Despite recent critiques of agrofuels, the industry is booming, signaling transformations in the world's food and fuels systems. International financial institutions, biotechnology firms, governments, and agribusiness are restructuring control over land, genetic resources, economic space, and market power. These moves prefer transnational capital at the expense of farmers in the North and extensive areas vital to the livelihoods of small producers in the Global South. This article suggests that the agrofuels boom may be a new—and particularly destructive—stage in industry's extractive (...) transformations of agriculture. The movement-based logic of food sovereignty—people's right to define their own food and agriculture systems—suggests a rollback of the “agrofuels transition” is possible. (shrink)

The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effectiveness due to pesticide resistance and anemic institutional support for non-chemical alternatives also have driven intensification in conventional systems. As an inter-disciplinary network of pesticide scholars, we (...) seek to renew the social science research agenda on pesticides to better understand this suite of contemporary changes. To identify research priorities, challenges, and opportunities, we develop the pesticide complex as a heuristic device to highlight the reciprocal and iterative interactions among agricultural practice, the agrochemical industry, civil society-shaped regulatory actions, and contested knowledge of toxicity. Ultimately, collaborations among social scientists and across the social and biophysical sciences can illuminate recent transformations and their uneven socioecological effects. A reinvigorated critical scholarship that embraces the multifaceted nature of pesticides can identify the social and ecological constraints that drive pesticide use and support alternatives to chemically driven industrial agriculture. (shrink)

Among philosophers, there are at least two prevalent views about the core concept of intentional action. View I (Adams 1986, 1997; McCann 1986) holds that an agent S intentionally does an action A only if S intends to do A. View II (Bratman 1987; Harman 1976; and Mele 1992) holds that there are cases where S intentionally does A without intending to do A, as long as doing A is foreseen and S is willing to accept A as a consequence (...) of S’s action. Joshua Knobe (2003a) presents intriguing data that may be taken to support the second view.1 Knobe’s data show an asymmetry in folk judgements. People are more inclined to judge that S did A intentionally, even when not intended, if A was perceived as causing a harm (e.g. harming the environment). There is an asymmetry because people are not inclined to see S’s action as intentional, when not intended, if A is perceived as causing a benefit (e.g. helping the environment). In this paper we will discuss Knobe’s results in detail. We will raise the question of whether his ordinary language surveys of folk judgments have accessed core concepts of intentional action. We suspect that instead Knobe’s surveys are tapping into pragmatic aspects of intentional language and its role in moral praise and blame. We will suggest alternative surveys that we plan to conduct to get at this difference, and we will attempt to explain the pragmatic usage of intentional language. (shrink)

In ordinary discourse the term ambiguity typically refers to vagueness or imprecision in a natural language. Among decision theorists, however, this term usually refers to imprecision in an individual’s probabilistic judgments, in the sense that the available evidence is consistent with more than one probability distribution over possible states of the world. Avoiding a prior commitment to either of these interpretations, Fishburn has explored ambiguity as a primitive concept, in terms of what he calls an ambiguity measure a on the (...) power set 2Ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$2^{\Omega }$$\end{document} of a finite set Ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\Omega $$\end{document}, characterized by five axioms. We prove, in purely set-theoretic terms, that if λ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lambda $$\end{document} is a so-called necessity measure on 2Ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$2^{\Omega }$$\end{document} and υ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\upsilon $$\end{document} is its associated possibility measure, then a=υ-λ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$a=\upsilon -\lambda $$\end{document} is an ambiguity measure. When Ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\Omega $$\end{document} is construed as a set of possible exemplars of a vague predicate ϕ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\phi $$\end{document}, then λ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lambda $$\end{document} and υ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\upsilon $$\end{document} may be regarded as arising from a fuzzy membership function f on Ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\Omega $$\end{document}, where f\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$f$$\end{document} designates the degree to which ϕ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\phi $$\end{document} is applicable to ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\omega $$\end{document}. In this case a represents the degree to which the partition {A,Ac}\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\{A,A^{c}\}$$\end{document} differentiates members of Ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\Omega $$\end{document} with respect to the predicate ϕ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\phi $$\end{document}. When Ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\Omega $$\end{document} is construed as a set of possible states of the world, a necessity measure may be regarded as a very special type of lower probability known as a consonant belief function, and a possibility measure as its associated upper probability, whence a represents the degree of imprecision in the pair \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$$$\end{document} with respect to the event A. Fishburn’s axioms are thus consistent with an interpretation of ambiguity as linguistic vagueness, as well as probabilistic imprecision. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Al Mele (2003) suggests that the Simple View of intentional action is “fiction” because it is “wholly unconstrained” by a widely shared (folk) concept of intentional action. The Simple View (Adams, 1986, McCann, 1986) states that an action is intentional only if intended. As evidence that the Simple View is not in accord with the folk notion of intentional action, Mele appeals to recent surveys of folk judgments by Joshua Knobe (2003, 2004a, 2004b). Knobe’s surveys appear (...) to show that the folk judge unintended but known side effects of actions to be performed intentionally. In this paper we will reject Mele’s suggestion that the Simple View is “fiction.” We will also discuss the relationship between surveys and philosophical theories, and the abilities of surveys to access folk core concepts. We will argue that considerations of both fail to support Mele’s suggestion. (shrink)

Twenty-first-century biology rejects genetic determinism, yet an exaggerated view of the power of genes in the making of bodies and minds remains a problem. What accounts for such tenacity? This article reports an exploratory study suggesting that the common reliance on Mendelian examples and concepts at the start of teaching in basic genetics is an eliminable source of support for determinism. Undergraduate students who attended a standard ‘Mendelian approach’ university course in introductory genetics on average showed no change in their (...) determinist views about genes. By contrast, students who attended an alternative course which, inspired by the work of a critic of early Mendelism, W. F. R. Weldon, replaced an emphasis on Mendel’s peas with an emphasis on developmental contexts and their role in bringing about phenotypic variability, were less determinist about genes by the end of teaching. Improvements in both the new Weldonian curriculum and the study design are in view for the future. (shrink)

En choisissant de consacrer un ouvrage à Antiphon « l’Athé­nien », M. Gagarin opte, dans le cadre du débat sur l’identité d’Anti­phon, pour la thèse unitariste. Une des principales vocations de cet ouvrage est en effet de soutenir qu’Antiphon le sophiste, auteur du De la vérité et du De la concorde, Antiphon l’orateur et Antiphon l’auteur des Tétralogies, sont une seule et même personne. Les arguments clas­siques en faveur de la thèse unitariste sont présentés au chapitre 2, mais cet ouvrage,...

David Annis is professor of philosophy at Ball State University. In this essay, Annis offers an alternative to the foundationalist-coherent controversy: "contextualism." This theory rejects both the idea of intrinsically basic beliefs in the foundational sense and the thesis that coherence is sufficient for justification. he argues that justification is relative to the varying norms of social practices.

The Mental Health Literacy Scale is the most widely used and strong theory-based measurement tool to gain an understanding of mental health knowledge and ability. This study aimed to test the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Mental Health Literacy Scale and to document the norm and its influential factors of mental health literacy among nurses. The MHLS was translated following Brislin’s translation model and tested with a sample of 872 clinical registered nurses. The Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Health (...) Professionals, Patient Health Questionnaire-2, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder-2 were administered to assess convergent validity. The minimum average partial test, parallel analysis and confirmatory factor analysis supported 4 first-order 2 second-order structure. The 4 factors were named “knowledge of mental disorder,” “ability to seek information and help,” “recognition of mental disorder,” and “acceptance of patients with mental illness,” with factor 1-3 were summarized into MHLS-Core and factor 4 as MHLS-SA. The MHLS-C was moderately negatively correlated with the PHQ-2 and GAD-2 and highly positively correlated with JSE-HP. The Cronbach’s α was 0.85 for the overall scale and 0.89 and 0.93 for two subscales. The test-retest reliability was good, with intraclass correlation coefficients of 0.80 for the whole scale, and 0.79 and 0.94 for two subscales. As an approximately normal distribution, the 50th percentile for the MHLS-C was 99, with 50th percentiles of 74 and 20 for MHLS-Core and MHLS-SA. Higher position, higher professional credentials, higher hospital hierarchy, other specialist hospital, psychiatric hospital and unmarried status were positive predictors. The 29-item MHLS-C, with two subscales of MHLS-Core and MHLE-SA, is a stable and validated tool to measure mental health literacy. MHLS-Core could be used independently to measure the core content of mental health literacy. It may be applicable for Chinese health professionals, but need further validation among the general public. MHL curriculum and a targeted culturally appropriate program for acceptance for health professionals, especially for those in general hospitals and with less working tenure, may be recommended. (shrink)

In this article we examine the specific contributions Native American thought can make to the ongoing search for a Western ecological consciousness. We begin with a review of the influence of Native American beliefs on the different branches of the modem environmental movement and some initial comparisons of Western and Native American ways of seeing. We then review Native American thought on the natural world, highlighting beliefs in the need for reciprocity and balance, the world as a living being, and (...) relationships with animals. We conclude that Native American ideas are important, can prove inspirational in the search for a modem environmental consciousness, and affirm the arguments of both deep ecologists and ecofeminists. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled ‘What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?’ examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on (...) the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra‐activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany—including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the perception of actual and ideal ethical climate type among 95 nurses working in the internal medicine wards of one central hospital in the state of Israel. We also examined whether nurses’ demographic characteristics influence that perception and if a relationship between perceptions of an actual and an ideal ethical climate type influences nurses’ job satisfaction. A questionnaire composed of three subquestionnaires was administered and the responses analyzed using multiple linear regressions, analysis of variance and (...) Pearson’s correlation coefficient. The results demonstrated that demographic characteristics (such as: gender, job tenure and level of education) partially influence the perception of an ideal ethical climate. Incongruence in perceptions of ‘caring’ and ‘independence’ climate types indicated a decline in nurses’ job satisfaction, while perception of actual ‘caring’ and ‘service’ climates positively influenced all aspects of job satisfaction. We recommend constructing training programs emphasizing the ethics of nursing practice and also to help lead nurses to clarify an ethical framework and guide nursing staff in dealing with ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Policies and position statements regarding decision-making for extremely premature babies exist in many countries and are often directive, focusing on parental choice and expected outcomes. These recommendations often state survival and handicap as reasons for optional intervention. The fact that such outcome statistics would not justify such approaches in other populations suggests that some other powerful factors are at work. The value of neonatal intensive care has been scrutinized far more than intensive care for older patients and suggests that neonatal (...) care is held to a higher standard of justification. The relative value placed on the life of newborns, in particular the preterm, is less than expected by any objective medical data or any prevailing moral frameworks about the value of individual lives. Why do we feel less obligated to treat the premature baby? Do we put newborns in a special and lesser moral category? We explore this question from a legal and ethical perspective and offer several hypotheses pertaining to personhood, reproductive choices, “precious children,” and probable evolutionary and anthropological factors. (shrink)

Gyenis and Rédei (G&R) have shown that any prior _p_ on a finite algebra _A_, however chosen, significantly restricts the set of posteriors derivable from _p_ by Jeffrey conditioning (JC) on a nontrivial measurable partition (i.e., a partition consisting of members of _A_, at least one of which is not an atom of _A_). They support this claim by proving that the set of potential posteriors _not derivable_ from _p_ in this way, which they call the _Bayes blind spot of (...) p_, is large, having cardinality _c_ and normalized Lebesgue measure 1, as well as being of second Baire category for a natural metrizable topology. In the present paper, we establish results analogous to those of G&R for probability measures on any infinite sigma algebra of subsets of a countably infinite set (which requires distinctly different treatments of the topological and measure-theoretic cases). We also show, in both the finite and infinite cases, that all of the limitative results for a single prior _p_ continue to hold for the intersection of the Bayes blind spots of countably many priors. This leads us to reject the claim of G&R that the large size of blind spots in the single prior case is attributable to the limitations imposed by priors. We argue instead that it is the so-called _rigidity property_ of JC that accounts for the large size of Bayes blind spots. G&R also prove that _any_ potential posterior _q_ can be derived from a prior _p_ by at most two applications of JC on nontrivial partitions. But they remark that their particular two-stage derivation of an \(r \in BS(p)\) from _p_ is barely distinguishable from a single, complete reassessment on a trivial partition. We show, however, that there are two-stage derivations of _r_ from _p_ that require no direct assessment of the probability of any atom at either stage. Finally, in order to situate the aforementioned limitative results in the proper context, we demonstrate that a probability revision that would amount to complete reassessment within a Jeffrey evidentiary framework may arise, in a different evidentiary framework, in a way that involves no direct assessment of the probability of any atom, as, for example, in a generalization of Jeffrey’s solution to the problem of old evidence and new explanation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Reciprocating Engine--Like ProustRoger ShattuckWould you buy a book called “How to Read a Book”? Only out of annoyance, I imagine. In the company of literary scholars, critics, and writers, we all think we know already how to read. Otherwise, we’d be professional charlatans. Still, in 1940 tens of thousands of people bought a book called How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler. It stayed on the (...) best seller lists for several weeks. Adler wrote in an easy conversational style and promoted good books—even old ones. But he had the essentials wrong. He believed we should read the way a tyro tours an art museum: the tyro looks at the label before looking at the painting. Of course our whole educational system—K plus 12 plus 4 plus even more—inevitably follows this label-first method. I shall come back to the basic question of order of events in reading literature.On the basis of my own experience and of my investigations in recent years, I distinguish three kinds or levels of reading. We read for basic comprehension of words and sentences. We read for literary response to the parts and the whole of a work. And we read for the relations of the work to other works and to life itself. These tentative categories of reading do not represent sequential stages. Our response to language may resort to one or all of these three activities at any stage of learning.Formal reading begins with the basic association of written word with sounded word—with a notion in the mind—with some phenomenon in the world. Since most of us have forgotten how we learned those initial associations, we understand them probably from having helped a child to read. And in that gradual process we do not usually encounter the excitement that can occur when an illiterate older child or an illiterate [End Page 104] adult suddenly grasps the miracle of language. The exemplary case of Helen Keller concentrates into one incident at the water pump the revelation that comes to the rest of us over a period of weeks or months at a much earlier age. We should never forget one fundamental: the comprehension stage of reading is not an empty skill that can be acquired apart from meaningful content. In order to make sense of written language, we cannot just learn a mental trick of association but must also acquire much information about the world we live in.This first category of reading for comprehension is endlessly debated by all parties, including literary scholars and critics. Almost no one speaks of the third category: how to keep track of and make use of what we read over the years, both as professionals in the field of literature and as individuals seeking to shape a life out of our experience. I lifted the title of this panel from a remarkable essay on how to keep notes on one’s reading and how to set up and constantly revise a system of files both in order to give direction to one’s professional career and in order to constitute one’s character as a person. The essay “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” was written by C. Wright Mills as an appendix for The Sociological Imagination (1959). We all pick up procedures for keeping notes and files as we go along. But despite the number of methodology courses in graduate programs in literature, such basics are rarely discussed. Mills deserves much credit for raising a neglected subject essential for all writers. Intellectual craftsmanship will become even more challenging in the era of electronics and computers.Another great scholar a century earlier saw fit to speak of these basics near the end of his autobiography.I may mention that I keep from thirty to forty large portfolios, in cabinets with labelled shelves, into which I can at once put a detached reference or memorandum. I have bought many books and at their ends I make an index of all the facts that concern my work; or, if the book is not my own, write out a separate abstract, and of such abstracts I have a huge drawer... (shrink)

The free flow of ideas among scholars and their colleagues is essential to the fabric of academic life. The foregoing discussion shows the extent to which federal authority is now being asserted to restrict and disrupt that flow.

This paper argues that the augmented reality gaming application for smart devices, _Pokémon GO_ shows the fate of the legal subject as a neoliberal monster subjugated to the limitations imposed by hypercapitalism. The game, derived from Nintendo’s iconic Pokémon franchise, reveals the legal subject as a frenzied, diminished and impulsive being, allowed to see, move, catch and accumulate but unable to participate in more meaningful self-narration. It is not that the game is lawless, notwithstanding, anxieties in the semiosphere about users (...) trespassing or engaging in criminal behaviour. Rather the game is over structured and highly limited, both within its game-play which is repetitive and impulsive, and in its absence of narrative. Unlike the classic Nintendo Pokémon games which are within the role-playing game genre, _Pokémon GO_ abstracts the seeing, moving, catching and accumulating features of the classic games without the overarching narrative, questing and competition. In this _Pokémon GO_ manifests the transformation of the liberal legal subject of capitalism to the neoliberal subject of a digital orientated hypercapitalism where seeing, moving, catching and accumulating is immediate and impulsive, obliterating the ‘prudent’ subject participating in their own self-narration. (shrink)

The extremely preterm infant, born before 28 weeks of gestational age, has been the focus of much ethical discussion. These infants have a significant risk of mortality and morbidity, and it is not...

Background: There are numerous benefits to ethics consultation services, but little is known about the reasons different professionals may or may not request an ethics consultation. Inter-professional differences in the perceived utility of ethics consultation have not previously been studied.Methods: To understand profession-specific perceived benefits of ethics consultation, we surveyed all employees at an urban tertiary children’s hospital about their use of ethics committee services (n = 842).Results: Our findings suggest that nurses and physicians find ethics consultations useful for different (...) reasons; physicians were more likely to report normative benefits, while nurses were more likely to report communicative and relational benefits.Conclusions: These findings support an open model of ethics consultation and may also help ethics committees to better understand consultation requests and remain attuned to the needs of various professional groups. (shrink)

The proposed model consists of 1) a Phonological Planning Component to plan the symbolic and relational goals for an utterance, 2) a Phonetic Planning Component to plan the quantitative details of the acoustic goals and how they will be achieved articulatorily, and 3) a Motor-Sensory Implementation Component to ensure that the goals are achieved on time. The temporal characteristics specified in the Phonetic Planning Component include durations between acoustic landmarks, as well as parameters of Lee’s TauG-Guidance equation, which determine how (...) a movement evolves over time. Movement coordination is assumed to be based on movement endpoints (rather than onsets) and accomplished via Tau-coupling (Lee 1998). Both the Phonetic Planning and Motor-Sensory Implementation components are assumed to make use of general-purpose, phonology-extrinsic, timekeeping mechanisms to represent, specify, and track time. Supporting evidence includes greater timing precision at movement endpoints compared to other parts of movements, suggesting the separate control of the timing of movement endpoints compared to other parts of movement. This evidence challenges models in which all parts of a movement trajectory are controlled by the same equation of motion, but supports models in which a) each abstract, symbolic phonological representation maps onto spatial and temporal characteristics of the part(s) of movement most closely related to the goal of producing a planned set of acoustic cues to signal the phonological contrast (often the endpoint), b) movements are coordinated primarily based on the goal-related part of movement, and c) speakers give priority to the accurate implementation of the part(s) of movement most closely related to the phonological goals. Further support for phonology-extrinsic timing comes from three types of evidence suggesting that surface durations are represented during speech production. Finally, phonology-extrinsic timing is supported by greater timing variability for repetitions of longer intervals, assumed to be due to noise in a general-purpose (and phonology-extrinsic) timekeeping process. The evidence appears to be incompatible with models that have a unified Phonology/Phonetics Component, with models which do not represent the surface timing of phonetic events, nor with models in which timing in speech production is not represented, specified and tracked by a general-purpose timekeeping mechanisms. (shrink)

Among the many sorts of problems encountered in decision theory, allocation problems occupy a central position. Such problems call for the assignment of a nonnegative real number to each member of a finite set of entities, in such a way that the values so assigned sum to some fixed positive real number s. Familiar cases include the problem of specifying a probability mass function on a countable set of possible states of the world, and the distribution of a certain sum (...) of money, or other resource, among various enterprises. In determining an s-allocation it is common to solicit the opinions of more than one individual, which leads immediately to the question of how to aggregate their typically differing allocations into a single “consensual” allocation. Guided by the traditions of social choice theory decision theorists have taken an axiomatic approach to determining acceptable methods of allocation aggregation. In such approaches so-called “independence” conditions have been ubiquitous. Such conditions dictate that the consensual allocation assigned to each entity should depend only on the allocations assigned by individuals to that entity, taking no account of the allocations that they assign to any other entities. While there are reasons beyond mere simplicity for subjecting allocation aggregation to independence, this radically anti-holistic stricture has frequently proved to severely limit the set of acceptable aggregation methods. As we show in what follows, the limitations are particularly acute in the case of three or more entities which must be assigned nonnegative values summing to some fixed positive number s. For if the set V⊆[0,s] of values that may be assigned to these entities satisfies some simple closure conditions and Vis finite, then independence allows only for dictatorial or imposed aggregation. This theorem builds on and extends a theorem of Bradley and Wagner and, when V={0,1}, yields as a corollary an impossibility theorem of Dietrich on judgment aggregation. (shrink)

Friendship was an important topic for classical philosophers; the analysis, Value, And duties of friendship all received considerable attention. But friendship has been a relatively dormant topic among more recent philosophers. This paper (a) presents an analysis of friendship and explains its core elements, (b) discusses several different models for explaining the value of friendship, And (c) argues that there are special duties of friendship and that these aren't based solely on utilitarian considerations.

Children acquiring languages with noun classes have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the hypothesis that children are classifying nouns optimally with respect to a distribution that does not match the surface distribution of statistical features in their input. We propose three ways in which children's apparent statistical (...) insensitivity might arise, and find that all three provide ways to account for the difference between children's behavior and the optimal classifier. A fourth model combines two of these proposals and finds that children's insensitivity is best modeled as a bias to ignore certain features during classification, rather than an inability to encode those features during learning. These results provide insight into children's developing knowledge of noun classes and highlight the complex ways in which statistical information from the input interacts with children's learning processes. (shrink)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s elegy for his infant son, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” in The Souls of Black Folk, has received relatively scant attention from political theorists. Yet it illuminates crucial developments in Du Bois’s political thought. It memorializes a tragedy central to his turn from scientific facts to rhetorical appeals to emotion. Its rhetoric also exemplifies a broader tension in his writings, between masculinist and elitist commitments and more insurrectionary impulses. In its normalizing rhetorical mode, which dominates, the (...) elegy depicts an idealized patriarchal bourgeois household—potentially eliciting white readers’ sympathetic identification, but failing to displace the gendered and classed logic of racial exclusion. Its moments of transgressive rhetoric complicate or refuse such identification, celebrating Burghardt’s racial impurity and invoking a lineage of black maternal ambivalence. Though each is vexed and ephemeral, these moments of transgressive rhetoric reveal countervailing impulses that Du Bois would articulate in later writings. (shrink)

In an age of professionalization and specialization, the practice of clinical ethics is facing an identity crisis. Are clinical ethicists moral experts, ethics experts, or merely quasi-lawyers giving legal advice? Are they extensions of the hospital, always working to advance the hospital’s interests? Or is there another option? Since 1998, when the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities first issued its Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation, there has been debate about the role of standardization and proceduralism in clinical ethics (...) consultation. Now, as ASBH continues to move forward with its credentialing program, proceduralism in clinical ethics must be critically examined. In this paper, I argue that the proceduralist approach to clinical ethics consultation, as espoused by the ASBH’s call for credentialing, creates a demeaning experience for all parties involved and precludes goods internal to the practice of clinical ethics consultation from being actualized. As a practice embedded in medicine and in institutions such as the hospital, clinical ethics consultation must define and examine its own goods in order to bring about more than a sterile, law-like solution to difficult moral quandaries, as these sterile solutions leave patients, families, and providers unsatisfied, abandoned, and disappointed. Thus, in an effort to push back against this proceduralism in clinical ethics consultation, I will offer a preliminary exploration of what these goods might be. (shrink)

Kant’s treatment of laughter in section 54 of the Critique of Judgment is intriguing: he places laughter among the arts, but does not deem it serious enough to be a fine art. According to Kant, laughter is an agreeable art, and ministers only to the senses. But when he describes to us what laughter actually does, it turns out that this bodily phenomenon is actually a moral phenomenon akin to the sublime in that it elevates and humbles us at the (...) same time. This paper revisits Kant’s aesthetic themes, shows the distinctive role of laughter in the third Critique, and explores the possibilities of a true reunification of law and freedom through laughter. (shrink)

This study describes the implementation of a curricular tool designed for students to develop civic engagement through running a social business in one fifth-grade classroom. The One Hen unit focuses on teaching elementary students the concept of social entrepreneurship through a project where students run their own social business to address a community need. This study has the potential to contribute to our understanding of how elementary students learn economics to increase civic engagement as the One Hen unit could lead (...) to students’ becoming more aware of problems in their community and to gain experience planning for civic action. (shrink)