McKeon was a pragmatist who developed a heuristic that outlined the philosophical roots behind the tensions created by the paradox of pluralism. This heuristic was based on the four main schools of ancient Greek philosophy and allowed McKeon to map out how different philosophical perspectives create different understandings of foundational concepts such as freedom, history and motion. This paper applies that heuristic to the concept of communication and demonstrates how different philosophical approaches create tension over the definition of communication. Scholars (...) can use this application to both better approach McKeon’s pragmatism as well as gain insight into the philosophical foundations of our own perspectives of communication. (shrink)

Health authorities increasingly request that general practitioners use information and communication technologies such as electronic patient records for accountability purposes. This article deals with the use of EPRs among general practitioners in Britain. It examines two ways in which GPs use the EPR for accountability purposes. One way is to generate audit reports on the basis of the information that has been entered into the record. The other is to let the computer intervene in the clinical process through prompts. The (...) article argues that GPs' ambivalence toward using the EPR makes them active in finding ways that turn the EPR into a meaningful tool for them, that is, a tool that helps them provide what they see as good care. The article's main contribution is to show how accountability and autonomy are coproduced; less professional autonomy does not follow from more requests to document one's work. Instead, new forms of autonomy are produced in the sociotechnical network that is made up by health policy and local engagements with patients and technology. (shrink)

In the categorical approach to the foundations of quantum theory, one begins with a symmetric monoidal category, the objects of which represent physical systems, and the morphisms of which represent physical processes. Usually, this category is taken to be at least compact closed, and more often, dagger compact, enforcing a certain self-duality, whereby preparation processes (roughly, states) are interconvertible with processes of registration (roughly, measurement outcomes). This is in contrast to the more concrete “operational” approach, in which the states and (...) measurement outcomes associated with a physical system are represented in terms of what we here call a convex operational model: a certain dual pair of ordered linear spaces–generally, not isomorphic to one another. On the other hand, state spaces for which there is such an isomorphism, which we term weakly self-dual, play an important role in reconstructions of various quantum-information theoretic protocols, including teleportation and ensemble steering. In this paper, we characterize compact closure of symmetric monoidal categories of convex operational models in two ways: as a statement about the existence of teleportation protocols, and as the principle that every process allowed by that theory can be realized as an instance of a remote evaluation protocol—hence, as a form of classical probabilistic conditioning. In a large class of cases, which includes both the classical and quantum cases, the relevant compact closed categories are degenerate, in the weak sense that every object is its own dual. We characterize the dagger-compactness of such a category (with respect to the natural adjoint) in terms of the existence, for each system, of a symmetric bipartite state, the associated conditioning map of which is an isomorphism. (shrink)

Computational models of semantic memory exploit information about co-occurrences of words in naturally occurring text to extract information about the meaning of the words that are present in the language. Such models implicitly specify a representation of temporal context. Depending on the model, words are said to have occurred in the same context if they are presented within a moving window, within the same sentence, or within the same document. The temporal context model (TCM), which specifies a particular definition of (...) temporal context, has proved useful in the study of episodic memory. The predictive temporal context model (pTCM) uses the same definition of temporal context to generate semantic memory representations. Taken together pTCM and TCM may prove to be part of a general model of declarative memory. (shrink)

Realism in international relations theory is frequently understood to entail the abandonment or cynical manipulation of moral rules and principles. But realism has always been more than an amoral or immoral doctrine. More interesting versions of realism offer moral justifications for limiting the role of morality. We argue for a version of realism that flows from the function of the liberal democratic state as an indispensable condition of value. After setting out its central characteristics, we also argue that this liberal (...) democratic realism can adequately address four severe criticisms typically raised against realism in general. (shrink)

People across the world seek out beautiful sounds in nature, such as a babbling brook or a nightingale song, for positive human experiences. However, it is unclear whether this positive aesthetic response is driven by a preference for the perceptual features typical of nature sounds versus a higher‐order association of nature with beauty. To test these hypotheses, participants provided aesthetic judgments for nature and urban soundscapes that varied on ease of recognition. Results demonstrated that the aesthetic preference for nature soundscapes (...) was eliminated for the sounds hardest to recognize, and moreover the relationship between aesthetic ratings and several measured acoustic features significantly changed as a function of recognition. In a follow‐up experiment, requiring participants to classify these difficult‐to‐identify sounds into nature or urban categories resulted in a robust preference for nature sounds and a relationship between aesthetic ratings and our measured acoustic features that was more typical of easy‐to‐identify sounds. This pattern of results was replicated with computer‐generated artificial noises, which acoustically shared properties with the nature and urban soundscapes but by definition did not come from these environments. Taken together, these results support the conclusion that the recognition of a sound as either natural or urban dynamically organizes the relationship between aesthetic preference and perceptual features and that these preferences are not inherent to the acoustic features. Implications for nature's role in cognitive and affective restoration are discussed. (shrink)

Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

This collection of essays is dedicated to William Rowe, with great affection, respect, and admiration. The philosophy of religion, once considered a deviation from an otherwise analytically rigorous discipline, has flourished over the past two decades. This collection of new essays by twelve distinguished philosophers of religion explores three broad themes: religious attitudes of faith, belief, acceptance, and love; human and divine freedom; and the rationality of religious belief. Contributors include: William Alston, Robert Audi, Jan Cover, Martin Curd, Peter van (...) Inwagen, Norman Kretzmann, George Nakhnikian, John Hawthorne, Philip Quinn, James Ross, Eleonore Stump, and William Wainwright. (shrink)

In this paper a model for barrecursion is presented. It has as a novelty that it contains discontinuous functionals. The model is based on a concept called strong majorizability. This concept is a modification of Howard's majorizability notion; see [T, p. 456].

Following recent work by Don Ross (Ross, 2000; Ross & Spurrett, 2004), I contrast the influential theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland in information-theoretic terms. Dennett makes much of the fact that the morphological shorthand which emerges before a witness as she looks upon cohesive aggregates of matter commands some measure of predictive power. This, for him, speaks against eliminating recourse to an intentional vocabulary. By contrast, the eliminative materialism defended by Churchland does not gloss such (...) informational compressibility as an explanatory desideratum, and thus regards the informational noise which accrues at higher levels of description as patently unacceptable. Yet, since it is unlikely, as Ross, Ladyman, and Collier (2007) have recently suggested, that anything remains once we subtract the appeal to patterns, I argue that the ubiquity of informational compression in scientific explanation seriously undermines the claim that talk of the mental could be eliminated. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

Recently, Howard argued for the defensibility of research on nonhuman animals. Unfortunately, his essay is unnecessarily combative, lacking in detail, unbalanced, and poorly argued. Howard unfairly and mistakenly stereotypes as biologically naive anyone who rejects his position that nature's poor treatment of wild animals justifies animal research. Those interested in the morality of animal research deserve better guidance than what Howard provides. Here, we analyze Howard's claims and their implications, present relevant literature on ethics and animals, (...) and conclude that much work remains to be done to understand and properly appreciate the moral dimensions of animal research. The questions raised about uses of animals by humans in various activities, including research, are difficult and demand careful interdisciplinary analysis. Simple answers should not be expected. We explore some of the issues and make them accessible to a wide audience, including practicing scientists. (shrink)

This book is a comparative study of the sociological theory of such founding American sociologists as Ward, Sumner, Keller, Giddings, Ross, Small, and Cooley. The work is divided into chapters such as the one on "Social Origins" in which the contributions of these sociologists are delineated and compared. Hinkle attempts to characterize the fundamental working assumptions of these men by relating their work to the materials of American history and to the structures of American society and academia around 1880-1915. (...) Thus Hinkle claims that his book is "a contribution to the sociology of the history of sociological theory.". (shrink)

In this chapter we offer a reflection on the notion of sample representativeness from an interpretivist-qualitative perspective. Specifically we are looking into the idea of learning about a phenomenon through examining extraordinary individuals characterized by that phenomenon; to describe them we use the term ‘extraordinary’ as a noun, thereby building on Howard Gardner’s notion of ‘extraordinary minds’ (Gardner, 1997). We are looking at the ‘extraordinary’ in their professional socio-historical contexts, as the phenomena we are interested in cannot be divorced (...) from the contexts in which they are embedded. In this particular book chapter we are interested in the phenomenon of creativity, and the two research projects on which we base our argument are also concerned with creativity. However, we do not see any reason why similar considerations could not be made in other areas – but we do not suggest that a simple generalizability is possible. -/- The basis of our reflection are two research projects we have done in the past: In the first one, we conducted ‘insider interviews’ (the second-named author used to be a chef in Michelin-starred restaurants) with 18 extraordinary chefs in order to gain a better understanding of how creativity manifests itself socio-culturally in the culinary domain (Cousins, O’Gorman, & Stierand, 2010; Stierand, 2015; Stierand & Dörfler, 2012b, 2016; Stierand, Dörfler, & MacBryde, 2014; Stierand & Lynch, 2008). In the second one, we interviewed 20 extraordinary scientists, including 17 Nobel Laureates in order to gain a better understanding of cognitive complexity and how cognitive complexity is manifested in the socio-cultural acceptance of creative outcomes in the scientific world (Dörfler & Eden, 2014a, 2014b, 2017). -/- We have presented our research at various conferences, and, perhaps as we were so passionate about it, we have received a great deal of interest from others, mainly PhD students and early career researchers, who were keen to undertake similar research projects. But, although we believe that the methodological journey we have taken can be an excellent path to very interesting and meaningful research, we cannot wholeheartedly recommend it to junior colleagues, knowing the difficulties they will face when trying to justify their findings and methodological choices and the uncertain profits in the form of publication of the results (see an excellent overview of the difficulties and profits in Lebuda, 2014). We made our initial methodological choices, i.e. interviewing extraordinary chefs and scientists, purely intuitively that is, we just knew that the insights we could gain from these people would potentially lead to excellent findings. However, this is not an acceptable justification in the academic world. Therefore, we started to develop a framework for conducting this type of research, but we are not quite there yet. This reflection chapter is a midway point for taking stock of the convincing arguments we have developed over time and of the problems we still need to solve. (shrink)

This collection covers the fundamental concepts and analytic tools of generative transformational syntax of the last half century, from Chomsky's Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (1951) to the present day. It makes available, in one place, key published material on important areas such as phrase structure, transformations, and conditions on rules and representations. Presenting articles by leading contributors to the field such as Baltin, Bokovic, Bresnan, Chomsky, Cinque, Emonds, Freidin, Hale, Higginbotham, Huang, Kayne, Lasnik, McCawley, Pollock, Postal, Reinhart, Rizzi, Ross, (...) Stowell, Torrego, Travis, Vergnaud, and Williams, this fascinating collection also includes a general introduction by the editors and an index, thus providing a comprehensive single reference resource for students and researchers alike. (shrink)

The publication of John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet in 1558 had engendered a radical debate about the public role of women and the nature of female authority and obedience. Howard was not the only author who attempted to refute Knox's tract. The Marian exile and future Bishop of London, John Aylmer, the Catholic Bishop of Ross, John Leslie, and the Catholic, Scottish lawyer, David Chambers, all published books disproving Knox's allegations about women's unfitness for rule. Richard (...) Bertie, husband of Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, also prepared a manuscript refutation which was never published. The published works are moderately well known, and have been discussed elsewhere. This article concentrates on Howard's unpublished contribution to the Knox debate. The tract is important because of its length and detail, its conclusions regarding the potential role of aristocratic women, and because of Howard's personal reputation and aristocratic connections. The �Defense� was both eloquent and persuasive, analysing women's legal, historical and theological status within early modern society. Howard presented alternative interpretations of female stereotypes found in sermons and polemical writings. His commentaries on Genesis, Athalia, Jezebel and Deborah show how traditional biblical stories could be interpreted in radically differing ways, with profound implications for contemporary women. Because of the length of Howard's tract, this article can present only a summary of his main conclusions. His interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis will be presented in rather more detail as an indication of the complexity of the early modern debate about women, and the dangers of trying to attach simplistic labels to individual attitudes. (shrink)

Inflicting harm is generally preferable to inflicting death. If you must choose between the two, you should generally choose to harm. But prenatal harm seems different. If a mother must choose between harming her fetus or aborting it, she may choose either, at least in many cases. So it seems that prenatal harm is particularly objectionable, sometimes on a par with death. This paper offers an explanation of why prenatal harm seems particularly objectionable by drawing an analogy to the all-or-nothing (...) problem. It then argues that this analogy offers independent support for the ‘voluntarist’ view that at least some parental role obligations are grounded in the choice to be a parent. (shrink)

Nation and Identity provides a concise and comprehensive account of the place of national identity in modern life. Ross Poole argues that the nation became a fundamental organising principle of social, political and moral life during the period of early modernity and that is has provided the organising principle of much liberal, republican and democratic thought. Ross Poole offers us a new and urgently needed analysis of the concept of identity, arguing that we are now in a position (...) to envisage the end of nationalism. We see that the impact of issues like multiculturalism, republicanism, and indigenous rights have made it very difficult to see how the possibility of a postnational cosmopolitanism could not degenerate into a nihilistic moral universe. Nation and Identity will be a fascinating read for all those interested in issues of national identity, both politically and philosophically. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Everyday Life presents results from a rigorous qualitative approach to the psychological study of everyday human activities and experiences. This book does not replace scientific observation with humanistic analysis, but provides an additional perspective on significant human questions. The qualitative approach this book employs is grounded in the philosophical traditions of existentialism and phenomenology, which use dialogue as their major method of inquiry. These traditions are especially well adapted to encompass and describe human events and activities. In (...) addition, such events can be properly investigated only on the basis of a method sensitive enough to articulate the nuances of human experience and reflection. In this latter regard, it is important to note that insights deriving from literature and the humanities are equally as revealing of the human world as those from experimental psychology, biology or medicine. (shrink)

Many have been tempted to invoke a primitive notion of grounding to describe the way in which some features of reality give rise to others. Jessica Wilson argues that such a notion is unnecessary to describe the structure of the world: that we can make do with specific dependence relations such as the part–whole relation or the determinate–determinable relation, together with a notion of absolute fundamentality. In this paper I argue that such resources are inadequate to describe the particular ways (...) in which some parts of reality give rise to others, and thus that we do in fact need grounding. (shrink)

Is GDP a good proxy for social welfare? Building on economic theory, this book confirms that it is not, but also that most alternatives to it share its basic flaw, i.e., a focus on specific aspects of people's lives without sufficiently taking account of people's values and goals. A better approach is possible.

In the transdisciplinary field of ‘mindfulness,’ originally a Buddhist concept (Pāli sati; Sanskrit smṛti; Chinese nian 念; Tibetan dran pa), the two tendencies represented by Buddhist traditional a...

An exploration of Immanuel Kant's account of war and the controversies that have arisen from its interpretation. This book brings the ideas of Kant's critical philosophy to bear on one of the leading political and legal questions of our age: under what circumstances, if any, is recourse to war legally and morally justifiable?

BackgroundPatient-centred care and patient autonomy is one of the key factors to better quality of service provision, hence patient outcomes. It enables the development of patients’ trusts which is an important element to a better doctor-patient relationship. Given the increasing number of patient disputes and conflicts between patients and doctors in Chinese public hospital, it is timely to ensure patient-centred care is fully and successfully implemented. However, limited studies have examined the views and practice in different aspects of patient-centred care (...) among doctors in the Chinese public hospitals.MethodsA quantitative approach was adopted by distributing paper-based questionnaires to doctors and patients in two hospitals (Level III and Level II) in Jinan, Shandong province, China.ResultsIn total, 614 doctors from the surgical and internal medicine units of the two hospitals participated in the survey yielding 90% response rates. The study confirmed the inconsistent views among doctors in terms of their perception and practice in various aspects patient-centred care and patient autonomy regardless of the hospital where they work (category II or category III), their unit speciality (surgical or non-surgical), their gender or seniority. The high proportion of doctors (more than 20%) who did not perceive the importance of patient consultation prior to determining diagnostic and treatment procedure is alarming. This in in part due to the belief held by more than half of the doctors that patients were unable to make rational decisions and their involvement in treatment planning process did not necessarily lead to better treatment outcomes.ConclusionThe study calls for the development of system level policy and organisation wide strategies in encouraging and enabling the practice of patient-centred care and patient autonomy with the purposes of improving the quality of the service provided to patients by Chinese hospitals. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have developed an extensive literature on social ontology that applies methods and concepts from analytic metaphysics. Much of this is entirely abstracted from, and unconcerned with, social science. However, Epstein (2015) argues explicitly that analytic social metaphysics, provided its account of ontological ‘grounding’ is repaired in specific ways, can rescue social science from explanatory impasses into which he thinks it has fallen. This version of analytic social ontology thus directly competes with radically naturalistic alternatives, in a way that (...) helps to clarify what makes some metaphysics genuinely scientific (that is, part of the scientific enterprise and worldview). I consider this competition, marshal considerations against the value to social science of analytic metaphysics, and sketch a contrasting scientific metaphysics for understanding the implications of revisionist social ontology in unified scientific ontology. (shrink)

The practice of “lectio divina”–-devotional reading of the biblical text–-is popular these days. While people have explored this practice within Roman Catholic history, little research has been conducted regarding the character of devotional Bible-reading within evangelical traditions and its relationship to what is currently identified as lectio divina. The present article seeks to offer some reflections regarding the practice of devotional Bible-reading in evangelical Christianity and to do so using the categories commonly employed to describe lectio divina. First, it will (...) demonstrate how the devotional reading of Scripture has been regarded as a recognized spiritual practice in the history of evangelical Christianity, a practice that was expected to be employed in association with certain attitudes and assumptions. Next, the article examines the each of the elements of classical lectio divina–-reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation, and action. Finally, the article concludes by offering a few suggestions regarding more recent developments in evangelicalism and on the use of the practice of devotional Bible reading today. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and competitiveness. We start with the commonly held view that firm competitiveness is defined by the market. That is, the question of what are the critical competitiveness factors is answered by looking at how companies and financial analysts describe and evaluate a firm. To analyze this, we review the current state of the art on the relationship between CSR and competitiveness. Second, CSR criteria used by financial analysts (...) is identified and compared with company valuation methods. Third, the results of a multi-stakeholder dialogue on CSR and competitiveness of the European financial sector are presented. As a conclusion, we argue that CSR and competitiveness relate through a learning and innovation cycle, where corporate values, policies and practices are permanently defined and re-defined. Thus, we propose that learning takes place as CSR is embedded in business processes, and that once it has been integrated, in turn, it generates innovative practices, and finally, competitiveness. At the end of the paper, we propose that CSR in practice consists of managing inherent paradoxes generated by the tension between CSR and business policies. (shrink)

Through the 1960s, many people claimed that drug advertising was educational and physicians often relied on it. Continuing Medical Education (CME) was developed to provide an alternative. However, because CME relied on grants, industry funders chose the subjects offered. Now policymakers worry that drug firms support CME to promote sales and that commercial support biases prescribing and fosters inappropriate drug use. A historical review reveals parallel problems between advertising and industry-funded CME. To preclude industry influence and improve CME, we should (...) ensure independent funding by taxing medical industries, facilities and physicians. Independent public and professional authorities should create CME curricula. An independent agency should allocate all funds to educational institutions for approved curricula. (shrink)