I discuss the predicament that engineering-ethics education in Japan now faces and propose a solution to this. The predicament is professional motivation, i.e., the problem of how to motivate engineering students to maintain their professional integrity. The special professional responsibilities of engineers are often explained either as an implicit social contract between the profession and society (the “social-contract” view), or as requirements for membership in the profession (the “membership-requirement” view). However, there are empirical data that suggest that such views will (...) not do in Japan, and this is the predicament that confronts us. In this country, the profession of engineering did not exist 10 years ago and is still quite underdeveloped. Engineers in this country do not have privileges, high income, or high social status. Under such conditions, neither the social-contract view nor the membership-requirement view is convincing. As an alternative approach that might work in Japan, I propose a pride-based view. The notion of pride has been analyzed in the virtue-ethics literature, but the full potential of this notion has not been explored. Unlike other kinds of pride, professional pride can directly benefit the general public by motivating engineers to do excellent work even without social rewards, since being proud of themselves is already a reward. My proposal is to foster a particular kind of professional pride associated with the importance of professional services in society, as the motivational basis for professional integrity. There is evidence to suggest that this model works. (shrink)

商品の魅惑と横暴さによって見えなくされている“資本”、それは「利子生み資本」とは異なる「つつましやかな資本」の可能条件である。「利潤」を生む資本と「剰余価値」を生む資本とを区分し、原発危機・経済危機を 産みだしている悪しき「ふとどきな資本」に分水嶺を設定し、物象化の構造化された諸構造を超えていく自己技術と資本パワーを示す、画期的な書。場所資本、環境資本、文化資本の理論場を切削する。.

1. Tetsugaku jiban no ten'i : hi bunri jutsugosei basho hi jiko --.

This paper analyzes Deborah Mayo's recent criticism of use-novelty requirement. She claims that her severity criterion captures actual scientific practice better than use-novelty, and that use-novelty is not a necessary condition for severity. Even though certain cases in which evidence used for the construction of the hypothesis can test the hypothesis severely, I do not think that her severity criterion fits better with our intuition about good tests than use-novelty. I argue for this by showing a parallelism in terms of (...) severity between the confidence interval case and what she calls 'gellerization'. To account for the difference between these cases, we need to take into account certain additional considerations like a systematic neglect of relevant alternatives. (shrink)

This paper aims at giving a general outlook of Bayesianism as a set of meta-criteria for scientific methodology. In particular, it discusses Social Bayesianism, that is, the application of Bayesian meta-criteria to scientific institutions. From a Bayesian point of view, methodologies and institutions that simulate Bayesian belief updating are good ones, and those with more discriminatory power are better ones than those with less discriminatory power, other things being equal. This paper applies these ideas to a particular issue: diversity in (...) science. Bayesian considerations reveal some conditions for epistemically desirable diversity in science. (shrink)

The main theme of this dissertation is to explore how to establish a better relationship between sociological and philosophical investigations of science; how should epistemological considerations be used in sociological studies of scientific knowledge, and how should sociological findings be used in epistemological studies? To answer these questions, I review both sociological and social epistemological literatures on scientific knowledge, with more emphasis on the latter. On the sociological side, I point out that a large part of SSK literature is, contrary (...) to what some philosophers believe, totally compatible with the idea of scientific rationality. Given that, I propose the 'even stronger' program of SSK that can better utilize the philosophical literature on scientific rationality. ;On the philosophical side, I review works of four philosophers in detail. I classify them into two general categories, the descriptive approach and the normative approach . After critical analyses of each of them, I apply their insights to a concrete case study, namely the issues related with diversification of Post WW II American sociology. These analyses and applications aim to show that all of them have some interesting things to say. One interesting observation in terms of the case study is that the diversity in theory and methodology in American sociology may be a good thing for various philosophical reasons, offered by these authors. ;Finally, the general characteristics of descriptive and normative approaches are compared. Some seeming incompatibilities between two approaches can be resolved by introducing some meta-epistemological notions. Especially the notion of WRE is important in identifying different roles played by two approaches. In any case, a good philosophical analysis cannot ignore sociological findings on actual scientific practices. To say the least, when there are two epistemological views, one of them does better than the other in accounting for actual scientific practices, this is a prima facie reason to prefer the one to the other. (shrink)

Recent discussions around education for global citizenship continues to retrace notions of cosmopolitanism first laid out in Europe. Ostensibly seeking global inclusivity, much of this work ultimately returns to a rather narrow set of ontological and epistemic themes, primarily Stoicism and Pauline Christianity. The Kyoto School offers a constructive reconstruction of these core premises of European cosmopolitanism. In resisting the ontologizing of autonomous individualism and abstract universalism, Kyoto School thinkers offered an alternative tripartite structure that drew greater attention to the (...) specific : individual and universal are inevitably mediated by the ‘logic’ of specific histories, languages, institutions, and communities. Rather than naïve nationalism, this view emerged within a radically relational worldview: ‘continuity-in-discontinuity’ emplaced within absolute nothingness. Kimura Motomori, a leading Kyoto School educational thinker, explicitly extended these Nishidian ideas to challenge Rousseau’s contracting individualism, Kantian abstract universalism, and Hegelian teleological temporality, thus offering a fresh vision of cosmopolitanism: self-aware citizens engaging concretely in the task of opening their specific societies. In conclusion, in part to demonstrate the very forms of critique we envisage, we trace historically the impacts of Kyoto School cosmopolitanism ideas on postwar policy in Japan and lament the recent regressive closing. (shrink)

本書は、生活者のハピネス(豊かさや幸せ)の視点から科学技術や社会の変革を考える『因果関係から相関へ、個別技術からシステムへ』と題した『武田シンポジウム2018』の内容をまとめたものです。昨今最も注目を 浴びている科学技術である「AI」、「免疫システム研究」、「民間宇宙ロケット開発」の3つと異なる切り口から、ビッグデータと言われる時代の科学の方法論、個の集積以上の意味をもつシステムとしてのアプローチに ついて立体的に考察します。.

A sense of agency (SoA) is the experience of subjective awareness regarding the control of one’s actions. Humans have a natural tendency to generate prediction models of the environment and adapt their models according to changes in the environment. The SoA is associated with the degree of the adaptation of the prediction models, e.g., insufficient adaptation causes low predictability and lowers the SoA over the environment. Thus, identifying the mechanisms behind the adaptation process of a prediction model related to the (...) SoA is essential for understanding the generative process of the SoA. In the first half of the current study, we constructed a mathematical model in which the SoA represents a likelihood value for a given observation (sensory feedback) in a prediction model of the environment and in which the prediction model is updated according to the likelihood value. From our mathematical model, we theoretically derived a testable hypothesis that the prediction model is updated according to a Bayesian rule or a stochastic gradient. In the second half of our study, we focused on the experimental examination of this hypothesis. In our experiment, human subjects were repeatedly asked to observe a moving square on a computer screen and press a button after a beep sound. The button press resulted in an abrupt jump of the moving square on the screen. Experiencing the various stochastic time intervals between the action execution button-press) and the consequent event square jumping caused gradual changes in the subjects' degree of their SoA. By comparing the above theoretical hypothesis with the experimental results, we concluded that the update (adaptation) rule of the prediction model based on the SoA is better described by a Bayesian update than by a stochastic gradient descent. (shrink)

Al-Kind la littcrivant sur les mcouverte des trcrivit sur ce sujet a survditions et des traductions de l'un et l'autre textes, ainsi que les deux traductions latines faites du chapitre dans Les quarantes chapitres et des commentaires de la proce par al-Kindī.

Esse estudo objetivou analisar a violência infantil no contexto brasileiro, correlacionando-a com fatores socioeconômicos, socioculturais, geracionais e de gênero, investigando o impacto dos mesmos na saúde das crianças. Realizou-se um estudo epidemiológico descritivo, realizado a partir de dados de artigos científicos e documentos oficiais sobre e violência infantil, além do banco de dados do Sistema de Informação de Agravos de Notificação (SINAN) e da plataforma SciELO e Google Acadêmico. Encontrou-se uma maior prevalência de violência física e negligência, maior índice de (...) violência sexual contra o sexo feminino e negligência no sexo masculino. Os principais agressores identificados foram o pai e a mãe. Acerca da etnia, crianças pardas foram as mais agredidas, bem como as de menor escolaridade. As consequências da violência infantil se estendem para além do momento da agressão, ao perturbar funções cognitivas e mesmo influenciar na gênese de transtornos psiquiátricos. (shrink)

This collection of essays reflects the wide range of David Pingree's expertise in the scientific texts of Ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, India, Persia, and the medieval Arabic, Hebrew and Latin traditions. Both theoretical aspects and the practical applications of the exact sciences-in time keeping, prediction of the future, and the operation of magic-are dealt with. The book includes several critical editions and translations of hitherto unknown or understudied texts, and a particular emphasis is on the diffusion of scientific learning from one (...) culture to another, and through time. Above all, the essays show the variety and sophistication of the exact sciences in non-Western societies in pre-modern times. (shrink)

Understanding employee stress has become a key issue for top management for corporate growth and risk reduction. So far, annual employee satisfaction surveys have been conducted to assess the soundness of an organization. However, since it is difficult to collect questionnaires quantitatively and continuously, there is a need for a practical method that can be used to frequently measure group stress levels with a small burden on employees. We propose such a method and evaluated four combinations of approaches, using activity/rest (...) duration distributions from body motion data and generating estimation models on an individual/group basis. The optimal result was obtained when modeling was made on a group basis by using the activity duration distribution, making it possible to assess the degree of the stress of employees quantitatively and easily, and this showed the possibility of this method being useful as a management guide for companies. (shrink)

BackgroundPrevious studies have found that the decision-making process for stored unused frozen embryos involves much emotional burden influenced by socio-cultural factors. This study aims to ascertain how Japanese patients make a decision on the fate of their frozen embryos: whether to continue storage discard or donate to research.MethodsTen Japanese women who continued storage, 5 who discarded and 16 who donated to research were recruited from our infertility clinic. Tape-recorded interviews were transcribed and analyzed for emergent themes.ResultsA model of patients’ decision-making (...) processes for the fate of frozen embryos was developed, with a common emergent theme, “coming to terms with infertility” resulting in either acceptance or postponing acceptance of their infertility. The model consisted of 5 steps: 1) the embryo-transfer moratorium was sustained, 2) the “Mottainai”- embryo and having another child were considered; 3) cost reasonability was taken into account; 4) partner’s opinion was confirmed to finally decide whether to continue or discontinue storage. Those discontinuing, then contemplated 5): the effect of donation. Great emotional conflict was expressed in the theme, steps 2, 4, and 5.ConclusionsPatients’ 5 step decision-making process for the fate of frozen embryos was profoundly affected by various Japanese cultural values and moral standards. At the end of their decision, patients used culturally inherent values and standards to come to terms with their infertility. While there is much philosophical discussion on the moral status of the embryo worldwide, this study, with actual views of patients who own them, will make a significant contribution to empirical ethics from the practical viewpoint. (shrink)