Disgust is reasoned to operate in conjunction with the immune system to help protect the body from illness. However, less is known about the factors that impact the degree to which individuals invest in pathogen avoidance (disgust) versus pathogen management (prophylactic immunological activity). Here, we examine the role that one’s control over pathogen contact plays in resolving such investment trade-offs, predicting that (a) those from low control environments will invest less in pathogen-avoidance strategies and (b) investment in each of these (...) two strategies will occur in a compensatory fashion (i.e. they will be traded off with one other). Across four studies, we found support for these predictions, using a variety of manipulations and measures. By providing novel insights into how one’s control over pathogen exposure influences disgust sensitivity and immune system activity, the current research poses an important contribution to the literature on disgust, pathogen avoidance, and the immune system. (shrink)

In her book Specifications Grading, Linda B. Nilson advocates for a grading regimen she claims will save faculty time, increase student motivation, and improve the quality and rigor of student work. If she is right, there is a strong case for many faculty to adopt some version of the system she recommends. In this paper, we argue that she is mostly right and recommend that faculty move away from traditional grading. We begin by rehearsing the central features of specifications grading (...) and providing two examples of how to implement it in philosophy classes. In light of the examples, we argue that specifications grading fulfills two of Nilson’s central desiderata but not the third. Since specifications grading generates two benefits that when combined increase student learning, without adding or increasing burdens, we conclude that student learning increases when courses are revised to include aspects of specifications grading. (shrink)

This paper discusses three potential varieties of update: updates to the common ground, structuring updates, and updates that introduce discourse referents. These different types of update are used to model different aspects of natural language phenomena. Not-at-issue information directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary mood of a sentence structures the context. Other updates introduce discourse referents of various types, including propositional discourse referents for at-issue information. Distinguishing these types of update allows a unified treatment of a broad range of (...) phenomena, including the grammatical evidentials found in Cheyenne (Algonquian) as well as English evidential parentheticals, appositives, and mood marking. An update semantics that can formalize all of these varieties of update is given, integrating the different kinds of semantic contributions into a single representation of meaning. (shrink)

This collection examines the question of nonhuman animal agency by shifting emphasis from the human perspective toward that of other animals, exploring modes of ...

Earth system science (ESS) has identified worrying trends in the human impact on fundamental planetary systems. In this conceptual article, we discuss the implications of this research for business schools and management education (ME). We argue that ESS findings raise significant concerns about the relationship between business and nature and, consequently, a radical reframing is required to embed economic and social activity within the global sustainability of natural systems. This has transformative implications for ME. To illustrate this reframing, we apply (...) the ESS lenses of social-ecological interdependence, multiscalar relations, environmental governance, and environmental values to the ME functional domains of institutional purpose, social context and engagement, pedagogical practice, curricular design, and research focus. Our work contributes to the literature on business education for sustainability and the business-society-nature nexus. We explore and apply key ESS findings and concepts, discuss normative implications of these ideas, and offer guidance on transformational pathways for business schools and ME. (shrink)

Many languages grammatically mark evidentiality, i.e., the source of information. In assertions, evidentials indicate the source of information of the speaker while in questions they indicate the expected source of information of the addressee. This dissertation examines the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality and illocutionary mood, set within formal theories of meaning and discourse. The empirical focus is the evidential system of Cheyenne (Algonquian: Montana), which is analyzed based on several years of fieldwork by the author.

School gardens and garden-based learning continue to gain great popularity in the United States, and their pedagogical potential, and ability to impact students’ fruit and vegetable consumption and activity levels have been well-documented. Less examined is their potential to be agents of food system reskilling and transformation. Though producer and consumer are inextricably linked in the food system, and deskilling of one directly influences the other, theorists often focus on production-centered and consumption-centered deskilling separately. However, in a school garden, the (...) production/consumption disconnect is erased, by virtue of the design of the site itself and how it is utilized by the actors within it. School gardens provide the critical component of education in alternative food networks, and contribute to the producer/consumer reskilling that is a necessary part of food system transformation. We conducted a case study of an established school garden program during its transition from autonomous non-profit to official, district-funded program of a rural school district in the Midwest. By participating in the full “seed to plate” life cycle of a garden crop, students in the garden were actively involved in the reconnection of producer and consumer, while educators were fostering in students an appreciation for fresh, healthy foods and actively challenging the “McDonaldization” of both students’ diets and education. Based upon these findings, we argue that school gardens in rural areas could leverage the dominant role of rural America in developing and shifting food system paradigms. (shrink)

This book provides a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials (...) and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses the at-issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. 0The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the author's own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages. (shrink)

In the last 50 years, multiauthored publications have become more prevalent, given the increasing number of collaborative, interdisciplinary, multicenter research studies. The determination of authorship credit and order is a difficult process, especially for graduate students, whose disadvantaged power position in research settings increases their vulnerability to exploitation. The American Psychological Association has published ethical standards for determining authorship credit, but the power difference inherent in the student-faculty relationship may complicate this ethical dilemma. The authors reviewed a number of previously (...) recommended strategies and proposed that determining authorship credit is most effectively facilitated through professional development. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of practical reason often refer vaguely to the Kantian conception of reasons as an alternative to various means-ends theories, but it is rarely clear what this is supposed to be, except that somehow moral concerns are supposed to fare better under the Kantian conception. The theories of Nagel, Gewirth, Darwall, and Donagan have been labeled “Kantian” because they deviate strikingly from standard preference models, but their roots in Kant have not been traced in detail and important differences may (...) go unnoticed. All this is not surprising, of course, because Kant’s conception of practical reason is inseparable from his ideas of freedom, which are notoriously difficult and controversial. It is hard enough to characterize these ideas accurately in Kantian terminology, harder still to explain them in terms of contemporary debates about reasons for action. (shrink)

Any evolved disposition for fairness and cooperation would not replace but merely compete with selfish and other antisocial impulses. Therefore, we propose that human cooperation and fairness depend on self-regulation. Evidence shows reductions in fairness and other prosocial tendencies when self-regulation fails.

Ancient moral philosophers, especially Aristotle and his followers, typically shared the assumption that ethics is primarily concerned with how to achieve the final end for human beings, a life of “happiness” or “human flourishing.” This final end was not a subjective condition, such as contentment or the satisfaction of our preferences, but a life that could be objectively determined to be appropriate to our nature as human beings. Character traits were treated as moral virtues because they contributed well toward this (...) ideal life, either as means to it or as constitutive aspects of it. Traits that tended to prevent a “happy” life were considered vices, even if they contributed to a life that was pleasant and what a person most wanted. The idea of “happiness” was central, then, in philosophical efforts to specify what we ought to do, what sort of persons we should try to become, and what sort of life a wise person would hope for. (shrink)

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that monkeys’ discrimination sensitivity when identifying images of animals is predicted by established measures of semantic similarity derived from human conceptual judgments. We used metrics from computer (...) vision and computational neuroscience to show that monkeys’ and humans’ performance cannot be explained by low-level visual similarity alone. The results demonstrate that at least some of the underlying structure of object representations in humans is shared with non-human primates, at an abstract level that extends beyond low-level visual similarity. Because the monkeys had no experience with the objects we tested, the results suggest that monkeys and humans share a primitive representation of object similarity that is independent of formal knowledge and cultural experience, and likely derived from common evolutionary constraints on object representation. (shrink)

Examined as an isolated situation, and through the lens of a rare and feared disease, Mr. Duncan's case seems ripe for second-guessing the physicians and nurses who cared for him. But viewed from the perspective of what we know about errors and team communication, his case is all too common. Nearly 440,000 patient deaths in the U.S. each year may be attributable to medical errors. Breakdowns in communication among health care teams contribute in the majority of these errors. The culture (...) of health care does not seem to foster functional, effective communication between and among professionals. Why? And more importantly, why do we not do something about it? (shrink)

Although the dynamic field model predicts infants' perseverative behavior in the context of the A-not-B manual search task, it does not account for infant perseveration in other contexts. An alternative cognitive capacity explanation for perseveration is more parsimonious. It accounts for the graded nature of perseverative responses and perseveration in different contexts.

Bodily methodologies that engage with the affective, rhythmic, and temporal dimensions of movement have altered the landscape of social science and humanities research. Walking is one such methodology by which scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation. Extending this rich field, this article invokes the concept trans to reconceptualize walking research through theories that attend to the vitality and agency of matter, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, the importance of mediation and bodily (...) affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethico-political responsibility. While theoretical and empirical research about embodied, emplaced, and sensorial relations between moving bodies and space are well developed in the field of walking studies, their entanglements become profoundly altered by theories of trans – transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities. Taking up trans theories we experiment in thinking-with a sonic art performance, Walking to the Laundromat, which probes bodily, affective, and gendered labour. (shrink)

Philosophers have debated for millennia about whether moral requirements are always rational to follow. The background for these debates is often what I shall call “the self-interest model.” The guiding assumption here is that the basic demand of reason, to each person, is that one must, above all, advance one's self-interest. Alternatively, debate may be framed by a related, but significantly different, assumption: the idea that the basic rational requirement is to develop and pursue a set of personal ends in (...) an informed, efficient, and coherent way, whether one's choice of ends is based on self-interested desires or not. For brevity I refer to this as “the coherence-and-efficiency model.” Advocates of both models tend to think that, while it is sufficiently clear in principle what the rational thing to do is, what remains in doubt is whether it is always rational to be moral. They typically assume that morality is concerned, entirely or primarily, with our relations to others, especially with obligations that appear to require some sacrifice or compromise with the pursuit of self-interest. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose that the distinction between what is at-issue and what is not can be modeled as a distinction between two components of assertion. These two components affect the common ground in different ways. The at-issue component of an assertion, which is negotiable, is treated as a proposal to update the common ground. The not-at-issue component of an assertion, which is not negotiable, is added directly to the common ground. Evidence for this proposal comes from evidentials, which (...) I argue grammaticize this distinction. It has been observed that sentences with evidentials make both an ‘evidential’ and a ‘propositional’ contribution (Faller 2002, 2006, Matthewson et al. 2008). The evidential contribution is not directly challengeable or up for negotiation. In contrast, the propositional contribution, the ‘main point’ of the sentence, is directly challengeable and up for negotiation. I analyze these two contributions of evidentials as the not-at-issue component of assertion and the at-issue component of assertion, respectively. Supporting data comes from Cheyenne, a language with evidentials that are part of the illocutionary mood paradigm. (shrink)

Most, if not all, psychologists have served as teaching or research assistants during graduate school, been instructed by teaching assistants, or both. As both faculty and students themselves, graduate assistants are faced with several dilemmas for which they typically have little preparation or guidance. These issues are explored in the context of the existing literature on multiple relationships in academic settings. Recommendations are made for graduate assistants, their faculty supervisors or mentors, and administrators to proactively address and confront these challenges (...) in a manner consistent with the profession of psychology's ethics code and to minimize the potential for harm to those we are entrusted to teach. (shrink)

Affirmative action programs remain controversial, I suspect, partly because the familiar arguments for and against them start from significantly different moral perspectives. Thus I want to step back for a while from the details of debate about particular programs and give attention to the moral viewpoints presupposed in differenttypesof argument. My aim, more specifically, is to compare the “messages” expressed when affirmative action is defended from different moral perspectives. Exclusively forward-looking (for example, utilitarian) arguments, I suggest, tend to express the (...) wrong message, but this is also true of exclusively backward-looking (for example, reparation-based) arguments. However, a moral outlook that focuses on cross-temporal narrative values (such as mutually respectful social relations) suggests a more appropriate account of what affirmative action should try to express. Assessment of the message, admittedly, is only one aspect of a complex issue, but it is a relatively neglected one. My discussion takes for granted some common-sense ideas about the communicative function of action, and so I begin with these.Actions, as the saying goes, oftenspeaklouder than words. There are times, too, when only actions can effectively communicate the message we want to convey and times when giving a message is a central part of the purpose of action. What our actions say to others depends largely, though not entirely, upon our avowed reasons for acting; and this is a matter for reflective decision, not something we discover later by looking back at what we did and its effects. The decision is important because “the same act” can have very different consequences, depending upon how we choose to justify it. (shrink)

Across cultures, people employ space to construct representations of time. English exhibits two deictic space–time metaphors: the “moving ego” metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time and the “moving time” metaphor conceptualizes time as moving forward towards the ego. Earlier research investigating the psychological reality of these metaphors has shown that engaging in certain types of spatial-motion thinking may influence how people reason about events in time. More recently, research has shown that people’s interactions with cultural artifacts may (...) also influence their representations of time. Extending research on space–time mappings in new directions, three experiments investigated the role of cultural artifacts, namely calendars and clocks, in the interpretation of metaphorical expressions about time. Taken together, the results provide initial evidence that, in their interpretation of ambiguous metaphorical expressions about time, people automatically access and use spatial representations of absolute time, whereby moving forward in space corresponds with moving later in time. Moreover, asking participants to use a reverse space–time mapping causes interference, which is reflected through their temporal reasoning. (shrink)

Nuclear speckles are eukaryotic nuclear bodies enriched in splicing factors. Their exact purpose has been a matter of debate. The different proposed roles of nuclear speckles are reviewed and an additional layer of function is put forward, suggesting that by accumulating splicing factors within them, nuclear speckles can buffer the nucleoplasmic levels of splicing factors available for splicing and thereby modulate splicing rates. These findings build on the already established model that nuclear speckles function as a storage/recycling site for splicing (...) factors. Many studies have demonstrated proximity between nuclear speckles and sites of active transcription, suggesting that this juxtaposition can enhance the rates of gene expression. It is found that nuclear speckle disassembly increases splicing factor availability in the nucleoplasm, leading to an increase in splicing rates and faster release of nascent transcripts from the gene after transcription. Altogether, this era in which genomic and imaging approaches are applied to study nuclear organization has expanded the outlook on the possible roles of nuclear speckles. (shrink)

In this fascinating book, Sarah Worth addresses from a philosophical perspective the many ways in which reading benefits us morally, socially and cognitively.

We recommend that the future of religion and science involve more partnerships between scholars, amateurs, and artists. This reimagines an underdeveloped aspect of the history of religion and science. Case studies of an undergraduate course examining religious ritual and technology, seminarians reflecting on memory and identity in light of Alzheimer's disease, environmentalists responding to their guilt and shame about climate change, and Chicagoans recognizing the presence of nature in the city show how these partnerships respect insights and experiences of our (...) varied partners, identify and resolve community problems, and advance scholarship. Sourdough starter, a new metaphor, describes these collaborative, nourishing partnerships. (shrink)

Research focused on the prodromal period prior to the onset of psychosis is essential for the further development of strategies for early detection, early intervention, and disease pre-emption. Such efforts necessarily require the enrollment of individuals who are at risk of psychosis but have not yet developed a psychotic illness into research and treatment protocols. This work is becoming increasingly internationalized, which warrants special consideration of cultural differences in conceptualization of mental illness and international differences in health care practices and (...) rights regarding research participation. The process of identifying and requesting informed consent from individuals at elevated risk for psychosis requires thoughtful communication about illness risk and often involves the participation of family members. Empirical studies of risk reasoning and decisional capacity in young people and individuals with psychosis suggest that most individuals who are at-risk for psychosis can adequately provide informed consent; however ongoing improvements to tools and procedures are important to ensure that this work proceeds with maximal consideration of relevant ethical issues. This review provides a discussion of these issues in the context of international research efforts. (shrink)