and biologists identify the debate between mechanists and vitalists over the nature of life itself with the arguments of Driesch, Loeb, and other prominent voices. But what if the conversation was broader and the consequences deeper for the field? Following the suspicions of Joseph Needham in the 1930s and Francis Crick in the 1960s, we deployed tools of the digital humanities to an old problem in the history of biology. We analyzed over 31,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers and learned that (...) bioexceptionalism participated in a robust discursive landscape throughout subfields of the life sciences, occupied even by otherwise unknown biologists. (shrink)