Equality before the law is one of the fundamental guarantees citizens expect in a just and fair society. We argue that recent trend toward mass incarceration, which has had vastly disproportionate impact on African Americans, is undermining this claim to fairness and raises a serious legitimacy problem for the legal system as a whole. Using original data from the Race, Crime and Public Opinion study we show that African Americans view the 'War on Drugs" as racially biased in its implementation. (...) This perception of bias consequentially undermines legal system legitimacy by lowering blacks' expectations for police performance in their communities and encouraging receptivity to appeals for jury nullification based on race. (shrink)

Much research in the field of emotions has shown that people differ in the cues that they use to perceive their own emotions. People who are more responsive to personal cues (personal cuers) make use of cues arising from their own bodies and behavior; people who are less responsive to personal cues (situational cuers) make use of cues arising from the world around them. An evolutionary explanation of this well-documented phenomenon is that it occurs because of the operation of a (...) cognitive module designed to enable the organism to predict its own impending behavior. This theory suggests that situational cuers would be people for whom external factors are the best source of information about their own future behavior, whereas personal cuers are people for whom cues about themselves are the best source of information about their own future behavior. Such a view is founded in the New Realist philosophy of the early twentieth century, a philosophy that affected psychology through the work of E. C. Tolman and J. J. Gibson. (shrink)

. This paper reports the preliminary results from a semester-long ethics project at an AACSB accredited, regional comprehensive undergraduate school. This project culminated in an Ethics Awareness Week, which highlight a case study of the controversial EverQuest® multi-player online game. Issues of project planning and design are outlined, the dynamics of a business program-wide approach to ethics are social responsibility are presented, student survey results are presented and analyzed, and issues related to ongoing research are discussed. Nonparametric survey results indicate (...) that the greatest effect in student’s self reported enhanced understanding and interest in issues of business ethics is present when multiple pedagogical methods, e.g., case studies, lectures, assignments, and an Oxford-style debate, are applied by a number of faculty members over an extended time period. The paper concludes with a discussion of future research issues as well as a series of prescriptions for planning, organizing, and implementing such an extended activity. (shrink)

• An adequate conceptual framework is still needed to account for phenomena that (i) have a first-person, subjective-experiential or phenomenal character; (ii) are (usually) reportable and describable (in humans); and (iii) are neurobiologically realized.2 • The conscious subject plays an unavoidable epistemological role in characterizing the explanadum of consciousness through first-person descriptive reports. The experimentalist is then able to link first-person data and third-person data. Yet the generation of first-person data raises difficult epistemological issues about the relation of second-order awareness (...) or meta-awareness to first-order experience (e.g. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

This volume investigates the role of the arts in character education. Bringing together insights from esteemed philosophers and educationalists, it looks to the arts for insight into human character and explores the arts' relationship to human flourishing and the development of the virtues. Focusing on the moral value of art and considering questions of whether there can be educational value in imaginative and non-narrative art, the nine chapters herein critically examine whether poetry, music, literature, films, television series, videogames, and even (...) gardening may improve our understanding of human character, sharpen our moral judgement, inculcate or refine certain skills required for virtue, or perhaps cultivate certain virtues themselves. Bringing together research on aesthetics, ethics, moral and character education, this book will appeal to students, researchers and academics of philosophy, arts, and education as well as philosophers of education, morality, aesthetics, and teachers of the arts. (shrink)

Objectives: To discover the current state of opinion and practice among doctors in Victoria, Australia, regarding end-of-life decisions and the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia. Longitudinal comparison with similar 1987 and 1993 studies.Design and participants: Cross-sectional postal survey of doctors in Victoria.Results: 53% of doctors in Victoria support the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia. Of doctors who have experienced requests from patients to hasten death, 35% have administered drugs with the intention of hastening death. There is substantial disagreement among doctors concerning the (...) definition of euthanasia.Conclusions: Disagreement among doctors concerning the meaning of the term euthanasia may contribute to misunderstanding in the debate over voluntary euthanasia. Among doctors in Victoria, support for the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia appears to have weakened slightly over the past 17 years. Opinion on this issue is sharply polarised. (shrink)

Determining the semantic role of sentence constituents is a key task in determining sentence meanings lying behind a veneer of variant syntactic expression. We present a model of natural language generation from semantics using the FrameNet semantic role and frame ontology. We train the model using the FrameNet corpus and apply it to the task of automatic semantic role and frame identification, producing results competitive with previous work (about 70% role labeling accuracy). Unlike previous models used for this task, our (...) model does not assume that the frame of a sentence is known, and is able to identify null- instantiated roles, which commonly occur in our corpus and whose identification is crucial to natural language interpretation. (shrink)

We present five experiments and simulation studies to establish late analogical abstraction as a new psychological phenomenon: Schema abstraction from analogical examples can revive otherwise inert knowledge. We find that comparing two analogous examples of negotiations at recall time promotes retrieving analogical matches stored in memory—a notoriously elusive effect. Another innovation in this research is that we show parallel effects for real‐life autobiographical memory (Experiments 1–3) and for a controlled memory set (Experiments 4 and 5). Simulation studies show that a (...) unified model based on schema abstraction can capture backward (retrieval) effects as well as forward (transfer) effects. (shrink)

We tested the hypothesis that choices determined by Type 1 processes are compelling because they are fluent, and for this reason they are less subject to analytic thinking than other answers. A total of 104 participants completed a modified version of Wason's selection task wherein they made decisions about one card at a time using a two-response paradigm. In this paradigm participants gave a fast, intuitive response, rated their feeling of rightness for that response, and were then allowed free time (...) to reconsider their answers. As we predicted, answers consistent with a matching heuristic were made more quickly than other answers, were given higher FOR ratings, and received less subsequent analysis as measured by rethinking time and the probability of changing answers. These data suggest that reasoning biases may be compelling because they are fluently generated; this is turn creates a strong FOR, which acts as a signal that further analysis is not necessary. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 550-573, July 2022.

Under the influence of recurrent deleterious mutation and selection, asexual and sexual populations reach a deterministic equilibrium with individuals carrying 0,1,2,. . . harmful mutations. When a favourable mutation (aA) occurs in an asexual population it will usually occur in an individual who has one or more (k) deleterious mutations. Muller's ratchet then applies as A will thereafter never occur in an individual with less than k mutations. If the selective advantage of A is less than the selective disadvantage of (...) k harmful mutations then A will not spread. If it is greater it may spread carrying k deleterious mutations to fixation. Sexual populations are not affected in this way. A will spread through the population experiencing genomes with 0,1,2,. . . deleterious mutations in accordance with the deterministic equilibrium. (shrink)

In my translation of the Historia Animalium, now thirty-five years old, I pointed out a couple of passages where νθρωπος stood in the text though νος seemed to be the appropriate word. It had not occurred to me for the moment, though it soon after wards did, that ανος was at hand to account for so curious a misreading. The same contraction has other misreadings to account for, as we may read in Cobet; but I do not know that this (...) one has been drawn attention to. (shrink)

βρυχεδανς : πολυφγος, ο δ μακρς. For μακρς read μργος. ζγγος· τν μελισσν χος, κα τν μοων. L. and S. translate literally, ‘humming of bees, etc.’; but to buzz or hum is not a common property of insects, it is peculiar to a few. For τν μοων I suggest τν μυιν. ζγγος refers especially to the buzz, or ‘ping’, of a mosquito , LL. zanzara; cf. Cassiodorus ‘Ciniphes genus est culicum, fixis aculeis permolestum, quas vulgus consuevit vocare zinzalas’; and in (...) the Appendix, De Wit adds: ‘zinzala; parva musca, id est culex; unde zinzalarium, conopeum ad eas arcendas, Gloss. Ugut. ’—i.e. a mosquito-net. Culex, by the way, is an interesting and a homely word; we lack mosquitoes in Scotland, but we know the angry bite of a ‘horse-fly’ and call it a ‘cleg’. (shrink)