Background: There is increasing evidence to support the efficacy of transcranial direct current stimulation applications in cognitive augmentation and rehabilitation. Neuromodulation achieved with tDCS may further regulate regional cerebral perfusion affiliated through the neurovascular unit; however, components of cerebral perfusion decrease across aging. A novel neuroimaging approach, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, can aid in quantifying these regional perfusional changes. To date, the interaction of the effects of tDCS on cognitive performance across the lifespan and obtained fNIRS hemodynamic responses remain unknown.Objective: This (...) review aims to examine the effects of tDCS on cognitive performance and fNIRS hemodynamic responses within the context of cognitive aging.Methods: Six databases were searched for studies. Quality appraisal and data extraction were conducted by two independent reviewers. Meta-analysis was carried out to determine overall and subgroup effect sizes.Results: Eight studies met inclusion criteria. The overall effect size demonstrates that tDCS can alter cognitive performance and fNIRS signals, with aging being a potential intermediary in tDCS efficacy.Conclusion: From the studies included, the effects of tDCS on cognitive performance and fNIRS metrics are most prominent in young healthy adults and appear to become less robust with increasing age. Given the small number of studies included in this review further investigation is recommended. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 215 Seiten: 1-42.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi ed. by Kim-chong ChongLuyao Li (bio)Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi. Edited by Kim-chong Chong. Dordrecht: Springer, 2022. Pp. 835. Hardcover US $133.15, isbn 978-3-030-92330-3.Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi, edited by Kim-chong Chong, is the sixteenth volume in the Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy series. This volume includes a total of 34 chapters and is (...) divided into six parts: "Authorship and Commentary" (Part I), "Concepts" (Part II), "Language and Metaphor" (Part III), "Zhuangzi in the Context of Chinese Philosophy" (Part IV), "Ethical, Social, and Epistemic Issues" (Part V), and "The Zhuangzi and Western Philosophy" (Part VI). These six parts not only provide students or non-specialists with a clear overview of the various possible aspects and approaches to Zhuangzi studies, but also present the latest discussions and diverse perspectives on crucial issues in the Zhuangzi, making the volume a valuable resource for experts in this field.Each part of the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi extensively explores diverse research perspectives on a specific theme in Zhuangzi studies. Part IV, "Zhuangzi in the Context of Chinese Philosophy," serves as an exemplary illustration of this approach. Considering the possibility that Laozi and the Logicians may have influenced the thought in the Zhuangzi to some extent, this part is comprised of two chapters that respectively examine the connections and distinctions between Zhuangzi and Laozi, and Zhuangzi and the Logicians. Regarding scholars who may have lived after Zhuangzi, Angel On Ki TING envisions Zhuangzi's response to Xunzi's criticism, exploring their respective attitudes towards rites (li 禮) through examining the motivation for action. Additionally, there are chapters that discuss the influence of Zhuangzi's thoughts after the Warring States period, on Neo-Daoism, Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism, as well as on inner alchemy and religious Daoism.In Part II, however, such extensive exploration proves to be less satisfactory. Here, some crucial concepts in the Zhuangzi are illustrated, including heaven (tian 天) and human (ren 人), transformation (hua 化), vast or big (da 大) and minute (xiao 小), true person (zhen ren 真人) and true knowledge (zhen zhi 真知), no-emotion (wu qing 无情), and ming 命 (fate, destiny, mandate and command). It is unclear why certain concepts are chosen, whereas the central concepts of Dao (道) and de (德) are not focused on. It would perhaps be worthwhile to look closer into more of the above listed concepts, and the [End Page 1] relevance of Dao and de, particularly in terms of Dao and de's relationships to closely connected notions like heaven (tian 天) and ming (命).Furthermore, clear distinctions of themes in various parts of this edited volume overlook the connections among them. Certain terms and issues are addressed in chapters of different parts, with little or no communication between them. For example, the true person is the main concern in a number of chapters: "The True Person and True Knowledge in the Zhuangzi" (Part II, pp. 179-198); "Those Who Fly Without Wings: Depictions of the Supreme Idea Figure in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi" (Part III, pp. 305-376); and "Zhuangzi's Notion of the True Master and Wittgenstein's Grammatical Investigation" (Part VI, pp.807-824). Such exploration of various perspectives on a particular theme is noteworthy. It is regrettable, however, that there is a lack of correspondence between those perspectives. Some discussion on interactions among relevant chapters would certainly enhance the volume.In addition to presenting an extensive range of studies on the Zhuangzi, the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi also makes contributions to specific issues, which will be appealing to specialists in this field. I will elaborate on three of these contributions drawing on various parts of the volume.First, this work contributes to discussions on the issue of authorship. The traditional viewpoint attributes the Inner Chapters, or at least their main part, to the historical figure Zhuang Zhou, and assumes that they were written in the Warring States period and composed earlier than other chapters. Therefore, the Inner Chapters are prioritized in studies of the Zhuangzi. Esther Klein has previously challenged the view that the Inner... (shrink)

Some people of colour feel shame in response to racist incidents. This phenomenon seems puzzling since, plausibly, they have nothing to feel shame about. This puzzle arises because we assume that targets of racism feel shame about their race. However, I propose that when an individual is racialised as non-White in a racist incident, shame is sometimes prompted, not by a negative self-assessment of her race, but by her inability to choose when her stigmatised race is made salient. I argue (...) that this can make sense of some shame responses to racism. My account also helps to highlight some of the emotional and cognitive costs of racism that have their root in shame as well as a new form of hermeneutical injustice and distinctive communicative harms, contributing to a fuller picture of what is objectionable about racism. (shrink)

We provide new findings that add to the growing body of empirical evidence that important epistemic intuitions converge across cultures. Specifically, we selected three recent studies conducted in the US that reported surprising effects of knowledge attribution among English speakers. We translated the vignettes used in those studies into Mandarin Chinese and Korean and then ran the studies with participants in Mainland China, Taiwan, and South Korea. We found that, strikingly, all three of the effects first obtained in the US (...) also emerged in the East Asian cultures we studied. Our findings not only cohere with but also provide—at least moderate—support for the existence of extensive convergences of important epistemic intuitions across cultures. (shrink)

Since the early 1980’s, with the clinical advent of in vitro fertilization resulting in so-called “test tube babies,” a wide array of ethical considerations and concerns regarding artificial womb technology (AWT) have been described. Recent breakthroughs in the development of extracorporeal neonatal life support by means of AWT have reinitiated ethical interest about this topic with a sense of urgency. Most of the recent ethical literature on the topic, however, pertains not to the more imminent scenario of a physiologically improved (...) method of neonatal care through AWT, but instead to the remote scenario of “complete ectogenesis” that imagines human gestation occurring entirely outside of the womb. This scoping review of the ethical literature on AWT spans from more abstract concerns about complete ectogenesis to more immediate concerns about the soon-to-be-expected clinical life support of what we term the fetal neonate or fetonate. Within an organizing framework of different stages of human gestational development, from conception to the viable premature infant, we discuss both already identified and newly emerging ethical considerations and concerns regarding AWT and the care of the fetonate. (shrink)

We are moral apes, a difference between humans and our relatives that has received significant recent attention in the evolutionary literature. Evolutionary accounts of morality have often been recruited in support of error theory: moral language is truth-apt, but substantive moral claims are never true. In this article, we: locate evolutionary error theory within the broader framework of the relationship between folk conceptions of a domain and our best scientific conception of that same domain; within that broader framework, argue that (...) error theory and vindication are two ends of a continuum, and that in the light of our best science, many folk conceptual structures are neither hopelessly wrong nor fully vindicated; and argue that while there is no full vindication of morality, no seamless reduction of normative facts to natural facts, nevertheless one important strand in the evolutionary history of moral thinking does support reductive naturalism—moral facts are facts about cooperation, and the conditions and practices that support or undermine it. In making our case for, we first respond to the important error theoretic argument that the appeal to moral facts is explanatorily redundant, and second, we make a positive case that true moral beliefs are a ‘fuel for success’, a map by which we steer, flexibly, in a variety of social interactions. The vindication, we stress, is at most partial: moral cognition is a complex mosaic, with a complex genealogy, and selection for truth-tracking is only one thread in that genealogy. (shrink)

In this article I develop a big picture of the evolution of human cooperation, and contrast it to an alternative based on group selection. The crucial claim is that hominin history has seen two major transitions in cooperation, and hence poses two deep puzzles about the origins and stability of cooperation. The first is the transition from great ape social lives to the lives of Pleistocene cooperative foragers; the second is the stability of the social contract through the early Holocene (...) transition to complex hierarchical societies. The first of these transitions is driven, at least initially, by individual advantage: cooperation paid off for individual foragers, initially through mutualist interaction, then through reciprocation. This argument leads to a reanalysis of the role of violence and the nature of the freeriding threat to cooperation. But the conditions that select for cooperative individuals in the Pleistocene were eroded in the Pleistocene–Holocene transition. So we need an alternative account of the survival, and indeed the expansion, of cooperation in the Holocene. Group selection driven by intercommunal conflict really may well be central to this second transition. (shrink)

While it is well known that Zhuangzi uses metaphor extensively, there is much less appreciation of the role that it plays in his thought-a topic that is investigated in this essay. At the same time, this investigation is closely concerned with questions about the nature of metaphor. Comparisons are made between a central metaphorical structure in the Zhuangzi on the one hand and contemporary views of the nature of metaphor by Donald Davidson and by Lakoff and Johnson on the other. (...) It is hoped that these comparisons will help to illuminate the central metaphorical structure and its role in the philosophy of the Zhuangzi. (shrink)

Who should have a right to participate in a polity’s decision-making? Although the answers to this ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory remain controversial, it is widely believed that the enfranchisement of tourists and children is unacceptable. Yet, the two most prominent inclusion principles in the literature – Robert Goodin’s ‘all (possibly) affected interests’-principle and the ‘all subjected to law’-principle – both enfranchise those groups. Unsurprisingly, democratic theorists have therefore offered several reasons for nonetheless exempting tourists and children from the franchise. (...) In this paper, I argue that their attempts fail. None of the proposed rationales can do the job without having unacceptable implications for the voting rights of other groups. I then develop a new specification of the affected interests-view, one that avoids such problems. According to my life plan-principle, a person is entitled to participate in a polity’s decision-making if and only if its decisions will actually affect her autonomously chosen life plans, or prevent her from developing or revising plans of that kind. I show that this principle straightforwardly avoids enfranchising tourists and children, and thus improves upon its two prominent rivals. The paper ends by considering and rejecting two objections to my new principle. (shrink)

The subsistence technology of forager communities has varied greatly over space and time. This paper (i) reviews briefly the main causal factors the literature identifies as responsible for this variation; (ii) analyzes in some detail the most prominent idea in the literature on spatial variation:Complex technology is an adaptive response to elevated risks of subsistence failure; (iii) it argues that the alleged empirical support for this hypothesis depends on dubious proxies of risk; (iv) it argues that it fails to explain (...) the subsistence technologies of desert foragers, who generally live with simple technologies in high‐risk environments; (v) it offers an alternative analysis, based on the reduced opportunity costs of complex technologies in highly seasonal environments, on the high value of typical forager targets in those environments and their relatively predictable location in space and time; and (v) the paper concludes with a conjecture about the role of environmental variation in toolkit change over deep time. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. One is to defend an incrementalist view of the evolution of language, not from those who think that syntax could not evolve incrementally, but from those who defend a fundamental distinction between Gricean communication or ostensive inferential communication and code-based communication. The paper argues against this dichotomy, and sketches ways in which a code-based system could evolve into Gricean communication. The second is to assess the merits of the Sender–Receiver Framework, originally formulated by David Lewis, (...) and much elaborated and set into an evolutionary context by Brian Skyrms and colleagues, as a framework for thinking about the evolution of language. Despite the great strengths of that framework, and despite the great value of a framework that is both general and formally tractable, I argue that there are critical features of language that it fails to capture. (shrink)

This paper responds to Birch and Buskell's thoughtful critique. In it, I defend my use of behavioural ecology. I argue, contra Birch and Buskell, that I can give a principled defence of the emergence of conventions for respecting property, modelling as a network of pairwise iterated PDs between incipient farmers. Second, I defend my scepticism about the power of cultural group selection to optimise community normative packages. Finally, I located my views, as requested, against those of The dawn of everything. (...) I argue that the more complex “original position” envisaged in Dawn depends on special conditions rarely found on Pleistocene Africa. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:We discuss workers’ dignity in hierarchical organizations. First, we explain why a conflict exists between high-ranking individuals’ authority and low-ranking individuals’ dignity. Then, we ask whether there is any justification that reconciles hierarchical authority with the dignity of workers. We advance a communitarian justification for hierarchical authority, drawing upon Confucianism, which provides that workers can justifiably accept hierarchical authority when it enables a certain type of social functioning critical for the good life of workers and other involved parties. The Confucian (...) communitarian perspective shows that promoting workers’ good life or well-being is an important condition for protecting their dignity. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to the people of sinking island states. When their territories inevitably disappear, what, if anything, do the world's remaining territorial st...

Debates on the contingency of history have largely focused on the history of life. This article targets the supposed contingency of human history. It does not defend a global claim about the overall contingency of history. Rather, it aims to identify and explain the difference between robust and fragile historical trajectories. It does so by considering a set of contrasting cases and identifying critical differences among the cases. The analysis shows that one important source of contingency is the historical emergence (...) of command-and-control institutions; one important source of robustness is the existence of population-level processes structured by relatively stable institutions. (shrink)

The basic idea of Birch’s analysis is plausible: normative guidance began in agents’ assessment of their own craft skills. But I suggest developing that idea in a different way. I suggest that proto-normative affect plays its guiding role diachronically, in the development of those skills, rather than synchronically, in modulating their moment-by-moment execution. More importantly, I suggest a different pathway to normative affect’s direction at second and third parties. Normative response became social in the context of skilled collaborative activities, for (...) in those activities others’ failures have material consequences for each agent. In such collaborations, all have reason to care about others’ skill, or lack of it. (shrink)

Secession is again a hot political topic. Consider the recent events in Catalonia. In an illegal referendum in October 2017, amid large-scale demonstrations and violent interventions by the Spanish...

Hutto and Satne identify three research traditions attempting to explain the place of intentional agency in a wholly natural world: naturalistic reduction; sophisticated behaviourism, and pragmatism, and suggest that insights from all three are necessary. While agreeing with that general approach, I develop a somewhat different package, offering an outline of a vindicating genealogy of our interpretative practices. I suggest that these practices had their original foundation in the elaboration of much more complex representation-guided control structures in our lineage and (...) the support and amplification of those control structures through external resources. Cranes became increasingly important in the explanation of systematically successful action. These more complex representational engines coevolved with selection to detect and respond to the control structures of others. Since much of that selection was driven by the advantages of cooperation and coordination, in part these control structures were co-opted as external signals and guarantees, in cooperation and coordination. As the time depth of cooperation and co-ordination extended, these public signals of belief and intent acquired secondary functions, as mechanisms to stabilise and structure control systems, making humans not just more transparent to one another at a time, but more predictable over time. Mindshaping, not just mindreading, became increasingly important in our lineage. (shrink)

This chapter connects the major transitions to evolvability and its evolution. It reviews a three-pulse model of the conditions that make the evolution of complexity possible. It specifically outlines the life up to the evolution of fully equipped prokaryote cells, the phase of microbial evolution, and the third phase that sees the evolution of complex development. It compares the prokaryote and multicellular evolvability. The deeply obscure problem of precellular evolution is also evaluated. This chapter shows that individual properties of developmental (...) mechanisms are significant to evolvability, but they are not all that is important. (shrink)

Some commentators hold that Xunzi's criticism of Mencius' thesis that human nature is good depends more on Xunzi's definition of xing or nature than on substantive argument. Some also claim that Xunzi is committed to accepting Mencius' thesis. A more precise account of Xunzi's critique is offered here, based on an elaboration of his distinction in the "Xing e pian" between ke yi (capacity) and neng (ability). Others have noted this distinction, but no one has sufficiently appreciated its role in (...) making Xunzi's critique more systematic and substantive than it is usually thought to be. (shrink)

This article has both substantive and methodological goals. Methodologically, it shows that rational choice theory is an especially important tool for guiding research in contexts in which agents appear to be acting against their best interests. The Neolithic transition is one such case, and the article develops a substantive conception of that transition, illustrating the heuristic power of behavioral ecology.

A common and driving assumption in agricultural research is that the introduction of research trials, new practices and innovative technologies will result in technology adoption, and will subsequently generate benefits for farmers and other stakeholders. In Lao PDR, the potential benefits of introduced technologies have not been fully realised by beneficiaries. We report on an analysis of a survey of 735 smallholder farmers in Southern Lao PDR who were questioned about factors that influenced their decisions to adopt new technologies. In (...) this study, we have constructed measures or states of adoption which identify key elements of an adoption decision-making nexus. Analysis was conducted to statistically group explanatory factors of adoption. The key explanatory factors represented attributes of the farmer, the factors considered when undertaking production decisions and elements of the agricultural value chain that present as opportunities or constraints. We describe the combination of farmer’s personal attributes, perceptions of the value chain, and the introduction of new technologies by external actors as an “agricultural research value chain”, where agricultural research activities intervene to derive greater benefits for local farmers. A generalised linear model, via Poisson regression analysis on the identified explanatory factors, was applied to explore how they influence adoption measures and we found several significant relationships. (shrink)

The use of ethnography to understand archaeology is both prevalent and controversial. This paper develops an alternative approach, using ethnography to build and test a general theory of forager behaviors, and their variations in different conditions, one which can then be applied even to prehistoric sites differing from contemporary experience. Human behavioral ecology is chosen as the framework theory, and forager social learning as a case study. The argument is then applied to social learning in the late Pleistocene, and hence (...) to a famous archaeological puzzle: the late Pleistocene acceleration of technical innovation and regional differentiation. (shrink)

This article discusses the resurgence of the term ‘patriarchy’ in digital culture and reflects on the everyday online meanings of the term in distinction to academic theorisations. In the 1960s–1980s, feminists theorised patriarchy as the systematic oppression of women, with differing approaches to how it worked. Criticisms that the concept was unable to account for intersectional experiences of oppression, alongside the ‘turn to culture’, resulted in a fall from academic grace. However, ‘patriarchy’ has found new life through Internet memes (humorous, (...) mutational images that circulate widely on social media). This article aims to investigate the resurgence of the term ‘patriarchy’ in digital culture. Based on an analysis of memes with the phrase ‘patriarchy’ and ‘smash the patriarchy’, we identify how patriarchy memes are used by two different online communities (feminists and anti-feminists) and consider what this means for the ongoing usefulness of the concept of patriarchy. We argue that, whilst performing important community-forming work, using the term is a risky strategy for feminists for two reasons: first, because memes are by their nature brief, there is little opportunity to address intersections of oppression; secondly, the underlying logic of feminism is omitted in favour of brevity, leaving it exposed to being undermined by the more mainstream logic of masculinism. (shrink)

Buchanan and Powell develop a concept of moral progress, and build a middle-range theory of how moral progress comes about. They argue on the basis of their view of the evolutionary origins of normative thought that further moral progress towards more inclusive moral and political systems is possible. In doing so they rebut a conservative reading of the evolution of normative thought: a reading that regards the hope for inclusive moral systems as utopian. Buchanan and Powell argue that this ‘evoconservative’ (...) argument overlooks overwhelming evidence of the adaptive plasticity of normative thought. I agree with their rejection of that evoconservative position, but give an alternative account of the evolutionary foundations of normative cognition and its plasticity. But I also argue that there is a gap in their defence of their view of moral progress: it begs the question against exclusive, relational conceptions of the naturalistic foundations of normative obligations and rights. Their account is less fully naturalistic than they seem to suppose, for it lacks a developed account of the natural facts which make normative claims true, and it is not clear that there is an account to be given that would vindicate their inclusive liberal intuitions about the norms we should have. (shrink)

To establish the claim that racism is an ideology that consists of having morally impermissible attitudes towards people in virtue of their racialised identities, Appiah claims that a (false) belief in race is not automatically morally wrong. This paper examines what is involved in believing in races and shows that believing in races is in itself morally problematic as it involves stereotyping that undermines agency.

This paper discusses what implications global luck egalitarianism (GLE) has for border control. Some authors suggest that an open‐borders policy follows from GLE. The idea is that various unchosen inequalities inevitably follow from differences in birthplace, such that GLE will always have principled reason to condemn closed borders. Others are skeptical of the assumption that GLE will have liberal implications for border control, because open borders may have other, adverse effects that outweigh the reductions in unjust inequality. Against such skeptics, (...) we argue that GLE will (typically) have quite liberal implications for border control. However, this connection is not a principled one: Whether (and to what extent) GLE favors opening or closing borders will depend upon empirical circumstances. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Although many accept the Rawlsian distinction between ‘end-state’ and ‘transitional’ principles, theorists disagree strongly over which feasibility constraint to use when selecting the former. While ‘minimalists’ favor a scientific-laws-only constraint, ‘non-minimalists’ believe that end-state principles should also be constrained by what people could (empirically) accept after reasoned discussion. I argue that a theorist who follows ‘non-minimalism’ will devise end-state principles that cannot be realized (as end-state principles), or cannot be stabilized (as end-state principles), or are indistinguishable in content from those (...) she would have selected had she followed ‘minimalism.’ The paper ends by outlining the implications of my analysis for the broader methodological map of political philosophy. (shrink)

In comparison with classroom settings that are more accessible to the scrutiny of researchers and institutional monitoring, the one-to-one setting of instrumental and vocal studio teaching has been...

An important feature of some recent jurisprudential writings is the tendency to reject the precept of liberal individualism which affirms the priority of the principles of the "right conduct" over the substantive conceptions of "the good". This rejection, explicit in a recent book by Rogers M. Smith, and implicit in a recent work by Guido Calabresi, leads to strikingly illiberal consequences; hence, this provides indirect confirmation that the priority of the right over the good constitutes the most reliable defense of (...) individual liberty against majoritarian oppression. In Smith, an attempt to replace this priority with the principle of "rational liberty" leads to the disappearance of the guarantees of minority rights against orthodox majorities; in Calabresi, the doctrine of weighing and balancing competing moral principles of "the good" fails to provide an explanation for the strongly held moral intuition that some external preferences have to be disqualified at the outset, before they enter the forum of moral bargaining. (shrink)