The frame problem was originally a problem for Artificial Intelligence, but philosophers have interpreted it as an epistemological problem for human cognition. As a result of this reinterpretation, however, specifying the frame problem has become a difficult task. To get a better idea of what the frame problem is, how it gives rise to more general problems of relevance, and how deep these problems run, I expound six guises of the frame problem. I then assess some proposed heuristic solutions to (...) the frame problem; I show that these proposals misunderstand, and fail to address, an important aspect of the frame problem. Finally, I argue that though human cognition does not solve the frame problem in its epistemological guise, human cognition avoids some of the epistemological worries. (shrink)

The recent emergence of generative AI software as viable tools for use in the cultural and creative industries has sparked debates about the potential for “creativity” to be automated and “augmented” by algorithmic machines. Such discussions, however, begin from an ontological position, attempting to define creativity by either falling prey to universalism (i.e. “creativity is X”) or reductionism (i.e. “only humans can be truly creative” or “human creativity will be fully replaced by creative machines”). Furthermore, such an approach evades addressing (...) the real and material impacts of AI on creative labour in these industries. This article thus offers more expansive methodological and conceptual approaches to the recent hype on generative AI. By combining (Csikszentmihalyi, The systems model of creativity, Springer, Dordrecht, 2014) systems view of creativity, in which we emphasise the shift from “what” to “where” is creativity, with (Lievrouw, Media technologies, The MIT Press, 2014) relational-materialist theory of “mediation”, we argue that the study of “creativity” in the context of generative AI must be attentive to the interactions between technologies, practices, and social arrangements. When exploring the relational space between these elements, three core concepts become pertinent: creative labour, automation, and distributed agency. Critiquing “creativity” through these conceptual lenses allows us to re-situate the use of generative AI within discourses of labour in post-industrial capitalism and brings us to a conceptualisation of creativity that privileges neither the human user nor machine algorithm but instead emphasises a relational and distributed form of agency. (shrink)

A survey of contemporary philosophical and scientific literatures reveals that different authors employ the term ‘heuristic’ in ways that deviate from, and are sometimes inconsistent with, one another. Given its widespread use in philosophy and cognitive science generally, it is striking that there appears to be little concern for a clear account of what phenomena heuristics pick out or refer to. In response, I consider several accounts of ‘heuristic’, and I draw a number of distinctions between different sorts of heuristics (...) in order to make sense of various research programmes. I then develop a working characterization of ‘heuristic’ which is shown to be coherent and robust enough to serve as a kind within philosophy and cognitive science broadly. My intent is not to pursue a unified account of ‘heuristic’, but to highlight some features of certain kinds of heuristics that are important for theorizing about cognition in order to proceed with a science of the mind/brain. 1 Why We Need an Appropriate Characterization of ‘Heuristic’2 Inadequate Definitions2.1 A positive attempt2.2 Heuristics versus guaranteed correct outcomes3 A Taxonomy of Heuristics3.1 Stimulus-driven versus heuristic3.2 Perceptual versus cognitive heuristics3.3 Computational versus cognitive heuristics3.4 Methodological versus inferential heuristics3.5 Summary of distinctions4 Characterizing Cognitive Heuristics4.1 Heuristics as rules of thumb4.2 Beyond rules of thumb: exploiting information5 Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

Mental or computer simulation of cause and effect of certain behaviors is a recognized approach to changing one’s attitude or triggering an action. Meanwhile, psychology research results suggest that frequency of simulation may affect the corresponding persuasiveness. This paper argues that with always-on sensing and data-driven visualization technologies, interactive tangible systems can be designed to simulate hypothetical outcomes of real-life behaviors in everyday contexts, which repeatedly stimulate users’ imagination of behavioral consequences and thereby behavioral intentions. To investigate the effect, a (...) working prototype of Incingarette, including a smart ashtray in connection with a digital picture frame, was built. When the ashtray is used for smoking, the digital picture is incrementally covered by virtual dust. Field trials involved participants in five daily smoking sessions. Post-session surveys show increasingly stronger perceived causality between smoking and the simulated outcomes, increasingly more vivid mental imagery of consequences, and increasingly intense intention to reduce smoking. Results suggest that repeatedly presenting simulated outcomes cognitively linked to real-life behaviors can increase behavioral intentions. (shrink)

In this article, we contribute to sociological literatures on morality, professional and institutional contexts, and morally stigmatized ‘dirty work’ by emphasizing and exploring how they mutually inform one another in lawyers’ work activities. Drawing on interview data with 58 practitioners in the commercial legal industry in Singapore, we analyze how they experience professional and institutional constraints on the expressions of morality in their work. Our findings illustrate how a dominant managerial and economic focus maintains and reproduces a constrained form of (...) morality, limited to instrumental, utilitarian and commercial ends, and subordinated to lucrative client and firm interests. We discuss our findings in terms of the need to research and reform professions in ways that support more rounded and unconstrained moral reflexivity and autonomy in how work is undertaken and valued. This in turn has implications for how organizations and professions might achieve alternative moral institutional orders, and for legal work to avoid the moral and social taints of dirty work. (shrink)

This article examines the social circumstances, both current and past, that have affected the development and transformation of feminist consciousness among Asian American women. Gender, race, class, and culture all influenced the relative lack of participation of Asian American women in the mainstream feminist movement in the United States. It concludes that Asian American women have to come to terms with their multiple identities and define feminist issues from multiple dimensions. By incorporating race, class, and cultural issues along with gender (...) concerns, a transcendent feminist consciousness that goes beyond these boundaries may develop. (shrink)

The null-hypothesis significance-test procedure (NHSTP) is defended in the context of the theory-corroboration experiment, as well as the following contrasts: (a) substantive hypotheses versus statistical hypotheses, (b) theory corroboration versus statistical hypothesis testing, (c) theoretical inference versus statistical decision, (d) experiments versus nonexperimental studies, and (e) theory corroboration versus treatment assessment. The null hypothesis can be true because it is the hypothesis that errors are randomly distributed in data. Moreover, the null hypothesis is never used as a categorical proposition. Statistical (...) significance means only that chance influences can be excluded as an explanation of data; it does not identify the nonchance factor responsible. The experimental conclusion is drawn with the inductive principle underlying the experimental design. A chain of deductive arguments gives rise to the theoretical conclusion via the experimental conclusion. The anomalous relationship between statistical significance and the effect size often used to criticize NHSTP is more apparent than real. The absolute size of the effect is not an index of evidential support for the substantive hypothesis. Nor is the effect size, by itself, informative as to the practical importance of the research result. Being a conditional probability, statistical power cannot be the apriori probability of statistical significance. The validity of statistical power is debatable because statistical significance is determined with a single sampling distribution of the test statistic based on H0, whereas it takes two distributions to represent statistical power or effect size. Sample size should not be determined in the mechanical manner envisaged in power analysis. It is inappropriate to criticize NHSTP for nonstatistical reasons. At the same time, neither effect size, nor confidence interval estimate, nor posterior probability can be used to exclude chance as an explanation of data. Neither can any of them fulfill the nonstatistical functions expected of them by critics. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger once wrote that the world had, in the age of modern science, become a world picture. For Rey Chow, the world has, in the age of atomic bombs, become a world target, to be attacked once it is identified, or so global geopolitics, dominated by the United States since the end of the Second World War, seems repeatedly to confirm. How to articulate the problematics of knowledge production with this aggressive targeting of the world? Chow attempts (...) such an articulation by probing the significance of the chronological proximity of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature—fields of inquiry that have each exerted considerable influence but whose mutual implicatedness as postwar U.S. academic phenomena has seldom been theorized. Central to Chow’s discussions is a critique of the predicament of self-referentiality—the compulsive move to interiorize that, in her view, constitutes the collective frenzy of our age—in different contemporary epistemic registers, including the self-consciously avant-garde as well as the militaristic and culturally supremacist. Urging her readers to think beyond the inward-turning focus on EuroAmerica that tends to characterize even the most radical gestures of Western self-deconstruction, Chow envisions much broader intellectual premises for future transcultural work, with reading practices aimed at restoring words and things to their constitutive exteriority. (shrink)

We live in an increasingly globalizing world, in which countries are closely linked by international trade and investment ties. Cross-cultural comparative studies of national values and ethics have attracted growing research interest in recent years, because shared practices, values and ethical standards depend on shared beliefs. However, the findings of such studies have been unable to reach a consensus on the impact of culture on ethics-related attitudes and behavior. Empirically, many "cross–cultural" differences reported by previous studies might actually stem from (...) cross-national differences. In order to partially fill this gap, this study advocates an analytical framework that isolates the role of cultural and national differences in order to test their relationship to individual level variables. Within this framework, we test competing hypotheses based on both cultural and national contexts by comparing groups of Chinese and American respondents together with a "bridging group" of Chinese Chinese-Americans. Theoretically, this contextual approach helps resolve the debate on the role of culture, by showing that culture plays a far more important role in shaping value orientations than the national background. Specifically, the two ethnic Chinese groups had many cultural values in common, and differed significantly from the Caucasian group. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

The traditional doctrine that God is impassible is subject to the objection that it is incompatible with belief that God is loving and compassionate. However, the doctrine that God is passible has grave difficulties as well. I argue that Christian believers should take an analogical approach, by believing that God does something relevantly similar to loving us in a way that involves vulnerability to suffering, and thus conceiving of God as loving us in that way, while simultaneously believing that God (...) is in fact impassible. I conclude with answers to several likely objections. (shrink)

By bringing queer ecologies to bear on the blue humanities, this essay promotes a queer hydropoetic investigation that attends to the forms, aesthetics, and politics of pools. Pools are sites of aquatic enjoyment, sport, and revelation that have long been understudied within the blue humanities. We ask whether the promises and failures of swimming in these geographies can provide a queer heuristic in which submersion, immersion, and staying afloat subtend coming out, queer eroticism, and queer of color coalitional politics. Our (...) tripartite examination engages the independent film Saved! (2004), the ecosexual documentary Water Makes Us Wet (2019), and the young adult novel and graphic novel adaptation of Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016/2019 and 2020, respectively). Our analysis of pools, as intimate bodies of water that capture media and literature alike, reorients the blue humanities to consider closer proximities and smaller scales of water’s queer potentiality. (shrink)

This pathbreaking work argues that the major intellectual trend in China from the seventeenth through to the early nineteenth century was Confucian ritualism, as expressed in ethics and classical learning. Through the performance of rites, the early Qing scholars believed they could cultivate Confucian virtues and achieve social order. The author shows how Confucian ritualism, with its emphasis on lineage, became a broad movement of social reform that stressed conformity and clearly prescribed rules of behavior, expressed notably in the growing (...) cult of female chastity. (shrink)

A steady demand for green products from concerned consumers has led companies to introduce new product lines that match or exceed consumer environmental concerns. Nonetheless, not all the organizations were able to achieve significant returns on their investments in green products. These failures are generally attributed towards companies’ inability to overcome consumer scepticism towards the performance of functional and green attributes of their brands to generate a positive green image and green value in consumers mind. Therefore, the question arises that (...) does the success in promoting green brand image and value depend on consumer existing perceptions about the brand quality and credibility? This study analyzes the influence of brand perceive quality and credibility on consumer perceptions towards a brand green image, green value and green equity. A theoretical model with hypothesized relationships is developed and tested to answer these research questions. Data have been collected from the consumers of electrical and electronic goods. The hypothesized relationships were tested with the help of structural equation modeling procedure. The results suggest that brand perceived quality and its overall credibility does have a significant influence on generating a greener image, green perceive value and green brand equity. (shrink)

This study uses three audit-specific ethical dilemmas to assess the level of ethical reasoning between Chinese accounting students (as proxies for new entrants to the auditing profession) and experienced auditors. A sample of U.S. accounting students is used as a base for comparison. Consistent with expectations based on particularly salient aspects of Chinese national culture, we find the Chinese students’ levels of ethical reasoning to be significantly lower than those of their U.S. counterparts in the two cases that invoked these (...) cultural attributes. In contrast, the Chinese students’ level of ethical reasoning is slightly higher than that of the U.S. students in the third, control case. We further find that the Chinese auditors’ levels of ethical reasoning are even lower than those of the Chinese students in two cases, while not being significantly different in the third. Together, these findings suggest that cross-national differences in auditors’ ethical reasoning depend on the nature of the ethical dilemma and caution against wholesale inferences about ethical reasoning levels in China. (shrink)

Some important meta-theoretical insights about experimental psychology are integrated into the "conjectures and refutations" framework in order to reinforce a realist's view of scientific methodology. Some issues which may be difficult for the realist's position are discussed. It is argued that there is no need for the evidential observation to mimic the phenomenon of interest; such a mimicry may even be counter-productive. A case is also made that questions about ecological validity are not relevant to the rationale of experimentation.

People faced with the prospect of being in the spotlight often feel apprehensive, even when being in the spotlight garners positive attention from others. Performance anxiety has been studied most...

ABSTRACT Avner de Shalit argues that political philosophy centrally involves political persuasion, defined as a process of mutual empathy that involves more than just providing rationales or normative arguments. Building upon this idea of political persuasion as mutual empathy, de Shalit thinks that to engage the public, philosophers need to examine problems from the public’s perspective, and not a perspective unique to their professional group. In this paper, I argue that de Shalit’s conception of political persuasion is overly narrow. In (...) its place, I argue for a more pluralistic approach to understanding political persuasion. (shrink)

In normative decision theory, the weight of an uncertain event in a decision is governed solely by the probability of the event. A large body of empirical research suggests that a single notion of probability does not accurately capture peoples' reactions to uncertainty. As early as the 1920s, Knight made the distinction between cases where probabilities are known and where probabilities are unknown. We distinguish another case –- the unknowable uncertainty –- where the missing information is unavailable to all. We (...) propose that missing information influences the attractiveness of a bet contingent upon an uncertain event, especially when the information is available to someone else. We demonstrate that the unknowable uncertainty –- falls in preference somewhere in between the known and the known uncertainty. (shrink)

Cliff Hooker’s effort at developing a naturalistic philosophy for scientific and quotidian reason is formidable. With Barry Hoffmaster, Hooker has recently expanded his naturalism to encompass moral reason and moral epistemology by considering a real life example of moral decision-making. Hoffmaster and Hooker’s work thus presents a unique opportunity to examine a thoroughgoing naturalism applied to a concrete, complex case. This paper offers a critical assessment of the Hoffmaster and Hooker piece through the lens of an externalist approach to naturalism (...) developed by Adam Morton. General lessons for naturalism about reason are revealed before a rough sketch of a novel account of problems and problem-solving is given to illustrate the importance of externalism. (shrink)

In this paper we show that being blameworthy for not blaming and being blameworthy for victim blaming are structurally similar. Each involve the two traditional contours of moral responsibility: a knowledge condition and a control condition. But interestingly, in these cases knowledge and control are importantly interrelated. Being in a relationship with another person affords us varying degrees of knowledge about them. This knowledge in turn affords agents in relationships varying degrees of influence over one another. Cases where an agent (...) is especially blameworthy for failing to blame a friend, a close colleague, or a spouse highlight this. The interdependence of these two conditions in interpersonal relationships sheds (partial) light on why victim blaming is morally wrong. We argue that victim blamers suffer from a kind of moral myopia by only focusing on what the victim could do, in virtue of their being in a relationship of some sort with their abuser, to avoid abuse. We focus specifically on cases where such moral myopia is fueled by misogynistic and hierarchical gender schema and scripts. (shrink)

The Second Taiwan IUD Follow-up Survey, reported on here, is a representative sample of all IUD acceptors in Taiwan up to the middle of 1966. The data show that 30 months after insertion, 36% of acceptors are continuing users, on a first segment basis, and that if reinsertions are taken into account, the proportion increases to 45%. Compared with extensive clinic data from the city of Taichung, the island-wide termination rates are about 5% higher at 30 months, for first segments, (...) but the all segment rates show little difference at this duration. (shrink)

Christianity has become the religion of choice for a growing number of diasporic Chinese. This qualitative study examines the conversion narratives of first-generation Chinese converts to evangelical Protestant Christianity, exploring in particular the spiritual experiences that encouraged or confirmed their resolve to become Christians. Utilizing the method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, twenty English-speaking participants were interviewed, mostly immigrants to the United States or the United Kingdom from China, including Hong Kong, or from Taiwan. The converts to Christianity in this study (...) were in search of an intellectually plausible faith, and an overarching framework of meaning, purpose, and fullness for their lives, and were motivated as well by longings for community and belonging. Participants reported being profoundly “touched”—inexplicably moved—by the love extended to them by other Chinese Christians, and being transformed in wide-ranging and durable ways as a result. In their view, such love was qualitatively different from, and superior to, the more transactional relational dynamics with which they had been familiar. They inferred that it was “otherworldly,” and necessarily emanated from a real and unconditionally benevolent divine source. The study thus illuminates the spiritual dynamics that persist in Chinese Christian conversions, even in a secular age. (shrink)

A new approach to environmental policy analysis is introduced that is designed to mitigate the exacerbation of environmental problems, which can result from the application of traditional approaches in environmental decision making. These approaches are problematic because they tend to rely on technical fixes, a single-discipline focus, and optimality. When such traditional approaches are applied, complex environmental problems are simplified beyond recognition, and the solution produced no longer matches the original problem. An alternative approach has been developed at the U.S. (...) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that is designed to improve the utilization of scientific research results and data (social, physical, and biological) through a more inclusive problem-solving process aimed particularly at difficult and complex environmental issues. Using a policy application pertaining to the EPA’s 1995 decision to approve a fuel additive, the authors illustrate how integrated environmental policy decision analysis can be made operational using this new approach. (shrink)

This paper addresses the extent to which quotidian cognition is like scientific inference by focusing on Jerry Fodor's famous analogy. I specifically consider and rebut a recent attempt made by Tim Fuller and Richard Samuels to deny the usefulness of Fodor's analogy. In so doing, I reveal some subtleties of Fodor's arguments overlooked by Fuller and Samuels and others. Recognizing these subtleties provides a richer appreciation of the analogy, allowing us to gain better traction on the issue concerning the extent (...) to which everyday cognition is like scientific inference. In the end, I propose that quotidian cognition is indeed like scientific inference, but not precisely in the way Fodor claims it is. (shrink)