When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In Blind Spots, leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to. From the collapse of Enron and corruption in the tobacco industry, to sales of the defective Ford Pinto, (...) the downfall of Bernard Madoff, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the authors investigate the nature of ethical failures in the business world and beyond, and illustrate how we can become more ethical, bridging the gap between who we are and who we want to be. Explaining why traditional approaches to ethics don't work, the book considers how blind spots like ethical fading--the removal of ethics from the decision--making process--have led to tragedies and scandals such as the Challenger space shuttle disaster, steroid use in Major League Baseball, the crash in the financial markets, and the energy crisis. The authors demonstrate how ethical standards shift, how we neglect to notice and act on the unethical behavior of others, and how compliance initiatives can actually promote unethical behavior. They argue that scandals will continue to emerge unless such approaches take into account the psychology of individuals faced with ethical dilemmas. Distinguishing our "should self" from our "want self", the authors point out ethical sinkholes that create questionable actions. Suggesting innovative individual and group tactics for improving human judgment, Blind Spots shows us how to secure a place for ethics in our workplaces, institutions, and daily lives. (shrink)

When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In Blind Spots, leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to. From the collapse of Enron and corruption in the tobacco industry, to sales of the defective Ford Pinto, (...) the downfall of Bernard Madoff, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the authors investigate the nature of ethical failures in the business world and beyond, and illustrate how we can become more ethical, bridging the gap between who we are and who we want to be. Explaining why traditional approaches to ethics don't work, the book considers how blind spots like ethical fading--the removal of ethics from the decision--making process--have led to tragedies and scandals such as the Challenger space shuttle disaster, steroid use in Major League Baseball, the crash in the financial markets, and the energy crisis. The authors demonstrate how ethical standards shift, how we neglect to notice and act on the unethical behavior of others, and how compliance initiatives can actually promote unethical behavior. They argue that scandals will continue to emerge unless such approaches take into account the psychology of individuals faced with ethical dilemmas. Distinguishing our "should self" from our "want self", the authors point out ethical sinkholes that create questionable actions. Suggesting innovative individual and group tactics for improving human judgment, Blind Spots shows us how to secure a place for ethics in our workplaces, institutions, and daily lives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Blind Spots and Avenues for Transformation within the Utopian Canon: Toward A Terrestrial EcotopianismHeather Alberro (bio)Limitations and Exclusions of the (Western) Utopian CanonUtopianism in all of its manifestations often powerfully (re)surfaces during times of significant socio-ecological upheaval as a response to oppressive and exploitative realities. As such it is a fervent refusal against a given status quo and its purported inevitability. Utopianism and hope are rendered possible (...) by, and draw their transformative potential from, the boundless terrain of potentiality surrounding any given reality.1 Indeed, without such conditions of radical uncertainty, hope and utopianism would not be possible. Often and understandably, the seminal works of Plato, Thomas More, William Morris, H. G. Wells and others come to mind when we think of utopian studies. Hence Kumar’s parochial observation that there is no discernible utopian tradition beyond the West because other cultures lack the foundational myth of the Golden Age—that is, the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, and Arcadia—that has been so formative to the development of utopia in the West.2 These traditional or “transcendental” utopian modalities often feature a dichotomous opposition to their present reality, depicting time and historical movement [End Page 528] as linear successions of stages proceeding from an archaic past and toward a future wherein the utopian ideal is seen as occupying a “fixed space outside time and history.”3 Such temporally “transcendent” utopias marked the dawn of the modern phase of utopian thought, originating in the seventeenth century alongside new theories of social evolution that coalesced into modern Enlightenment notions of linear historical progress.4Prioritizing Pluralism: Critical Heterotopias of the “Here and Now”What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops.5Tom Moylan’s notion of “critical utopianism,” which emerged during the “historic block” of political opposition of the 1960s and 1970s, marks one important step within the utopian canon toward praxis and the essential “Nowness” of critique and imaginative projection.6 This “critical” strand of utopianism is fueled by a fervent opposition to the exploitation and domination of people and the natural world that is increasingly characteristic of Western-capitalist societies.7 This opposition is coupled with a utopian desire for mutual aid, ecological resilience, liberation, and peaceful living—in effect, a longing for community.8 The “critical” in Moylan’s formulation has a bivalency: first, in the sense of critique through the debunking and deconstruction of the utopian genre itself, which was “colonized” by capitalism toward the 1970s and infused with technocratic dreams of material abundance through boundless economic expansion; and second, in the sense of the critical mass required to effect fundamental societal transformations.9 If the better is the enemy of the good, then perfection serves as “a stick with which to beat the possible.”10 Utopias do not offer rigid blueprints of a fixed or perfect ideal world but rather head toward “the ideal” by offering “a rich blending of creative fantasy, critical thinking, and oppositional activism” predicated on a demand for radically new relations between social and natural systems.11 Ever critically self-reflective, critical utopias continually remind us of the limitations of the utopian impulse, particularly the dangers of pursuing rigid and transcendental visions of “the better.” Nevertheless, these are desperate times that demand some orientation toward a better; utopianism’s [End Page 529] denunciative function is not enough. Thus, in his impassioned recent work Becoming Utopian, Moylan denotes the need for an intersectional, democratically unified leadership structure that can help sustain a political movement for counteracting the “global/neoliberal superpower order while reaching for a utopian horizon.”12 With a focus more on process than a fixed ideal, the critical utopia explores and articulates vibrant post-capitalist futures that are simultaneously open-ended, and far more socio-ecologically resilient than the “now” of late capitalism.Akin in function and style to critical utopias are the grounded and transgressive... (shrink)

These lectures on logic, more specifically proof theory, are basically intended for postgraduate students and researchers in logic. The question at stake is the nature of mathematical knowledge and the difference between a question and an answer, i.e., the implicit and the explicit. The problem is delicate mathematically and philosophically as well: the relation between a question and its answer is a sort of equality where one side is ``more equal than the other'': one thus discovers essentialist blind (...) class='Hi'>spots. Starting with Godel's paradox --so to speak, the incompleteness of answers with respect to questions--the book proceeds with paradigms inherited from Gentzen's cut-elimination. Various settings are studied: sequent calculus, natural deduction, lambda calculi, category-theoretic composition, up to geometry of interaction, all devoted to explicitation, which eventually amounts to inverting an operator in a von Neumann algebra. Mathematical language is usually described as referring to a preexisting reality. Logical operations can be given an alternative procedural meaning: typically, the operators involved in GoI are invertible, not because they are constructed according to the book, but because logical rules are those ensuring invertibility. Similarly, the durability of truth should not be taken for granted: one should distinguish between imperfect and perfect modes. The procedural explanation of the infinite thus identifies it with the unfinished, i.e., the perennial. But is perenniality perennial? This questioning yields a possible logical explanation for algorithmic complexity. This highly original course on logic by one of the world's leading proof theorists challenges mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and philosophers to rethink their views and concepts on the nature of mathematical knowledge in an exceptionally profound way. (shrink)

This paper aims to identify several interpretive problems posed by the final part of DA II.11, where Aristotle intertwines the thesis that a sense is like a ‘mean’ and an explanation for the existence of a ‘blind spot’ related to the sense of touch, adding the further contention that we are capable of discriminating because the mean ‘becomes the other opposite’ in relation to the perceptible property being perceived. To solve those problems, the paper explores a novel interpretation of (...) Aristotle’s claims, arguing that they describe a homeostatic physiological reaction by which the sensory apparatus responds to perceptible stimuli. According to the proposed interpretation, such homeostatic reaction constitutes a necessary condition for perceiving what Aristotle refers to as ‘proper’ perceptible features, which include properties like ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ as well as colors and sounds. (shrink)

Why absolute certainty is impossible in science In today's unpredictable and chaotic world, we look to science to provide certainty and answers—and often blame it when things go wrong. The Blind Spot reveals why our faith in scientific certainty is a dangerous illusion, and how only by embracing science's inherent ambiguities and paradoxes can we truly appreciate its beauty and harness its potential. Crackling with insights into our most perplexing contemporary dilemmas, from climate change to the global financial meltdown, (...) this book challenges our most sacredly held beliefs about science, technology, and progress. At the same time, it shows how the secret to better science can be found where we least expect it—in the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the inevitably unpredictable. William Byers explains why the subjective element in scientific inquiry is in fact what makes it so dynamic, and deftly balances the need for certainty and rigor in science with the equally important need for creativity, freedom, and downright wonder. Drawing on an array of fascinating examples—from Wall Street's overreliance on algorithms to provide certainty in uncertain markets, to undecidable problems in mathematics and computer science, to Georg Cantor's paradoxical but true assertion about infinity—Byers demonstrates how we can and must learn from the existence of blind spots in our scientific and mathematical understanding. The Blind Spot offers an entirely new way of thinking about science, one that highlights its strengths and limitations, its unrealized promise, and, above all, its unavoidable ambiguity. It also points to a more sophisticated approach to the most intractable problems of our time. (shrink)

Dispositionalist accounts of belief define beliefs in terms of specific sets of dispositions. In this article, I provide a blind-spot argument against these accounts. The core idea of the argument is that beliefs having the form [p and it is not manifestly believed that p] cannot be manifestly believed. This means that one cannot manifest such beliefs in one’s assertions, conscious thoughts, actions, behaviours, or any other type of activity. However, if beliefs are sets of dispositions, they must be (...) manifestable in some way. Therefore, according to my argument, beliefs are not sets of dispositions. The argument is defended against some possible objections. (shrink)

This article examines the thought of two prominent political theorists: John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Both Rawls and Habermas take deliberation to be central to the theory of justice. In their view, deliberation provides a necessary alternative to paternalistic models of power and authority. The deliberative turn has been celebrated as one of the great frontiers of political theory. But what are its limitations? What are its blind spots? This article argues that the deliberative turn has reinforced the (...) anthropocentrism of modern political theory by categorically excluding the moral claims of animals from the sphere of justice. The article then proposes an evolutionary conception of justice as a way out of our anthropocentric social imaginary. (shrink)

Can there be higher level laws of nature even though everything is reducible to the fundamental laws of physics? The computer science notion of level of abstraction explains how there can be.

Wright, Ken Review(s) of: Blind spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right And What to Do about It, by Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel Princeton University Press 2011, x, 191pp.

Classic theories of religious toleration from the 17th century regularly made exceptions for various categories of people such as Catholics and atheists who need not be tolerated. From a contemporary perspective these may be understood as blind spots because at least some of us would argue that these exceptions were not necessary. This essay explores the toleration theories of John Milton, Benedict de Spinoza, Denis Veiras, John Locke and Pierre Bayle in order to assess whether they actually called (...) for such exceptions and whether those exceptions were justifed or were in fact blind spots. It concludes with some reflections on what our own blind spots may be, and whether we can see around them. (shrink)

Though Socrates can easily look like a cosmopolitan in moral and political theory, a closer reading of the relevant texts shows that, in the most important sense of the term as we now use it, he turns out – disappointingly, perhaps – not to be. The reasons why not are instructive and important, both for readers of Plato and for political theorists; they have to do with the phenomenon that I shall call ethical blind-spots.

The growing prevalence of misleading information (i.e., bullshit) in society carries with it an increased need to understand the processes underlying many people’s susceptibility to falling for it. Here we report two studies (N = 412) examining the associations between one’s ability to detect pseudo-profound bullshit, confidence in one’s bullshit detection abilities, and the metacognitive experience of evaluating potentially misleading information. We find that people with the lowest (highest) bullshit detection performance overestimate (underestimate) their detection abilities and overplace (underplace) those (...) abilities when compared to others. Additionally, people reported using both intuitive and reflective thinking processes when evaluating misleading information. Taken together, these results show that both highly bullshit-receptive and highly bullshit-resistant people are largely unaware of the extent to which they can detect bullshit and that traditional miserly processing explanations of receptivity to misleading information may be insufficient to fully account for these effects. (shrink)

In order to better understand the conditions of the twenty-first century Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello revisit the twentieth century in Political Blind Spots: Reading the Ideology of Images. Sassower and Cicotello revisit some of the most significant periods in art and politics in the twentieth century paying close attention to the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

This article shows that the concept of choice is central to Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism. It argues that his valuing of choice is anchored in a particular conception of human nature, one that assumes and presupposes free will. Berlin’s works sketch a metaphysics of choice, and his reluctance to situate himself openly in the debate on free will is unconvincing. By introducing the theory of autopoiesis, this article further suggests that there is a way to take Berlin’s value pluralism seriously, by (...) considering sets of values as autopoietic conscious systems. Drawing on the works of Maturana and Varela in biology and Luhmann in sociology, autopoiesis strengthens value pluralism and acts as a critique of liberalism. By putting objectivity in parenthesis, autopoiesis finally allows for value systems to coexist side by side in a stronger sense than Berlin’s liberalism ever could. (shrink)

Interpretation without Truth is the result of thirty years of research that Pierluigi Chiassoni has devoted to legal interpretation and legal reasoning. More generally, the book represents one of t...

It is estimated that over 800 million people are hungry each day and two billion are suffering from the consequences of vitamin and mineral deficiencies. While a paradigm shift towards a multi-dimensional and multi-sectoral approach to food and nutrition insecurity is emerging, technical approaches largely prevail to tackle the causes of hunger and malnutrition. Founded in original in-depth field research among smallholder farmers in southwest Kenya, we argue that incorporating cultural or social dimensions in this technical debate is imperative and (...) that by systematically overlooking these dimensions, food insecurity cannot be accurately captured nor properly addressed. Based on a sub-location in rural southwest Kenya where the food plate is rapidly narrowing towards a high-calorie low nutrient diet and where over 80 % of households experience food shortages at least once a year, conclusions suggest that preferences, the local function of food, and the practices that emerge therefrom can affect the regularity of meals and their composition. The findings allow us to complement emerging research and program development with a more comprehensive and locally adapted approach to tackle food and nutrition insecurity. (shrink)

This paper is about the alethic aspect of epistemic rationality. The most common approaches to this aspect are either normative (what a reasoner ought to/may believe?) or evaluative (how rational is a reasoner?), where the evaluative approaches are usually comparative (one reasoner is assessed compared to another). These approaches often present problems with blindspots. For example, ought a reasoner to believe a currently true blindspot? Is she permitted to? Consequently, these approaches often fail in describing a situation of alethic maximality, (...) where a reasoner fulfills all the alethic norms and could be used as a standard of rationality (as they are, in fact, used in some of these approaches). I propose a function α, which accepts a set of beliefs as inputand returns a numeric alethic value. Then I use this function to define a notion of alethic maximality that is satisfiable by finite reasoners (reasoners with cognitive limitations) and does not present problems with blindspots. Function α may also be used in alethic norms and evaluation methods (comparative and non-comparative) that may be applied to finite reasoners and do not present problems with blindspots. A result of this investigation isthat the project of providing purely alethic norms is defective. The use of function α also sheds light on important epistemological issues, such as the lottery and the preface paradoxes, and the principles of clutter avoidance and reflection. (shrink)

Agriculture in Western Europe has become efficient and productive but at a cost. The quality of biodiversity, soil, air, and water has been compromised. In the search for ways to ensure food security and meet the challenges of climate change, new production systems have been proposed. One of these is the transition to circular agriculture: closing the cycles of nutrients and other resources to minimise losses and end the impact on climate change. This development aims to address existing problems in (...) food production but also raises questions about animal health and welfare. Although the role animals can play in this development is not ignored, the animal welfare dimension of circular agriculture seems to be overlooked. We argue that this is a problem both for the success of circular agriculture and for the animals involved. To substantiate this claim, we analyse the background to this lack of attention, which we find in (a) the way circular agriculture is conceptualised; (b) the institutional hurdles related to the legal, political and economic context; and (c) the concept of animal welfare, which requires further innovation. By analysing these aspects, we develop stepping stones for an animal-welfare inclusive concept of circular agriculture. These stepping stones include: recognising the animal as a participant with its own interests in the innovation towards circular agriculture; using a dynamic concept of animal welfare; a concept of circularity that provides space for social values, including animal welfare; and attention to institutional innovation by improving public engagement and building trust. (shrink)

This chapter analyses the Church's efforts in opposing The Da Vinci Code as a concerted bid to reinforce the ideological bulwark surrounding millennia-old structures of episcopal governance. It postulates that it was Church leaders sensing a challenge to Roman Catholicism's traditional manner of organizing and exercising power in the form of depersonalized office charisma that provoked the criticisms they mounted worldwide against The Da Vinci Code. Weber's discussion of models for the institutionalization of legitimate power speaks directly to the contingency (...) of outcomes for religions founded upon charismatic authority. In early 2005 Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a former high Vatican official, urged Catholics to shun the novel like rotten food and branded the bestseller 'a sack full of lies' insulting the Christian faith. For Weber, the Catholic Church provided a paradigmatic example of the rise of a bureaucracy to the position of an all-powerful authority. (shrink)

An argument for the inclusion of the human perspective within science and how it makes science possible.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 9, Page 16-18, September 2011.

The aim of this paper is to mount a philosophical challenge to the currently highly visible research and discourse on empathy. The notion of empathetic perspective-shifting—a conceptually demanding, high-level construal of empathy in humans that arguably captures the core meaning of the term—is criticized from the standpoint of a philosophy of normatively accountable agency. Empathy in this demanding sense fails to achieve a true understanding of the other and instead risks to impose the empathizer’s self-constitutive agency upon the person empathized (...) with. Attempts to ‘simulate’ human agency, or attempts to emulate its cognitive or emotional basis, will likely distort their target phenomena in profound ways. Thus, agency turns out to be empathy’s blind spot. Elements of an alternative understanding of interpersonal relatedness are also discussed, focusing on aspects of ‘interaction theory’. These might do some of the work that high-level constructs of empathy had been supposed to do without running into similar conceptual difficulties. (shrink)

Together, the code and inferential models of communication are often thought to range over all cases of communication. However, their prevailing versions seem unable to fully explain what I call underdeterminacy without ostension. The latter is constituted by communication where stimuli that are not (nor appear to be) produced with communicative or informative intentions nevertheless communicate information underdetermined by the relevant codes. Though the prevailing accounts of communication cannot fully explain how communication works in such cases, I suggest that some (...) version of the inferential model can—if we allow it to extend to non‐ostensive, non‐intentional behaviors. (shrink)

Online creative idea generation is often considered an extension of traditional creative idea activities on the Internet platform, in which digital technology plays an important role. Consistent with the studies on traditional creative idea activities, the studies on online creative idea generation take the creativity of mass psychology as the core, and believe that digital technology can stimulate people’s creative output. This study challenges the past research paradigm from the perspective of media materiality, redefines the processes and activities of online (...) creative idea generation, and further suggests that it may affect people’s psychology by reducing their creativity without real awareness. The study is innovative in both theory and practice. We also discuss the limitations and future directions of the study. (shrink)

When I proposed having the future at the center of this issue, which marks the 10th anniversary of Humanist Studies & The Digital Age, I was aware of the complexity of this controversial topic. The possibility of magnifiche sorti e progressive — a “splendid and progressive destiny” — made possible by human technology inspires hope in some and critique in others. The expression comes from one of Leopardi’s last poems, Ginestra o il fiore del deserto (Broom, or the flower of (...) the desert), where he uses it ironically to suggest the powerlessnesss of humanity in the face of natural disasters. The poet argues with all those who praise the human condition and progress acritically. He condemns their hubris and bitterly invites them to visit the arid slopes of Vesuvius, reduced to a desert by the volcano’s eruption. (shrink)

Since their emergence in the 1980s, environmental virtue ethics (EVEs) have aimed to provide an alternative to deontological and consequentialist approaches for guiding ecological actions in the context of the global environmental crisis. The deterioration of the ecological situation and the challenges in addressing collective action problems caused by global changes have heightened interest in these ethics. They offer a framework for meaningful individual actions independently of the commitment of other actors. However, by shifting the focus onto individuals, EVEs appear (...) to grapple with the tension between anthropocentrism and respect for nature, as well as between self-flourishing and concern for other living beings. This article argues that this difficulty is rooted in the neglect within EVEs of the communitarian aspect of ancient virtue ethics. Drawing from Baird Callicott’s ecocentric approach and Val Plumwood’s works, this paper explores the possibility of conceiving ecological communities as collective frameworks in which both public and private virtues are defined and practiced. (shrink)

The Bayes Blind Spot of a Bayesian Agent is the set of probability measures on a Boolean algebra that are absolutely continuous with respect to the background probability measure of a Bayesian Agent on the algebra and which the Bayesian Agent cannot learn by conditionalizing no matter what evidence he has about the elements in the Boolean algebra. It is shown that if the Boolean algebra is finite, then the Bayes Blind Spot is a very large set: it (...) has the same cardinality as the set of all probability measures ; it has the same measure as the measure of the set of all probability measures ; and is a ``fat'' set in topological sense in the set of all probability measures taken with its natural topology. (shrink)

What are the consequences of modernity for the institution of contracting? As the unity of the traditional contract is dissolved into a multiplicity of separate contracting worlds, the binding force of contracting needs to be reformulated from an interpersonal to an interdiscursive relation. The central thesis of this Article is that the unity of contracting is hidden in the blind spot of the distinction between contracting worlds. Contracting needs two diametrically contradictory but complementary theories which cannot be integrated into (...) a synthesis. As demonstrated with the example of the expertise contract, the subtle interplay of different contracting worlds depends basically on a fragile symmetry of chances of translation. The normative correlate of contract understood as translation between different worlds of meaning would be an extension of constitutional rights into the context of private governance regimes. (shrink)

This study investigates the ethical implications of American newspaper policies that call for the automatic rejection of anonymous submissions to "letters to the editor" forums. The investigation is a qualitative analysis of more than 30 practitioner essays printed in journalism trade journals in the mid-to-late 20th century and interviews conducted with editors from 16 U.S. newspapers. The analysis found that contemporary American editors exhibited a blind spot toward anonymous commentary that seems to be in contention with certain tenets of (...) codes of ethics. Although editors took some steps toward making ethical arguments in favor of those policies, they either truncated or skipped some steps-such as considering all of the facts, considering journalistic principles, and acknowledging their personal biases toward anonymity-in making ethical decisions. The study concludes that editors who make ethical arguments in favor of "must-sign" policies should reconsider either their ethical justifications for those policies or the utility of the policies themselves. (shrink)

the article deals with the interrelation between galileo and the visual arts. it presents a couple of drawings from the hand of galileo and confronts them with viviani's report that galileo had not only wanted to become an artist in his youth but stayed close to the field of visual arts throughout his lifetime. in the ambiance of these drawings the famous moon watercolors are not in the dark. they represent a very acute and reasonable tool to convince the people (...) who trusted images more than words. the article ends with panofsky's argument that it was galileo's anti-mannerist notion of art that evoked a repulsion of kepler's ellipses. it tries to show that it was again an aesthetical prejudice that hindered einstein from accepting panofsky's theory. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that bioethics has tended to emphasise: ‘high tech’ areas of medicine at the expense of ‘low tech’ areas such as psychiatry; problems arising in treatment at the expense of those associated with diagnosis; questions of fact at the expense of questions of value; and applied ethics at the expense of philosophical theory. The common factor linking these four ‘bioethical blind spots’ is a failute to recognise the full extent to which medicine is (...) an ethical as well as scientific discipline. Once this is acknowledged it leads to a full-field bioethics in which the different areas are mutually complementary. In particular, it paves the way for a fruitful two-way exchange between the more abstract aspects of philosophical theory and the contingencies of day-to-day clinical work. The arguments of the paper are illustrated with recent work on the abuse of psychiatry. (shrink)

Brandom explains perceptual knowledge as the product of two distinguishable sorts of capacities: the capacity to reliably discriminate behaviorally between different sorts of stimuli; and the capacity to take up a position in the game of giving and asking for reasons. However, in focusing exclusively on the entitlement of observation reports, rather than on perception itself, Brandom passes over a conception of perceptual experience as a sort of contentful mental state. In this article, I argue that this is a (...) class='Hi'>blind spot, which makes Brandom’s account of perceptual knowledge unable to properly accommodate the phenomenon of seeing aspects and to explain how we can justify the attributions of reliability to observers that make observation reports. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe article deals with the interrelation between Galileo and the visual arts. It presents a couple of drawings from the hand of Galileo and confronts them with Viviani's report that Galileo had not only wanted to become an artist in his youth but stayed close to the field of visual arts throughout his lifetime. In the ambiance of these drawings the famous moon watercolors are not in the dark. They represent a very acute and reasonable tool to convince the (...) people who trusted images more than words. The article ends with Panofsky's argument that it was Galileo's anti-Mannerist notion of art that evoked a repulsion of Kepler's ellipses. It tries to show that it was again an aesthetical prejudice that hindered Einstein from accepting Panofsky's theory. (shrink)

This study aims to examine the development of diversity and inclusion (D&I) literature and identify its prominent themes and blind spots. The research was conducted using bibliometric analysis on the Web of Science database and included 2510 publications. Results showed that the development of D&I literature had increased exponentially since the 1960s, mainly due to different political and societal events. The geographic development showed that research was primarily conducted in developed countries where quotas and other legislation are implemented. (...) The thematic development revealed a stable but narrow focus on diversity management, board diversity, and team diversity, with little attention to inclusion. The keyword analysis strongly emphasized surface-level diversity, such as gender, race, and cultural diversity, while deep-level diversity received less attention. This study concludes that previous D&I literature has mainly focused on the financial effects of D&I and neglected other elements, such as the effects on social performance, its ethical implications, and the relationship between diversity and inclusion. The study recommends future research to expand the interpretation of diversity, examine the relationship between diversity and inclusion, and explore the effects of diversity on non-financial outcomes such as social performance and ethics. This study provides a valuable contribution to the field of business ethics by highlighting the blind spots in D&I literature and encouraging future research to consider the ethical implications of diversity in the workplace. (shrink)

The filling-in process proposed as a cover up for the existence of the blind spot has some conceptual similarities to blindsight. The perceptual operation of a hypothetical mechanism responsible for filling in represents a logical paradox. The apparent indeterminacy of the percept in the optic-disc region can be tested experimentally by viewing the grating test pattern below.