In an era of fake news, alternative truths and leaked secrets making constant headlines, we are telling stories about ourselves all the time, and we are telling them in so many different ways. From vlogs and blogs to tweets and posts, from photos and gifs to live streams. From instant updates that disappear to rash words that last for ever and data trails that chart every step we take. While people around her shake their heads and mutter bad things about (...) the new levels of day-to-day deceit, Kathleen Wyatt is busy marvelling at how society manages it. How do we do this extraordinary thing - often under the most ordinary of circumstances? How do we convince each other to suspend disbelief? And why do we do it? In this brilliant, wide-ranging study of lies and lying, Wyatt introduces us to a cast of professionals and professional liars - from scientists to investigators, from double agents to journalists, from toddler specialists to a fallen titan of industry - all to help her prove a remarkable thesis: lies hold us together as much as they push us apart and may be vital in a healthy society"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Anti-exceptionalists about logic maintain that it is continuous with the empirical sciences. Taking anti-exceptionalism for granted, we argue that traditional approaches to explanation are inadequate in the case of logic. We argue that Andrea Woody's functional analysis of explanation is a better fit with logical practice and accounts better for the explanatory role of logical theories.

Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words, uses, and the reactions of audience members. Patterns of offence aren’t adequately explained by current theories. We propose an explanation based on the unjust power imbalance that a slur seeks to achieve. Our starting observation is that in discourse participants take on discourse roles. These are typically inherited from social roles, but only exist during a discourse. A (...) slurring act is a speech-act that alters the discourse roles of the target and speaker. By assigning discourse roles the speaker unjustly changes the power balance in the dialogue. This has a variety of effects on the target and audience. We show how these notions explain all three types of offence variation. We also briefly sketch how a role and power theory can help explain silencing and appropriation. Explanatory power lies in the fact that offence is correlated with the perceived unjustness of the power imbalance created. (shrink)

Scientists depend on complex computational systems that are often ineliminably opaque, to the detriment of our ability to give scientific explanations and detect artifacts. Some philosophers have s...

Reclamation is the phenomenon of an oppressed group repurposing language to its own ends. A case study is reclamation of slur words. Popa-Wyatt and Wyatt (2018) argued that a slurring utterance is a speech act which performs a discourse role assignment. It assigns a subordinate role to the target, while the speaker assumes a dominant role. This pair of role assignments is used to oppress the target. Here I focus on how reclamation works and under what conditions its (...) benefits can stabilise. I start by reviewing the data and describing preconditions and motivations for reclamation. Can reclamation be explained in the same basic framework as regular slurring utterances? I argue that it can. I also identify some features that must be a prediction of any theory of reclamation. I conclude that reclamation is an instance of a much broader class of acts we do with words to change the distribution of power: it begets power, but it also requires it. (shrink)

Two rival accounts of irony claim, respectively, that pretence and echo are independently sufficient to explain central cases. After highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of these accounts, I argue that an account in which both pretence and echo play an essential role better explains these cases and serves to explain peripheral cases as well. I distinguish between “weak” and “strong” hybrid theories, and advocate an “integrated strong hybrid” account in which elements of both pretence and echo are seen as complementary (...) in a unified mechanism. I argue that the allegedly mutually exclusive elements of pretence and echo are in fact complementary aspects enriching a core structure as follows: by pretending to have a perspective/thought F, an ironic speaker U echoes a perspective/thought G. F is merely pretended, perhaps caricaturised or exaggerated, while G is real/possible. (shrink)

Slurs are typically defined as conveying contempt based on group-membership. However, here I argue that they are not a unitary group. First, I describe two dimensions of variation among derogatives: how targets are identified, and how offensive the term is. This supports the typical definition of slurs as opposed to other derogatives. I then highlight problems with this definition, mainly caused by variable offence across slur words. In the process I discuss how major theories of slurs can account for variable (...) offence, and conclude that contempt based on group-membership doesn’t cover all the data. I finish by noting that the most offensive slurs are those that target oppressed groups. I claim it is oppression that underpins most offence, and that beyond this offensive property, some slurs are actively used to oppress. (shrink)

This paper argues that we need to re-think the semantics/pragmatics distinction in the light of new evidence from embedding of irony. This raises a new version of the old problem of ‘embedded implicatures’. I argue that embedded irony isn’t fully explained by solutions proposed for other embedded implicatures. I first consider two strategies: weak pragmatics and strong pragmatics. These explain embedded irony as truth-conditional content. However, by trying to shoehorn irony into said-content, they raise problems of their own. I conclude (...) by considering how a modified Gricean model can explain that irony embeds qua implicature. This leads us to prefer a local implicature model. This has important consequences for how we draw the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (shrink)

La autora presenta una critica a la concepcion clasica de los sentidos asumida por la mayoria de autores naturalistas que pretenden explicar el contenido mental. Esta crítica se basa en datos neurobiologicos sobre los sentidos que apuntan a que estos no parecen describir caracteristicas objetivas del mundo, sino que actuan de forma ʼnarcisita', es decir, representan informacion en funcion de los intereses concretos del organismo.El articulo se encuentra también en: Bechtel, et al., Philosophy and the Neuroscience.

It’s natural for hyperbole to mix with metaphor and irony, and other figures of speech. How do they mix together and what kind of compound, if any, arises out of the mixing? In tackling this question, I shall argue that thinking of hyperbolic figures along the lines familiar from ironic metaphor compounds is a temptation we should resist. Looking in particular at hyperbolic metaphor and hyperbolic irony, I argue, they don’t yield a new encompassing compound figure with one figure building (...) on another. Instead, what we have is one dominant figure colored with hyperbolic tinges. So what does hyperbole bring to the mixing pot? I suggest we should think of hyperbole in hyperbolic figures as being an interpretive effect, modulating the working of the partner figure and thus rendering more emphatic. (shrink)

Hyperbole is traditionally understood as exaggeration. Instead, in this paper, we shall define it not just in terms of its form, but in terms of its effects and its purpose. Specifically, we characterize its form as a shift of magnitude along a scale of measurement. In terms of its effect, it uses this magnitude shift to make the target property more salient. The purpose of hyperbole is to express with colour and force that the target property is either greater or (...) lesser than expected or desired. This purpose is well suited to hyperbolic expression. This because hyperbole naturally draws a contrast between two points: how things are versus how they were expected to be. We also consider compound figures involving hyperbole. When it combines with other figures hyperbole operates by magnifying the specific effects of the figure it operates on. We shall see that sometimes hyperbole works as an input for irony; and at other times it builds on a metaphor to increase the effects of that metaphor. (shrink)

Compound figures are a rich, and under-explored area for tackling fundamental issues in philosophy of language. This paper explores new ideas about how to explain some features of such figures. We start with an observation from Stern that in ironic-metaphor, metaphor is logically prior to irony in the structure of what is communicated. Call this thesis Logical-MPT. We argue that a speech-act-based explanation of Logical-MPT is to be preferred to a content-based explanation. To create this explanation we draw on Barker’s (...) expressivist speech-act theory, in which speech-acts build on other speech-acts to achieve the desired communicative effects. In particular, we show how Barker’s general ideas explain metaphor as an assertive-act, and irony as a ridiculing-act. We use Barker’s notion of proto-illocutionary-acts to show how metaphorical-acts and ironic-acts can build one on the other. Finally, we show that while an ironic-act can build on a metaphorical-act, a metaphorical-act cannot build on an ironic-act. This restriction on how they can be composed establishes Logical-MPT via a different route. (shrink)

As we become more aware of the various problems associated with technologically mediated meat production , we also confront a variety of technologically mediated potential fixes . Rather than comparing bad and good technologies in the context of meat, I want instead to explore the dynamics of the human-animal relationships expressed within specific approaches. This method, I suggest, illustrates the technological aspects of the relationships, which reflect an orientation to the world that mediates human interaction with the environment. It also (...) helps to show that the more we try to take responsibility for those bodies—in terms of knowledge, in terms of energy—the more we require the environment to reflect our conditions and the less tolerant we become of failure. (shrink)

Harmful and dangerous language is frequent in social media, in particular in spaces which are considered anonymous and/or allow free participation. In this paper, we analyse the language in a Telegram channel populated by followers of Donald Trump, in order to identify the ways in which harmful language is used to create a specific narrative in a group of mostly like-minded discussants. Our research has several aims. First, we create an extended taxonomy of potentially harmful language that includes not only (...) hate speech and direct insults, but also more indirect ways of poisoning online discourse, such as divisive speech and the glorification of violence. We apply this taxonomy to a large portion of the corpus. Our data gives empirical evidence for harmful speech such as in/out-group divisive language and the use of codes within certain communities which have not often been investigated before. Second, we compare our manual annotations to several automatic methods of classifying hate speech and offensive language, namely list based and machine learning based approaches. We find that the Telegram data set still poses particular challenges for these automatic methods. Finally, we argue for the value of studying such naturally occurring, coherent data sets for research on online harm and how to address it in linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophical views of language have traditionally been focused on notions of truth. This is a reconstructive view in that we try to extract from an utterance in context what the sentence and speaker meaning are. This focus on meaning extraction from word sequences alone, however, is challenged by utterances which combine different types of figures. This paper argues that what appears to be a special case of ironic utterances—ironic metaphorical compounds—sheds light on the requirements for psychological plausibility of a theory (...) of communication and thus presents a different view of communication and language to that dominant in philosophy of language. In the view presented here, the hearer does not extract the speaker’s communicative intention from the sequence of words in the utterance, but from other channels, so as to constrain the inferential space for the sentence and speaker meaning. Specifically, we examine an example of ironic metaphor discussed by Stern. He argues that ironic content is logically dependent on metaphorical content, but makes no claims about how psychologically plausible this is in terms of the processing order. We argue that a straightforward translation of logical order into temporal order makes little sense. The primary sticking point is that without a prior understanding of the speaker’s communicative intentions, it is computationally more challenging to process the sub-component meanings. An alternative solution based on communicative channels leads us to a more psychologically plausible account of the structure of communicative acts and intentions. This provides support for the psychological realism of a richer theory of communicative intent. (shrink)

A common view in both philosophy and the vision sciences is that, in human vision, wavelength information is primarily ‘for’ colouring: for seeing surfaces and various media as having colours. In this article we examine this assumption of ‘colour-for-colouring’. To motivate the need for an alternative theory, we begin with three major puzzles from neurophysiology, puzzles that are not explained by the standard theory. We then ask about the role of wavelength information in vision writ large. How might wavelength information (...) be used by any monochromat or dichromat and, finally, by a trichromatic primate with object vision? We suggest that there is no single ‘advantage’ to trichromaticity but a multiplicity, only one of which is the ability to see surfaces and so on as having categorical colours. Instead, the human trichromatic retina exemplifies a scheme for a general encoding of wavelength information given the constraints imposed by high spatial resolution object vision. Chromatic vision, like its partner, luminance vision, is primarily for seeing. Viewed this way, the ‘puzzles’ presented at the outset make perfect sense. 1 Reframing the Problem1.1 Introduction1.2 Three puzzles1.2.1 Why is trichromatic vision an anomaly in diurnal mammals?1.2.2 Why does the colour system occupy such a large and central part in human vision?1.2.3 Why are the blue cones so rare?1.3 Recasting the question2 The Costs and Benefits of Spectral Vision2.1 Spectral information and object vision2.2 Encoding the spectral dimension of light2.2.1 ‘General’ versus ‘specific’ encoding2.2.2 Spectral encoding and the monochromat2.2.3 Spectral encoding and the dichromat2.2.4 Spectral encoding and the human trichromat2.3 Three puzzles revisited2.3.1 Why is trichromatic vision an anomaly in diurnal mammals?2.3.2 Why does the colour system occupy such a large and central part in human vision?2.3.3 Why are the blue cones so rare3 Conclusion. (shrink)

This empirical study examines corporate responses to activist shareholder groups filing social-policy shareholder resolutions. Using resource dependency theory as our conceptual framing, we identify some of the drivers of corporate responses to shareholder activists. This study departs from previous studies by including a fourth possible corporate response, engaging in dialogue. Dialogue, an alternative to shareholder resolutions filed by activists, is a process in which corporations and activist shareholder groups mutually agree to engage in ongoing negotiations to deal with social issues. (...) Based on a unique dataset of resolutions filed by member organizations of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility from 2002 to 2005 and the outcomes of these resolutions, our analysis finds that corporate managers are more likely to engage in dialogue with shareholder activists when the firm is larger, is more responsive to stakeholders, the CEO is the board chair, and the firm has a relatively lower percentage of institutional investors. (shrink)

Support for the prototype theory of categorization was found in a study of the structure of social categories. Though occupational terms such as DOCTOR are socially defined, they do not have the classical structure their clear definitional origins would predict. Conceptions of social categories are richer and more complex than those of physical object categories and subjects agree upon them. Comparison of various instructions for eliciting attributes of categories showed that whether subjects are asked to define a term, give characteristics, (...) or describe ways they recognize members of categories, the attributes they list contribute to a prototype structure. These data provide evidence against the view that prototype structure is relevant only to an identification procedure and not to the core of concepts, as has been suggested. (shrink)

We think and speak in figures. This is key to our creativity. We re-imagine one thing as another, pretend ourself to be another, do one thing in order to achieve another, or say one thing to mean another. This comes easily because of our abilities both to work out meaning in context and re-purpose words. Figures of speech are tools for this re-purposing. Whether we use metaphor, simile, irony, hyperbole, and litotes individually, or as compound figures, the uses are all (...) rooted in literal meanings. These uses invite us to explore the context to find new meanings, new purposes, beyond the literal. -/- This special issue of Philosophical Studies brings together eight papers on various aspects and applications of figurative speech including: David Hills, Mitch Green, Liz Camp, Ofra Magidor, Larry Horn, Ken Walton, Stephen Barker, and Mihaela Popa-Wyatt. (shrink)

A popular approach to defining fictive utterance says that, necessarily, it is intended to produce imagining. I shall argue that this is not falsified by the fact that some fictive utterances are intended to be believed, or are non-accidentally true. That this is so becomes apparent given a proper understanding of the relation of what one imagines to one's belief set. In light of this understanding, I shall then argue that being intended to produce imagining is sufficient for fictive utterance (...) as well. (shrink)

This is one of the most original and important works of contemporary European thought. First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today.Castoriadis offers a brilliant and far-reaching analysis of the unique character of the social-historical world and its relations to the individual, to language, and to nature. He argues that most traditional conceptions of society and history overlook the essential feature of the social-historical world, namely that this (...) world is not articulated once and for all but is in each case the creation of the society concerned. In emphasizing the element of creativity, Castoriadis opens the way for rethinking political theory and practice in terms of the autonomous and explicit self-institution of society. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur has been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of the century. _Oneself as Another,_ the clearest account of his "philosophical ethics," substantiates this position and lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of morals. Focusing on the concept of personal identity, Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of the self that charts its epistemological path and ontological status.

This article examines the complaint that arbitrary algorithmic decisions wrong those whom they affect. It makes three contributions. First, it provides an analysis of what arbitrariness means in this context. Second, it argues that arbitrariness is not of moral concern except when special circumstances apply. However, when the same algorithm or different algorithms based on the same data are used in multiple contexts, a person may be arbitrarily excluded from a broad range of opportunities. The third contribution is to explain (...) why this systemic exclusion is of moral concern and to offer a solution to address it. (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's _Memory, History, Forgetting_ examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production (...) of historical narrative. _Memory, History, Forgetting_, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, _Memory, History, Forgetting_ provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ and _Oneself as Another_ and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events.... It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—_Library Journal _“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— _New York Times Book Review _. (shrink)

The concept of a relational self has been prominent in feminism, communitarianism, narrative self theories, and social network theories, and has been important to theorizing about practical dimensions of selfhood. However, it has been largely ignored in traditional philosophical theories of personal identity, which have been dominated by psychological and animal theories of the self. This book offers a systematic treatment of the notion of the self as constituted by social, cultural, political, and biological relations. The author's account incorporates practical (...) concerns and addresses how a relational self has agency, autonomy, responsibility, and continuity through time in the face of change and impairments. This cumulative network model of the self incorporates concepts from work in the American pragmatist and naturalist tradition. The ultimate aim of the book is to bridge traditions that are often disconnected from one another--feminism, personal identity theory, and pragmatism--to develop a unified theory of the self. (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's _Memory, History, Forgetting_ examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production (...) of historical narrative. _Memory, History, Forgetting_, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, _Memory, History, Forgetting_ provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ and _Oneself as Another_ and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events.... It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—_Library Journal _“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— _New York Times Book Review _. (shrink)

COVID-19 is a highly contagious infection with no proven treatment. Approximately 2.5% of patients need mechanical ventilation while their body fights the infection.1 Once COVID-19 patients reach the point of critical illness where ventilation is necessary, they tend to deteriorate quickly. During the pandemic, patients with other conditions may also present at the hospital needing emergency ventilation. But ventilation of a COVID-19 patient can last for 2–3 weeks. Accordingly, if all ventilators are in use, there will not be time for (...) patients to ‘queue up’ to wait for those who arrived earlier to recover. Those who need a ventilator will die if they do not receive access to one quickly. Many nations now face the prospect that they failed to prepare appropriately for this foreseen risk of pandemic (another issue worthy of legal analysis) and that their populations will need far more ventilators than the health service can supply. For many weeks, the UK has been anticipating a surge of COVID-19 infections that could leave patients queuing in hospitals for ICU care. Luckily, social distancing has ‘flattened the curve’ and this problem might not arise. There is still a degree of risk, however, and other countries will not be so lucky. At some point, during this pandemic or the next, all countries will need to answer hard questions about whether and when scarce ICU resources (such as ventilators, beds and staff) should be either withheld or withdrawn from certain groups of patients solely for the purpose of providing them to others. Attempts to answer these questions can be found in a wide range of ICU triage protocols and ethical guidance documents, many of which embrace the foundational principle of ‘save the most lives’. Unfortunately, this worthwhile goal has generated many suggestions that could violate the law. This article identifies …. (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue that (...) both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

The tremendous recent growth of the women's movement as a political force has been accompanied by an event of equal import to the academic world--the development of the discipline of women's studies. Colleges across the nation are establishing programs in this area. Women's Studies is a classroom anthology designed for use in these newly-introduced courses.

There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay’s conceptual version of (...) the view. Next, we will survey relevant work on Theory of Mind which indicates that children younger than two and non-human primates are able to attribute false beliefs. Then, we will bring these false-belief data to bear on Asay’s form of primitivism, arguing that the data support two of the four distinctive theses of this view and offering some remarks about the empirical evaluability of the two remaining theses. We hope that our discussion will help to bridge the gap between psychological and philosophical inquiry and that it will encourage further empirical research on the cognitive significance of the concept of truth for humans and other thinking creatures. (shrink)

Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable yet (...) underappreciated role to play in all of these debates. Recognising the indispensability of cross-linguistic experimental philosophy should compel philosophers to significantly revise the ways in which they inquire about truth. It should also prompt analytic philosophers more generally to consider whether similar revisions might be necessary elsewhere in the field. (shrink)

As philosophers of mind we seem to hold in common no very clear view about the relevance that work in psychology or the neurosciences may or may not have to our own favourite questions—even if we call the subject ‘philosophical psychology’. For example, in the literature we find articles on pain some of which do, some of which don't, rely more or less heavily on, for example, the work of Melzack and Wall; the puzzle cases used so extensively in discussions (...) of personal identity are drawn sometimes from the pleasant exercise of scientific fantasy, at times from surprising reports of scientific fact; and there are those who deny, as well as those who affirm, the importance of the discovery of rapid-eye-movement sleep to the philosophical treatment of dreaming. A general account of the relation between scientific, and philosophical, psychology is long overdue and of the first importance. Here I shall limit myself to just one area where the two seem to connect, discussing one type of neuropsychological research and its relevance to questions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

Many scholars think that women are sentenced more leniently than men because judges are paternalistic toward women. In this article, I suggest that paternalism is a multilayered concept and that it is important to distinguish between judicial concerns for protecting women and those for protecting children and families. To learn what factors judges consider in sentencing and whether these differ for men and women defendants, I interviewed 20 men and 3 women judges in two state criminal courts. I learned that (...) the primary objects of judicial protection were not women, but children, and men's and women's economic support or care for families. However, there was a labor hierarchy in the judges' minds in that they believed that care giving was more important than wage earning for the maintenance of families. Interactive influences among the defendant's gender, familial status, race or ethnicity, and the nature of the offense charged are discussed. (shrink)

With a focus on end-of-life discussion in aging and chronically ill populations, this book offers insight into the skill of communicating in complex and emotionally charged discussions. This text is written for all clinicians and professionals in the fields of healthcare and public health who are faced with questions of ethical deliberation when a patient's illness turns from chronic to terminal. This skill is required to manage care well in an age of advanced technology, and numerous autonomous choices. With a (...) palliative care and ethics focus, the manuscript provides case studies illustrating issues which occur in the acuity and chronicity of end of life. Clear tools for clinicians, such as scripting and "the advance care planning video library" are included. The book focuses on the unique concept of outpatient ethics, including readmission prevention and shortened length of stay through good communication for clinicians who will be required to conduct this discussion with patients. The ethical undertone in this text provides a perfect opening for application in healthcare ethics classes, both in fields of public health and healthcare. Medical scholars and physicians, nurse practitioners and physician's assistants, as well as social workers, both in practice and training, will benefit from this text. (shrink)

Our time is marked by a resurgence of hate that threatens to increase oppression. Social media has contributed to this by acting as a medium through which hate speech is spread. How should we model the spread of hate? This article considers two models. First, I consider a simple contagion model. In this model, hate spreads like a virus through a social network. This model, however, fails to capture the fact that people do not acquire hatred from a single infectious (...) contact. Instead, it builds up in a person's beliefs and attitudes through time until the infection reaches a level where the subject themselves becomes a generator of hate speech. Second, to accommodate this, I consider an alternative model known as complex contagion. I argue that not only is a complex contagion model more explanatory and predictive, but it can be used to explain why certain features of social media cause it to be a promoter of hate. I conclude by sketching some mitigation strategies. (shrink)