Disrupting Journalism Ethics sets out to disrupt and change how we think about journalism and its ethics. The book contends that long-established ways of thinking, which have come down to us from the history of journalism, need radical conceptual reform, with alternate conceptions of the role of journalism and fresh principles to evaluate practice. Through a series of disruptions, the book undermines the traditional principles of journalistic neutrality and "just the facts" reporting. It proposes an alternate philosophy of journalism as (...) engagement for democracy. The aim is a journalism ethic better suited to an age of digital and global media. As a philosophical pragmatist, Stephen J. A. Ward critiques traditional conceptions of accuracy, neutrality, detachment and patriotism, evaluating their capacity to respond to ethical dilemmas for journalists in the 21st century. The book proposes a holistic mindset for doing journalism ethics, a theory of journalism as advocacy for egalitarian democracy, and a global redefinition of basic journalistic norms. The book concludes by outlining the shape of a future journalism ethics, employing these alternative notions. Disrupting Journalism Ethics is an important intervention into the role of journalism today. It asks: what new role journalists should play in today's digital media world? And what new mind-set, new aims, and new standards ought jounalists to embrace? The book aims to persuade--and provoke--ethicists, journalists, students, and members of the public to disrupt and invent. (shrink)

κάτοπτρον, which is in all the manuscripts, was emended by Canter to κάτοπτον, and this emendation, or Headlam's κατόπτην, has been received by subsequent editors. Those who read κάτοπτον have been in the habit of taking the word to mean here ‘looking down upon’, and in support of this interpretation they sometimes adduce a scholium in M, κατόψιον. This does seem to prove that the scholar, whose note is copied in our scholium, found κάτοπτον in his text. Presumably he took (...) Σαρωνικο πορθμο κάτοπτον to signify ‘descried from the Saronic gulf’, having very possibly in his mind the phrase in Euripides, Hippolytus 30, where the temple of Cypris is said to be κατόψιον γς τσδε, visible from Troezen. At least we ought not without proof to lay to his account what appears to be the solecism of regarding κάτοπτον as if it meant ‘looking down upon’. Headlam's κατόπτην has at least an active force, but I cannot find that it means ‘one who looks down upon’, if that is the sense desired; it is a ‘spy’ or an ‘inspector’. And, at the end of all discussion, when one asks what in fact is this peak or headland that ‘looks down upon the Saronic crossing’, then commentators take refuge in silence or tend to contradict one another. An emendation that nobody can be sure he understands can hardly be regarded as satisfactory. It may be feared that what has happened is this. In order to get rid of κάτοπτρον, which appeared to them devoid of meaning, editors have introduced into the text a word which does not mean what they want it to mean, and which, if it had that meaning, would still present us with a picture which no man can recognize. (shrink)

Of all topics within the psychology of education, learning is one of the most crucial. Yet in terms of practical texts likely to be of use to teachers, it is one of the most neglected. This book is a short, down-to-earth account of learning by children of the kinds of knowledge and skills they acquire at school. Though it does not aim to show teachers how to teach, it gives a highly practical account of learning, remembering and related processes. Some (...) recent developments in mainstream psychology promise to be of enormous potential benefit for classroom work: increasing attention is given to the ways in which people use their knowledge and skills to acquire new information. Psychologists have come to grips with practical questions about the determinants of effective remembering and we are now much better informed about what children need to do in order to learn. This book is the first to present this material in a form suitable for those training and working as teachers. (shrink)

Introduction: The Dutch Euthanasia Act states that euthanasia is not punishable if the attending physician acts in accordance with the statutory due care criteria. These criteria hold that: there should be a voluntary and well-considered request, the patient’s suffering should be unbearable and hopeless, the patient should be informed about their situation, there are no reasonable alternatives, an independent physician should be consulted, and the method should be medically and technically appropriate. This study investigates whether physicians experience problems with these (...) criteria in medical practice.Methods: In 2006, questionnaires were sent to a random, stratified sample of 2100 Dutch physicians . Physicians were asked about problems in their decision-making related to requests for euthanasia or assisted suicide after enforcement of the 2002 Euthanasia Act.Results: Of all physicians who had received a request for euthanasia or assisted suicide , 25% had experienced problems in the decision-making with regard to at least one of the criteria of due care. Physicians who had experienced problems mostly indicated to have had problems related to evaluating whether or not the patient’s suffering was unbearable and hopeless and whether or not the patient’s request was voluntary or well considered .Discussion: Physicians in The Netherlands most frequently reported problems related to aspects in which they have to evaluate the patient’s subjective perspective. However, it can be questioned whether placing emphasis on these subjective aspects is an adequate fulfilment of the duties imposed on physicians, as laid down in the Dutch Euthanasia Act. (shrink)

I. Introduction Siris, Berkeley's last major work, is undeniably a rather odd book. It could hardly be otherwise, given Berkeley's aims in writing it, which are three-fold: 'to communicate to the public the salutary virtues of tar-water,'1 to provide scientific background supporting the efficacy of tar-water as a medicine, and to lead the mind of the reader, via gradual steps, toward contemplation of God.2 The latter two aims shape Berkeley's extensive use of contemporary natural science in Siris. In particular, Berkeley's (...) focus on what he calls fire (or aether or light) as a quasiuniversal 'cause' of natural change3 serves these purposes, for the 'activity' of the aether, in his view, can both explain the miraculous virtues of a certain medicine, i.e. tar-water, and reveal God's action and his divine order.4 Berkeley's corpuscular speculations, including his use of fire-theory, are not especially idiosyncratic as natural philosophy. In his theorizing, as Jessop and other have noted, he is heavily indebted to the work of Hermann Boerhaave, the Dutch chemist, botanist, and physician whose teachings were highly influential in mid-eighteenth century Britain.5 Boerhaave, along with other Dutch natural philosophers cited by Berkeley, assigned a central role in accounting for physio-chemical activity to fire, a subtle, insensible particulate substance, sometimes identified with light. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to Locke now joins the long list of titles available in this excellent series. As we have come to expect, the contributors to this Companion are distinguished and the result is comprehensive and eminently useful. This volume is one of the more accessible in the series, with most of the chapters pitched at a level accessible to advanced undergraduates and especially helpful to beginning graduate students. Many of the chapters will be of considerable interest to scholars; here (...) I myself think especially of Edwin McCann’s chapter on Locke’s philosophy of body, which considerably advances our understanding of the place of mechanism in Locke’s thought. In addition, the notes, selective bibliography, and index of passages cited will serve as resources for readers at all levels of expertise. (shrink)

The use of focus groups is a well‐established qualitative research method in the social sciences that would seem to offer scope for a significant contribution to the advancement of knowledge and understanding in the field of business ethics. This paper explores the potential contribution of focus groups, reviews their contribution to date and makes some recommendations regarding their future use. We find that, while the use of focus groups is not extensive, they have been utilised in a non‐negligible number of (...) studies. Focus groups are usually used as a supplementary method, often as part of the development of a research instrument. Whether used on their own or in conjunction with other methods, we find that in the majority of cases there is insufficient information for a reader to judge that the method has been carried out well and hence that the ‘findings’ may be trusted. Nor is it easy for future researchers to learn about the practical application of the method in business ethics contexts. We therefore recommend improved reporting in future published studies. Based on an analysis of a subsample of papers that provided a reasonable level of methodological detail, we provide further insights into, and recommendations for, the use of focus groups in business ethics research. (shrink)

Understanding terrestrial carbon metabolism is critical because terrestrial ecosystems play a major role in the global carbon cycle. Furthermore, humans have severely disrupted the carbon cycle in ways that will alter the climate system and directly affect terrestrial metabolism. Changes in terrestrial metabolism may well be as important an indicator of global change as the changing temperature signal. Improving our understanding of the carbon cycle at various spatial and temporal scales will require the integration of multiple, complementary and independent methods (...) that are used by different research communities. Tools such as air sampling networks, inverse numerical methods, and satellite data allow us to study the strength and location of the global- and continental-scale carbon sources and sinks. Bottom-up studies provide estimates of carbon fluxes at finer spatial scales and examine the mechanisms that control fluxes at the ecosystem, landscape, and regional scales. Bottom-up approaches include comparative and process studies that provide the necessary mechanistic information to develop and validate terrestrial biospheric models. An iteration and reiteration of top-down and bottom-up approaches will be necessary to help constrain measurements at various scales. We propose a major international effort to coordinate and lead research programs of global scope of the carbon cycle. (shrink)

Despite the frequency of stillbirths, the subsequent implications are overlooked and underappreciated. We present findings from comprehensive, systematic literature reviews, and new analyses of published and unpublished data, to establish the effect of stillbirth on parents, families, health-care providers, and societies worldwide. Data for direct costs of this event are sparse but suggest that a stillbirth needs more resources than a livebirth, both in the perinatal period and in additional surveillance during subsequent pregnancies. Indirect and intangible costs of stillbirth are (...) extensive and are usually met by families alone. This issue is particularly onerous for those with few resources. Negative effects, particularly on parental mental health, might be moderated by empathic attitudes of care providers and tailored interventions. The value of the baby, as well as the associated costs for parents, families, care providers, communities, and society, should be considered to prevent stillbirths and reduce associated morbidity. (shrink)

Not for the first time, the banks and other financial institutions have got themselves – and the rest of us – into a mess, this time on an unprecedented financial and geographical scale. It is no surprise that opinions about causes, consequences and cures abound with ethical issues, as well as technical and economic concerns, a focus of attention. It is to be hoped that useful lessons for the future will be learned. In this chapter, however, we step back from (...) a direct engagement with the stated ills of the financial system itself, whether actual or perceived, chronic or acute. Our starting point is that crisis in the financial system not only makes us stop and think; but it might also, particularly under conditions of moral panic, prevent us from thinking well. Our contention is that a further impediment to thinking well about financial crises is the lack of a substantial body of academic knowledge that might be termed ‘financial ethics’ – a corpus of well developed conceptual insights and appropriate empirical evidence. We identify some of the reasons for this situation and proffer some suggestions regarding what might be done to remedy it – including the development of knowledge that is as relevant to everyday practices during periods of normality as it is to providing perspectives on crisis. The chapter is structured as follows: the next section provides a perspective on debate during times of crisis; the middle section seeks to explain why academic financial ethics is not a significant constituent element of debate on the financial crisis post-2007; and the final two main sections explore ways in which an academic agenda for financial ethics might be constructed. In a curious way this chapter echoes some of the themes and especially the conclusion of David Bevan’s chapter in this work although the reasoning to the conclusion that finance ethics is an empty set follows a rather different Badiou-inspired path in chapter 18. (shrink)

Preadolescence is an important period for the consolidation of certain arithmetic facts, and the development of problem-solving strategies. Obese subjects seem to have poorer academic performance in math than their normal-weight peers, suggesting a negative effect of obesity on math skills in critical developmental periods. To test this hypothesis, event-related potentials were collected during a delayed-verification math task using simple addition and subtraction problems in obese [above 95th body mass index percentile] and non-obese preteens with different levels of math skill; (...) thirty-one with low math skills and thirty-one with high math skills. No significant differences between weight groups were observed in task accuracy regardless of their mathematical skill level. For ERPs, electrophysiological differences were found only in the subtraction condition; participants with obesity showed an electrophysiologic pattern associated with a reduced ability to allocate attention resources regardless of their math skill level, these differences were characterized by longer P300 latency than their normal-weight peers. Moreover, the participants with obesity with high math skills displayed hypoactivity in left superior parietal lobule compared with their normal-weight peers. Additionally, obese preteens with low math skills displayed smaller arithmetic N400 amplitude than non-obese participants, reflecting difficulties in retrieving visual, semantic, and lexical information about numbers. We conclude that participants with obesity are less able than their normal-weight peers to deploy their attention regardless of their behavioral performance, which seems to have a greater effect on obese participants with low math skills because they also show problems in the retrieval of solutions from working memory, resulting in a delay in the development of mathematical skills. (shrink)

I do not approach the question of free will as a scientist, like Colin Blakemore, or a lawyer, like David Hodgson, or philosopher, like Daniel Dennett, but as a priest -- someone who feels responsible for my own actions and who is called upon to counsel and absolve such as come to me with their shame and their guilt. Should I say that their sense of responsibility is illusory? Or should I encourage them to accept responsibility, and then to deal (...) with it in the various ways -- religious, psychological and practical -- that are open to them? (shrink)

Living out of silence, out of a fully functioning, lovingly attentive mind, and not just out of thought, out of a partially functioning mind, is requisite for depth or profundity in living or relating. A fully attentive, truly silent or meditative mind sees that there is real dualism of time and the timeless and that time and the timeless each has its own unique value. The timeless, or real silence, that which alone can make for depth in one's living and (...) relating, can be there only when, in one's awareness, time and all that is related to time, have come to an end. An examination of a wide variety of statements made by writers, both past and present, shows that these understandings are seldom there in contemporary writings, just as they were not there in writings that have come down to us from the past. 'Living beyond the One and the Many' invites readers to consider the possibility that what is presented in it can bring deep meaning to one's way of living in the world"--Publisher's description, back cover. (shrink)

Recent data indicate that under a specific posthypnotic suggestion to circumvent reading, highly suggestible subjects successfully eliminated the Stroop interference effect. The present study examined whether an optical explanation could account for this finding. Using cyclopentolate hydrochloride eye drops to pharmacologically prevent visual accommodation in all subjects, behavioral Stroop data were collected from six highly hypnotizables and six less suggestibles using an optical setup that guaranteed either sharply focused or blurred vision. The highly suggestibles performed the Stroop task when naturally (...) vigilant, under posthypnotic suggestion not to read, and while visually blurred; the less suggestibles ran naturally vigilant, while looking away, and while visually blurred. Although visual accommodation was precluded for all subjects, posthypnotic suggestion effectively eliminated Stroop interference and was comparable to looking away in controls. These data strengthen the view that Stroop interference is neither robust nor inevitable and support the hypothesis that posthypnotic suggestion may exert a top-down influence on neural processing. (shrink)

This paper provides a concise description and discussion of bottom–up and top–down approaches to misattribution of agency in schizophrenia. It explores if first-person accounts of passivity phenomena can provide support for one of these approaches. The focus is on excerpts in which the writers specifically examine their experiences of external influence. None of the accounts provides arguments that fit easily with only one of the possible approaches, which is in line with current attempts to theoretical integration.

The question discussed is whether the conditions for knowledge laid down by externalist or causal theories of knowledge render knowledge claims secure from scepticism of the cartesian kind. a simple account of such conditions encourages an affirmative answer. but such an account proves inadequate and some of the conditions of an adequate account are sketched. once these conditions are introduced, it is argued, knowledge claims appear as open as ever to sceptical challenge. however it is also seen how modest knowledge (...) claims may be upheld, and the conclusion reached is that the type of theory discussed allows us to compromise with scepticism rather than to capitulate. (shrink)

An introductory logic text with the emphasis on the process of problem solving, said process being broken down into five parts: analysis of the problem, formation, examination, testing of hypotheses, and drawing of conclusions. Elements of traditional and symbolic logic are utilized in the section on examining hypotheses. There is a strong tendency towards oversimplification, and the author's unrestrained use of the exclamation point is rather annoying!—A. E. J.

We live in turbulent times, our world is changing at accelerating speed. Information is everywhere, but wisdom appears in short supply when trying to address key inter-related challenges of our time such as; runaway climate change, the loss of biodiversity, the depletion of natural resources, the on-going homogenization of culture, and rising inequity. Living in such times has implications for education and learning. This book explores the possibilities of designing and facilitating learning-based change and transitions towards sustainability. In 31 chapters (...) contributors from across the world discuss (re)emerging forms of learning that not only assist in breaking down unsustainable routines, forms of governance, production and consumption, but also can help create ones that are more sustainable. The book has been divided into three parts: re-orienting science and society, re-connecting people and planet and re-imagining education and learning. This is essential reading for educators, educational designers, change agents, researchers, students, policymakers and entrepreneurs alike, who are concerned about the well-being of the planet and convinced of our ability to do better. The content and related issues can be discussed on the blog by editor Arjen Wals: Transformative learning. 'We are living in times of incertitude, complexity, and contestation, but also of connectivity, responsibility, and new opportunities. This book analyses the consequences of these times for learning in formal, non-formal, and informal education. It explores the possibilities offered by the concept of sustainability as a central category of a holistic paradigm which harmonizes human beings with Earth. To change people and to change the world are interdependent processes - this book contributes to both.' Moacir Gadotti, Director of Paulo Freire Institute, São Paulo, Brazil 'I hope you share my excitement about the innovations for sustainability that this book catalogues and analyses. While the ecological news is grim, the human news is not. Even in a time of accelerating change, people are showing their enormous capacities to learn, adapt, restore and protect.' From the Foreword by Juliet Schor, author of ‘True Wealth: how and why millions of Americans are creating a time-rich, ecologically-light, small-scale high-satisfaction economy’ 'This book implies a ‘culture of critical commitment’ in educational thinking and practice - engaged enough to make a real difference to social-ecological resilience and sustainability but reflexively critical enough to learn constantly from experience and to keep options open in working for a sustainability transformation.' From the Afterword by Stephen Sterling, Professor of Sustainability Education, Centre for Sustainable Futures, Plymouth University, United Kingdom. (shrink)

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...) made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration. (shrink)

Over fifteen years have passed since Cora Diamond and James Conant turned Wittgenstein scholarship upside down with the program of “resolute” reading, and ten years since this reading was crystallized in the major collection _The New Wittgenstein_. This approach remains at the center of the debate about Wittgenstein and his philosophy, and this book draws together the latest thinking of the world’s leading Tractatarian scholars and promising newcomers. Showcasing one piece alternately from each “camp”, _Beyond the Tractatus Wars_ pairs newly (...) commissioned pieces addressing differing views on how to understand early Wittgenstein, providing for the first time an arena in which the debate between “strong” resolutists, “mild” resolutists and “elucidatory” readers of the book can really take place. The collection includes famous “samizdat” essays by Warren Goldfarb and Roger White that are finally seeing the light of day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Who or What is the Preembryo?S.J. Richard A. McCormick (bio)IntroductionAlthough widely used by scientists, the term "preembryo" has raised some suspicions. Histopathologist Michael Jarmulowicz (1990), for example, asserts that the term was adopted by the American Fertility Society (AFS) and the Voluntary Licensing Authority (VLA) in Britain "as an exercise of linguistic engineering to make human embryo research more palatable to the general public."I cannot speak for the VLA, (...) but I can clarify that this was not the motive of the AFS. As a member of the AFS ethics committee that discussed and adopted this terminology, I know that our discussion was not tied to embryo research or moral issues. The term "preembryo" was adopted because the earliest stages of mammalian development primarily involve establishment of the nonembryonic trophoblast, rather than the formation of the embryo. As Clifford Grobstein (1988, p. 61), a distinguished basic scientist who also sat on the AFS committee notes:The scientific rationale for the term preembryo... is its greater accuracy in characterizing the initial phase of mammalian and human development.... The status implications of such a change in terminology were not at issue in the discussion.This is not to say that the moral status of the preembryo is not a concern worthy of independent consideration. It is an important question with significant practical implications, especially in the context of in vitro fertilization. At stake are issues such as: (1) what may be done to preembryos before transfer; (2) whether all preembryos must be transferred; and (3) what may be done to preembryos that are not transferred (Ethics Committee of the American Fertility Society (AFS) 1986, p. 29S). Furthermore, emergency treatment of rape cases may also depend on such a determination. [End Page 1]Cryopreservation, which entails freezing unused preembryos for possible later use, is one example of a procedure that raises issues associated with the moral status of the preembryo. Cryopreservation decreases the number of stimulated egg recovery cycles a woman must undergo and increases flexibility in transfer protocols. But thawing of the preembryos is not a completely benign process; significant numbers of the preembryos die in the process and injury cannot be excluded.In addition, down the road a year or so lies preimplantation genetic diagnosis, now being tested in several centers of reproductive research. This would involve the removal of one or more cells from a preembryo developing in vitro. The DNA from these cells would be studied and then only genetically normal preembryos would be transferred. With the growth in knowledge about single gene defects and the rapid advance of amplification technology, which allows gene visualization, it is not difficult to imagine scientists embarking on a variety of micromanipulations of the preembryo for the sake of gaining knowledge.Not all research with gametes involves preembryos, but clearly some experiments and procedures await resolution of the moral status of the preembryo. I contend in this paper that the moral status—and specifically the controversial issue of personhood—is related to attainment of developmental individuality (being the source of one individual). This contrasts with the view that holds that personhood occurs earlier, at the point of genetic uniqueness. I believe that an embryo that has developed to the point where it can be one individual and one individual only, differs in moral status from a preembryo that has not, even if in many cases we may choose to treat them similarly.The Scientific UnderpinningsTwo things must be kept in mind—and in a sense, in tension—in turning to science for help in assessing the status of the preembryo. First, science is not competent to decide the question of personhood or ensoulment. As the Catholic document, Declaration on Procured Abortion, which I will return to later, notes: "It is a philosophical problem" (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) 1974, p. 10, endnote 19). On the other hand, another Catholic document, Donum vitae(CDF 1987), notes that the conclusions of science provide a "valuable indication" for reason's deliberations about personhood. We might say that if science cannot decide the question of personhood, neither can it be decided without science.For my review of embryological science... (shrink)

Shestov's name appears from time to time in existentialist literature. Camus, for example, refers approvingly to Shestov in The Myth of Sisyphus: "Shestov... tracks down, illuminates, and magnifies the human revolt against the irremediable." Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy was translated earlier into French and into Danish in 1947, and German in 1949. The Danes received Shestov's book with great appreciation, and were particularly happy about his attempt to relate Kierkegaard to such diverse thinkers as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hegel, Spinoza, (...) Luther, and others. And that is what Shestov's work on Kierkegaard is fundamentally all about, an attempt to place Kierkegaard in the history of philosophical and theological thought. Shestov is appreciative of Kierkegaard as the great champion of the revelational character of the Christian faith. Revelation stands over against reason, and the truths of one cannot be reconciled with the truths of the other. Shestov attempts to set in opposition the proponents of a rationalistic philosophy, Socrates, Spinoza, Hegel, and Kant, and the advocates of Biblical faith, Job, Abraham, Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard, arguing that a reconciliation is impossible. One must choose to live the life of "the knight of faith," rather than attempt to find answers to, or reasons for, life's ambiguities. The author employs a methodological device much in vogue among Kierkegaard scholars in the 30s and 40s, i.e., he employs Kierkegaard's own life and experiences as a model to analyze and clarify theological conundrums. Kierkegaard's unhappiness is related to the human problem of suffering, just as Kierkegaard attempts at knowledge fail because he had forgotten the Biblical truth that "all that is not faith is sin." Finally, man must reject Spinoza's injunction "Do not laugh, do not weep, do not condemn, but understand." Not understanding, but faith. Kierkegaard's own life reveals an alternation between those polar opposites.--W. A. J. (shrink)

. Early microbiome research found numerous associations between microbial community patterns and host physiological states. These findings hinted at community-level explanations. “Top-down” experiments, working with whole communities, strengthened these explanatory expectations. Now, “bottom-up” mechanism-seeking approaches are dissecting communities to focus on specific microbes carrying out particular biochemical activities. To understand the interplay between methodological and explanatory scales, we examine claims of “dysbiosis,” when host illness is proposed as the consequence of a community state. Our analysis concludes with general observations about (...) how methodologies relate to explanations, and the implications for microbiome research. (shrink)

Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are widely believed to possess considerable socialization strengths. However, the findings on social cognition capabilities are controversial. In the present study, we investigated whether individuals with DS exhibit shortage in face tuning, one of the indispensable components of social cognition. For this purpose, we implemented a recently developed Face-n-Food paradigm with food-plate images composed of food ingredients such as fruits and vegetables. The key benefit of such ‘face like non-face’ images is that single elements do (...) not facilitate face processing. In a spontaneous recognition task, 25 children with DS aged 9 to 18 years were presented with a set of Face-n-Food images bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style. The set of images was administered in a predetermined order from the least to most resembling a face. In DS individuals, thresholds for recognition of the Face-n-Food images as a face were drastically higher as compared not only with typically developing controls, but also with individuals with autistic spectrum disorders and Williams-Beuren syndrome. This outcome represents a significant step towards better conceptualization of visual social world in DS and neurodevelopmental disorders in general. (shrink)

We argue that two main accounts of hypocrisy— the deception-based and the moral-non-seriousness-based account—fail to capture a specific kind of hypocrite who is morally serious and sincere "all the way down." The kind of hypocrisy exemplified by this hypocrite is irreducible to deception, self-deception or a lack of moral seriousness. We call this elusive and peculiar kind of hypocrisy, pure hypocrisy. We articulate the characteristics of pure hypocrisy and describe the moral psychology of two kinds of pure hypocrites.

The aim of this analysis was to examine the effects on stature in two nationally representative samples of Polish 19-year-old conscripts of maternal and paternal education level, and of degree of urbanization, before and after the economic transition of 1990. Data were from two national surveys of 19-year-old Polish conscripts: 27,236 in 1986 and 28,151 in 2001. In addition to taking height measurements, each subject was asked about the socioeconomic background of their families, including paternal and maternal education, and the (...) name of the locality of residence. The net effect of each of these social factors on stature was determined using four-factor analysis of variance. The secular trend towards increased stature of Polish conscripts has slowed down from a rate 2·1 cm per decade across the period 1965–1986 to 1·5 cm per decade between 1986 and 2001. In both cohorts, mean statures increase with increasing size of locality of residence, paternal education and maternal education. The effect of each of these three social factors on conscript height is highly significant in both cohorts. However, the effect of maternal education has increased substantially while that of size of locality of residence and paternal education diminished between 1986 and 2001. These results imply that the influence of parental education on child growth cannot be due solely to a relationship between education and income, but is also perhaps a reflection of household financial management which benefits child health and growth by better educated parents, regardless of level of income. In addition they suggest that, irrespective of whether there are one or two breadwinners in the family, it is the mother, more so than the father, who is principally responsible for the extent to which such management best favours child health and growth. The asymmetry between the importance of maternal as against paternal education for child growth, clearly seen in the 1986 cohort, became more accentuated in 2001, after the abrupt transition from a command to a free-market economy in the early 1990s. (shrink)

Research over the past half century has produced extensive evidence that observers cannot report or retain all of the details of their visual world from one moment to the next. During the past decade, a new set of studies has illustrated just how pervasive these limits are. For example, early evidence for the failure to detect changes to simple dot patterns (Phillips, 1974) and arrays of letters (Pashler, 1988) generalizes to more naturalistic displays such as photographs and motion pictures (e.g., (...) Levin & Simons, 1997; Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 1997; see Rensink, 2002 for a recent review). This failure to report changes (change blindness) can be induced in both simple and naturalistic displays, whenever the change co-occurs with a visual disruption such as an eye movement (Currie, McConkie, Carlson-Radvansky, & Irwin, 1995; Hollingworth, Schrock, & Henderson, 2001), image shift (Blackmore, Brelstaff, Nelson, & Troscianko, 1995), flashed blank screen (Rensink et al., 1997), blink (O’Regan, Deubel, Clark, & Rensink, 2000), transient (O’Regan, Rensink, & Clark, 1999; Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 2000), movie cut or pan (Levin & Simons, 1997; Simons, 1996), or an occlusion event (Levin, Simons, Angelone, & Chabris, 2002; Simons & Levin, 1998). Change blindness can also occur in the absence of a disruption, provided the change occurs gradually enough that it does not attract attention (Simons, Franconeri, & Reimer, 2000). -/- Failures of visual awareness have been induced in a number of ways. For example, observers often fail to report a visible but unexpected stimulus when attention is focused on some other object or event in the display (inattentional blindness). As for change blindness, inattentional blindness occurs for both simple (Mack & Rock, 1998; Most et al., 2001) and naturalistic stimuli (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Similarly, repeated instances of an item often go undetected when embedded in a rapid sequence (repetition blindness), a phenomenon that occurs for both words and pictures (Kanwisher, 1987; Kanwisher & Potter, 1990). Observers can also fail to detect a stimulus in a rapid stream of stimuli provided they had to perform an attention-demanding task shortly before the stimulus appeared (Shapiro, Arnell, & Raymond, 1997). The surprisingly large variety of conditions that induce failures of conscious perception reinforces the broad conclusion that we are often unaware of what would otherwise be fully-visible stimuli. -/- Along with an increased appreciation of the limitations of visual awareness has come a renewed interest in using these limitations to explore the nature of the representations and processes underlying our visual experience. Are these limitations due to failures of perception? Of attention? Of memory? What is preserved with and without awareness? -/- The papers in this special issue of the Journal of Vision provide examples of exciting new work on induced failures of visual awareness and the mechanisms that underlie them. For example, several papers examine whether observers are drawn to parts of a display by the stimulus features or whether top-down control or semantic comprehension influence search through a display. Others investigate the nature of and limits on the information that is preserved from one view to the next and how much information needs to be retained for effective perception and action. As guest editors, we hope that this special issue will illustrate how studying the relationship between visual awareness and visual representations can lead to important new insights into the nature of seeing. (shrink)

In temporal binding, the temporal interval between one event and another, occurring some time later, is subjectively compressed. We discuss two ways in which temporal binding has been conceptualized. In studies showing temporal binding between a voluntary action and its causal consequences, such binding is typically interpreted as providing a measure of an implicit or pre-reflective “sense of agency”. However, temporal binding has also been observed in contexts not involving voluntary action, but only the passive observation of a cause-effect sequence. (...) In those contexts, it has been interpreted as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. These two views need not be in conflict with one another, if one thinks of them as concerning two separate mechanisms through which temporal binding can occur. In this paper, we explore an alternative possibility: that there is a unitary way of explaining temporal binding both within and outside the context of voluntary action as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. Any such explanation needs to account for ways in which agency, and factors connected with agency, have been shown to affect the strength of temporal binding. We show that principles of causal inference and causal selection already familiar from the literature on causal learning have the potential to explain why the strength of people’s causal beliefs can be affected by the extent to which they are themselves actively involved in bringing about events, thus in turn affecting binding. (shrink)

Selecting provincial leaders is a fraught task for authoritarian regimes. Although central authorities more readily trust provincial leaders with close ties to the center, such loyalists may lack the local knowledge and connections necessary to govern adeptly. Using an original data set on the tenures and backgrounds of China’s provincial party standing committee members, this article explores how Beijing fine-tunes provincial leadership teams to resolve this dilemma. The analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that Beijing exerts its tightest personnel control in (...) strategically important provinces. It shows that Beijing tolerates significant embeddedness of local leadership in provinces with complex governance challenges even when these provinces are important. Moreover, it finds that when the center reasserts control through appointments of loyalist personnel during times of crisis, it does so in a balanced manner. These calibrated personnel strategies highlight the extent to which authoritarian systems rely on local expertise and experience as well as top-down control. (shrink)

Visual imagery is a form of sensory imagination, involving subjective experiences typically described as similar to perception, but which occur in the absence of corresponding external stimuli. We used the Activation Likelihood Estimation algorithm (ALE) to identify regions consistently activated by visual imagery across 40 neuroimaging studies, the first such meta-analysis. We also employed a recently developed multi-modal parcellation of the human brain to attribute stereotactic co-ordinates to one of 180 anatomical regions, the first time this approach has been combined (...) with the ALE algorithm. We identified a total 634 foci, based on measurements from 464 participants. Our overall comparison identified activation in the superior parietal lobule, particularly in the left hemisphere, consistent with the proposed ‘top-down’ role for this brain region in imagery. Inferior premotor areas and the inferior frontal sulcus were reliably activated, a finding consistent with the prominent semantic demands made by many visual imagery tasks. We observed bilateral activation in several areas associated with the integration of eye movements and visual information, including the supplementary and cingulate eye fields (SCEFs) and the frontal eye fields (FEFs), suggesting that enactive processes are important in visual imagery. V1 was typically activated during visual imagery, even when participants have their eyes closed, consistent with influential depictive theories of visual imagery. Temporal lobe activation was restricted to area PH and regions of the fusiform gyrus, adjacent to the fusiform face complex (FFC). These results provide a secure foundation for future work to characterise in greater detail the functional contributions of specific areas to visual imagery. (shrink)

This paper questions an exclusively state-centred framing of global health justice and proposes a multilateral alternative. Using the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to illustrate, we bring to light a broad range of global actors up and down the chain of vaccine development who contribute to global vaccine inequities. Section 1 (Background) presents an overview of moments in which diverse global actors, each with their own priorities and aims, shaped subsequent vaccine distribution. Section 2 (Collective action failures) characterises collective action failures (...) at each phase of vaccine development that contributed to global vaccine disparities. It identifies as critical the task of establishing upstream strategies to coordinate collective action at multiple stages across a range of actors. Section 3 (A Multilateral model of global health governance) takes up this task, identifying a convergence of interests among a range of stakeholders and proposing ways to realise them. Appealing to a responsibility to protect (R2P), a doctrine developed in response to human rights atrocities during the 1990s, we show how to operationalise R2P through a principle of subsidiarity and present ethical arguments in support of this approach. (shrink)

[This is an edited version of a keynote talk at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on November 28, 2022, with some minor additions and subtractions.] -/- There has recently been widespread discussion of whether large language models might be sentient or conscious. Should we take this idea seriously? I will break down the strongest reasons for and against. Given mainstream assumptions in the science of consciousness, there are significant obstacles to consciousness in current models: for example, their (...) lack of recurrent processing, a global workspace, and unified agency. At the same time, it is quite possible that these obstacles will be overcome in the next decade or so. I conclude that while it is somewhat unlikely that current large language models are conscious, we should take seriously the possibility that successors to large language models may be conscious in the not-too-distant future. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic, and an account of consequence offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. This text presents what the authors term as 'logical pluralism' arguing that the notion of logical consequence doesn't pin down one deductive consequence relation; it allows for many of them.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Interpreting Arnauld ed. by Elmar J. KremerLisa DowningElmar J. Kremer, editor. Interpreting Arnauld. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 183. Cloth, $65.00.This attractive volume represents (with one exception) the proceedings of what was evidently a lively colloquium on Arnauld’s philosophy, held at the University of Toronto in 1994 to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. Although Antoine Arnauld has been best known to contemporary (...) philosophers as the author of the fourth set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations, interest in Arnauld’s own philosophical thought appears to be on the rise within the Anglo-American philosophical community, as indicated by the publication, within the last eight years, of two new translations of his Des vrayes et des fausses idées (a philosophical polemic against Malebranche) and a new translation of the Port-Royal Logic that Arnauld co-authored with Pierre Nicole. This new collection, from an international group of contributors, is thus well-timed. The two main themes that emerge from the collection as a whole serve to indicate the potential importance of Arnauld scholarship to our understanding of seventeenth century philosophy.The first theme that unites most of the papers is that of the diversity of views that existed within the constellation of philosophers who identified in one way or another with the doctrines of René Descartes. Arnauld was, of course, one such Cartesian. Nevertheless, many of the papers take the differences between Descartes and Arnauld as their starting point. Peter Schouls sets up a general contrast between the modernity of Descartes’ thought, as founded on the validity of subjective consciousness, and the tradition-grounded character of Arnauld’s philosophy. Jill Vance Buroker focuses productively on Arnauld’s and Descartes’ opposing views on the nature of assertion and judgment. Alan Nelson uses Arnauld’s challenge to Descartes’ account of the material falsity of ideas as the basis for a controversial but fascinating reassessment of a range of crucial issues in Descartes scholarship: clarity and distinctness, objective reality, and representation, as well as material falsity. Jean-Luc Solère’s contribution (described further below) documents the fact that significant philosophical debates existed, not [End Page 367] just within Cartesianism, but even within the still narrower Jansenist community that agreed in taking Augustine and Descartes as their philosophical models. In thus highlighting and documenting the diversity and richness of Cartesianism, the collection provides a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy. This theme is also very much present in the essays by Ndiaye, Kremer, and Carraud, which are discussed below.The second theme, shared by the majority of the papers, is that of philosophical theology. As Elmar Kremer remarks in his editor’s introduction (p. ix), while Arnauld himself held that philosophy and theology are distinguishable disciplines, the volume as a whole documents their many interconnections in his work. These interconnections are especially well brought out in the contributions by Kremer, Solère, and Sleigh. Kremer argues that we can understand three of Arnauld’s key departures from Descartes (with respect to the nature of body, the production of sensory ideas, and divine omnipotence) as motivated by his Christian commitments. Solère contends, in his intricate and illuminating essay, that Arnauld’s views about the metaphysical status of known truths (that they are relations in our minds, rather than entities in God grasped by us) are connected to a debate about the savability of non-Christians, and that his disputant, Pierre Nicole, developed an account of implicit or indirect knowledge in order to accommodate his commitment to general grace, a divine illumination had by everyone. Robert Sleigh’s essay considers the difficult question of how Arnauld wished to reconcile his doctrine of efficacious grace with human freedom: Arnauld clearly advocated some sort of compatibilism, but what sort, exactly? Although Sleigh admits that he cannot give an unambiguous defense of a single answer, his map of the territory is very valuable indeed. Other topics in philosophical theology touched on in the collection are the epistemology of papal infallibility (discussed by Thomas Lennon), miracles (discussed by Graeme Hunter) and divine omnipotence. This last topic (which is connected both to the question of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Interpreting Arnauld ed. by Elmar J. KremerLisa DowningElmar J. Kremer, editor. Interpreting Arnauld. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 183. Cloth, $65.00.This attractive volume represents (with one exception) the proceedings of what was evidently a lively colloquium on Arnauld’s philosophy, held at the University of Toronto in 1994 to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. Although Antoine Arnauld has been best known to contemporary (...) philosophers as the author of the fourth set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations, interest in Arnauld’s own philosophical thought appears to be on the rise within the Anglo-American philosophical community, as indicated by the publication, within the last eight years, of two new translations of his Des vrayes et des fausses idées (a philosophical polemic against Malebranche) and a new translation of the Port-Royal Logic that Arnauld co-authored with Pierre Nicole. This new collection, from an international group of contributors, is thus well-timed. The two main themes that emerge from the collection as a whole serve to indicate the potential importance of Arnauld scholarship to our understanding of seventeenth century philosophy.The first theme that unites most of the papers is that of the diversity of views that existed within the constellation of philosophers who identified in one way or another with the doctrines of René Descartes. Arnauld was, of course, one such Cartesian. Nevertheless, many of the papers take the differences between Descartes and Arnauld as their starting point. Peter Schouls sets up a general contrast between the modernity of Descartes’ thought, as founded on the validity of subjective consciousness, and the tradition-grounded character of Arnauld’s philosophy. Jill Vance Buroker focuses productively on Arnauld’s and Descartes’ opposing views on the nature of assertion and judgment. Alan Nelson uses Arnauld’s challenge to Descartes’ account of the material falsity of ideas as the basis for a controversial but fascinating reassessment of a range of crucial issues in Descartes scholarship: clarity and distinctness, objective reality, and representation, as well as material falsity. Jean-Luc Solère’s contribution (described further below) documents the fact that significant philosophical debates existed, not [End Page 367] just within Cartesianism, but even within the still narrower Jansenist community that agreed in taking Augustine and Descartes as their philosophical models. In thus highlighting and documenting the diversity and richness of Cartesianism, the collection provides a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy. This theme is also very much present in the essays by Ndiaye, Kremer, and Carraud, which are discussed below.The second theme, shared by the majority of the papers, is that of philosophical theology. As Elmar Kremer remarks in his editor’s introduction (p. ix), while Arnauld himself held that philosophy and theology are distinguishable disciplines, the volume as a whole documents their many interconnections in his work. These interconnections are especially well brought out in the contributions by Kremer, Solère, and Sleigh. Kremer argues that we can understand three of Arnauld’s key departures from Descartes (with respect to the nature of body, the production of sensory ideas, and divine omnipotence) as motivated by his Christian commitments. Solère contends, in his intricate and illuminating essay, that Arnauld’s views about the metaphysical status of known truths (that they are relations in our minds, rather than entities in God grasped by us) are connected to a debate about the savability of non-Christians, and that his disputant, Pierre Nicole, developed an account of implicit or indirect knowledge in order to accommodate his commitment to general grace, a divine illumination had by everyone. Robert Sleigh’s essay considers the difficult question of how Arnauld wished to reconcile his doctrine of efficacious grace with human freedom: Arnauld clearly advocated some sort of compatibilism, but what sort, exactly? Although Sleigh admits that he cannot give an unambiguous defense of a single answer, his map of the territory is very valuable indeed. Other topics in philosophical theology touched on in the collection are the epistemology of papal infallibility (discussed by Thomas Lennon), miracles (discussed by Graeme Hunter) and divine omnipotence. This last topic (which is connected both to the question of the... (shrink)