There is considerable evidence that listeners’ understanding of a spoken sentence need not always follow from a full analysis of the words and syntax of the utterance. Rather, listeners may instead conduct a superficial analysis, sampling some words and using presumed plausibility to arrive at an understanding of the sentence meaning. Because this latter strategy occurs more often for sentences with complex syntax that place a heavier processing burden on the listener than sentences with simpler syntax, shallow processing may represent (...) a resource conserving strategy reflected in reduced processing effort. This factor may be even more important for older adults who as a group are known to have more limited working memory resources. In the present experiment, 40 older adults and 20 younger adults were tested for comprehension of plausible and implausible sentences with a simpler subject-relative embedded clause structure or a more complex object-relative embedded clause structure. Dilation of the pupil of the eye was recorded as an index of processing effort. Results confirmed greater comprehension accuracy for plausible than implausible sentences, and for sentences with simpler than more complex syntax, with both effects amplified for the older adults. Analysis of peak pupil dilations for implausible sentences revealed a complex three-way interaction between age, syntactic complexity, and plausibility. Results are discussed in terms of models of sentence comprehension, and pupillometry as an index of intentional task engagement. (shrink)

Empirical ethics research is increasingly valued in bioethics and healthcare more generally, but there remain as yet under-researched areas such as pharmacy, despite the increasingly visible attempts by the profession to embrace additional roles beyond the supply of medicines. A descriptive and critical review of the extant empirical pharmacy ethics literature is provided here. A chronological change from quantitative to qualitative approaches is highlighted in this review, as well as differing theoretical approaches such as cognitive moral development and the four (...) principles of biomedical ethics. Research with pharmacy student cohorts is common, as is representation from American pharmacists. Many examples of ethical problems are identified, as well as commercial and legal influences on ethical understanding and decision making. In this paper, it is argued that as pharmacy seeks to develop additional roles with concomitant ethical responsibilities, a new prescription is needed for empirical ethics research in pharmacy—one that embraces an agenda of systematic research using a plurality of methodological and theoretical approaches to better explore this under-researched discipline. (shrink)

Do UK community pharmacists encounter the high drama dilemmas of the medical ethics literature or is a 'morality of the mundane' more appropriate? This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study that asked a sample of UK pharmacists to describe their ethical issues and to establish whether these were ethical dilemmas as understood philosophically or ethical problems of a more legal or emotional nature. It emerged that although many pharmacists referred to 'dilemmas', these were often problems involving a conflict (...) between an ethical value and a legal or procedural issue and often arose in the routine minutiae of dispensing prescriptions and selling medicines. Such ethical problems remained of concern for pharmacists and the commercial environment, corporate pharmacy ownership and pharmacists' subordination to doctors, all precipitated ethical problems. Law and ethics appeared to be understood synonymously but this may reflect a modernity that increasingly brackets out ethical experiences by encouraging reliance upon law and procedure. (shrink)

Background: Increasing interest in empirical ethics has enhanced understanding of healthcare professionals’ ethical problems and attendant decision-making. A four-stage decision-making model involving ethical attention, reasoning, intention and action offers further insights into how more than reasoning alone may contribute to decision-making.Aims: To explore how the four-stage model can increase understanding of decision-making in healthcare and describe the decision-making of an under-researched professional group.Methods: 23 purposively sampled UK community pharmacists were asked, in semi-structured interviews, to describe ethical problems in their work (...) and how they were resolved. Framework analysis of transcribed interviews utilised the four decision-making stages, together with constant comparative methods and deviant-case analysis.Results: Pharmacists were often inattentive and constructed problems in legal terms. Ethical reasoning was limited, but examples of appeals to consequences, the golden rule, religious faith and common-sense experience emerged. Ethical intention was compromised by frequent concern about legal prosecution. Ethical inaction was common, typified by pharmacists’ failure to report healthcare professionals’ bad practices, and ethical passivity emerged to describe these negative examples of the four decision-making stages. Pharmacists occasionally described more ethically active decision-making, but this often involved ethical uncertainty.Discussion: The four decision-making stages are a useful tool in considering how healthcare professionals try to resolve ethical problems in practice. They reveal processes often ignored in normative theories, and their recognition and the emergence of ethical passivity indicates the complexity of decision-making in practice. Ethical passivity may be deleterious to patients’ welfare, and concerns emerge about improving pharmacists’ ethical training and promoting ethical awareness and responsibility. (shrink)

In this presidential address, I use the metaphor of “reclaiming my time” as a framework that highlights the ways black women are playing an essential role transforming workplaces, media, and politics in the current moment. I consider how black feminist thought provides a useful starting point for assessing these efforts, and I examine how black women’s leadership offers a blueprint for how other groups also can restructure social institutions in an era of increasing polarization and inequality.

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre‐registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based on an 11‐dimensional (...) representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co‐occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow‐up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/. (shrink)

Many men who work in women's professions experience a glass escalator effect that facilitates their advancement and upward mobility within these fields. Research finds that subtle aspects of the interactions, norms, and expectations in women's professions push men upward and outward into the higher-status, higher-paying, more “masculine” positions within these fields. Although most research includes minority men, little has explicitly considered how racial dynamics color these men's encounters with the mechanisms of the glass escalator. In this article, the author examines (...) how intersections of race and gender combine to shape experiences for minority men in the culturally feminized field of nursing and finds that the upward mobility implied by the glass escalator is not uniformly available to all men who do “women's work.” The author concludes that the glass escalator is a racialized concept and a gendered one and considers the implications of this for future studies of men in feminized occupations. (shrink)

Caplan & Waters argue that the processing resources used for sentence comprehension are not drawn from an undifferentiated verbal working memory resource. This commentary cites data from normal aging to support this position. Still lacking in theory development is a specification of the transient memory representations necessary for interpretive and post-interpretive operations.

Recent studies indicate that mammalian chromosomes contain discretecis‐acting loci that control replication timing, mitotic condensation, and stability of entire chromosomes. Disruption of the large non‐coding RNA gene ASAR6 results in late replication, an under‐condensed appearance during mitosis, and structural instability of human chromosome 6. Similarly, disruption of the mouse Xist gene in adult somatic cells results in a late replication and instability phenotype on the X chromosome. ASAR6 shares many characteristics with Xist, including random mono‐allelic expression and asynchronous replication timing. (...) Additional “chromosome engineering” studies indicate that certain chromosome rearrangements affecting many different chromosomes display this abnormal replication and instability phenotype. These observations suggest that all mammalian chromosomes contain “inactivation/stability centers” that control proper replication, condensation, and stability of individual chromosomes. Therefore, mammalian chromosomes contain four types ofcis‐acting elements, origins, telomeres, centromeres, and “inactivation/stability centers”, all functioning to ensure proper replication, condensation, segregation, and stability of individual chromosomes. (shrink)

Vaesen infers unique properties of mind from the appearance of specific cultural innovation – a correlation without causal direction. Shifts in habitat, population density, and group dynamics are the only independently verifiable incentives for changes in cultural practices. The transition from Acheulean to Late Stone Age technologies requires that we consider how population and social dynamics affect cultural innovation and mental function.

The first English translation of Fichte’s second set of 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre.

Orthologic is defined by weakening the axioms and rules of inference of the classical propositional calculus. The resulting Lindenbaum-Tarski quotient algebra is an orthoimplication algebra which generalizes the author's implication algebra. The associated order structure is a semi-orthomodular lattice. The theory of orthomodular lattices is obtained by adjoining a falsity symbol to the underlying orthologic or a least element to the orthoimplication algebra.

This new edition of Law and Medical Ethics continues to chart the ever-widening field that the topics cover. The interplay between the health caring professions and the public during the period intervening since the last edition has, perhaps, been mainly dominated by wide-ranging changes in the administration of the National Health Service and of the professions themselves but these have been paralleled by important developments in medical jurisprudence.

The purpose of this text is to draw attention to eight forgotten heroes: William C. Bagley, Charles DeGarmo, David Felmley, William Torrey Harris, Isaac L. Kandel, Charles McMurry, William C. Ruediger, and Edward Austin Sheldon. They have been marginalized from our profession, and drawing upon their legacy is the best hope for restoring the profession of teaching today. This work also includes a chapter at the end of the book entitled "John Dewey's Forgotten Essays." The audience for this book includes: (...) 1) classroom teachers, 2) school administrators, 3) teacher educators, 4) deans and other university administrators, 5) college and university presidents, 6) legislators, 7) historians of education, 8) curriculum specialists, 9) specialists in teacher training, and 10) the general public. (shrink)

Scientists and laypeople alike use the sense of understanding that an explanation conveys as a cue to good or correct explanation. Although the occurrence of this sense or feeling of understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good explanation, it does drive judgments of the plausibility and, ultimately, the acceptability, of an explanation. This paper presents evidence that the sense of understanding is in part the routine consequence of two well-documented biases in cognitive psychology: overconfidence and hindsight. In light of (...) the prevalence of counterfeit understanding in the history of science, I argue that many forms of cognitive achievement do not involve a sense of understanding, and that only the truth or accuracy of an explanation make the sense of understanding a valid cue to genuine understanding. (shrink)

Knowledge, like other things of value, can be faked. According to Hawley (2011), know-how is harder to fake than knowledge-that, given that merely apparent propositional knowledge is in general more resilient to our attempts at successful detection than are corresponding attempts to fake know-how. While Hawley’s reasoning for a kind of detection resilience asymmetry between know-how and know-that looks initially plausible, it should ultimately be resisted. In showing why, we outline different ways in which know-how can be faked even when (...) a given performance is successful; and in doing so, we distinguish how know-how can be faked (no less than know-that) via upstream and downstream indicators of its presence, and within each of these categories, we’ll distinguish (in connection with detection resilience) both faking symptoms and (various kinds of) criteria. The unappreciated resilience of faked knowledge-how to successful detection highlights a largely overlooked dimension of social-epistemic risk – risk we face not just in our capacity as recipients of testimony, but in our capacity as both (would-be) apprentices and clients of knowledge-how. (shrink)

In management research, theory testing confronts a paradox described by Meehl in which designing studies with greater methodological rigor puts theories at less risk of falsification. This paradox exists because most management theories make predictions that are merely directional, such as stating that two variables will be positively or negatively related. As methodological rigor increases, the probability that an estimated effect will differ from zero likewise increases, and the likelihood of finding support for a directional prediction boils down to a (...) coin toss. This paradox can be resolved by developing theories with greater precision, such that their propositions predict something more meaningful than deviations from zero. This article evaluates the precision of theories in management research, offers guidelines for making theories more precise, and discusses ways to overcome barriers to the pursuit of theoretical precision. (shrink)

The philosophical literature on sport and games has had little to say about boredom beyond presuming that sports and games can be important ways of overcoming or preventing it. But boredom is an interesting and often misunderstood phenomenon with overlooked implications in this context. Boredom has significant human value and motivates play in ways that contribute to well-being and culture, often through encouraging engaged agency and exploration of novelty. Understanding boredom can also help to clarify problems and tendencies in sports (...) and games that qualify them as havens from boredom. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

In this era of increased polarization of opinion and contentious disagreement, CRITICAL REASONING presents a cooperative approach to critical thinking and formation of beliefs. CRITICAL REASONING emphasizes the importance of developing and applying analytical skills in real life contexts. This book is unique in providing multiple, diverse examples of everyday arguments, both textual and visual, including hard to find long argument passages from real-life sources. The book provides clear, step-by-step procedures to help you decide for yourself what to believe--to be (...) a consumer of information in our contemporary "world of experts.". (shrink)

Human brain organoids (HBOs) are novel entities that may exhibit unique forms of cognitive potential. What moral status, if any, do they have? Several authors propose that consciousness may hold the answer to this question. Others identify various _kinds of_ consciousness as crucially important for moral consideration, while leaving open the challenge of determining whether HBOs have them. This paper aims to make progress on these questions in two ways. First, it proposes a framework for thinking about the moral status (...) of entities other than paradigmatic persons. This framework identifies four qualities that ground moral status: evaluative stance, self-directedness, agency, and other-directedness. Second, we speculate on ways in which these qualities are relevant to dimensions of conscious experience that have been, or could be, identified in nonhuman animals. We further explore how these approaches could be adapted for use in HBOs, and argue that such studies, or something similar to them, will have to be performed if we wish to have empirical indications that HBOs have consciousness of a morally significant kind. We end by proposing that in our current scientific and epistemic situation, it is too soon to attribute any moral status to HBOs, but that this might change in the future. (shrink)