Is the closet just a metaphor? Closet Spaces provides a highly original account of the spatial metaphor of "the closet," and is the first geography text to focus on this important issue. Using a variety of research techniques and materials the book explores the closet through diverse texts such as the oral histories of gay men in the UK and US and international travel guides and travelogues.

Differences across fields and experience levels are frequently considered in discussions of ethical decision making and ethical behavior. In the present study, doctoral students in the health, biological, and social sciences completed measures of ethical decision making. The effects of field and level of experience with respect to ethical decision making, metacognitive reasoning strategies, social-behavioral responses, and exposure to unethical events were examined. Social and biological scientists performed better than health scientists with respect to ethical decision making. Furthermore, the ethical (...) decision making of health science students decreased as experience increased. Moreover, these effects appeared to be linked to the specific strategies underlying participants' ethical decision making. The implications of these findings for ethical decision making are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre-post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Ethical decision making measures are widely applied as the principal dependent variable used in studies of research integrity. However, evidence bearing on the internal and external validity of these measures is not available. In this study, ethical decision making measures were administered to 102 graduate students in the biological, health, and social sciences, along with measures examining exposure to ethical breaches and the severity of punishments recommended. The ethical decision making measure was found to be related to exposure to ethical (...) events and the severity of punishments awarded. The implications of these findings for the application of ethical decision making measures are discussed. (shrink)

It is commonly held that early career experiences influence ethical behavior. One way early career experiences might operate is to influence the decisions people make when presented with problems that raise ethical concerns. To test this proposition, 102 first-year doctoral students were asked to complete a series of measures examining ethical decision making along with a series of measures examining environmental experiences and climate perceptions. Factoring of the environmental measure yielded five dimensions: professional leadership, poor coping, lack of rewards, limited (...) competitive pressure, and poor career direction. Factoring of the climate inventory yielded four dimensions: equity, interpersonal conflict, occupational engagement, and work commitment. When these dimensions were used to predict performance on the ethical decision-making task, it was found that the environmental dimensions were better predictors than the climate dimensions. The implications of these findings for research on ethical conduct are discussed. (shrink)

Individuals engage in moral cleansing, a compensatory process to reaffirm one's moral identity, when one's moral self-concept is threatened. However, too much moral cleansing can license individuals to engage in future unethical acts. This study examined the effects of incentives and consequences of one's actions on cheating behavior and moral cleansing. Results found that incentives and consequences interacted such that unethical thoughts were especially threatening, resulting in more moral cleansing, when large incentives to cheat were present and cheating explicitly harmed (...) others. Implications are discussed in terms of ethics training, using incentives as motivators, and the depersonalized norms of science. (shrink)

Lucretius' poem, for which Epicurean philosophy provided the inspiration, attempts to explain the nature of the universe and its processes with the object of freeing mankind from religious fears. The third book not only seeks to demonstrate that, since the soul is mortal, there can be no after-life, but also aims to reconcile the reader to the prospect of the end of his consciousness. This edition incorporates a new text and prose translation and is designed to set the book in (...) the context of the whole poem and of the Epicurean philosophical system, to explain and elucidate its argument, and at the same time to analyse some of the literary and artistic features which contribute to Lucretius' poetic achievement and stature. Latin text with facing page translation. (shrink)

An implicit goal of many interventions intended to enhance integrity is to minimize peoples' exposure to unethical events. The intent of the present effort was to examine if exposure to unethical practices in the course of one's work is related to ethical decision making. Accordingly, 248 doctoral students in the biological, health, and social sciences were asked to complete a field appropriate measure of ethical decision making. In addition, they were asked to complete measures examining the perceived acceptability of unethical (...) events and a measure examining perceptions of ethical climate. When these criterion measures were correlated with a measure examining the frequency with which they had been exposed to unethical events in their day-to-day work, it was found that event exposure was strongly related to ethical decision making but less strongly related to climate perceptions and perceptions of event acceptability. However, these relationships were moderated by level of experience. The implications of these findings for practices intended to improve ethics are discussed. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

Scholars have proposed a number of courses and programs intended to improve the ethical behavior of scientists in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the scientific enterprise. In the present study, we conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on 26 previous ethics program evaluation efforts, and the results showed that the overall effectiveness of ethics instruction was modest. The effects of ethics instruction, however, were related to a number of instructional program factors, such as course content and delivery methods, in (...) addition to factors of the evaluation study itself, such as the field of investigator and criterion measure utilized. An examination of the characteristics contributing to the relative effectiveness of instructional programs revealed that more successful programs were conducted as seminars separate from the standard curricula rather than being embedded in existing courses. Furthermore, more successful programs were case based and interactive, and they allowed participants to learn and practice the application of real-world ethical decision-making skills. The implications of these findings for future course development and evaluation are discussed. (shrink)

Recent studies lead to the paradoxical conclusion that the act of affirming one's egalitarian or prosocial values and virtues might subsequently facilitate prejudiced or self-serving behavior, an effect previously referred to as ?moral credentialing.? The present study extends this paradox to the domain of academic misconduct and investigates the hypothesis that such an effect might be limited by the extent to which misbehavior is rationalizable. Using a paradigm designed to investigate deliberative and rationalized forms of cheating (von Hippel, Lakin, & (...) Shakarchi, 2005), we found that when participants had credentialed themselves (vs. a nonclose acquaintance) via a set of hypothetical moral dilemmas, they were more likely to cheat on a subsequent math task, but only if cheating was highly rationalizable. When cheating was difficult to rationalize, moral credentialing had almost no impact on cheating. (shrink)

We agree with Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) proposal that dialogue is an important empirical and theoretical test bed for models of language processing. However, we offer two cautionary notes. First, the enterprise will require explicit computational models. Second, such models will need to incorporate both joint and separate speaker and hearer commitments in ways that go beyond priming and alignment.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 327-329 [Access article in PDF] Husserlian Comments on Blankenburg's "Psychopathology of Common Sense" Osborne P. Wiggins, Michael Alan Schwartz, and Jean Naudin In this essay, Wolfgang Blankenburg sketches his influential view that some of the disturbances of schizophrenia in particular can be interpreted as a pathology of common sense. We think it important at the outset, however, to avoid possible misunderstandings of (...) Blankenburg's point. It is perhaps unfortunate that this point is expressed by use of the phrase, "common sense." As Blankenburg's own essay shows, even among the learned, "common sense" has no definite or univocal meaning. Therefore, it is entirely possible to find many people who, under some conception of "common sense," appear to lack common sense and yet should not be deemed schizophrenic. Consequently, it is probably best to avoid the ambiguous phrase "common sense" altogether and seek to comprehend Blankenburg's point in other terms. That is precisely what we shall attempt here. We do endorse Blankenburg's view. Moreover, we shall pursue his suggestions that a Husserlian phenomenology of our experience of the life-world may provide the basis for developing the kind of psychopathology he seeks. Our ultimate aim, however, is for this phrase "common sense" to vanish into the Husserlian phenomenology we offer, so that all the other meanings of common sense will not threaten Blankenburg's position with misunderstandings.Our comments must remain a mere sketch. Since, however, Husserl's phenomenology is not well known, we shall have to devote some time to outlining those features of it that we deem relevant here.For Husserl, every mental process is an awareness of something. In his terminology, it is "intentional." No mental process occurs in isolation, however. It rather occurs within a concatenation of many other mental processes. Some of these co-occurring mental processes intend the same object; they intend other aspects of the object. For example, a woman may be aware of the color of a dress she is considering wearing. Hence, one process in her mental life is (visually) aware of the brown color. But another process in her mental life may be intending it as a "party dress." And yet another process in her mental life may be (tactually) intending the texture of the cloth. Because all of these mental processes (and many others) intend the same object, namely, the dress, Husserl says that they are synthesized with one another. "Synthesis," then, connotes a multiplicity of mental processes united with one another through intending the same object.Now Husserl believed that it is because the many processes occurring in our mental lives [End Page 327] synthetically intend the many objects we encounter that we experience ourselves as inhabiting a world of objects. If these syntheses failed to occur, we would not experience the world or ourselves as parts of this world. These syntheses make it possible for us to experience objects and events as related to one another in the manifold spatial, causal, temporal, social, political, religious, and other relationships that we do in fact experience. Husserl thus contends that our mental lives "constitute" the world for us. Mental life can accordingly be viewed as "world-constituting." Mental life is thus the condition for the possibility of there being a world of objects for us, to modify Kant's phrase. Husserl thought his notion of world-constituting consciousness sufficiently similar to Kant's for him to appropriate the latter philosopher's concept of "transcendental." Husserl also then spoke of "transcendental consciousness" and the study of this consciousness as "transcendental philosophy."Husserl made many distinctions among kinds of mental processes and their correlative objects. We shall here explicate only one such distinction. Mental processes must be distinguished as those that are actively generated by an ego and those that are not produced by an ego. The latter kind of mental process occurs automatically or, as Husserl writes, "passively." Husserl calls the first kind of mental process "active." Having mentioned him, however, we should also briefly characterize the "ego... (shrink)

Meeting of the Minds records the proceedings of the S.I.E.P.M. conference held in Boston from June 14-16, 1996. The conference participants centred their attention on the relationships between medieval and classical modern philosophy. These relationships have been painted in dramatically different ways by those who have presented overviews of the two eras. Hans Blumenberg, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and his subsequent works, discovers the seeds of modernity in the medieval authors themselves. Leo Strauss and his followers see (...) a radical difference between the classical world views of the ancients and medievals and the successive layers of modern thought. These general portraits demand specifics, and the strength of the conference, whose results are contained in this volume, was that it provided many specific examinations of concrete relations between the philosophical positions of celebrated medieval and modern thinkers. Our hope is that this collection of papers will suggest the direction for further cooperative efforts on the interplay of the philosophical views represented by these two eras, and that the issues commonly debated by the medieval and early modern thinkers represented in this volume will give renewed consideration to important philosophical points that have been ignored in more recent debates. The volume contains contributions from E. Jennifer Ashworth (Waterloo, Ontario), Allan Back (Kutztown, Pennsylvania), Jos Decorte (Leuven), Thomas Dewender (Bochum), Idit Dobbs-Weinstein (Nashville), John P.Doyle (St.Louis), Jeremiah Hackett (Columbia, South Carolina), Simo Knuuttila (Helsinki), James McEvoy (Maynooth), A.Stephen McGrade (Storrs), Edward P.Mahoney (Durham, North Carolina), James D.Maliszewski (Toronto), Emily Michael (New York), Woosuk Park (Taejon, Korea), Horacio Santiago-Otero(+) (Madrid), Alison Simmons (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Jean-Luc Solere (Paris), Jose MariSoto Rabanos (Madrid), and Eileen C. Swe. (shrink)

Know-it-All Society is about how we form and maintain our political convictions, and the ways in which political ideologies, human psychology and technology conspire to make our society more dogmatic, less intellectually humble and ultimately less democratic.

An investigation into the way in which information technology has shaped how and what we know, from "Google-knowing" to privacy and social media.

What is truth? Michael Lynch defends a bold new answer to this question. Traditional theories of truth hold that truth has only a single uniform nature. All truths are true in the same way. More recent deflationary theories claim that truth has no nature at all; the concept of truth is of no real philosophical importance. In this concise and clearly written book, Lynch argues that we should reject both these extremes and hold that truth is a functional property. (...) To understand truth we must understand what it does, its function in our cognitive economy. Once we understand that, we'll see that this function can be performed in more than one way. And that in turn opens the door to an appealing pluralism: beliefs about the concrete physical world needn't be true in the same way as our thoughts about matters -- like morality -- where the human stain is deepest. (shrink)

This article discusses xenotransplantation and examines the way its scientific promoters have defended their technology against potentially damaging public representations. The authors explore the criteria used to legitimate the selection of the pig as the best species from which to “harvest” transplant tissues in the future. The authors’ analysis shows that scientists and medical practitioners routinely switch between scientific and cultural repertoires. These repertoires enable such actors to exchange expert identities in scientific discourse for public identities in cultural discourse. These (...) discourses map onto similarities and differences between animal donors and human hosts. Finally, the case is used to comment on a number of related approaches where the dynamics of medical and scientific authority are discussed. (shrink)

Minimalists generally see themselves as engaged in a descriptive project. They maintain that they can explain everything we want to say about truth without appealing to anything other than the T-schema, i.e., the idea that the proposition that p is true iff p. I argue that despite recent claims to the contrary, minimalists cannot explain one important belief many people have about truth, namely, that truth is good. If that is so, then minimalism, and possibly deflationism as a whole, must (...) be rejected or recast as a profoundly revisionary project. (shrink)

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 1999 Academic debates about pluralism and truth have become increasingly polarized in recent years. One side embraces extreme relativism, deeming any talk of objective truth as philosophically naïve. The opposition, frequently arguing that any sort of relativism leads to nihilism, insists on an objective notion of truth according to which there is only one true story of the world. Both sides agree that there is no middle path. In Truth in Context, Michael Lynch (...) argues that there is a middle path, one where metaphysical pluralism is consistent with a robust realism about truth. Drawing on the work of Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, Lynch develops an original version of metaphysical pluralism, which he calls relativistic Kantianism. He argues that one can take facts and propositions as relative without implying that our ordinary concept of truth is a relative, epistemic, or "soft" concept. The truths may be relative, but our concept of truth need not be. (shrink)

By utilizing new information from both clinical and experimental (lesion, electrophysiological, and gene-activation) studies with animals, the anatomy underlying anterograde amnesia has been reformulated. The distinction between temporal lobe and diencephalic amnesia is of limited value in that a common feature of anterograde amnesia is damage to part of an comprising the hippocampus, the fornix, the mamillary bodies, and the anterior thalamic nuclei. This view, which can be traced back to Delay and Brion (1969), differs from other recent models in (...) placing critical importance on the efferents from the hippocampus via the fornix to the diencephalon. These are necessary for the encoding and, hence, the effective subsequent recall of episodic memory. An additional feature of this hippocampalanterior thalamic and the perirhinal–medial dorsal thalamic systems are compromised, leading to severe deficits in both recall and recognition. (shrink)

These essays center around two questions: Does truth have an underlying nature? And if so, what sort of nature does it have?

In this engaging and spirited text, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. He explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is.

This paper contributes to the (re-)conceptualisation of responsible innovation by proposing an evolutionary economic approach that focuses on the role of consumers in the innovation process. After a discussion of the philosophical foundations and ethical implications of this approach, which bears an explanatory potential that has not been adequately considered in previous discussions of responsible innovation, we present a first step towards capturing the important but often neglected role of consumers in innovation processes (including responsible innovation): We propose an agent-based (...) model that incorporates a multidimensional space of characteristics in which new products or services are represented by more than the mere aspect of price and quality. Instead, innovations are denoted by a large set of characteristics, including also negative or harmful ones. The model is used to illustrate that consumers’ heterogeneity and bounded rationality – even if considered in a simple manner – indeed play a crucial role in the creation and diffusion of responsible innovation which can and should be used for further work in this field and for possible extensions of the model. (shrink)

Beginning in earnest in the late 1990s, educational researchers devoted increasing attention to the study of “active learning,” leading to a robust literature on the topic in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, during largely the same period, political theorists discovered the radical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, which soon after began to ripple through more radical forms of philosophy of education. While both the SoTL works on active learning and writings of “Agambenian” philosophers of education have offered new insights (...) into their respective fields, active learning has not yet received a systematic philosophical reflection and the community of Agambenian philosophy of education has not yet been systematized. This article addresses both gaps, first through an outline of existing Agambenian approaches to the philosophy of education and second by theorizing active learning as a form of “destituent potential.” The systematic reflection on the three threads of Agambenian philosophy of education—whatever, potentiality, and study—offers an introduction to less familiar readers, and the second section offers a model for how philosophical concepts can become theoretical tools for SoTL analysis. (shrink)

The Western world is currently gripped by an obsessive concern for the rights of animals - their uses and abuses. In this book, Leahy argues that this is a movement based upon a series of fundamental misconceptions about the basic nature of animals. This is a radical philosophical questioning of prevailing views on animal rights, which credit animals with a self-consciousness like ours. Leahy's conclusions have implications for issues such as bloodsports, meat eating and fur trading.