Pietraszewski contends that group representations that rely on a “containment metaphor” fail to adequately capture phenomena of group dynamics such as shifts in allegiances. We argue, in contrast, that social categories allow for computationally efficient, richly structured, and flexible group representations that explain some of the most intriguing aspects of social group behaviour.

Abstract: William James argued that we ordinarily think of the objects that we can observe—things that belong to 'the world of sense'—as having an unquestioned reality. However, young children also assert the existence of entities that they cannot ordinarily observe. For example, they assert the existence of germs and souls. The belief in the existence of such unobservable entities is likely to be based on children's broader trust in other people's testimony about objects and situations that they cannot directly observe (...) for themselves. (shrink)

The current study examined the impact of religious socialization practices and parents’ concepts on the development of an abstract religious concept in young children, and whether or not children’s socio-cognitive ability moderates the relationship between their religious concept and sources of information about the concept. 215 parent-child dyads from diverse religious backgrounds participated. Children were between the ages of 3.52 and 6.98 years of age. Four main findings emerged from this study. First, children conceptualized God as more humanlike than their (...) parents did. Second, younger children were more likely to have a humanlike conception of God than older children. Third, parents’ concept of God and children’s concept of God had a stronger relationship when the child’s mental-state reasoning was more accurate. Fourth, the frequency of children’s engagement in religious practices was unrelated to children’s concept of God after controlling for child’s age. Taken together, these findings lend support for the view that social cognition is an important factor in young children’s acquisition of cultural information about abstract entities. (shrink)

While ethical conflicts in the provision of healthcare are common, the current third-party mediator model is limited by a lack of expert ethical mediators, who are often not on site when conflict escalates. In order to improve clinical outcomes in situations such as conflicts at the end of life, we suggest that clinicians—physicians, nurses and social workers—be trained to prevent and deescalate emerging conflicts. This can be achieved using a mediation model framed by a communication-training approach. A case example is (...) presented and the model is discussed. The implication of this preventative/early intervention model for improving clinical outcomes, in particular end-of life conflict, is considered. (shrink)

Respect for victims requires that we have social systems for punishing and condemning (reproving) serious crimes. But, the conditions of social marginalization and political subordination of the communities from which an overwhelming number of prisoners in the United States come place serious barriers in the face of effective reprobation. Mass incarceration makes this problem worse by disrupting and disrespecting entire communities. While humanities education in the prisons is far from a total solution, it is one way to make reprobation meaningful, (...) so long as the prison classroom is a place where the educators’ values are also put at risk. (shrink)

Advanced Cell Technology's Ethics Advisory Board has been called window dressing for a corporate marketing plan. But the scientists and managers have paid attention, and the lawyers have gone along.

Eyewitnesses to crimes sometimes search for a culprit on social media before viewing a police lineup, but it is not known whether this affects subsequent lineup identification accuracy. The present online study was conducted to address this. Two hundred and eighty-five participants viewed a mock crime video, and after a 15–20 min delay either viewed a mock social media site including the culprit, viewed a mock social media site including a lookalike, or completed a filler task. A week later, participants (...) made an identification from a photo lineup. It was predicted that searching for a culprit on social media containing the lookalike would reduce lineup identification accuracy. There was a significant association between social media exposure and lineup accuracy for the Target Present lineup, but for the Target Absent lineup there was no significant association with lineup identification accuracy. The results suggest that if an eyewitness sees a lookalike when conducting a self-directed search on social media, they are less likely to subsequently identify the culprit in the formal ID procedure. (shrink)

We use Homer and Sun Tzu as a background to better understand and reformulate confrontation, anger and violence in medicine, contrasting an unproductive ‘love of war’ with a productive ‘art of war’ or ‘art of strategy’. At first glance, it is a paradox that the healing art is not pacific, but riddled with militaristic language and practices. On closer inspection, we find good reasons for this cultural paradox yet regret its presence. Drawing on insights from Homer's The Iliad and The (...) Odyssey, we argue for better understanding of confrontation, anger, bullying, intimidation and violence in medicine in order to change the culture. For example, equating medicine with war is not a given condition of medicine but a convenient metaphor with historical origins and a historical trajectory. Other, non-martial metaphors, such as medicine as collaboration, may be more appropriate in an age of team-based care. Taking lessons from Homer, we suggest three key ways in which cold-hearted confrontation and anger in medicine can be transformed into productive, warm-hearted engagement: the transformation of angry impulse into reflection, moral courage and empathy. Thinking with Homer can offer an aesthetically and morally charged alternative to the current body of literature on topics, such as anger in doctors, and how this may be ‘managed’, without recourse to an instrumental economy where emotions are viewed as commodities, and emotional responses can be ‘trained’ through communication skills courses. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to computer modelling of the development and regeneration of multicellular biological structures. Some species are able to regenerate parts of their body after amputation damage, but the global rules governing cooperative cell behaviour during morphogenesis are not known. Here, we consider a simplified model organism, which consists of tissues formed around special cells that can be interpreted as stem cells. We assume that stem cells communicate with each other by a set of signals, and that the (...) values of these signals depend on the distance between cells. Thus the signal distribution characterizes location of stem cells. If the signal distribution is changed, then the difference between the initial and the current signal distribution affects the behaviour of stem cells—e.g. as a result of an amputation of a part of tissue the signal distribution changes which stimulates stem cells to migrate to new locations, appropriate for regeneration of the proper pattern. Moreover, as stem cells divide and form tissues around them, they control the form and the size of regenerating tissues. This two-level organization of the model organism, with global regulation of stem cells and local regulation of tissues, allows its reproducible development and regeneration. (shrink)

Contemporary emphasis on creating culturally relevant and context specific knowledge increasingly drives researchers to conduct their work in settings outside their home country. This often requires researchers to build relationships with various stakeholders who may have a vested interest in the research. This case study examines the tension between relationship development with stakeholders and maintaining study integrity, in the context of potential harms, data credibility and cultural sensitivity. We describe an ethical breach in the conduct of global health research by (...) a arising from the ad-hoc participation of a community stakeholder external to the visiting research group. A framework for reflection is developed from a careful examination of underlying factors and presented with a discussion of consequences and mitigation measures. This framework aims to present lessons learned for researchers working abroad who might face similar situations in their work. (shrink)

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number (...) of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts. (shrink)

Intimate relationships between emotion and action have long been acknowledged, yet contemporary theories and experimental research within affective and movement neuroscience have not been linked into a coherent framework bridging these two fields. Accumulating psychological and neuroimaging evidence has, however, brought new insights regarding how emotions affect the preparation, execution, and control of voluntary movement. Here we review main approaches and findings on such emotion–action interactions. To assimilate key emotion concepts of action tendencies and motive states with fundamental constructs of (...) the motor system, we underscore the need for integrating an information-processing approach of motor control into affective neuroscience. This should provide a rich foundation to bridge the two fields, allowing further refinement and empirical testing of emotion theories and better understanding of affective influences in movement disorders. (shrink)

I offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Time as an account of the relationship between individual agents and the public normative practices of their communities. According to a prominent recent interpretation, Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, death and the “call of conscience” together explain how we can respond to the norms of our practices as reasons and subject them to critical reflection. I argue that this is only part of the story. Anxiety is an occasion (...) for Dasein to take responsibility for its ongoing activity of interpreting the possibilities for living and acting made available by the normative practices of its community, which is presupposed and overlooked from the perspective of everyday Dasein. Public normativity underdetermines Dasein’s conception of what it would mean to take up any of the possibilities available in its world as a way of living its own life. (shrink)

This exploratory study assessed the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine hemodynamic response patterns during sentence processing. Four groups of participants: monolingual English children, bilingual Chinese-English children, bilingual Chinese-English adults and monolingual English adults were given an agent selection syntactic processing task. Bilingual child participants were classified as simultaneous or sequential bilinguals to examine the impact of first language, age of second-language acquisition (AoL2A), and the length of second language experience on behavioral performance and cortical activation. Participants (...) were asked to select the agent of four types of sentences: subject-verb-object (SVO), passive (PAS), subject-extracted relative clause (SR), and object-extracted relative clause (OR) adopted from the “Whatdunit” task by Montgomery et al. (2016). Semantic cues were removed by using inanimate nouns for agents and patients, which constrained participants to make decisions based on syntactic knowledge. Behavioral results showed greater accuracy for canonical SVO and SR sentence types than for noncanonical OR and PAS sentence types, which aligns with prior studies. Neuroimaging results revealed greater hemodynamic responses to relative clauses (i.e., SR and OR sentences) than to simple sentences (SVO and PAS), especially for Chinese-English bilinguals suggesting first-language transfer influencing sentence processing in English. The effects AoL2A and the length of second language experience showed no significant differences between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals or between bilingual adults and children for identifying the correct agent in each sentence. However, neuroimaging results demonstrated greater hemodynamic responses in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) in simultaneous bilinguals compared to sequential bilinguals and greater hemodynamic responses in left and right DLPFC and left IPL among bilingual adults. Different behavioral and neural hemodynamic response patterns afford new insights into the effects of syntactic knowledge on sentence processing. (shrink)

The paper proposes a solution to the problem with Odysseus’ kingship in the Odyssey by maintaining that Odysseus is not officially considered dead. Consequently, Telemachus cannot inherit the position of king and Penelope must leave Odysseus’ household before remarrying. After discussing the modern concept of legal death and previous interpretations of the Ithacan situation, the paper focusses on Athena's speech at 1.275–92. A close reading demonstrates that erecting a cenotaph to Odysseus would be tantamount to a modern declaration of death (...) in absentia, since it will render Penelope a widow and Telemachus the head of the household. This legal convention chimes with the Homeric depiction of Hades. (shrink)

This article reflects upon the state of the philosophical profession vis‐à‐vis a close reading of the hoax perpetrated against the International Journal of Badiou Studies in 2016. This hoax is not a subversive act of disciplinary criticism (as the hoaxers contend). Rather, it is a poorly disguised attempt to enforce a partisan and myopic conception of philosophy and to delegitimize an entire subfield of philosophical production—namely, continental philosophy. The hoax is symptomatic of a deeper problem that plagues the profession today: (...) the willingness exhibited by many philosophers to police the boundaries of the discipline by engaging in what we call “acts of force.” The prevalence of acts of force demonstrates that professional philosophy is shaped not only by the giving and taking of reasons but also by shopworn disciplinary tribalisms (for example, continental versus analytic) and asymmetrical power relations involving agents with unequal amounts of social, professional, and philosophical capital. (shrink)

This thesis presents and criticizes Hilary Putnam's argument that mathematics is as empirical as science, in particular the argument that the switch from Euclidean geometry to Riemannian geometry as the approporiate geometry for physical space constituted an instance of revising mathematics as a result of observation. The thesis explains Putnam's views on mathematics as following from his theory of meaning and reference for natural kind terms. It is argued that Putnam's account of reference is unsuitable for mathematical terms and that (...) an "if-thenist" approach to mathematical knowledge is more fruitful. (shrink)

There is extensive literature that indicates animals suffer considerably in the practices of factory farming and animal experimentation. In the light of the evidence of this suffering there is an urgent need to answer the question whether our current use of animals is ever morally justifiable. The aim of this thesis is to provide a critical examination of the moral status of animals and of our treatment of animals in these practices. My objective is to assess whether these practices are (...) ever justifiable and whether we have a moral obligation to revise our attitudes towards our use of animals. Animals are often denied moral standing on the basis that they lack certain capacities, such as rationality, language and the ability to think. Further, it is often thought that animals' supposed lack of such capacities could be used as a defence for our use of them in intensive farming and animal experimentation. Thus, in examining the moral status of animals this thesis also examines animals and their capacities in order to determine whether any of the arguments given against the moral standing of animals are sound. In seeking to discover the extent of our moral obligations towards animals and the necessary conditions for moral standing, I will demonstrate that, although animals used in factory farming and experiments do have moral standing, the only consistent course is to extend moral standing to all living things. I will conclude that although the possession of certain much-prized capacities is not necessary for moral standing, many animals do indeed possess such capacities, including the ability to use language. Centrally this thesis calls for a re-evaluation of our attitudes towards animals, particularly in respect of our beliefs about animals used in factory farms and experiments. (shrink)

Although rationalization about one's own beliefs and actions can improve an individual's future decisions, beliefs can provide other benefits unrelated to their epistemic truth value, such as group cohesion and identity. A model of resource-rational cognition that accounts for these benefits may explain unexpected and seemingly irrational thought patterns, such as belief polarization.