The underlying thesis of the research in ethical autonomy for lethal autonomous unmanned systems is that they will potentially be capable of performing more ethically on the battlefield than are human soldiers. In this article this hypothesis is supported by ongoing and foreseen technological advances and perhaps equally important by an assessment of the fundamental ability of human warfighters in today's battlespace. If this goal of better-than-human performance is achieved, even if still imperfect, it can result in a reduction in (...) noncombatant casualties and property damage consistent with adherence to the Laws of War as prescribed in international treaties and conventions, and is thus worth pursuing vigorously. (shrink)

In «Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence Revisited», the original target article for the various refutations that I comment on here, I revisited through a slightly different lens the subject of the article that I coauthored with Brian Leiter close to twenty years ago. That article has prompted four responses from Professors Pardo, Spellman, Muffato, and Enoch. Professors Pardo and Spellman basically accept the implications of the original article and offer useful but friendly amendments. Prof. Muffato apparently does not (...) want to dispute over my ground and so changes the subject, and in doing so offers a number of interesting points. Only the fourth, Prof. Enoch, has the same doubts about the utility of my original article as I do of the genre that gave rise to it. I can thus be quite brief in discussing professors Pardo, Spellman, and Muffato, but it will take bit more effort to lay out the limits of Prof. Enoch’s analysis. (shrink)

Criticism of Shakespeare's comedies has shifted from stressing their light-hearted and festive qualities to giving a stronger sense of their dark aspects and their social resonances. This volume introduces the key critical debates under five headings: genre, history and politics, gender and sexuality, language and performance.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

We revisit Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence, published twenty years ago. The evolution of the relative plausibility theory of juridical proof is offered as evidence of the advantage of a naturalized approach to the study of the field and law evidence. Various alternative explanations of aspects of juridical proof from other disciplines are examined and their shortcomings described. These competing explanations are similar in their reductive, a priori approaches that are at odds with an empirically oriented naturalized approach. (...) The shortcomings of the various a priori approaches are driven by their common methodological commitments to employing weird hypotheticals to engage in intuition mining about the American legal systems that in turn ignore important aspects of the actual legal systems and consistently make impossible epistemological demands. As a result, both their descriptions of and prescriptions for American legal systems are implausible, unlike the relative plausibility theory. (shrink)

Humans are complex social beings. To understand human behaviour, an integrated perspective is required - one which considers both what we regularly do and what motivates us. Personality, Values, Culture uses an evolutionary perspective to look at the similarities and differences in personality and values across modern societies. Integrating research on personality and human values into a functional framework that highlights their underlying compatibilities, Fischer describes how personality is shaped by the complex interplay between genes and the environment, both over (...) the course of human evolution and within the lifespan of individuals. He proposes a gene-culture coevolution model of personality and values to explain how and why people differ around the world and how genes, economics, social conditions, and climate jointly shape personality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As bioethics emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and began to have enormous impacts on the practice of medicine and research – fuelled, by broad socio‐political changes that gave rise to the struggle of women, African Americans, gay men and lesbians, and the antiauthoritarian impulse that characterised the New Left in democratic capitalist societies – little attention was given to the question of the ethics of public health. This was all the more striking since the core values and practices (...) of public health, often entailing the subordination of the individual for the common good, seemed opposed to the ideological impulses of bioethics. Of what relevance is autonomy‐focused bioethics for public health, with its mix of justifications including those that are either implicitly or explicitly paternalistic or that seek to impose strictures on individuals and communities in the name of collective welfare? To examine the deep divide between the central commitments of bioethics and the values that animate the practice of public health, we focus on a series of controversies implicating the concepts of privacy, liberty, and paternalism. Recognising the role of moral values in decision‐making was a signal contribution of bioethics in its formative period. Over the past three decades a broad array of perspectives emerged under the rubric of bioethics but individualism remains central. As we commence the process of shaping an ethics of public health, it is clear that bioethics is the wrong place to start when thinking about the balances required in defence of the public's health. (shrink)

The present research was guided by the important need for a diversion from an economistic to a humanistic management perspective of sustainability. It concentrates on the current importance of digital strategic communication, particularly regarding the concept of corporate sustainability in the context of the conflict arena of the oil industry. The focus is on the comparison of the persuasive effectiveness of the framings of corporate versus activist NGO website communications and their impacts on the perception of the triple pillars of (...) sustainability and, corporate greenwashing with respect to a proposed bituminous oil pipeline in Canada. The results of these pro and con messages were analyzed within the Elaboration Likelihood Model demonstrating a “non expert” peripheral route to a positive persuasion from exposure to the corporate communication versus an “expert” central route to a negative persuasion from the activist NGO communication. Subsequent exposure to the opposite website communication further emphasized the predominance of a negative persuasion based on both groups now being motivated as “expert” viewers of these strategic communications, leading to an important perception of greenwashing by participants resulting from vague claims, visual and linguistic contents of the corporate communication versus the mainly verifiable factual ones in that of the activist NGO. (shrink)

This research takes a retrospective look at modern consumption opportunities of the U.S. poor from both sides of the marketing exchange relationship. The paper opens with a critical assessment of the consumer-behavior literature and its primary focus on middle-class Americans. The next section profiles the impoverished and their purchasing habits and closes with a summary of how both have changed over the last forty years. Then a theoretical account is presented using consumer literature from the same timeframe. The paper ends (...) with a discussion of common business practices and moral dilemmas that have continued over these decades, along with an ethical paradigm involving distributive justice to guide future management tactics. (shrink)

Over the centuries, magicians have developed extensive knowledge about the manipulation of the human mind—knowledge that has been largely ignored by psychology. It has recently been argued that this knowledge could help improve our understanding of human cognition and consciousness. But how might this be done? And how much could it ultimately contribute to the exploration of the human mind? We propose here a framework outlining how knowledge about magic can be used to help us understand the human mind. Various (...) approaches—both old and new—are surveyed, in terms of four different levels. The first focuses on the methods in magic, using these to suggest new approaches to existing issues in psychology. The second focuses on the effects that magic can produce, such as the sense of wonder induced by seeing an apparently impossible event. Third is the consideration of magic tricks—methods and effects together—as phenomena of scientific interest in their own right. Finally, there is the organization of knowledge about magic into an informative whole, including the possibility of a science centered around the experience of wonder. (shrink)

We show that early vision can use monocular cues to rapidly complete partially-occluded objects. Visual search for easily detected fragments becomes difficult when the completed shape is similar to others in the display; conversely, search for fragments that are difficult to detect becomes easy when the completed shape is distinctive. Results indicate that completion occurs via the occlusion-triggered removal of occlusion edges and linking of associated regions. We fail to find evidence for a visible filling-in of contours or surfaces, but (...) do find evidence for a "functional" filling-in that prevents the constituent fragments from being rapidly accessed. As such, it is only the completed structures—and not the fragments themselves—that serve as the basis for rapid recognition. (shrink)

Our visual experience of the world is one of diverse objects and events, each with particular colors, shapes, and motions. This experience is so coherent, so immediate, and so effortless that it seems to result from a single system that lets us experience everything in our field of view. But however appealing, this belief is mistaken: there are severe limits on what can be visually experienced. -/- For example, in a display for air-traffic control it is important to track all (...) moving items. For a single item, this can be done without problem. Three or four can also be tracked, although some degree of effort may be needed. As the number is increased further, accurate tracking becomes more and more difficult—and eventually, impossible. Performance is evidently affected by a factor within the observer which enables certain kinds of perception to occur, but is limited in some way. This factor is generally referred to as attention. -/- At various times, attention has been associated with clarity of perception, intensity of perception, consciousness, selection, or the allocation of a limited “resource” enabling various operations (see Hatfield, 1998). During the past several decades, considerable progress has been achieved by focusing on the idea of selection (Broadbent, 1982). In particular, attention can be productively viewed as contingently selective processing. This can be embodied in various ways by various processes—there need not be a single quantity identified with all forms of attention, or a single site where it operates (Allport, 1993; Tsotsos, 2011). Although “paying attention” is often considered to be a unitary operation, it may simply refer to the control of one or more selective processes, ideally in a co-ordinated way. While this view has some cost in terms of conceptual simplicity, it can help make sense of a large set of phenomena. -/- This article surveys several of the major issues in our understanding of attention and how it relates to perception. It focuses on vision, since many—if not all—considerations are similar for all sensory modalities, and the level of understanding achieved in this domain is currently the most advanced. (shrink)

My thesis is that, although medicine is scientific, it is not and can not become a science. After rejecting as flawed an argument attempting to show that medicine is already a science, I argue that a comparison of such basic, defining features as internal aims, criteria of success, and principles regulating the enterprises demonstrate that medicine and science are inherently different. I then argue that while it may be possible to reduce the cognitive content of medicine to biology, medicine itself (...) cannot be reduced, for as an enterprise it possesses features that make it an inappropriate subject of reduction. I conclude by indicating four results that emerge from recognizing that medicine and science are basically distinct. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Legal scholarship exploring the nature of evidence and the process of juridical proof has had a complex relationship with formal modeling. As evident in so many fields of knowledge, algorithmic approaches to evidence have the theoretical potential to increase the accuracy of fact finding, a tremendously important goal of the legal system. The hope that knowledge could be formalized within the evidentiary realm generated a spate of articles attempting to put probability theory to this purpose. This literature was both insightful (...) and frustrating. Much light was shed on the legal system, but it also quickly became evident that the tools of probability theory were in many ways ill-constructed for the task. Fundamental incompatibilities between the structure of legal decision making and the extant formal tools were identified, and it became evident that many of the purported explanations of legal phenomena were internally inconsistent. As a consequence, interest in this type of formal modeling declined, and attention was directed toward different kinds of explanations of the phenomena. Perhaps under the influence of a recent trend toward various types of formal modeling in legal scholarship, a recent burst of articles, rather than attempting to explain the macro structure of trials, which was the previous object of interest, attempts to quantify the probative value of various items of evidence in ways consistent with the formal features of various probability theories, and then to study decision making from that perspective. For example, the value of evidence is often purported to be its likelihood ratio, that is, the probability of discovering or receiving the evidence given a hypothesis (e.g., the defendant did it) divided by the probability of discovering or receiving the evidence given the negation of the hypothesis (the defendant didn't do it). Alternatively, the value of evidence is purported (more contextually) to be the information gain it provides, defined as the increase in probability it provides for a hypothesis above the probability of the hypothesis based on the other available evidence. Both conceptions then assume that all of the various probability assessments conform or ought to conform to the dictates of Bayes' theorem (that maintains consistency among such assessments); empirical studies are then done testing the extent to which this is so and proposing how the law can increase the probability that it is so. The general criticisms of using Bayes' theorem as a formal model of juridical proof are well known and were integral to the last wave of interest in formal modeling of the evidentiary process. This paper thus for the most part puts aside that more general issue, and focuses specifically on mathematical modeling of the value of particular items of evidence. The paper demonstrates that formal modeling has only limited value in explaining the value of legal evidence, much more limited than those constructing and discussing the models assume, and thus that the conclusions they draw about the value of evidence are unwarranted. This is done through a discussion of four recent examples that attempt to quantify evidence relating to, respectively, carpet fibers, infidelity, DNA random-match evidence, and character evidence used to impeach a witness. This article thus makes two contributions. First, and most importantly, it is another demonstration of the complex relationship between algorithmic tools and legal decision making. Second, at a minimum it points out serious pitfalls for analytical or empirical studies of juridical proof. (shrink)

The human experience is punctuated by times of crisis. Some crises are experienced at a personal level (e.g., the diagnosis of a life-threatening disease), organizational level (e.g., a business facing bankruptcy), and still others are experienced on a societal or global level (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic). Although crises can be deeply troubling and anxiety provoking, they can also serve as an important catalyst for creative action and innovative outcomes. This is because during times of crisis our typical forms of reasoning and (...) action may no longer serve us. It is precisely during such times that new ways of thought, action and leadership are needed. A key question for researchers to consider is:Why and how times of crisis serve as an impetus for creative actions and outcomes?The purpose of this paper is to address this question. I open by briefly discussing the features of a crisis. I then introduce an empirically testable, process model that outlines various pathways, factors, and outcomes associated with different ways people and organizations respond during times of crisis. I close by briefly outlining future directions for creativity theory and research. (shrink)

Discourse around assisted colonization focuses on the ecological risks, costs, and uncertainties associated with the practice, as well as on its technical feasibility and alternative approaches to it. Nevertheless, the ethical underpinnings of the case for assisted colonization are claims about the value of species. A complete discussion of assisted colonization needs to include assessment of these claims. For each type of value that species are thought to possess it is necessary to determine whether it is plausible that species possess (...) the type of value and, if so, to what extent their possessing it justifies assisted colonization. I conducted such an assessment for each of the predominant types of value ascribed to species: ecological, instrumental (including option value), existence, and intrinsic value (including interest‐based, objective, and valuer‐dependent intrinsic value). The vast majority of species, including several that have been proposed as candidates for assisted colonization, have much less value than is often presumed. Moreover, with respect to some types of value, assisted colonization would not fully preserve the value of the target species even if it were to keep the target species in existence. Therefore, the case for assisted colonization is significantly weaker and more qualified than its advocates often suppose. There may be exceptional species for which assisted colonization is well justified—and for this reason, case‐by‐case assessment is necessary—but in general the burden of justification generated by the ecological risks associated with assisted colonization is not met by the value potentially preserved by assisted colonization. This suggests that assisted colonization ought to have, at most, a very minor role in the portfolio of ecosystem management practices, even as it pertains to species conservation under conditions of rapid climate change. (shrink)

Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, the contributors to _Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins_ hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future. Denis R. Alexander (...) and Ronald L. Numbers bring together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for nonscientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring an essay on eugenics from Edward J. Larson and an examination of the progress of evolution by Michael J. Ruse, _Biology and Ideology_ examines uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today. An accessible survey, this collection will enlighten historians of science, their students, practicing scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and culture. (shrink)

My thesis is that biology is most plausibly regarded as a universal, as distinct from a provincial, science. First, I develop the general notion of a provincial science, formulate three criteria for applying the concept, and present brief examples illustrating their use. Second, I argue that a consideration of population genetics as a characteristic example of a basic biological theory strengthens the prior presumption that biology is not a provincial science. Finally, I examine two arguments to the effect that biology (...) is a provincial science. The first concerns biology's exclusively terrestrial evidence base, the second the logical character of its laws. I introduce considerations that weaken the persuasiveness of the first argument and then show that the second one rests upon a false premise and so should be rejected. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 465-477.

The present research was guided by the important need for a diversion from an economistic to a humanistic management perspective of sustainability. It concentrates on the current importance of digital strategic communication, particularly regarding the concept of corporate sustainability in the context of the conflict arena of the oil industry. The focus is on the comparison of the persuasive effectiveness of the framings of corporate versus activist NGO website communications and their impacts on the perception of the triple pillars of (...) sustainability and, corporate greenwashing with respect to a proposed bituminous oil pipeline in Canada. The results of these pro and con messages were analyzed within the Elaboration Likelihood Model demonstrating a “non expert” peripheral route to a positive persuasion from exposure to the corporate communication versus an “expert” central route to a negative persuasion from the activist NGO communication. Subsequent exposure to the opposite website communication further emphasized the predominance of a negative persuasion based on both groups now being motivated as “expert” viewers of these strategic communications, leading to an important perception of greenwashing by participants resulting from vague claims, visual and linguistic contents of the corporate communication versus the mainly verifiable factual ones in that of the activist NGO. (shrink)

The aesthetic appreciation of both art and nature is often, in fact, judged to be more – and less – serious. For instance, both natural objects and art objects can be hastily and unthinkingly perceived, and they can be perceived with full and thoughtful attention. In the case of art, we are better equipped to sift the trivial from the serious appreciation; for the existence of a corpus, and a continuing practice, of criticism of the arts – for all their (...) internal disputatiousness – furnishes us with relevant criteria. In the case of nature, we have far less guidance. Yet it must matter, there too, to distinguish trivial from serious encounters. When we seek to defend areas of “outstanding natural beauty” against depredations, it matters greatly what account we can give of the appreciation of that beauty: how its value can be set alongside competing and vociferously promoted values involved in industry, commerce and urban expansion. If we wish to attach very high value to the appreciation of natural beauty, we must be able to show that more is involved in such appreciation than the pleasant, unfocused enjoyment of a picnic place, or a fleeting and distanced impression of countryside through a touring-coach window, or obligatory visits to standard viewpoints or snapshot-points.That there is much work to be done on this subject is of course due to the comparative neglect of natural beauty in recent and fairly recent aesthetics. (shrink)

Aesthetic appreciation of landscape is by no means limited to the sensuous enjoyment of sights and sounds. It very often has a reflective, cognitive element as well. This sometimes incorporates scientific knowledge, e.g.,geological or ecological; but it can also manifest what this article will call 'metaphysical imagination', which sees or seems to see in a landscape some indication, some disclosure of how the world ultimately is. The article explores and critically appraises this concept of metaphysical imagination, and some of the (...) roles it can play in our aesthetic encounters. (shrink)

Somatic cell gene therapy has yielded promising results. If germ cell gene therapy can be developed, the promise is even greater: hundreds of genetic diseases might be virtually eliminated. But some claim the procedure is morally unacceptable. We thoroughly and sympathetically examine several possible reasons for this claim but find them inadequate. There is no moral reason, then, not to develop and employ germ-line gene therapy. Taking the offensive, we argue next that medicine has a prima facie moral obligation to (...) do so. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to show that adaptational sentences (i.e. sentences containing the terms "adaptive", "adapted", etc.) in evolutionary biology are best interpreted as equivalent to sentences about Darwinian or genetical selection. Thus, the use of adaptational languages does not introduce final purposes or other nonempirical notions into biology. I also try to demonstrate that adaptational sentences and functional sentences are not equivalent in an evolutionary context so that an analysis of function does not dispense with the need for (...) an analysis of adaptation. Finally, it is argued that, although some adaptational sentences might be construed as teleological explanations, given an empirical content, they do not serve as explanations. Rather, they express the outcome of selection, regarded in one way, and regarded in another, they express data for which a theory of evolution must account. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Traditionally, vision science and information/data visualization have interacted by using knowledge of human vision to help design effective displays. It is argued here, however, that this interaction can also go in the opposite direction: the investigation of successful visualizations can lead to the discovery of interesting new issues and phenomena in visual perception. Various studies are reviewed showing how this has been done for two areas of visualization, namely, graphical representations and interaction, which lend themselves to work on visual processing (...) and the control of visual operations, respectively. The results of these studies have provided new insights into aspects of vision such as grouping, attentional selection and the sequencing of visual operations. More generally yet, such results support the view that the perception of visualizations can be a useful domain for exploring the nature of visual cognition, inspiring new kinds of questions as well as casting new light on the limits to which information can be conveyed visually. (shrink)

Common property has been theoretically linked to environmental degradation through the metaphor of “the tragedy of the commons,” which discounts local solutions to commons dilemmas and typically posits the need for strong states or privatization. Though neither solution is theoretically or empirically adequate—because of the nature of states and nature in the real world—local arrangements for averting the tragedy suffer certain lacunaeas well, including stringent boundary conditions and overlapping/overarching commons situations that necessitate larger scale cooperation than is possible in the (...) face-to-face communities that are conducive to cooperation. Second-order or meta-commons issues expand the scope of inquiry necessarily beyond conservationto preservation.The Sundarbans illustrates the contradictory implications of the Leviathan solution to comons dilemmas, as well as the centrality of alternative perceptual framings of natural systems. (shrink)

The probabilistic account of juridical proof meets insurmountable problems. A better explanation of juridical proof is that it is a form of inference to the best explanation that involves the comparative plausibility of the parties’ stories. In addition, discrete evidentiary matters such as relevance and probative value are also best understood as involving inference to the best explanation rather than being probabilistic.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV.

Hannah Arendt develops an immensely attractive account of `judgment', both as a supremely important human mental capacity and with respect to its place in political life, and this account rightly draws attention from a broad array of political theorists. Her essay `Truth and Politics' is one of the texts in which she first articulates this account of judgment. However, the account of truth offered in that essay is full of both puzzles and problems — notably, the puzzle of why Arendt, (...) committed as she is to elevating the dignity of political life, thinks she needs to drive a wedge between politics and truth to the extent that she does in her account of the relation between them. The question pursued in this article is: why does Arendt think that, in order to give judgment and opinion the dignity that are appropriate to them, she needs, as it were, to slander truth as `coercive', `tyrannical', and so on? (shrink)

This paper offers a restatement of the basic project of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, tries to trace its theoretical motivation, and presents some criticisms of Arendt's interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Arendt's political philosophy as a whole is an attempt to ground the idea of human dignity on the publicly displayed 'words and deeds' that con stitute the realm of human affairs. This project involves a philo sophical response both to Plato's impugning of the dignity of (...) the polis and to Hegel's founding of modern historicism. The Kant Lectures bring this philosophical project to its completion because the enact ment of public deeds presupposes a company of judging spectators who draw meaning from the spectacle by judging and appreciating what is enacted. But this conception, precisely because it relates so deeply to Arendt's own theoretical impulse, leads to a sometimes onesided and misleading reading of Kant. Key Words: aesthetic judgment • dialogue/communication • Hannah Arendt • Immanuel Kant • political judgment. (shrink)