This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Pulvermüller traces the differences in brain activity associated with function and content words. The model considers words displayed primarily in isolation. Research on letter detection suggests that what distinguishes function from content words are their roles in text. Hence a model that fails to consider context effects on the processing of words provides an insufficient accounting of word representation in the brain.

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

We propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative performances and normative assessments that occur within an argumentative context, the social context in which the scheme arises. Our premise-and-conclusion structure identifies the typical instantiation of an argument in the argumentative context, and our critical framework describes a set of normative assessments available to participants in the context, what we call _practically normative_ assessments. We distinguish this practical normativity from the _rationally or universally normative_ assessment that might (...) be imposed from outside the argumentative context. Thus, the practical norms represented in an argument scheme may still be subject to rational critique, and the scheme avoids the is/ought fallacy. We ground our theoretical discussion and observations in an empirical study of US district court opinions resolving legal questions about copyright fair use and the lawyers’ briefs that led to them, instantiating our definition of argument scheme in the “argument for classification by precedent.” Our definition addresses some criticisms the argument-scheme construct has received. For example, using our data, we show that a minimally well formed instance of this type of argument does not shift any conventional burden from the proponent of the argument to its skeptics. We also argue that these argument schemes need not be seen as dialogical. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

A recent report by Persaud et al. [Persaud, N., McLeod, P. & Cowey, A. . Post-decision wagering objectively measures awareness. Nature Neuroscience 10, 257–261] addresses a fundamental issue in consciousness science: the experimental measurement of conscious content. The authors propose a novel technique, ‘post-decision wagering’, in which subjects place bets on the correctness of decisions or discriminations. In this note, I critique the authors’ claim that their method “measures awareness directly”.

Despite the importance of knowing the cognitive capabilities of children with neurodevelopmental conditions, less than one-third of children with cerebral palsy participate in standardized assessments. Globally, approximately 50% of people with cerebral palsy have an intellectual disability and there is significant risk for domain-specific cognitive impairments for the majority of people with cerebral palsy. However, standardized cognitive assessment tools are not accessible to many children with cerebral palsy, as they require manual manipulation of objects, verbal response and/or speeded response. As (...) such, standardised assessment may result in an underestimation of abilities for children with significant motor and/or speech impairment. The overall aim of the project is to examine and compare the psychometric properties of standardised cognitive assessment tools that have been accommodated for use with either a switch device or eye-gaze control technologies, with the specific aims to: Examine the psychometric properties of accommodated assessment tools by comparing the performance of typically developing children on six cognitive assessment tools administered via standardised versus accommodated administration; Describe and compare the performance and user experience of children with cerebral palsy on six accommodated cognitive assessments administered via switch or eye-gaze control technologies. Secondary aims are to: Describe the completion rates and time to complete assessments of participants in each group; Within the group with cerebral palsy, examine the effects of condition-specific characteristics and demographics on participation. This protocol paper describes a two-phase validation and acceptability study that utilizes a mixed-model design. This study will collect concurrent data from 80 typically developing children and 40 children with cerebral palsy, who use switch or eye-gaze control technology as alternate access communication methods. The set of instruments will measure receptive vocabulary, fluid reasoning, sustained attention, vision perception, visuospatial working memory and executive functions. Data analyses will be conducted using SPSS v. 25 and R v 4.1.0. SPSS Sample Power 3 was used for power computation and allows for a 10% drop out rate. Quantitative descriptive statistics, measurement agreement data plotting, bivariate and multiple regressions analysis will be conducted using appropriate methods. (shrink)

This daily diary study examined the within-person coupling between four emotion regulation strategies and both subjective well-being and perceived stress in daily life of geriatric nurses. Participants (N = 89) described how they regulated their emotions in terms of cognitive reappraisal and suppression. They also indicated their subjective well-being and level of perceived stress each day over three weeks. At the within-person level, cognitive reappraisal intended to increase positive emotions was positively associated with higher subjective well-being and negatively associated with (...) perceived stress. Suppression of the expression of positive emotions was negatively associated with subjective well-being and positively associated with perceived stress. However, cognitive reappraisal intended to down-regulate negative emotions and suppression as a strategy to inhibit the expression of negative emotions were not associated with daily well-being or perceived stress. Off-days were rated as days with higher subjective well-being and lower perceived stress in contrast to working days. At the between-person level, individuals who reported more daily negative affect reported increased suppression of positive emotions, corroborating the within-person findings. Moreover, findings indicated that nurses with more years of experience in the job reported higher subjective well-being and less perceived stress. These results provide insights into important daily emotional processes of geriatric nurses, both at workdays and in their leisure time. (shrink)

Social and personality psychology have been criticized for overreliance on potentially biased self-report variables. In well-being science, researchers have called for more “objective” physiological and cognitive measures to evaluate the efficacy of well-being-increasing interventions. This may now be possible with the recent rise of cost-effective, commercially-available wireless physiological recording devices and smartphone-based cognitive testing. We sought to determine whether cognitive and physiological measures, coupled with machine learning methods, could quantify the effects of positive interventions. The current 2-part study used a (...) college sample (N = 245) to contrast the cognitive (memory, attention, construal) and physiological (autonomic, electroencephalogram) effects of engaging in one of two randomly assigned writing activities (i.e., prosocial or “antisocial”). In the prosocial condition, participants described an interaction when they acted in a kind way, then described an interaction when they received kindness. In the “antisocial” condition, participants wrote instead about an interaction when they acted in an unkind way and received unkindness, respectively. Our study replicated previous research on the beneficial effects of recalling prosocial experiences as assessed by self-report. However, we did not detect an effect of the positive or negative activity intervention on either cognitive or physiological measures. More research is needed to investigate under what conditions cognitive and physiological measures may be applicable, but our findings lead us to conclude that they should not be unilaterally favored over the traditional self-report approach. (shrink)

A major approach to the ethics of artificial intelligence is to use social choice, in which the AI is designed to act according to the aggregate views of society. This is found in the AI ethics of “coherent extrapolated volition” and “bottom–up ethics”. This paper shows that the normative basis of AI social choice ethics is weak due to the fact that there is no one single aggregate ethical view of society. Instead, the design of social choice AI faces three (...) sets of decisions: standing, concerning whose ethics views are included; measurement, concerning how their views are identified; and aggregation, concerning how individual views are combined to a single view that will guide AI behavior. These decisions must be made up front in the initial AI design—designers cannot “let the AI figure it out”. Each set of decisions poses difficult ethical dilemmas with major consequences for AI behavior, with some decision options yielding pathological or even catastrophic results. Furthermore, non-social choice ethics face similar issues, such as whether to count future generations or the AI itself. These issues can be more important than the question of whether or not to use social choice ethics. Attention should focus on these issues, not on social choice. (shrink)

Benardete here interprets and, for the first time, pairs two important Platonic dialogues, the Gorgias and the Phaedrus . In linking these dialogues, he places Socrates' notion of rhetoric in a new light and illuminates the way in which Plato gives morality and eros a place in the human soul.

The Laws was Plato's last work, his longest, and one of his most difficult. In contrast to the Republic, which presents an abstract ideal not intended for any actual community, the Laws seems to provide practical guidelines for the establishment and maintenance of political order in the real world. With this book, the distinguished classicist Seth Benardete offers an insightful analysis and commentary on this rich and complex dialogue. Each of the chapters corresponds to one of the twelve books (...) of the Laws, illuminating the major themes and arguments, which have to do with theology, the soul, justice, and education. The Greek word for law, "nomos," also means musical tune. Bernardete shows how music--in the broadest sense, including drama, epic poetry, and even puppetry--mediates between reason and the city in Plato's philosophy of law. Most broadly, however, Benardete here uncovers the concealed ontological dimension of the Laws, explaining why it is concealed and how it comes to light. In establishing the coherence and underlying organization of Plato's last dialogue, Benardete makes a significant contribution to Platonic studies. (shrink)

This article explores the role of the Deaf child as peer educator. In schools where sign languages were banned, Deaf children became the educators of their Deaf peers in a number of contexts worldwide. This paper analyses how this peer education of sign language worked in context by drawing on two examples from boarding schools for the deaf in Nicaragua and Thailand. The argument is advanced that these practices constituted a child-led oppositional pedagogy. A connection is drawn to Freire’s (1972) (...) theory of critical pedagogy. Deaf children’s actions as peer educators are framed as an act of resistance towards the oppression of their language and culture. A contrast is drawn between oralist pedagogy that is historically associated with punitive practices and didactic methods and the experiential and dialogic interaction that characterised peer learning of sign languages. The argument is made that the peer teaching and learning processes enabled the self-actualisation of the Deaf children whereas the oralist methods were based on a deficit model that focused on modifying deaf children according to the norms of hearing society. The implications of this for current policy and practice are inferred to be about access to sign languages and the importance of Deaf communities in deaf children’s education. The argument is made that space needs to be created for deaf children to engage in peer learning. (shrink)

This paper critiques a number of standard ways of understanding the role of the metalanguage in a semantic theory for natural language, including the idea that disquotation plays a nontrivial role in any explanatory natural language semantics. It then proposes that the best way to understand the role of a semantic metalanguage involves recognizing that semantics is a model-based science. The metalanguage of semantics is language for articulating features of the theorist's model. Models are understood as mediating instruments---idealized structures used (...) to represent select aspects of the world, aspects the theorist is seeking some theoretical understanding of. The aspect of reality we are seeking some understanding of in semantics is a dimension of human linguistic competence---informally, knowledge of meaning. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence experts are currently divided into “presentist” and “futurist” factions that call for attention to near-term and long-term AI, respectively. This paper argues that the presentist–futurist dispute is not the best focus of attention. Instead, the paper proposes a reconciliation between the two factions based on a mutual interest in AI. The paper further proposes realignment to two new factions: an “intellectualist” faction that seeks to develop AI for intellectual reasons and a “societalist faction” that seeks to develop AI (...) for the benefit of society. The paper argues in favor of societalism and offers three means of concurrently addressing societal impacts from near-term and long-term AI: advancing societalist social norms, thereby increasing the portion of AI researchers who seek to benefit society; technical research on how to make any AI more beneficial to society; and policy to improve the societal benefits of all AI. In practice, it will often be advantageous to emphasize near-term AI due to the greater interest in near-term AI among AI and policy communities alike. However, presentist and futurist societalists alike can benefit from each others’ advocacy for attention to the societal impacts of AI. The reconciliation between the presentist and futurist factions can improve both near-term and long-term societal impacts of AI. (shrink)

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.

This study explores to what extent immigrants adopt the business ethical attitudes of their host country and/or maintain those of their country of origin. For countries that have significant immigration, acculturation is an important social issue. An immigrant’s acculturation is influenced through the ability to adapt his/her “ethical culture of origin” by integrating it with the host country’s ethical culture. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the role of acculturation on immigrant’s ethical attitudes. What happens (...) to individuals, who have developed in one cultural context, when they attempt to live in a new cultural context? Three groups were the object of this study: native students of business administration in Israel, students of business administration in the Ukraine and business students in Israel who had emigrated from the Ukraine. Samples of these student populations allowed the study of acculturation effects on the immigrants as they acclimated to Israeli society. Results showed that students living in the Ukraine had the lowest ethical attitudes, followed by Ukraine immigrants in Israel. Israeli-born students had significantly higher ethical attitudes than either of the two Ukrainian groups. Accordingly, the ethical perceptions of immigrant students showed that they were influenced by both their home and host cultures. According to Berry’s : 5–68, 1997) model of acculturation strategies, integration was their preferred strategy. The implications of these results and guidelines for further research are suggested. (shrink)

Normative ethical theories owe us an account of how to evaluate decisions under risk and uncertainty. Deontologists seem at a disadvantage here: our best decision theories seem tailor-made for consequentialism. For example, decision theory enjoins us to always perform our best option; deontology is more permissive. In this paper, we discuss and defend the idea that, when some pro-tanto wrongful act is all-things considered permissible, because it is a ‘lesser evil’, it is often merely permissible, by the lights of deontology. (...) We show that this raises new problems for deontological decision theory, and we show that to resolve them, we need to take a more innovative approach to morally evaluating decision-making under risk and uncertainty. (shrink)

When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something whose truth turns on how things are with the weather in the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on how things are with the weatherman’s state of mind in the world. Likewise when I tell you that I think that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I (...) say turns on how things are with my state of mind in the world. (shrink)

Materialist metaphysicians want to side with physics, but not to take sides within physics.If we took literally the claim of a materialist that his position is simply belief in the claim that all is matter, as currently conceived, we would be faced with an insoluble mystery. For how would such a materialist know how to retrench when his favorite scientific hypotheses fail? How did the 18th century materialist know that gravity, or forces in general, were material? How did they know (...) in the 19th century that the electromagnetic field was material, and persisted in this conviction after the aether had been sent packing?The doctrine of physicalism casts a long shadow in contemporary philosophy, configuring all kinds of philosophical issues and projects. Unsurprisingly, its proponents argue that physicalism has all the obvious features necessary for a scientific hypothesis to be in what we will call ‘good standing,’ i.e. being worthy of serious scientific investigation. In fact, many claim much more, arguing that physicalism is a well-confirmed hypothesis and possibly amongst the best of our theories. But, as our second opening passage makes clear, a persistent worry has been that physicalism, or ‘materialism’ as van Fraassen terms it, is an edifice built on sand. For many philosophers question whether the ‘physical’ can be specified at all, or at least in a manner that will produce a physicalism that would be in good standing. (shrink)

It may be unethical to deny children with cystic fibrosis access to ethically approved clinical trials from which they might benefitDespite advances in nutritional management, aggressive antibiotic usage, and physiotherapy, cystic fibrosis remains a life limiting illness with high morbidity that imposes considerable burdens on children and families.1 Although survival to 40 years is predicted for children born in 1990s, the median age of death in 2003 was 24.2 years .The pathophysiological features of CF are produced by a defective gene (...) on chromosome 7, resulting in the defective production of a protein that regulates cellular ion transport. Defective ion transport is thought to lead to increased mucus viscosity , with poor airway clearance, recurrent bacterial infection, lung damage, and death.Gene therapy , the insertion of a normally functioning gene into deficient host cells using a suitable vector, is a potential treatment or cure for diseases produced by single gene defects—for example, CF. Gene therapy does, however, have potential or actual risks, leading many to suggest that evidence of efficacy in adults should be demonstrated before trials are conducted in children. Many serious diseases in adults such as CF have their onset in childhood. If early treatment provides greater hopes of benefit, children may be more appropriate targets for GT in CF than adults. It may be unethical to deny them access to properly constructed, ethically approved clinical trials from which they might benefit.Since research in children should be scientifically valid, in the child’s best interests, and the subject of valid consent, this article will consider these parameters in relation to trials of GT in children with CF. Because of the importance of consumer participation in the design of research we present the results of a questionnaire about GT trials delivered …. (shrink)

Understanding human behaviour, thoughts, and emotional expressions can be challenging in the global context. Due to cultural differences, the study of psychology cannot be de-contextualised. This calls for unearthing of the explanatory systems that exist in Africa to understand and account for behaviour, emotions, and cognition of Africans. This call is addressed through the emergence of African Psychology (AP) or Indigenous Psychology in Africa (IPA) as a legitimate science of human experience. This Element discusses the motivations for AP, centrality of (...) culture, demarcations of AP, and the different strands within AP. It highlights issues related to African philosophy, African cultural anthropology, African philosophy of science, and suitable methodological approaches for AP research. It also discusses some selected theoretical contributions and applications of AP. The Element concludes that AP researchers and practitioners need to pursue interdisciplinarity and avoid meaningless rejection of good ideas from other cultural settings. (shrink)

V. 1. Structures and processes -- v. 2. Domains and categories.

Materialist metaphysicians want to side with physics, but not to take sides within physics.If we took literally the claim of a materialist that his position is simply belief in the claim that all is matter, as currently conceived, we would be faced with an insoluble mystery. For how would such a materialist know how to retrench when his favorite scientific hypotheses fail? How did the 18th century materialist know that gravity, or forces in general, were material? How did they know (...) in the 19th century that the electromagnetic field was material, and persisted in this conviction after the aether had been sent packing?The doctrine of physicalism casts a long shadow in contemporary philosophy, configuring all kinds of philosophical issues and projects. Unsurprisingly, its proponents argue that physicalism has all the obvious features necessary for a scientific hypothesis to be in what we will call ‘good standing,’ i.e. being worthy of serious scientific investigation. In fact, many claim much more, arguing that physicalism is a well-confirmed hypothesis and possibly amongst the best of our theories. But, as our second opening passage makes clear, a persistent worry has been that physicalism, or ‘materialism’ as van Fraassen terms it, is an edifice built on sand. For many philosophers question whether the ‘physical’ can be specified at all, or at least in a manner that will produce a physicalism that would be in good standing. (shrink)

I develop a conception of expressivism according to which it is chiefly a pragmatic thesis about some fragment of discourse, one imposing certain constraints on semantics. The first half of the paper uses credal expressivism about the language of probability as a stalking-horse for this purpose. The second half turns to the question of how one might frame an analogous form of expressivism about the language of deontic modality. Here I offer a preliminary comparison of two expressivist lines. The first, (...) expectation expressivism, looks again to Bayesian modelling for inspiration: it glosses deontically modal language as characteristically serving to express decision-theoretic expectation (expected utility). The second, plan expressivism, develops the idea (due to Gibbard 2003) that this language serves to express 'plan-laden' states of belief. In the process of comparing the views, I show how to incorporate Gibbard's modelling ideas into a compositional semantics for attitudes and modals, filling a lacuna in the account. I close with the question whether and how plan expressivism might be developed with expectation-like structure. (shrink)

Despite its enduring insights, Durkheim’s theory of suicide fails to account for a significant set of cases because of its overreliance on structural forces to the detriment of other possible factors. In this paper, we develop a new theoretical framework for thinking about the role of culture in vulnerability to suicide. We argue that by focusing on the cultural dynamics of excessive regulation, particularly at the meso level, a more robust sociological model for suicide could be offered that supplements structure-heavy (...) Durkheimian theory. In essence, we argue that the relevance of cultural regulation to suicide rests on the (1) degree to which culture is coherent in sociocultural places, (2) existence of directives related to prescribing or proscribing suicide, (3) degree to which these directives translate into internalized meanings affecting social psychological processes, and (4) degree to which the social space is bounded. We then illustrate how our new theory provides useful insights into three cases of suicide largely neglected within sociology: specifically, suicide clusters in high schools, suicide in the military, and suicides of “despair” among middle-aged white men. We conclude with implications for future sociological research on suicide and suicide prevention. (shrink)

This paper defends a counterexample to Modus Tollens, and uses it to draw some conclusions about the logic and semantics of indicative conditionals and probability operators in natural language. Along the way we investigate some of the interactions of these expressions with 'knows', and we call into question the thesis that all knowledge ascriptions have truth-conditions.

This is a study in the meaning of natural language probability operators, sentential operators such as probably and likely. We ask what sort of formal structure is required to model the logic and semantics of these operators. Along the way we investigate their deep connections to indicative conditionals and epistemic modals, probe their scalar structure, observe their sensitivity to contex- tually salient contrasts, and explore some of their scopal idiosyncrasies.

_The Being of the Beautiful_ collects Plato’s three dialogues, the _Theaetetus_, _Sophist_, and _Statesmen_, in which Socrates formulates his conception of philosophy while preparing for trial. Renowned classicist Seth Benardete’s careful translations clearly illuminate the dramatic and philosophical unity of these dialogues and highlight Plato’s subtle interplay of language and structure. Extensive notes and commentaries, furthermore, underscore the trilogy’s motifs and relationships. “The translations are masterpieces of literalness.... They are honest, accurate, and give the reader a wonderful sense of (...) the Greek.”—Drew A. Hyland, _Review of Metaphysics_. (shrink)

In this paper, we suggest that affect meets the traditional definition of “cognition” such that the affect–cognition distinction is phenomenological, rather than ontological. We review how the affect–cognition distinction is not respected in the human brain, and discuss the neural mechanisms by which affect influences sensory processing. As a result of this sensory modulation, affect performs several basic “cognitive” functions. Affect appears to be necessary for normal conscious experience, language fluency, and memory. Finally, we suggest that understanding the differences between (...) affect and cognition will require systematic study of how the phenomenological distinction characterising the two comes about, and why such a distinction is functional. (shrink)

We investigate a basic probabilistic dynamic semantics for a fragment containing conditionals, probability operators, modals, and attitude verbs, with the aim of shedding light on the prospects for adding probabilistic structure to models of the conversational common ground.