It is argued, in this paper, that moral theories should not be discussed extensively when teaching applied ethics. First, it is argued that, students are either presented with a large amount of information regarding the various subtle distinctions and the nuances of the theory and, as a result, the students simply fail to take it in or, alternatively, the students are presented with a simplified caricature of the theory, in which case the students may understand the information they are given, (...) but what they have understood is of little or no value because it is merely a caricature of a theory. Second, there is a methodological problem with appealing to moral theories to solve particular issues in applied ethics. An analogy with science is appealed to. In physics there is a hope that we could discover a unified theory of everything. But this is, of course, a hugely ambitious project, and much harder than, for example, finding a theory of motion. If the physicist wants to understand motion, he should try to do so directly. We would think he was particularly misguided if he thought that, to answer this question, he first needed to construct a unified theory of everything. (shrink)

The dominant view of women has changed radically during the last century. These changes have had an important impact on the way of life of women in general and, undoubtedly, on women as patients. So far, gender differences have received little attention when developing healthcare services. Stroke hits a great number of elderly women. Wyller et al. found that women seemed to be harder hit by stroke than men; they achieved lower scores in tests of motor, cognitive and ADL (...) functions, both in the acute phase and 1 year after stroke. It is reasonable to expect that differences in outcome among male and female sufferers may in part be explained by the fact that rehabilitation services are designed primarily to meet the needs of men. de Beauvoir's feminist theory maintains that one's body is fundamental in creating the person, which is a lifelong process. Traditionally, the female body has been exposed to alienation and oppression through life. This has led women to develop a life in immanence. This we feel can be of significance in connection with rehabilitation after a stroke, particularly for elderly women. In this article we will discuss how de Beauvoir's theory can throw new light on the experiences and rehabilitation of elderly women and point to ways of improving the process of rehabilitation. (shrink)

First paragraph: The awesome range of Heike Jung’s work—over different aspects of criminal law, different jurisdictions and traditions, different disciplines and languages—makes life both easier and harder for contributors to his Festschrift: easier, because one can choose almost any criminal law topic and be confident that it will connect to his work; harder (for those with the British vices of monolingualism and intellectual parochialism), since one’s paper will display the linguistic, jurisdictional or intellectual limitations that Heike Jung’s work (...) so impressively transcends. In an attempt to overcome some of those limitations, I will discuss a topic that concerns criminal trials and the scope of the criminal law, through the distinction between crimes (Straftaten) and ‘regulatory offences’ (Ordnungswidrigkeiten) which is more often formally drawn in Germany and other continental European systems than in English law. (shrink)

MY AIM in writing this paper is to ask help in the laying of a pair of ghosts who continue to haunt moral philosophy. Their names are ‘objectivism’ and ’subjectivism'; but the second sometimes assumes the name of ‘relativism'. I have long been convinced that the supposed battles between these two have no real substance; but for all that, they go on confusing many moral philosophers. It would be a great benefit to our profession if somebody could put an end (...) to the confusion once for all; but it has proved harder than might have been hoped, and that is my excuse for trying again. (shrink)

Plural quantification, often used to evade Russell paradoxes, will lead back to them, given certain assumptions about propositions. This chapter provides a more generalized version of the path to paradox by showing that any theory that makes possible the construction of an appropriate packaging relation falls prey to a Russell paradox. It gives examples of widely-held metaphysical theories that require such a relation. It shows that the paradoxes that can result from plural quantification are more widely damaging, and harder (...) to tame, than has been recognized. It also displays formal requirements that any metaphysical framework with a packaging relation must meet if it is to have a chance of escaping self-contradiction. The chapter first gives the general paradox-generating setup, and then shows how three families of metaphysical assumptions allow one to instantiate it. It concludes by assessing the aftermath of the arguments presented. (shrink)

How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words such as know harder for learners to acquire than words such as dog or jump? We suggest that the chief limiting factor in acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. This opening premise of our position, while controversial, is shared with some prior approaches. The present discussion moves (...) forward from there to a detailed proposal for how the mapping problem for the lexicon is solved, as well as a presentation of experimental findings that support this account. We describe an overlapping series of steps through which novices move in representing the lexical forms and phrase structures of the exposure language, a probabilistic multiple-cue learning process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The machinery is set in motion by word-to-world pairing, a procedure available to novices from the.. (shrink)

Digital and analog: What do these terms mean today? The use and meaning of such terms change through time. The analog, in particular, seems to go through various phases of popularity and disuse, its appeal pegged most frequently to nostalgic longings for nontechnical or romantic modes of art and culture. The definition of the digital vacillates as well, its precise definition often eclipsed by a kind of fever-pitched industrial bonanza around the latest technologies and the latest commercial ventures. One common (...) response to the question of the digital is to make reference to things like Twitter, Playstation, or computers in general. Here one might be correct, but only coincidentally, for the basic order of digitality (the digitality of digitality) has not yet been demonstrated through mere denotation. And the second question—the question of the analog—is harder still, with responses often also consisting of mere denotations of things: sound waves, the phonograph needle, magnetic tape, a sundial. At least denotation itself is analogical. This article will aim to define the analog explicitly and argue, perhaps counterintuitively, that the golden age of analog thinking was not a few decades past, prior to the wide-spread adoption of the computer. In fact, the fields of structuralism and poststructuralism that emerged in the middle to late twentieth century, concurrent with the deployment of the digital computer, were characteristically digital, what with their focus on the symbolic order and logical economies. If anything, the golden age of analog is happening today, all around us, as evidenced by the proliferation of characteristically analog concerns: sensation, materiality, experience, affect, ethics, and aesthetics. (shrink)

Ship design needs to respond to and attract an ever more design conscious society. However, little research has been conducted into perceptions of beauty and pleasure and how such perceptions can be usefully absorbed into ship design. Aesthetic consideration, is seen as a distraction from the bespoke nature of the ship design process and is often avoided, second guessed or left for external consultancy. The ship design discipline requires the nurturing of its own aesthetic methods, for future development, and to (...) adapt some of the aesthetic ideals found in architecture, art and design. This paper argues that philosophy can be effective in interpreting what the passenger finds attractive and pleasurable. To illustrate the philosophical approach proposed, the `Elbe SWATH’ and the `Oasis of the Seas’ are investigated and compared using theoretical resources from the culturally focused philosophy of `Functional Beauty’. Conclusions suggest that the interpretation of the end users most valued appreciations can lead to design directives that deliver subjective qualities of beauty - beauty similar to those seen in the pure aims of the Elbe SWATH’s purposeful work craft, or comparable to nature’s beauty and purity in aim. (shrink)

The papers collected in this book share a common motivation: All respond to certain kinds of injustice that unfairly and unreasonably prevent the insights and intellectual abilities of vulnerable and stigmatized groups from being given their due recognition. Most people are opposed to injustice in principle, and do not want to have mistaken views about others. But research in the social sciences reveals a disturbing truth: Even people who intend to be fair-minded and unprejudiced are influenced by unconscious biases and (...) stereotypes, as well as social structures and institutions that lead to unjust judgments. We may sincerely want to be epistemically just, but we frequently fail, and simply thinking harder about it will not fix the problem. -/- This volume collects 17 new essays that draw from cutting-edge social science research, to suggest how we can better manage our own unjust reactions, as well as resist patterns of epistemic injustice that we may face. The volume concludes with an afterward by Miranda Fricker, reflecting on these new lines of research and potential future directions to explore. (shrink)

It is well established that retrieval of names is harder than the retrieval of other identity specific information. This paper offers a review of the more influential accounts put forward as explanations of why names are so difficult to retrieve. A series of five experiments tests a number of these accounts.Experiments One to Three examine the claims that names are hard to recall because they are typically meaningless, or unique. Participants are shown photographs of unfamiliar people or familiar people (...) and given three pieces of information about each: a name, a unique piece of information, and a shared piece of information. Learning follows an incidental procedure, and participants are given a surprise recall test. In each experiment shared information is recalled most often, followed by unique information, followed by name. Experiment Four tests both the `uniqueness' account and an account based on the specificity of the naming response. Participants are presented with famous faces and asked to categorise them by semantic group. Results indicate that less time is needed to perform this task when the group is a subset of a larger semantic category. A final experiment examines the claim that names might take longer to access because they are less often retrieved than other classes of information. Latencies show that participants remain more efficient when categorising faces by their occupation than by their name even when they have received extra practice of naming the faces.We conclude that the explanation best able to account for the data is that names are stored separately from other semantic information and can only be accessed after other identity specific information has been retrieved. However, we also argue that the demands we make of these explanations make it likely that no single theory will be able to account for all existing data. (shrink)

Three- to six-year-olds were given Heyes's proposed task and theory of mind tasks. Although they correlated, Heyes's was harder; only 50% of participants with a theory of mind reached a criterion of 75% correct. Because of the complex series of inferences involved in Heyes's task, it is possible that one could have a theory of mind and fail Heyes's version.

How can one be a good person? That, in essence, is the question I ask in this dissertation. More specifically, I ask how we, in general, can best go about the complex and never-ending task of trying to figure out what we should do and then do it. I answer that question in four articles, each dealing with an aspect of the model of morality presented by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The title of the dissertation, ‘How (...) to be a good sentimentalist’, thus refers to that particular philosophical framework. However, the answers I give should be relevant to any person concerned with how to be a good person. The first article, Moral Tuning, deals with the first part of the question, namely how we can best go about figuring out what it is that we should and should not do. Specifically, it deals with the question of whether, and if so how, individuals like you and I can critically reflect upon the norms of our own society, sorting the chaff of merely conventional norms from the wheat of genuinely moral ones. In brief, it is the question of whether we as individuals are autonomous in our relation to the norms of our own society. In answering this question, my co-authors and I argue that Smith’s use of musical metaphors in TMS, words like tone, pitch, and concord, can be understood as elements of an analogical model of morality. In contrast to earlier interpretations of Smith’s musical metaphors, which have seen music as an aesthetic object, we draw on recent developments in musicology to argue that music may also be construed as a practice. Construing the source domain of this analogical model as musical practice allows us to construe the target domain also as a practice—as moral tuning. This in turn allows us to argue that moral autonomy consists in realising the freedom inherent in the constant need to translate norms into action, and in so doing, to interpret and reinterpret, not only the actions, but the norms themselves. In other words, following the norms of our own society already implies that we are autonomous in relation to them. Being good sentimentalists thus begins with realising that we are free to question and reshape the moral standard of our own society. The second article, Love Redirected, deals with the second part of the question, namely how we can best go about doing what we already think we should do. This, then, is a question of moral motivation, more specifically a question about the difference between genuinely moral motivation and other kinds of motivation, like a selfish desire for praise. Smith himself argues that we not only desire the actual praise of other people, but to be worthy of their praise, to be ‘praiseworthy’. The desire to be praiseworthy, the ‘love of praiseworthiness’ is then the genuinely moral motivation, for it aims at nothing but the satisfaction of having done the right thing. The trouble with Smith’s answer is that he does not adequately connect his claim about praiseworthiness to the rest of his model. This has lead to some confusion in the secondary literature, and in the first part of Love Redirected, I seek to end this confusion by combining what Smith says in the various editions of TMS into a coherent argument for how the desire to be praiseworthy comes from redirecting our desire for praise from other people towards the ideal of the ‘impartial spectator’. I then go on to show how this reading also fits with modern psychological research on the moral development of children. Finally, I conclude that this redirection of our desire for praise requires not just negative, but positive emotional reinforcement. Therefore, becoming good sentimentalists involves taking pleasure in our moral successes, no less than we are pained at our failures. The third article, The Practical Impossibility of Being both Impartial and Well-informed, makes a first pass at dealing with the idea of the impartial spectator itself, an idea that is central to the answers given in the two first articles. The problem with the impartial spectator is that she is also supposed to be well-informed about those she judges. However, the demands of impartiality and of understanding pull in opposite directions: To be well-informed—to properly understand the situation and character of the person we judge—we must, typically, be sufficiently physically close to that person to see with our own eyes what they are going through. At the same time, this kind of physical closeness tends to entangle us in the kinds of emotional bonds that hinder an impartial evaluation. One might think that this tension could be eased or eliminated by relying less on physical closeness and more on the powers of our imagination to, as Smith frequently puts it, ‘bring home to us’ the situation of the person we are judging. However, using Construal Level Theory, I argue that merely imagining someone’s situation in detail and/or taking their perspective produces a similar effect to physical closeness, and hence that the tension between understanding and impartiality is practically inescapable. To be good sentimentalists, we must therefore recognise our limitations, and give up on the illusion of ever being fully understanding and perfectly impartial at the same time. The fourth article, The Partially Impartial Spectator as an Ethical Ideal, makes a second pass at dealing with the idea, or rather ideal, of the impartial spectator. It begins with the recognition that we frequently fail to be impartial spectators, both of others, and of ourselves. This is especially true in those cases where our views conflict with those of someone else. Building on research detailing the various ways in which cognitive and affective biases impact our perception of the world, our reasoning about our own views, and our ability to resolve disputes with others, I argue that merely trying harder to be impartial spectators is liable to backfire, rendering us just as biased as ever, to which is added an unshakeable confidence that we were right all along. Therefore, I go on to argue, we must try smarter. Trying smarter, I conclude, involves aiming for something less ideal, more achievable, and, most importantly, humbler, namely to be partially impartial spectators. Being a good sentimentalist thus beings with realising our freedom to interpret, continues in our taking pleasure in our moral successes, pauses at the realisation that we will never be truly impartial spectators, and ends with a commitment to continued improvement under the lodestar of the ideal of the partially impartial spectator. (shrink)

In the early 1950s Grant McConnell, Jr., called for a political adjudication of our environmental and political visions. He pointed out the arbitrary nature of Gifford Pinchot's noble-sounding formula (“The greatest good for the greatest number over the longest time”), noting that such a determination depended on whom you asked. No technocrat can determine the greatest good on the basis of some secret expertise or privileged knowledge. We need to resolve our disparate visions of the uses of nature and human (...) beings politically, without recourse to privileged knowledge.But does such a political adjudication imply the unimpeded domination of the will of the majority? Not necessarily, because there is no overall majority for a total “bundle” of policies and programs — these must be horse-traded and haggled over on the basis of shifting coalitions. Yet, can it not be argued that even so, some very deeply held values of minorities will be trounced and trampled? It would be dishonest not to admit to such a danger. What we must do is try to define and develop a workable conception of baseline human rights that will be inviolable by the will of temporary majorities, and this itself is a tenuous political process which we have only just embarked on in recent times.The danger of Valentin Rasputins, Vernadskii cultists, and Deep Ecologists everywhere is that they are arguing from privileged knowledge. “We know what is really best for you, what will cure you,” they assert. They alone know the distinction between natural harmony and disorder, social health and corruption, pollution and purity, alienation and unity. They do not recognize the social construction of their ethical beliefs and political visions; they absolutize their individual truths. They may be right, but what if they are not...?It is therefore all the more important for those of us who wish to preserve a maximum of biotic and human diversity for our-selves and for future humans (and nonhumans) to be explicit about the moral and political agendas we embrace. The soundest way for us to prevail is to persuade our neighbors on this planet that our visions have something of value for them, too. We must keep in mind the fact that in a world where there exists more than one fanaticism, peaceful coexistence is in principle impossible.And if fanaticisms, including ecological ones, are the products of the fear or the fact of material, cultural, or spiritual dispossession, then we must work harder to make a world in which each of us and our interests are treated with equal respect. We cannot get there through the tainted means of absolutizing individual truths.Aldo Leopold, in his testament Sand County Almanac, as much as called for a new myth, for us to “think like a mountain.”57 He called for a new myth because he believed that humans were dangerous (to ourselves, first of all, and to the planet), and that inculcating a myth was the only way to effect a deep behavioral change on a massive enough scale to save the situation.58 It is my belief that myths are often more dangerous than the situations they seek to remedy. We need to cultivate a taste of de-mythologizing, of making our lives more self-aware. We need to become aware of our needs and our value preferences and to take responsibility for them as individual preferences. Then we will be in a good position indeed to respect and compromise with the preferences of our neighbors all around this planet, just as we would have them respect and compromise with ours. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402064 00005 *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402064 00006 *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402064 00007. (shrink)

Health care reform is a perennial issue in elections — partly because of the challenges facing health care and especially because health care is an important issue for the swing voters. Making reform happen is harder. There are deep divisions within each of the parties — not apparent during elections. Bipartisan support — and the willingness to accept the best legislation that can be passed as “good enough”— will be key.

Why do black families own less than white families? Why does school segregation persist decades after Brown v. Board of Education? Why is it harder for black adults to vote than for white adults? Will addressing economic inequality solve racial and gender inequality as well? This book answers all of these questions and more by revealing the hidden rules of race that create barriers to inclusion today. While many Americans are familiar with the histories of slavery and Jim Crow, (...) we often don't understand how the rules of those eras undergird today's economy, reproducing the same racial inequities 150 years after the end of slavery and 50 years after the banning of Jim Crow segregation laws. This book shows how the fight for racial equity has been one of progress and retrenchment, a constant push and pull for inclusion over exclusion. By understanding how our economic and racial rules work together, we can write better rules to finally address inequality in America. (shrink)

Many tasks in statistical and causal inference can be construed as problems of entailment in a suitable formal language. We ask whether those problems are more difficult, from a computational perspective, for causal probabilistic languages than for pure probabilistic (or “associational”) languages. Despite several senses in which causal reasoning is indeed more complex—both expressively and inferentially—we show that causal entailment (or satisfiability) problems can be systematically and robustly reduced to purely probabilistic problems. Thus there is no jump in computational complexity. (...) Along the way we answer several open problems concerning the complexity of well-known probability logics, in particular demonstrating the ${\exists \mathbb {R}}$ -completeness of a polynomial probability calculus, as well as a seemingly much simpler system, the logic of comparative conditional probability. (shrink)

Розкрито сутність поняття «рейтинг». Доведено значущість рейтингової оцінки для суб’єктів фінансового ринку, зокрема для страхових компаній, потенційних страхувальників, інвесторів та кредиторів.

Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought to provide us with an understanding of other minds that is basic in that sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it has also attracted the interest of philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend in the psychological and philosophical literature on joint attention consists of developing the suggestion that it holds (...) partially in virtue of communication: it is because we share our thoughts or feelings about an object that our individual attention becomes joint. This paper unpacks the communicative suggestion in a way that accounts for joint attention's basicness. (shrink)

This book offers a critical introduction to the work of American philosopher D. G. Leahy (1937-2014). Leahy's fundamental thinking can be characterized as an absolute creativity in which all creating is 'live' -- a happening occurring now that manifests a supersaturated polyontological actuality that is essentially created by the logic that characterizes it. Leahy leaves behind the categorial presuppositions of modern thought, eclipsing both Cartesian and Hegelian subjectivities and introducing instead an essentially new form of thinking founded in a nondual (...) logic of creation. The new thinking delineates the absolute unicity of existence as a creative interactivity beyond all traditional dichotomies (such as one vs. many, unity vs. plurality, identity vs. change): a fully "digitized" actuality that is nothing but newness, which inherently implies nothing but change. Through this new form of thinking, change itself is revealed to be the very essence of reality and mind. Any reader looking for a quantum leap beyond the thrall of modern and postmodern fixations is invited to hear and apprehend this new thinking that refuses to be conditioned by paradigms, categories, species, genera, walls, bridges, boundaries, or abstractions: an essentially free thinking that embodies creative novelty itself. (shrink)

This paper explains how an assertion may be understood despite there being nothing said or meant by the assertion. That such understanding is possible is revealed by cases of the so-called ``felicitous underspecification'' of demonstratives: cases where there is understanding of an assertion containing a demonstrative despite the interlocutors not settling on one or another object as the one the speaker is talking about (King 2014a, 2017, 2021). I begin by showing how Stalnaker's ([1978] 1999) well-known pragmatic principles adequately permit (...) and constrain the felicitous underspecification of demonstratives. I then establish a connection between the satisfaction of Stalnaker's principles and understanding, and show how that connection sheds further light on the relevant cases. After developing and motivating my proposal, I address some objections to it, then briefly discuss the felicitous underspecification of expressions other than demonstratives alongside contrasting my proposal with a similar one from Bowker (2015, 2019) that concerns definite descriptions. (shrink)

In spite of contemporary theoretical disagreement on the nature of language, there is a widespread informal agreement about what linguistic facts are. This article argues that a functional approach to language can provide the foundation for an explicit account of what the informal consensus implies. The account bridges the ‘internalist’ and the ‘externalist’ views of language by understanding mental constructs such as those involved in human languages as aspects of a dynamic social equilibrium. As in evolutionary biology, processes of selection (...) can work to stabilize certain features while others vary; and this process (in which ‘function’ plays a key role) is a necessary supplement to a purely mentalist account. This position is seen as a development of the position of Searle on social facts and Keller on language change. (shrink)

The hymns of Callimachus are generally divided into two groups: the ‘mimetic’ hymns , which seem to be enactments of ritual scenes, and the ‘nonmimetic’ hymns , which seem to follow the pattern of the Homeric hymns. Occasionally this distinction has been challenged, for instance by pointing to an' element of mimesis in H. 1, but on the whole the division into two groups has been 1 adhered to rather rigidly. A drawback of this distinction is that it seems to (...) prevent further insight into an important aspect of Callimachus' poetic technique. I think that there is in fact a subtle play with various aspects of diegesis and mimesis which pervades the whole collection of hymns and gives it a certain unity, because it draws attention to the way in which narratives or descriptions are presented in the hymns. Although the emphasis on mimesis or diegesis may vary, none of the hymns can be regarded as diegetic in all its aspects and there is a great deal of fluctuation between, the two modes of presentation both within the collection and within the individual hymns. (shrink)

In this first paperback edition, a new introduction by Tom Burke establishes the ongoing importance of Sleeper's analysis of the integrity of Dewey's work and ...

La logique de la science détermine les règles du raisonnement qui peut lui conférer la certitude. Un tel raisonnement s’appelle une démonstration, et la certitude qui en découle, certitude propre à la science, se dit apodictique. « On appellera science proprement dite uniquement celle dont la certitude est apodictique ». La science, dans la mesure où elle se caractérise par la certitude, l’apodicticité, la démonstration, semble donc dépendre de la logique, dans la mesure où celle-ci est capab...

The hymns of Callimachus are generally divided into two groups: the ‘mimetic’ hymns, which seem to be enactments of ritual scenes, and the ‘nonmimetic’ hymns, which seem to follow the pattern of the Homeric hymns. Occasionally this distinction has been challenged, for instance by pointing to an' element of mimesis inH. 1, but on the whole the division into two groups has been 1 adhered to rather rigidly. A drawback of this distinction is that it seems to prevent further insight (...) into an important aspect of Callimachus' poetic technique. I think that there is in fact a subtle play with various aspects of diegesis and mimesis which pervades the whole collection of hymns and gives it a certain unity, because it draws attention to the way in which narratives or descriptions are presented in the hymns. Although the emphasis on mimesis or diegesis may vary, none of the hymns can be regarded as diegetic in all its aspects and there is a great deal of fluctuation between, the two modes of presentation both within the collection and within the individual hymns. (shrink)