The article explores integration of knowledge-enabling digital technology into community functions through the development of local Digital Communities of Practice. This analysis includes both general considerations—in terms of domain, community, and practice dimensions—as well as results from an exploratory research project in Minnesota. The domain is described as integrated deployment of virtual services (education, human services, government) in local communities; the community is comprised of the local stakeholders and residents that would use or benefit from such services; and the practice (...) is considered as a decision-making processes for designing and deploying these services. The paper concludes with research and policy considerations for providing an enduring source of knowledge about local virtual services, needs, and solutions. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time a significant number of Reid's manuscript papers on natural history, physiology and materialist metaphysics. An important contribution not only to Reid studies but also to our understanding of eighteenth-century science and its context.

Autism research is increasingly moving to a view centred around sensorimotor atypicalities instead of traditional, ethically problematical, views predicated on social-cognitive deficits. We explore how an enactivist approach to autism illuminates how social differences, stereotypically associated with autism, arise from such sensorimotor atypicalities. Indeed, in a state space description, this can be taken as a skewing of sensorimotor variables that influences social interaction and so also enculturation and habituation. We argue that this construal leads to autism being treated on a (...) par with other sensorimotor atypicalities such as blindness or atypical height. This leads to our conclusion that, insofar there is an ethical call to inclusion in our public sphere regardless of contingent bodily difference, an enactivist take on autism naturally leads to extending such inclusion to autism. Moreover, our analysis suggests a concrete way forward to achieve inclusion of autistics: by being more attentive to autistic sensorimotor specifics. (shrink)

In the United States, hate speech sits at the intersection of ethical and legal debates and has a complex relationship with journalism. The First Amendment provides broad legal protections for hate...

When infrastructural technology is functioning correctly, it is often considered to recede from view and become invisible. According to this perspective, visibility is restored in cases of breakdown and malfunction, which for this reason, are often understood to represent important epistemic opportunities for grasping previously hidden aspects of infrastructure. This article seeks to outline the limitations of the idea that infrastructural failure has a positive epistemic function by distinguishing between two fundamentally different ways in which the nature of technological function (...) can be conceptualised; the first understands function as stemming primarily from the way a technology was designed and produced, the second as a process sustained by constant human activities of maintenance and repair. After illustrating how a number of recent studies of infrastructure build upon insights granted by the latter process perspective, this article aims to demonstrate how the experience of breakdown itself does little to facilitate a shift towards understanding infrastructure in this way. For this reason, this article ends with a suggestion for a shift in emphasis in studies of infrastructure, away from breakdown and towards a sustained examination of everyday practices of maintenance, repair and modification of infrastructural technologies. (shrink)

Ellen Fox and collaborators have produced the most detailed description of healthcare ethics practices in the United States available. Some findings are shocking for anyone committed to promoting q...

Organisationen spielen in modernen Gesellschaften eine zentrale Rolle. Der Beitrag geht davon aus, dass in den mittlerweile etablierten Formen von Ethik und Ethikberatung in Einrichtungen des Gesundheitssystems eine angemessene Reflexion des Organisationsbezugs oft ausbleibt bzw. eine besondere Herausforderung darstellt. Wir konzipieren deshalb eine „prozedurale Organisationsethik“, die sich kritisch mit der organisationalen Passung der Prozesse ethischer Reflexion auseinandersetzt. Daraus lassen sich als Anregung für Theorie und Praxis von ethischen Prozessen praktische Schlussfolgerungen ableiten. Sie betreffen die Orte der Differenzsetzung für die Frage (...) nach dem Guten; die ethischen Hintergrundtheorien und die Frage nach der organisatorischen Verknüpfung der Reflexionssettings. (shrink)

Definition of the problem Organisations play a vital role in modern societies. This article presumes a lack of sufficient organisational reflection of well-established forms of ethics and ethics counselling in institutions belonging to the health sector or sees particular challenges where it is implemented. Arguments We have therefore conceived a procedural type of organisational ethics which critically examines the organisational fit of processes in terms of ethical reflection, leading to practicable suggestions. Conclusions On the one hand they relate to where (...) differences are established when asking for the good; on the other hand they are concerned with background theories and the organisational fit of the reflection settings. (shrink)

Robots equipped with artificial intelligence pose a huge challenge to traditional ontological differentiations between the spheres of the human and the non-human. Drawing mainly from neo-animistic and perspectivist approaches in anthropology and science and technology studies, the paper explores the potential of new forms of interconnectedness and rhizomatic entanglements between humans and a world transcending the boundaries between species and material spheres. We argue that intelligent robots meet virtually all criteria Western biology came up with to define ‘life’ and that (...) it ultimately makes sense to recognize them as a new species that is part of our social universe. Contrasting dualistic concepts of man and nature with a monistic approach, we show that traditional properties of life (agency, self-replication, etc.) may apply to artefacts and that, once we accept the idea that social relationships are ultimately open connections to matter of any kind, the seemingly strict boundaries between species and material spheres can no longer be sustained. Instead, we propose to include ‘matter’ and ideas into the sphere of the social as agents in their own right to form a _relational ontology of multi-species assemblages_ (ROMA). (shrink)

Mechanistic approaches are very common in the causal interpretation of biological and neuroscientific experimental work in today’s philosophy of science. In the mechanistic literature a strict distinction is often made between causal relations and constitutive relations, where the latter cannot be causal. One of the typical reasons for this strict distinction is that constitutive relations are supposedly synchronic whereas most if not all causal relations are diachronic. This strict distinction gives rise to a number of problems, however. Our end goal (...) in this paper is to argue that it should be given up, at least in the context of the biological and the psychological sciences. To that effect, we argue that constitutive relations in this context are diachronic, thus undermining the aforementioned reason. We offer two cases from scientific practice in which constitutive relations are regarded as both diachronic and causally efficacious, review three existing ways of dealing with the apparent diachronic nature of interlevel relations in mechanisms and propose a new account of diachronic, causal constitutive relevance. (shrink)

Crutchfield and Redinger argue that consciousness-altering chemical restraints are less “liberty-intrusive” (or as we will sometimes put it, just less “intrusive”) than physical restraints. Physica...

Within the scope of the POPULISMUS research project, we have engaged in a methodological cross-fertilization between Essex School-inspired methods of analysis and computer-assisted text analysis. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on the Greek case and the material analyzed involves newspaper articles from the 2014–5 period. In particular, the analysis focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around representations of ‘the people’ and ‘populism’. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, something that has not attracted much attention in (...) the relevant bibliography, and focusing on their mutual constitution from a discourse-theoretical as well as lexicometric perspective, we articulate a comprehensive analysis of the populist and anti-populist press in Greece, with broader implications for populism research globally. (shrink)

Public participation is well known for its practitioner insights and wealth of case reports. This knowledge is essential and has been well employed. Likewise, the theoretical literature on public participation is growing rapidly. The need for better conceptual and theoretical understandings of public participation has become clear. Public participation theories have not received great attention, and few have been proposed or tested. Yet theory offers much to practitioners of various interventions. The authors summarize work toward developing a public participation theory (...) and propose a way to conceptualize its skeletal components. The authors recognize that any theory must acknowledge that different people have different beliefs about what public participation should accomplish. Further, contextual variables affect a process’s character and outcomes. The authors begin with a discussion of theory’s importance to scholars, practitioners, and participants and provide an overview of existing approaches. The authors present findings from two empirical case studies used to further develop their theory of fair and competent public participation. They conclude with some observations about challenges and ways forward. (shrink)

Background: The parent of a child with profound cognitive disability will have complex decisions to consider throughout the life of their child. An especially complex decision is whether to place a tracheotomy to support the child’s airway. The decision may involve the parent wanting a tracheotomy and the clinician advising against this intervention or the clinician recommending a tracheotomy while the parent is opposed to the intervention. This conflict over what is best for the child may lead to a bioethics (...) consult. Objective: The study explores the conflicts that may arise around tracheotomy placements. Research design: This study is a retrospective cohort study of pediatric patients for whom a tracheotomy decision required a bioethics consult. Participants and research context: Pediatric patients aged birth to 18 years old with a bioethics consult for a tracheotomy decision conflict between April 2010 and December 2016. A standardized data collection tool was used to review notes entered by the palliative care team, social workers, primary clinical team interim summaries, and the bioethics consult service. Ethical considerations: The study was reviewed and approved by the medical center’s institutional review board. Results: There were 248 clinical bioethics consults during the identified study period. There were 31 consults involving 21 children where the word tracheotomy was mentioned in the consult, and 13 of the 21 consults were for children with profound cognitive disability. Discussion and conclusion: Clinicians need to be aware of their own biases when discussing a child’s prognosis and treatment options while also understanding the parents’ values and what the parent might consider to be burdensome in the care of their child and the acceptable burden for the child to experience. (shrink)

The Russian Cards Problem has been extensively studied as an example of a problem of an unconditionally secure protocol where the sender and receiver are able to transmit secret information safely over a public non-secure channel without the secret being learned by a third party with access to the channel. Epistemic logic in general and public announcement logic in particular have been very useful in this study, as it involves careful analysis of subtle properties of nested knowledge. A long standing (...) open problem is whether or not there exist protocols of length strictly greater than two for the original problem. In this paper we finally settle this problem, answering the question in the affirmative, by presenting a new solution to the original Russian Cards Problem that involves more than two steps. It starts with an initial announcement with so-called crossing hands, after which it is not common knowledge that the protocol can terminate in one more step. (shrink)

In this discussion I argue that Peter Sullivan is wrong to suggest that Wittgenstein's position in the Philosophical Investigations involves a commitment to transcendental idealism. I show that Sullivan's interpretation involves holding that transcendental idealism was employed by Wittgenstein in the attempt to combat a Platonist mythology. I show, through a detailed appraisal of Wittgenstein's discussion of samples, that Wittgenstein's approach to Platonism does not involve any such employment of transcendental idealism. I conclude that there is no such motivation as (...) Sullivan finds in Wittgenstein for endorsing transcendental idealism, and that we ought not, therefore, ascribe to him such a view. (shrink)

It has often been observed that color is a highly preferred attribute for use in distinguishing descriptions, that is, referring expressions produced with the purpose of identifying an object within a visual scene. However, most of these observations were based on visual displays containing only colors that were maximally different in hue and for which the language of experimentation possessed basic color terms. The experiments described in this paper investigate whether speakers’ preference for color is reduced if the color of (...) the target referent is similar to that of the distractors. Because colors that look similar are often also harder to distinguish linguistically, we also examine the impact of the codability of color values. As a third factor, we investigate the salience of available alternative attributes and its impact on the use of color. The results of our experiments show that, while speakers are indeed less likely to use color when the colors in a display are similar, this effect is mostly due to the difficulty in naming similar colors. Color use for color with a basic color term is affected only when the colors of target and distractors are very similar (yet still distinguishable). The salience of our alternative attribute size, manipulated by varying the difference in size between target and distractors, had no impact on the use of color. (shrink)

In the European Enlightenments it was often argued that moral conduct rather than adherence to certain theological doctrines was the true measure of religious belief. Thomas Ahnert argues that this characteristically “enlightened” emphasis on conduct in religion was less reliant on arguments from reason alone than is commonly believed. In fact, the champions of the Scottish Enlightenment were deeply skeptical of the power of unassisted natural reason in achieving “enlightened” virtue and piety. They advocated a practical program of “moral (...) culture,” in which revealed religion was of central importance. Ahnert traces this to theological controversies going back as far as the Reformation concerning the key question of early modern theology, the conditions of salvation. His findings present a new point of departure for all scholars interested in the intersection of religion and Enlightenment. (shrink)

For successful goal-directed behavior, a performance monitoring system is essential. It detects behavioral errors and initiates behavioral adaptations to improve performance. Two electrophysiological potentials are known to follow errors in reaction time tasks: the error-related negativity, which is linked to error processing, and the error positivity, which is associated with subjective error awareness. Furthermore, the correct-related negativity is linked to uncertainty about the response outcome. Here we attempted to identify the involvement of the nucleus accumbens in the aforementioned performance monitoring (...) processes. To this end, we simultaneously recorded cortical activity and local field potentials during a flanker task performed by four patients with severe opioid abuse disorder who underwent electrode implantation in the NAc for deep brain stimulation. We observed significant accuracy-related modulations in the LFPs at the time of the ERN/CRN in two patients and at the time of Pe in three patients. These modulations correlated with the ERN in 2/8, with CRN in 5/8 and with Pe in 6/8, recorded channels, respectively. Our results demonstrate the functional interrelation of striatal and cortical processes in performance monitoring specifically related to error processing and subjective error awareness. (shrink)

At a time of COVID-19 pandemic, universal basic income (UBI) has been presented as a potential public health ‘upstream intervention’. Research indicates a possible impact on health by reducing poverty, fostering health-promoting behaviour and ameliorating biopsychosocial pathways to health. This novel case for UBI as a public health measure is starting to receive attention from a range of political positions and organisations. However, discussion of the ethical underpinnings of UBI as a public health policy is sparse. This is depriving policymakers (...) of clear perspectives about the reasons for, restrictions to and potential for the policy’s design and implementation. In this article, we note prospective pathways to impact on health in order to assess fit with Rawlsian, capabilities and perfectionist approaches to public health policy. We suggest that Raz’ pluralist perfectionist approach may fit most comfortably with the prospective pathways to impact, which has implications for allocation of resources. (shrink)

We argue that providing cumulative risk as an estimate of the uncertainty in dynamically changing risky environments can help decision-makers meet mission-critical goals. Specifically, we constructed a simplified aviation-like weather decision-making task incorporating Next-Generation Radar images of convective weather. NEXRAD radar images provide information about geographically referenced precipitation. NEXRAD radar images are used by both pilots and laypeople to support decision-making about the level of risk posed by future weather-hazard movements. Using NEXRAD, people and professionals have to infer the uncertainty (...) in the meteorological information to understand current hazards and extrapolate future conditions. Recent advancements in meteorology modeling afford the possibility of providing uncertainty information concerning hazardous weather for the current flight. Although there are systematic biases that plague people’s use of uncertainty information, there is evidence that presenting forecast uncertainty can improve weather-related decision-making. The current study augments NEXRAD by providing flight-path risk, referred to as the Risk Situational Awareness Tool. RSAT provides the probability that a route will come within 20 NMI radius of hazardous weather within the next 45 min of flight. The study evaluates four NEXRAD displays integrated with RSAT, providing varying levels of support. The “no” support condition has no RSAT. The “baseline” support condition employs an RSAT whose accuracy is consistent with current capability in meteorological modeling. The “moderate” support condition applies an RSAT whose accuracy is likely at the top of what is achievable in meteorology in the near future. The “high” support condition provides a level of support that is likely unachievable in an aviation weather decision-making context without considerable technological innovation. The results indicate that the operators relied on the RSAT and improved their performance as a consequence. We discuss the implications of the findings for the safe introduction of probabilistic tools in future general aviation cockpits and other dynamic decision-making contexts. Moreover, we discuss how the results contribute to research in the fields of dynamic risk and uncertainty, risk situation awareness, cumulative risk, and risk communication. (shrink)

The essays in this book began as a contributions to a Summer Workshop arranged by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, and haled at the University of Calgary from July 7 to 14, 1978. The Institute, which was founded by the University in 1976 for the encouragement of humanistic studies, has held such conferences each summer as a part of its programme of research.

The consideration of ethics in social research has gained increasing prominence in the past few years, particularly research which seeks to inform public policy. This book presents an examination of issues relating to research ethics in planning for an international audience.

Verschwindet die Religiosität in der Moderne oder ist im Gegenteil eine Rückkehr der Religionen zu verzeichnen? Das Handbuch beleuchtet die Dialektik von Säkularisierung und Revitalisierung der Religionen aus philosophischer, soziologischer und religionswissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Vorgestellt werden grundlegende Konzepte, z. B. von Durkheim, Weber, Habermas, Blumenberg und Luhmann. Der zweite Teil untersucht Begriffe wie das Böse, das Heilige, Pluralismus etc. in ihrer Bedeutung im Kontext der Säkularisierung. Abschließend geht es um Konflikte wie Glauben und Wissen, Religion und Menschenrechte oder Säkularisierung und die (...) Weltreligionen. (shrink)

This book is an ambitious attempt to develop a cognitive approach to religion. Focusing particularly on ritual action, it borrows analytical methods from linguistics and other cognitive sciences. The authors, a philosopher of science and a scholar of comparative religion, provide a lucid critical review of established approaches to the study of religion, and make a strong plea for the combination of interpretation and explanation. Often represented as competitive approaches, they are rather, complementary, equally vital to the study of symbolic (...) systems. (shrink)

It is well appreciated that Moore, in the final years of the nineteenth century, emphatically rejected the monistic idealism of F. H. Bradley. It has, however, been less widely noticed that Moore’s concern to defeat monism remained with him well into the 1920s. In the following discussion I describe the role that Moore’s adoption of a ‘common sense’ orientation played in his criticisms of Bradley’s monism. I begin by outlining certain distinctive features of Bradley’s sceptical methodology, before describing the contrasting (...) approach of Moore as it appears in 1910-11 and 1925. I bring these methodological differences into relief by assessing the status of common sense claims in the work of each figure. I show that Moore’s common sense methodology was employed against Bradley’s monistic conclusions, and that it was adopted with Bradley squarely in mind. (shrink)

Uchiyama et al. rightly consider how cultural variation may influence estimates of heritability by contributing to environmental sources of variation. We disagree, however, with the idea that generalisable estimates of heritability are ever a plausible aim. Heritability estimates are always context-specific, and to suggest otherwise is to misunderstand what heritability can and cannot tell us.

In this commentary we outline perceptual control theory and suggest this as a fruitful way for Lee and Schwarz (L&S) to fully embody their account of cleansing behavior. Moreover, we take issue with the command control approach that L&S have taken seeing this as an unnecessary cognitive commitment within an embodied model of cleansing behavior.

Many formerly incarcerated people have civil legal needs that can imperil their successful re-entry to society and, consequently, their health. We categorize these needs and assess their association with cardiovascular disease risk factors in a sample of recently released people. We find that having legal needs related to debt, public benefits, housing, or healthcare access is associated with psychosocial stress, but not uncontrolled high blood pressure or high cholesterol, in the first three months after release.

In this conversation, which took place across several months in the year 2021, Elizabeth Grosz describes her position with respect to “new materialism” and “the material turn”: while she emphasizes the necessity of materialist thought in the current situation marked by a global pandemic, she also stresses the equal importance of what she calls “the incorporeal”: an excess in and of matter, materiality’s heterogeneous virtuality, differentiality and becoming-other. Grosz describes the incorporeal as mutually implicated with materiality in a way that (...) eschews both monism and dualism. The conversation roughly follows five topics: 1. How does one conceive of ontology without fixity? 2. How does matter “make sense”? 3. Can we think sexual differences beyond cisgender binarism and oppositional dualism? 4. What are the ethico-political implications of a materialist thought predicated on becoming and immanence? 5. Is psychoanalysis compatible with materialism, and is there a materiality of the unconscious? In the course of this exceptional interview, Grosz discusses the works of Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray, Karen Barad, Friedrich Nietzsche, and of course Gilles Deleuze, among many others... (shrink)

This intervention study explored the effects of a newly developed intergenerational encounter program on cross-generational age stereotyping. Based on a biographical-narrative approach, participants were invited to share ideas about existential questions of life. Therefore, the dyadic Life Story Interview had been translated into a group format, consisting of 10 90-min sessions. Analyses verified that LSEP participants of both generations showed more favorable CGAS immediately after, but also 3 months after the program end. Such change in CGAS was absent in a (...) control group. The LSEP-driven short- and long-term effects on CGAS could be partially explained by two program benefits, the feeling of comfort with and the experience of learning from the other generation. (shrink)

We present a theoretical and an empirical challenge to Cushman's claim that rationalization is adaptive because it allows humans to extract more accurate beliefs from our non-rational motivations for behavior. Rationalization sometimes generates more adaptive decisions by making our beliefs about the world less accurate. We suggest that the most important adaptive advantage of rationalization is instead that it increases our predictability as potential partners in cooperative social interactions.

A review essay of three recent publications that focus in different ways on the evolution­ary basis of religion. Asma focuses on the ways in which “religion” energizes the emotional needs of humans. Torrey pays close attention to the evolutionary stages of brain development that are necessary for the emergence of religious concepts and the attitudes that accompany them. Finally, Turner et al. develop a complex theory of different types of selection that they regard as necessary in order to account for (...) the institu­tionalization of religion: they think that biological natural selection, even though building human capacities, is insufficient to explain the sociological facts about religion. (shrink)

Mobile social media have become a widespread means to participate in everyday social and professional life. These platforms encourage the disclosure and exchange of personal information, which comes with privacy risks. While past scholarship has listed various predictors and consequences of online privacy concerns, there has been to date no empirical investigation of a conceivable relationship with perceived stress. Using a longitudinal panel study, we examined the reciprocal relationship between mobile social media privacy concerns and perceived stress. Results supported the (...) hypothesis that mobile social media privacy concerns at T1 are associated with higher perceived stress at T2. However, we found no evidence for the reverse association, that is, perceived stress at T1 was not related to mobile social media privacy concerns at T2. The findings are discussed based on two models—the “Antecedents privacy concerns outcomes” model and the “Privacy calculus” model. (shrink)

British systematics was distinctly marked by a raft of vituperative controversies around the turn of the 1830s. After the local collapse of broad consensus in the Linnaean system by 1820, the emergence of new schemes of classification—most notably, the “quinarian” system of William Sharp Macleay—brought with it an unprecedented register of public debate among zoologists in Britain, one which a young Charles Darwin would bitterly describe to his friend John Stevens Henslow in October 1836 as possessing a “mean quarrelsome spirit,” (...) conducted in “a manner anything but like that of gentlemen.” This article aims to provide a social and conceptual account of the remarkable tenor of zoological discourse in Britain in the late 1820s and early 1830s, with joint attention to the philosophical and interpersonal commitments at play. In doing so, it analyzes the three of the period’s most striking public controversies, each of which counted key advocates of the quinarian system as central participants. (shrink)

Abstract:Romeo and Juliet is one of the first works to emphasize the important place that romantic love holds in the lives of two individuals. Less frequently acknowledged is the role of romantic love in the play's criticism of feudal society. Using the notion of an unlikely couple, I explore the play's critique of feudal society for allowing the antagonism between the two lovers' noble households to undermine the possibility of their finding true love. The play argues for the importance of (...) a strong, centralized state in securing the welfare of its citizens. (shrink)