[opening paragraph]: Drs. Ramachandran and Hirstein break new ground in ‘The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience', by setting out an unprecedented theory of how the brain processes and responds to art. There is much to be learned here about vision, the act of seeing and its relationship to the body's limbic system.

Her analysis deals with the role of narcissism and idealization in the formation of a love object. She accounts for the role of the death drive by coining the term "love/hate.".

This joint response to the roundtable takes the form of a written dialogue, based on longer conversations via video link and instant messaging. The written dialogue seems an especially apt format for this response, so interconnected is it with the traditions of utopian thinking from Plato onward, and one which moreover has much to do with utopian heuristics.

Epistemologists routinely distinguish between two kinds of justification or rationality – the propositional and the doxastic kind – in order to characterize importantly different ways in which an attitude can be justified or rational for a person. I argue that these notions, as they are commonly understood, are well suited to capture rationality judgments about the attitudes that agents reach as conclusions of their reasoning. Yet, these notions are ill-suited to capture rationality judgments about attitudes that agents form while their (...) reasoning is still in progress. In fact, we currently lack any suitable theory of rationality that lets us capture the ways in which we evaluate the rationality of such transitional attitudes, even though they are ubiquitous. I propose to capture these rationality judgments by introducing a new notion of rationality that is orthogonal to the propositional/doxastic distinction, which I call pro tem rationality. This new notion can be integrated with both traditional and formal ways of characterizing rationality or justification. It can be used to enlighten debates about logical and empirical learning, higher-order evidence, and the epistemology of philosophy, among others. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel answer to the question of what attitude agents should adopt when they receive misleading higher-order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. The answer builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning, called terminal attitudes, and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning, called transitional attitudes. Terminal and transitional attitudes differ both in their descriptive and (...) in their normative properties. When an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly to a belief or credence towards p, then their attitude towards p is no longer justified as a terminal attitude towards p, but it can still be justified as a transitional attitude. This view, which I call the unmooring view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation. (shrink)

In this opinionated review, I draw attention to some of the contributions reinforcement learning can make to questions in the philosophy of mind. In particular, I highlight reinforcement learning's foundational emphasis on the role of reward in agent learning, and canvass two ways in which the framework may advance our understanding of perception and motivation.

Spoken language consists of a linear sequence of units, from which the existence of particular underlying hierarchical processing mechanisms is inferred. Uddén et al. use graph theory to provide a framework for describing the possible structural relationships that may underlie a linear output sequence. Being more explicit in defining different structures can help identifying and testing for such structures in AGL experiments, as well as help showing how behavioral and neuroimaging data reveals signatures of hierarchical processing in humans.

In response to the lack of empirical studies examining the internal disclosure behavior in the Chinese context, this study tested a whistleblowing -decision-making process among employees in the Chinese banking industry. For would-be whistleblowers, positive affect and organizational ethical culture were hypothesized to enhance the expected efficacy of their whistleblowing intention, by providing collective norms concerning legitimate, management-sanctioned behavior. Questionnaire surveys were collected from 364 employees in 10 banks in the Hangzhou City, China. By and large, the findings supported the (...) hypotheses. Issues of whistleblowing in the Chinese context and implications were discussed. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should distinguish two different kinds of imaginative vividness: vividness of mental images and vividness of imaginative experiences. Philosophy has focussed on mental images, but distinguishing more complex vivid imaginative experiences from vivid mental images can help us understand our intuitions concerning the notion as well as the explanatory power of vividness. In particular, it can help us understand the epistemic role imagination can play on the one hand and our emotional engagement with literary fiction on (...) the other hand. (shrink)

In this paper I trace Husserl’s transformation of his notion of phantasy from its strong leanings towards empiricism into a transcendental phenomenology of imagination. Rejecting the view that this account is only more incompatible with contemporary neuroscientific research, I instead claim that the transcendental suspension of naturalistic (or scientific) pretensions precisely enables cooperation between the two distinct realms of phenomenology and science. In particular, a transcendental account of phantasy can disclose the specific accomplishments of imagination without prematurely deciding upon a (...) particular scientific paradigm for its experimental investigation; a decision that is best left to the sciences themselves. (shrink)

In this paper 1 argue that it would be unprincipled to withhold mental predicates from our behavioural duplicates however unlike us they are “on the inside.” My arguments are unusual insofar as they rely neither on an implicit commitment to logical behaviourism in any of its various forms nor to a verificationist theory of meaning. Nor do they depend upon prior metaphysical commitments or to philosophical “intuitions”. Rather, in assembling reminders about how the application of our consciousness and propositional attitude (...) concepts are ordinarily defended, 1 argue on explanatory and moral grounds that they cannot be legitimately withheld from creatures who behave, and who would continue to behave, like us. I urge that we should therefore reject the invitation to revise the application of these concepts in the ways that would be required by recent proposals in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

I argue for the role of reinforcement learning in the philosophy of mind. To start, I make several assumptions about the nature of reinforcement learning and its instantiation in minds like ours. I then review some of the contributions of reinforcement learning methods have made across the so-called 'decision sciences.' Finally, I show how principles from reinforcement learning can shape philosophical debates regarding the nature of perception and characterisations of desire.

We give Scott sentences for certain computable groups, and we use index set calculations as a way of checking that our Scott sentences are as simple as possible. We consider finitely generated groups and torsion-free abelian groups of finite rank. For both kinds of groups, the computable ones all have computable \ Scott sentences. Sometimes we can do better. In fact, the computable finitely generated groups that we have studied all have Scott sentences that are “computable d-\” sentence and a (...) computable \ sentence). In [9], this was shown for the finitely generated free groups. Here we show it for all finitely generated abelian groups, and for the infinite dihedral group. Among the computable torsion-free abelian groups of finite rank, we focus on those of rank 1. These are exactly the additive subgroups of \. We show that for some of these groups, the computable \ Scott sentence is best possible, while for others, there is a computable d-\ Scott sentence. (shrink)

Climate change evokes different emotions in people. Recently, climate emotions have become a matter of normative scrutiny in the public debate. This phenomenon, which we refer to as the normativization of climate emotions, manifests at two levels. At the individual level, people are faced with affective dilemmas, situations where they are genuinely uncertain about what is the right way to feel in the face of climate change. At the collective level, the public debate reflects disagreement about which emotions are appropriate (...) to feel in the climate context. The aim of this paper is to examine the normative reasons in favour of different climate emotions by combining normative criteria from philosophy and psychology, such as rationality-based and consequentialist ones. We conclude that these criteria provide partial reasons for or against different climate emotions and that the suitability of each criterion will depend on various considerations, including the specific object that the emotion is directed to. We suggest that emotional disagreement in climate contexts may generate distrust, potentially hindering cooperation for climate action. We propose that we can ease challenges like this if we come to terms with the complex nature of climate emotions and their normative justification. (shrink)

Resumo: O problema da perversão da comunidade social pela propriedade privada se tornara, para Marx, com o estudo dos socialistas utópicos e especialmente de Proudhon, bastante claro: não sendo um desenvolvimento necessário, e sim casual, a propriedade privada - e a cisão entre interesse particular e interesse geral dela proveniente - poderia ser subsumida. O presente artigo visa a demonstrar como, na busca de um republicanismo de tom rousseauniano e crítico ao liberalismo burguês, Karl Marx flertou com a crítica dos (...) comunistas à propriedade privada. Para tanto, perpassa cinco artigos redigidos para a Gazeta Renana - o artigo de defesa contra o kantiano Hermes, a polêmica com o socialista Moses Hess, a resposta à Gazeta de Augsburg, o artigo de crítica às resoluções da VI Assembleia da Província do Reno e o artigo “Sobre a lei do roubo de lenha” - e, ainda, a crítica de Proudhon à propriedade privada.: Through his study of the utopian socialists, and especially of Proudhon, the problem of the perversion of the social community by private property became quite clear to Marx: if private property - and the split between private interest and general interest originating from it - it is not a necessary development, but an incidental one, it can be subsumed. This article aims to demonstrate how, in search of a Rousseauian republicanism and a critique of bourgeois liberalism, Karl Marx flirted with the communists’ critique of private property. We discuss Proudhon’s critique of private property and five articles Mark wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung: the article against the Kantian Hermes, the controversy with the socialist Moses Hess, the reply to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, the critique of the resolutions of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly, and the “Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood”. (shrink)

Managers tasked with organizational change often face irreconcilable demands on how to enact justice—situations we call _justice conundrums_. Drawing on interviews held with managers before and after a planned large-scale change, we identify specific conundrums and illustrate how managers grapple with these through three prototypical paths. Among our participants, the paths increasingly diverged over time, culminating in distinct career decisions. Based on our findings, we develop an integrative process model that illustrates how managers grapple with justice conundrums. Our contributions are (...) threefold. First, we elucidate three types of justice conundrums that managers may encounter when enacting justice in the context of planned organizational change (the justice intention-action gap, competing justice expectations, and the justice of care vs. managerial-strategic justice) and show how managers handle them differently. Second, drawing on the motivated cognition and moral disengagement literature, we illustrate how cognitive mechanisms coalesce to allow managers to soothe their moral (self-) concerns when grappling with these conundrums. Third, we show how motivated justice intentions ensuing from specific justice motives, moral emotions, and circles of moral regard predict the types of justice conundrums managers face and the paths they take to grapple with them. (shrink)

Modern societies are characterized by group-based hierarchies. Similar to attackers, disadvantaged-group members wish to change the status quo; like defenders, advantaged-group members wish to protect it. However, the psychological arrays that are typical of disadvantaged- and advantaged-group members are opposite to those of attackers and defenders – suggesting that the Attacker-Defender Game does not capture the dynamics between advantaged and disadvantaged groups.

This article documents a moment in history when poor and working-class white boys and men are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the “Other” as a means of framing identities. Drawing on two independent qualitative studies, the authors investigate distinct locations where poor and working-class boys and men invent, relate to, and distance from marginalized groups in an effort to create self. First the authors look at an ethnography of “the Freeway boys,” a community of urban white working-class (...) high school boys who must deal with the economic ravagement of their neighborhood and their insecure place in a world different than that of their fathers. Next, the authors draw from a large-scale survey of young adults to hear how a combined sample of urban poor and working-class white men narrate identities that are carved explicitly out of territory bordered by white women and African American men. Across sites, the authors theorize how high schools and workplaces both, in part, create white masculinities and interrupt them, at a time when white working-class boys and men feel under siege. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Biomedical and philosophical traditions postulate the experience of pain either as quantifiable or as sociocultural phenomena. This critical assessment offers a close reading of Lara Parker’s Vagina Problems: Endometriosis, Painful Sex, and Other Taboo Topics (2020) and Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain (2018), analyzing the authors’ use of language as a tool to comprehend and communicate pain. Norman’s and Parker’s memoirs narrate the lived experience of endometriosis, a condition diagnosed (...) almost exclusively in women and characterized by chronic pain. The essay looks at how metaphors are employed in living and narrating endometriosis in medical, social, and cultural settings that are highly skeptical of women’s pain and trace a shift in the use of pain metaphors towards an acceptance of the pain experience, which is conceptualized as empowering by the climax of the narrative. (shrink)

He tried to look into her face, to find out what she thought, but she was smelling the lilac and the lilies of the valley and did not know herself what she was thinking—what she ought to say or do.OblomovMuch of modern and contemporary philosophy of mind in the ‘analytic’ tradition has presupposed, since Descartes, what might be called a realist view about the mind and the mental. According to this view there are independently existing, determinate items that are the (...) truth-conferrers of our ascriptions of mental predicates. The view is also a cognitivist one insofar as it holds that when we correctly ascribe such a predicate to an individual the correctness consists in the discovery of a determinate fact of the matter about the state the individual is in—a state which is somehow cognized by the ascriber. Disputes have arisen about the nature of the truth-conferrers and about the status and the nature of the individual's own authority about the state he is in. A dissenting position in philosophy of mind would have to be handled carefully. It would, most importantly, need to allow for the objectivity of ascriptions of mental predicates at least insofar as it made sense to reject some and accept others on appropriate grounds. Perhaps such a position in the philosophy of mind can be likened in at least one way to what David Wiggins has characterized as a doctrine of ‘cognitive underdetermination’ about moral or practical judgments. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a literary-critical reading of Modernity and the Holocaust, arguing that Bauman’s non-Hobbesian ethics is linked to a form of Orphic authorship. I contextualize this reading with a study of three literary authors: W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss and Janina Bauman, and their respective versions of this post-Holocaust authorship. At stake is the drama of the forbidden gaze, the moment when Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, killing her a second time. Using Levinas’ ethics and his scenario (...) of recognition, Bauman re-writes this fateful gaze as a loving gaze, implicitly proposing a counter-model to the Schmittian gaze — always ready to recognize the enemy, always ready to kill. (shrink)

© JNCCN-Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.Background: Next-generation tumor sequencing panels, which include multiple established and novel targets across cancers, are emerging in oncology practice, but lack formal positive coverage by US payers. Lack of coverage may impact access and adoption. This study identified challenges of NGTS coverage by private payers.Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 NGTS experts on potential NGTS benefits, and with 10 major payers, representing more than 125,000,000 enrollees, on NGTS coverage considerations. We used the (...) framework approach of qualitative research for study design and thematic analyses and simple frequencies to further describe findings.Results: All interviewed payers see potential NGTS benefits, but all noted challenges to formal coverage: 80% state that inherent features of NGTS do not fit the medical necessity definition required for coverage, 70% view NGTS as a bundle of targets versus comprehensive tumor characterization and may evaluate each target individually, and 70% express skepticism regarding new evidence methods proposed for NGTS. Fifty percent of payers expressed sufficient concerns about NGTS adoption and implementation that will preclude their ability to issue positive coverage policies.Conclusions: Payers perceive that NGTS holds significant promise but, in its current form, poses disruptive challenges to coverage policy frameworks. Proactive multidisciplinary efforts to define the direction for NGTS development, evidence generation, and incorporation into coverage policy are necessary to realize its promise and provide patient access. This study contributes to current literature, as possibly the first study to directly interview US payers on NGTS coverage and reimbursement. (shrink)

Per definition business sustainability demands the integration of environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Yet, managerial decision-making involving sustainability objectives is fraught with tension and the way managerial decision-makers frame sustainability issues in their mindset influences how sustainability tensions are managed at the organisational level. In the bid to better understand what types of managerial mindsets, or cognitive frames, foster integrative business sustainability practices that simultaneously advance environmental, social, and economic objectives, extant research has focussed on the underlying logics that drive (...) the acknowledgement of sustainability tensions. However, the existing logics-based constructs do not sufficiently explain this link, and it has been suggested that managers perceive and manage sustainability tensions based on the values that they hold. To clarify the roles of managerial values and logics as antecedents in business sustainability decision-making, we integrate Keeney’s value-focussed thinking approach with managerial and organisational cognition perspectives. Drawing on data from a survey with 169 senior procurement managers in Australia we found three types of cognitive frames which demonstrate that stronger sustainability values are associated with a more holistic perception of sustainability tensions and vice versa. We also found that managers’ cognitive framing of sustainability is strengthened by more holistic organisational cognitive frames and discuss according implications for managerial decision-making in theory and practice. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind was published over 50 years ago to wide acclaim, but his legacy has been tempered because of important misconceptions, including a) that contemporary philosophy has sufficiently absorbed what is valuable about his contribution; b) that he is responsible for propounding a version of philosophical behaviourism; and c) that Ryle travels down a substantially different philosophical track from that of Wittgenstein. This critical introduction sets out to overturn these misconceptions. It is extremely rare for a (...) UK-based philosopher to be invited to produce a critical introduction for a book published (in French) in France. The French publication has led to a) an invitation to produce an entry for Ryle for Stanford’s (on-line) Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, b) an AHRC research leave award to turn the introduction into a (English) book; an invitation to give lectures on the book at the Université de Picardie. The English version of the critical has received warm praise from a number of philosophers, including Cora Diamond. (shrink)

As an approach to public engagement, deliberation has the potential to pursue a range of goals identified by public participation theorists including the opportunity to substantively inform policy processes, increase the public’s knowledge and understanding of public issues and create or restore loss of public trust and confidence in public institutions. Baum and colleagues (2009) offer several important take-home messages for policy makers and public health leaders about the value of engaging with the public about ethically challenging, value-laden and resource (...) intensive policy issues such as pandemic response planning. (shrink)

During the past thirty years in the social sciences, there has been a wide-ranging discussion of “class politics” in capitalist modernity. Several distinct threads have developed, largely in isolation from each other. The authors suggest that the various accounts implicitly rely on different definitions of class politics and propose a way to classify them. The classification is based on two questions: first, whether changes in the strength of the left depend on the working class specifically or on cross-class dynamics and, (...) second, whether emergent class differences in politics are largely spontaneous or constructed. The authors use this classification to assess the prospects for testing the empirical implications of different accounts and point to the more general insights potentially offered by each approach. (shrink)

¿Qué queda de la escuela? La experiencia de la escuela primaria deja huellas que se memoran y narran tiempo después, dando cuenta de lo que ha afectado y atravesado las vidas en el tiempo de la infancia. A partir de la investigación narrativa y mediante entrevistas abiertas nos propusimos recuperar y analizar lo que los adultos memoran de ese tiempo. Sintetizamos los resultados del trabajo de campo, que ubican al disciplinamiento, al miedo y al respeto como los tópicos de mayor (...) recurrencia e intensidad, como asimismo a los sentidos otorgados a estos recuerdos. Esbozamos finalmente lo que se olvida o se silencia. La reflexión a la que invita el artículo enfatiza en los efectos que la escuela y los adultos producen de manera imperceptible o poco tematizada, en la vida de quienes las habitan. (shrink)

This article makes an analysis of Mabel Shaw's understanding of African spirituality and Christian theology that emerged while she worked as a missionary teacher for the London Missionary Society in Northern Rhodesia. It argues that post-colonial writing on missionary activity has tended to emphasize the negative aspects of the missionary movement, the consequence of which has been a failure to recognize the achievement of women such as Shaw. The freedom that the London Board of the LMS gave to their field (...) workers allowed Shaw to create a Boarding School for girls at Mbereshi that won Shaw acclaim as an educational practitioner. An instinctive belief in natural theology combined with a strong sense of the presence of God in loving action was critical in forming and shaping the practical application of her faith. While professionally it is apparent that Shaw `hit the glass ceiling' with her being overlooked as a candidate to become Mission Station Head she provides an impressive example of a woman who challenged perceptions of theology and denominational allegiance. Her radical thought on issues surrounding Christian spirituality had implications for the Christian movement as it became an agent of change in Central Africa. (shrink)

In the Northern region of Ghana in the mid-1990s a coalition of NGOs came together to mediate an end to a large-scale inter-ethnic conflict. This essay develops the theoretical concepts of conflict and peace narratives to show how this process was able to transcend the violence. It also examines how the NGO-mediated negotiations compared and related with concurrent state initiatives. NGO advantage derived from the social capital that these organisations had accumulated through local service provision, and the perceived neutrality of (...) the talks they arranged, highlighting the complex relationships between the provision of services, state resources and conflict resolution effectiveness. (shrink)