The article conceptualizes (post) authorship in the context of the development of contemporary network technologies. The development and specifics of contemporary information technologies are considered, and their impact on culture is determined. It is noted that contemporary technologies change people, social relations, and the nature of cultural production. It emphasizes the importance of cooperation, the network method of interaction, the importance of free access, the principles of freedom in the use and dissemination of information, technologies provided, in particular, by such (...) network systems as Peer-to-peer (P2P). It is from this technological perspective that P2P (post)authorship is conceptualized. The importance of separating the concepts of copyright and author is emphasized, the nature of the change in their functions is determined in the context of the distinction between autonomy and authority. Acceleration of technology development requires constant interaction, co-authorship, which can be implemented on the basis of free access to information. This requires a change in the concept of copyright, which was formed on the basis of private property, which today only inhibits the development of social relations. Along with this, it is important to review the figure of the author, focusing not only on the significance of co-authorship in the production of cultural products, but also on the conceptualization of a kind of multiple, decentralized author or (post)author. At the same time, it is about the significant role of change in the perception of time, emphasis on timeliness and simultaneity of interaction. In such a perspective, private property and copyright lose their usual meaning. The digital, intellectual, cultural author/product goes beyond material production, virtualized as a co-author. Peer-to-peer (post)author is realized through feeding the creativity of others. (shrink)

An overview of my work arguing that peer-to-peer computer networking (the Peer-to-Peer Simulation Hypothesis) may be the best explanation of quantum phenomena and a number of perennial philosophical problems.

The nature of authority is shifting in online scholarly communication. This examination of the history and future of peer review argues that effective online communication requires the development of an open, community?oriented, post?publication system of peer?to?peer review, transforming peer review from a process focused on gatekeeping to one concerned with filtering the wealth of scholarly material made available via the Internet.

This paper proposes an agent community based information retrieval method, which uses agent communities to manage and look up information related to users. An agent works as a delegate of its user and searches for information that the user wants by communicating with other agents. The communication between agents is carried out in a peer-to-peer computing architecture. In order to retrieve information related to a user query, an agent uses two histories : a query/retrieved document history(Q/RDH) and a (...) query/sender agent history(Q/SAH). The former is a list of pairs of a query and retrieved documents, where the queries were sent by the agent itself. The latter is a list of pairs of a query and sender agents and shows ``who sent what query to the agent''. This is useful to find a new information source. Making use of the Q/SAH is expected to cause a collaborative filtering effect, which gradually creates virtual agent communities, where agents with the same interests stay together. Our hypothesis is that a virtual agent community reduces communication loads to perform a search. As an agent receives more queries, then more links to new knowledge are achieved. From this behavior, a ``give and take''(or positive feedback) effect for agents seems to emerge. We implemented this method with Multi-Agents Kodama which has been developed in our laboratory, and conducted preliminary experiments to test the hypothesis. The empirical results showed that the method was much more efficient than a naive method employing 'broadcast' techniques only to look up a target agent. (shrink)

Collectivisation, as a socio-innovation, is an incremental part of history that has much to teach on questions of asset commoning. Such notions can provide renewed perspectives in understanding today’s peer-to-peer (p2p) economy and its influence on housing ownership models, which are constituting new forms of domesticity. This study understands domesticity as processes of collectivisation and de-collectivisation, and questions its conceptualisation as universal and invariant. It compares the transitioning moments by which a new governing body is instituted within recent-historical (...) Chinese-Asian contexts, including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. These moments were often postcolonial, full of changes, uncertainty, crisis, and anticipation; these contexts were unprecedented in scale, density, and cultural collision; in common, these were junctures of socio-innovation in land distribution that fashioned different forms of citizenry. By looking at these instances of innovation with situated thinking and against their historical–cultural backgrounds, the findings in this study reflect on the design of socio-technological systems, the potential consequences of our design interventions, and what “innovation” may mean given the complexity of transitional challenges. Putting together cosmopolitan and vernacular histories, the historiography presented is a collage of card game narratives, archived posters, news headlines, statistical figures, and literature. This journey through events of socio-innovation from the twentieth century till recent decades reveals how the history of governance has always been a question of cultivating collective actions, one way or another, and today’s p2p economy is simultaneously collectivising and fractionalising such socio-economic exchanges in digital citizenry. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the two most common views of how to respond rationally to peer disagreement–the Total Evidence View (TEV) and the Equal Weight View (EWV)–are both inadequate for substantial reasons. TEV does not issue the correct intuitive verdicts about a number of hypothetical cases of peer disagreement. The same is true for EWV. In addition, EWV does not give any explanation of what is rationally required of agents on the basis of sufficiently general epistemic (...) principles. I will then argue that there is a genuine alternative to both views–the Preemption View (PV)–that fares substantially better in both respects. I will give an outline and a detailed defense of PV in the paper. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the antecedents of guests’ behavioral intentions in Malaysia’s peer-to-peer accommodation industry. This study focused on the effects of physical and social environment on guest emotions, satisfaction, and subsequently on guest’s behavioral intentions towards P2P accommodation. The proposed research framework was developed based on Stimulus-Organism-Response model. Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine the proposed hypotheses. Data were collected from 476 foreign visitors who stayed at P2P accommodations in (...) Malaysia using online survey. The findings demonstrated that the P2P accommodation’s social and physical environment had a positive impact on guest satisfaction and emotions, while both satisfaction and emotions had significant impact on guest behavioral intentions. The findings also extend the applicability of the S-O-R theory in P2P accommodation context. In practice, both the physical and social environments are important stimuli cues to induce favorable level of organism factors, i.e., satisfaction and emotions. While behavioral intentions acted as the response factor in examining visitor’ responses towards P2P accommodation. All in all, this study emphasizes how crucial it is to emphasize on the external and internal factors when encouraging positive response in P2P accommodation platforms. (shrink)

Based on a unique data set on US direct microloans, we study the funding determinants of interest-free peer-to-peer crowdlending aimed at borrowers in the US. By performing logistic regressions on funding success and Tobit regressions on the reversed funding time, the existence of a social underwriting by a third-party trustee and information in the description texts fostering the investors’ trust are shown to be the main predictors of successful funding. Regarding social impact, the possibility to empower women and (...) groups of borrowers appeals to the investors, whereas empowerment of the family or community beyond the borrowers themselves appears to remain unappreciated. When examining the vulnerability of the borrowers as a predictor, the results manifest differences amongst the attitudes of the investors towards social impact. In the subsample of non-endorsed loans, the investors appear to prefer to support borrowers with an immigration background. In contrast, this is not the case with endorsed loans. (shrink)

Volume 46, Issue 6, November 2020, Page 693-707.

Although the topic of data-sharing has boomed in the past few years, practices of datasharing have attracted only scant attention within working groups and scientific cooperation (peer-to-peer data-sharing). To understand these practices, the author draws on Max Weber’s concept of social relationship, conceptualizing data-sharing as social action that takes place within a social relationship. The empirical material consists of interviews with 34 researchers representing five disciplines—linguistics, biology, psychology, computer sciences, and neurosciences. The analysis identifies three social forms of (...) data-sharing in peer-to-peer relationships: (a) closed communal sharing, which is based on a feeling of belonging together; (b) closed associative sharing, in which the participants act on the basis of an agreement; and (c) open associative sharing, which is oriented to “institutional imperatives” (Merton) and to formal regulations. The study shows that far more data-sharing is occurring in scientific practice than seems to be apparent from a concept of open data alone. If the main goal of open-data policy programs is to encourage researchers to increase access to their data, it could be instructive to study the three forms of data-sharing to improve the understanding of why and how scientists make their data accessible to other researchers. (shrink)

Some philosophers working on the epistemology of disagreement claim that conciliationist responses to peer disagreement embody a kind of intellectual humility. Others contend that standing firm or ‘sticking to one's guns’ in the face of peer disagreement may stem from an admirable kind of courage or internal fortitude. In this paper, we report the results of two empirical studies that examine the relationship between conciliationist and steadfast responses to peer disagreement, on the one hand, and virtues such (...) as intellectual humility, courage, grit, and actively open-minded thinking, on the other. We observed positive correlations between measures of conciliationism, intellectual humility, and actively open-minded thinking but failed to find any reliable association between steadfastness, courage, and grit. Our studies reveal that there are at least two important intellectual virtues associated with conciliationist responses to peer disagreement (viz., intellectual humility and actively open-minded thinking) and two vices associated with steadfast responses (intellectual arrogance and myside bias). These findings shed new light on the overall epistemic goodness of the conciliationist perspective. (shrink)

In my 2013 article, “A New Theory of Free Will”, I argued that several serious hypotheses in philosophy and modern physics jointly entail that our reality is structurally identical to a peer-to-peer (P2P) networked computer simulation. The present paper outlines how quantum phenomena emerge naturally from the computational structure of a P2P simulation. §1 explains the P2P Hypothesis. §2 then sketches how the structure of any P2P simulation realizes quantum superposition and wave-function collapse (§2.1.), quantum indeterminacy (§2.2.), wave-particle (...) duality (§2.3.), and quantum entanglement (§2.4.). Finally, §3 argues that although this is by no means a philosophical proof that our reality is a P2P simulation, it provides ample reasons to investigate the hypothesis further using the methods of computer science, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. (shrink)

Customer civility is an established construct in the study of ethical consumption. However, scholars have paid insufficient attention to customer civility in relation to the flourishing peer-to-peer economy. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to develop and test a theoretical framework which examines the antecedents of the customer civility in the P2P economy. We use social exchange theory to develop a model that posits customer interaction experiences with property owners, properties, and P2P platforms as antecedents of customer (...) civility in the P2P economy. Two studies were used to test our framework: Study 1 comprises a survey of Chinese customers ; Study 2 involves secondary data crawled from the Web site of Xiaozhu, one of China’s largest P2P accommodation platforms. OLS regression analysis was used for hypothesis testing. Results demonstrate three antecedents of customer civility in the P2P accommodation sector: interpersonal trust, property experience, and platform governance. In addition, the positive effect of interpersonal trust on customer civility is stronger when customers have high economic incentive, while the effect of property experience is significantly stronger when customers have low economic incentive. (shrink)

Traditional libraries will evolve to digital libraries which are clearly superior at: Dissemination, sharing, linking, storing, and information variety. Therefore, one can say that electronic libraries have specific needs in terms of content, services and long-term preservation. In contrast, digital libraries suffer from several inherent constraints: storage limitation, performance, relevancy, decentralization, lack of semantic, fault tolerance, scalability. The main intention of this paper is to present a design of an integrated digital library system based on peer-to-peer data mining. (...) This article aims also to prove that peer-to-peer mining, an emerging branch of distributed data mining, is a hot research area well suited to overcome intrinsic problems of digital libraries. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to identify which peer collaboration characteristics may be accountable for conceptual change through interaction. We focus on different socio‐cognitive aspects of the peer dialog and relate these with learning gains on the dyadic as well as the individual level. The scientific topic that was used for this study concerns natural selection, a topic for which students’ intuitive conceptions have been shown to be particularly robust. Learning tasks were designed according to the socio‐cognitive conflict (...) instructional paradigm. After receiving a short instructional intervention on natural selection, paired students were asked to collaboratively construct explanations for certain evolutionary phenomena while engaging in dialectical argumentation. Two quantitative coding schemes were developed, each with a different granularity. The first assessed discrete dialog moves that pertained to dialectical argumentation and to consensual explanation development. The second scheme characterized the dialog as a whole on a number of socio‐cognitive dimensions. Results from analyses on the dyadic as well as the individual level revealed that the engagement in dialectical argumentation predicted conceptual learning gains, whereas consensual explanation development did not. These findings open up new venues for research on the mechanisms of learning in and from peer collaboration. (shrink)

In the flow of information concerning Peer-to-Peer, it is difficult to get away from the apparently inexhaustible topic of music file sharing. This article invites us to refocus our attention towards the vast diversity of possible uses of the P2P technologies. After a survey of a few examples, the article denounces the ongoing confusion between an innovative and promising technology and the uses to which it can be subjected.

We explore whether digital inclusion, a public policy designed to provide high-speed internet infrastructure for historically digitally excluded populations, is associated with the social and ethical challenge of financial inclusion. Using evidence from a sizable P2P lender in the U.S., we document that digital inclusion is positively associated with P2P lending penetration and that this relation is more pronounced in counties with limited commercial bank loan penetration and higher minority populations. Our new evidence from cross-sectional tests suggests that digital inclusion (...) plays a key role in financial inclusion, particularly in regions with more vulnerable and/or underserved populations. In consequence tests, we document that high-risk borrowing is less likely to be denied in counties with higher digital inclusion and that digital inclusion is positively associated with P2P lending efficiency in the form of more repeated borrowing, decreased funding time, and improved funding fulfillment. In addition, we show that the availability of alternative information, a plausible channel through which digital inclusion is related to financial inclusion, is positively associated with efficiency in P2P lending. Our findings indicate that digital inclusion can empower financial service providers and other stakeholders to collaboratively fulfill their ethical and social responsibilities to meet the financial needs of historically marginalized groups. (shrink)

Ce texte traite de piratage en ligne à travers la pratique du peer-to-peer au Québec, c’est-à-dire une forme d’échange non autorisé de produits culturels sur Internet (pratique appelée « piratage culturel »). Une approche strictement juridique de la pratique y voit un simple détournement de copyright, tandis que d’autres approches (mouvement Copyleft, Parti pirate, etc.) postulent qu’un gain social est généré par une telle circulation de l’information à grande échelle. Peu de recherches empiriques ont documenté toutefois les contenus (...) circulant réellement dans ces réseaux de piratage culturel. Une première étude canadienne utilisant l’observation directe amène donc un éclairage nouveau. L’étude montre que le peer-to-peer est régulièrement utilisé au Québec pour transmettre des œuvres du patrimoine national (musique, films, livres, émissions de télévision, etc.), dont plusieurs sont non disponibles autrement. Cela suggère que le piratage culturel ne se limite pas à l’acquisition gratuite ou au « vol » de produits culturels (plusieurs produits n’existent pas en magasin), ni ne dessert en soi la diversité culturelle (des produits québécois y sont largement échangés). La réflexion éthique sur le phénomène se situe dès lors sur deux plans : au plan individuel (avec l’ethos des « pirates ») et au plan collectif (avec le rôle du piratage culturel dans la circulation du patrimoine québécois). Enfin, la pratique pourrait contribuer à la constitution et à la circulation d’archives nationales accessibles sur Internet, dans le contexte d’une migration généralisée des produits culturels du format physique au format numérique. (shrink)

Little is known about employee reactions in the form of un/ethical behavior to perceived acts of unfairness toward their peers perpetrated by the supervisor. Based on prior work suggesting that third parties also make fairness judgments and respond to the way employees are treated, this study first suggests that perceptions of interactional justice for peers (IJP) lead employees to two different responses to injustice at work: deviant workplace behaviors (DWBs) and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Second, based on prior literature pointing (...) to supervisors as among the most important sources of moral guidance at work, a mediating role is proposed for ethical leadership. The article suggests that supervisors who inflict acts of injustice on staff will be perceived as unethical leaders, and that these perceptions would explain why employees react to IJP in the form of deviance (DWBs) and citizenship (OCBs). Data were collected from 204 hotel employees. Results of structural equation modeling demonstrate that DWBs and OCBs are substantive reactions to IJP, whereas ethical leadership significantly mediates reactions in the form of DWBs and OCBs. Behavioral ethics and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 72-74.

Plutarch’s exuberant writings reaped praise in both antique and modern times. Various aspects of his work have been amply studied and analysed, yet some remain less discussed. This paper therefore aims to contribute to the ongoing research of his works by examining Plutarch’s references to stasis in general, and more particularly to the Roman civil wars. Plutarch lived through the civil wars of 69 CE, and although he did not suffer by experiencing them directly, these events no doubt contributed to (...) his views on the role of stasis and civil war, especially in Roman history. While Plutarch does not openly express his convictions on these events, especially not on contemporary occurrences, civil unrest is nevertheless a deliberate and significant theme in all of his writings. This paper presents various examples from Plutarch’s work which illuminate his particular understanding of Roman civil dissension and the ways in which he cleverly and meticulously approached this issue, being aware of the threat it may have posed him during the principate. (shrink)

Recent developments in global business gave rise to innovative forms of digital-exchange, facilitated by a new big data-based infrastructure – the sharing economy platform. SEPs are rapidly expanding, challenging the political-economic order and the classical division of work in society. Against the background of the current sustainability crisis, we discuss the increasingly momentous role of SEPs as a potential driver toward a more sustainable economy and society. Drawing on the theoretical lens of political CSR theory, we first outline how SEPs (...) are applying institutional strategies to gain a competitive advantage, thereby shaping contexts in their favor and triggering an erosion of foundations of social sustainability. However, SEPs also strive for legitimacy by taking over novel social responsibilities via profound digital capacities. Thus SEPs carry the potential to contribute to a more sustainable future economy. Our chapter considers future pathways of platform CSR regimes and a democratization of SEPs building on political CSR theory. (shrink)

Individuals are downloading copyrighted materials at escalating rates (Hill 2007; Siwek 2007). Since most materials shared within these networks are copyrighted works, providing, exchanging, or downloading files is considered to be piracy and a violation of intellectual property rights (Shang et al. 2008). Previous research indicates that personal moral philosophies rooted in moral absolutism together with social context may impact decision making in ethical dilemmas; however, it is yet unclear which motivations and norms contextually impact moral awareness in a (...) class='Hi'>peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing context (Shang et al. 2008). In sum, factors affecting the decision to share copyrighted material require further clarification and investigation (Shang et al. 2008). The purpose of this study was to use a consumer-based scenario and multiple ethics measures to explore how idealism, formalism, and perceived social consensus impact users’ propensity to recognize that the sharing of copyrighted media through P2P networks was an ethical issue and their subsequent ethical intentions. Results showed that high levels of idealism and formalism were associated with an increased recognition that file sharing was an ethical issue, but neither construct had a direct effect on ethical intention. Strong social consensus among respondents that other people consider file sharing to be unethical was also positively related to the recognition that file sharing was an ethical issue, and ethical recognition was a moderate predictor of intention not to engage in file sharing. Finally, a post hoc mediation analysis indicated that idealism, formalism, and social consensus operated through recognition of an ethical issue to impact ethical intention (indirect-only mediation). (shrink)

The sharing economy and peer-to-peer business relationships using information technology has become moreimportant in today’s world. For the sharing economy to work, however, trust and reputation are cruciallyimportant. I argue that the gathering of personal data needs to be accompanied by safeguards providing aguarantee of privacy rights. This argument will be based on a sketch of a theory called ‘peer-to-peer ethics.’Basically, the idea is that what constitutes the ground for normativity is something that is agreed upon (...) byeveryone involved. In short, what is considered to be ‘good’ is whatever contributes to bringing about thedesired goal of the community. This is a very familiar and ancient view on normative concepts, but, as I argue,one that deserves to be taken seriously especially as we enter into an intricately globalized world of ethicswhere worldviews clash with one another. (shrink)

Inappropriate social interactions of entrepreneurs can generate negative effects in the peer-to-peer lending market. To address this problem and assist peer-to-peer entrepreneurs in customizing their online interaction strategies, we used the cutting-edge cognitive-experiential self-system conceptual model and studied the relationship between peer-to-peer entrepreneurs’ interactions and financing levels. Online interactive information was categorized as emotional or cognitive, adding the moderator of entrepreneur popularity, and the effect of these interactions on individual investors was analyzed. We found (...) that the entrepreneurs’ online interactive information affected psychological perception of entrepreneurs and their corresponding brand image. The interaction between popularity and interactive information types was significant. The findings imply that less popular entrepreneurs should engage in emotional interactions, while more popular entrepreneurs should choose cognitive interactions. Online interaction created comparative advantages in the financing activities of peer-to-peer companies. These results expand understanding of the psychological facets of the consumer–brand relationship in the digital world, and extend the current literature. This study also highlights key areas of learning and application for both practitioners and scholars of organizational psychology. (shrink)

In 1956, ICJ judge Philip Jessup highlighted the gaps between private and public international law and the need to adapt the law to border-crossing problems. Today, sixty years later, we still ask what role transnational law can play in a deeply divided, post-colonial world, where multinationals hold more power and more assets than many nation states. In searching for suitable answers to pressing legal problems such as climate change law, security, poverty and inequality, questions of representation, enforcement, accountability and legitimacy (...) become newly entangled. As public and private, domestic and international actors compete for regulatory authority, spaces for political legitimacy have become fragmented and the state's exclusivist claim to be law's harbinger and place of origin under attack. Against this background, transnational law emerges as a conceptual framework and method laboratory for a critical reflection on the forms, fora and processes of law making and law contestation today. (shrink)

This article addresses the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. It first, critically, considers one of the most influential approaches to the psychophysics of aesthetic perception, viz. neuroaesthetics. Hereafter, it outlines constitutive tenets of aesthetic perception in terms of a particular intentional relation to the object. The argument comes in three steps. First, I show the inadequacies of the neuroaesthetics of beauty in general and Semir Zeki’s and V.J. Ramachandran’s versions of it in particular. The neuroaesthetics of beauty falls short, because it (...) develops hypotheses of aesthetic experience which have no consequences for the understanding of what art is, that is, how artists produce visual meaning effects in their works. This is so because they make the rewarding feeling of beauty the cornerstone of aesthetic experience. Next, I show why and how aesthetic experience should be defined relative to its object and the tools for meaning-making specific to that object, and not relative to the feeling (of beauty) it may elicit. Finally, I sketch the import this fact may have on a research program in empirical aesthetics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature, Imagination, and Human RightsWillie van Peer“the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen”Aristotle: Poetics, 1451aAristotle’s dictum has been of vital importance to the development of literary theory, and its significance can still be felt today. It is the foundation of the distinction we make between journalism and literature, between history and fiction. Literature, Aristotle proposes, (...) is about things that could happen, not about things that have taken place in reality. Literature is thus inscribed in the realm of the imagination. However, imagination does not operate in an epistemological vacuum. A fictional text entertaining no relation with the world would have no meaning. Perhaps giants, dragons and witches do not really exist, and perhaps it is not really possible to cover seven miles with each step of those wonderful boots that Tom Thumb discovered. But we have no difficulty in imagining those things, precisely because they entertain an intimate relationship with forms and things, events and actions that happen in daily life. The details of the relationship between reality and fiction are less important for the present argument than the fact that fiction is embedded in our pragmatic attitudes. 1 Ernst Bloch has given this human tendency a name: The Hope Principle. Our desire for a better world expresses itself in hope, a distinctive feature of the species Homo Sapiens. The importance of the imagination in the project of humanity has received eloquent and systematic treatment in the philosophical work of Hans Vaihinger and Helmuth Plessner. 2 Imagination also gives impetus to history, because it drives us toward the realization of aims and plans that initially lived only in our hearts and minds: “Someone dreaming never remains in the same place.” 3 [End Page 276]Similar things have been asserted about literature, by Horace, Sidney, Matthew Arnold, and others. Reading is supposed to make us better humans, heightening our awareness, increasing our sensibility, and thus indirectly guiding our actions toward the establishment of a better world. Sometimes noble motives are associated with this function. Reading literature, it is then assumed, makes the reader more socially tolerant, more perceptive about other humans, and more politically conscious. This is the so-called Edification Hypothesis. Anthony Savile sums up this view when he submits the thesis that literature has a unique power to make us understand the thoughts and feelings of other human beings. This ethical perspective on literature has been expressed since Greek Antiquity. 4 It will be remembered that Plato condemned literature precisely for this reason: because it diverts our attention from the real world, itself already an imperfect reflection of Pure Ideas. Aristotle rejects this view and develops a theory squarely opposed to that of his teacher. According to him, literature contributes to the elevation of mankind, to paideia. By showing us that which is possible, and by involving us in the inescapable passage of tragic events, readers and spectators are drawn into emotions of fear and compassion, emotions that lead to katharsis, a process that purifies us of megalomania (hubris), safeguarding democratic government and protecting us from unrestrained tyranny. 5The Aristotelian view that literature has an edifying effect had been generally present in Western tradition till about 1800. Until then literature was viewed almost universally as an ethical category. Consider, for instance, the self-evident way in which Richardson prefaces Pamela: “If to divert and entertain, and at the same time to instruct and improve the minds of the YOUTH of both sexes: If to inculcate religion and morality in so easy and agreeable a manner, as shall render them equally delightful and profitable: If to set forth in the most exemplary lights, the parental, the filial, and the social duties....” 6The embarrassment a modern reader may feel when confronted with such overt claims to morality is largely a product of the nineteenth century, when literature came to be seen as a predominantly aesthetic category, eluding all attempts at moral categorization. This movement has resulted in a liberation of literature from moralism. At the same time, it has created nontrivial difficulties in thinking about ethical and political issues, so... (shrink)

Graphical AbstractScientists should learn to communicate effectively with their colleagues through long-term, sustained training instead of ad hoc, one-off “interventions” that may or may not occur during graduate school or postdoctoral work. Since such training may place unreasonable demands on research advisors, institutions should create career opportunities for “peer-peer communication teachers.”.

A blindspot is a consistent but inaccessible proposition. For instance, I cannot know 'The test is on Friday but I do not know it'. No contradiction follows from the supposition that you know my blindspot. But could you know my blindspot if we are epistemic peers? Epistemic peers have the same evidence and reasoning ability. So either both peers know a proposition or both are ignorant. Since I cannot know my blindspot, neither can my peer. Thus the formal ignorance (...) associated with blindspots spreads to my peers. This contagion is used to improve a solution to the blindspot solution to the surprise test paradox. (shrink)

This paper provides a précis of Ernst Cassirer's concept of art as a symbolic form. It does so, though, in a specific respect. It points to the fact that Cassirer's concept of "symbolic form" is two-sided. On the one hand, the concept captures general cultural phenomena that are not only meaningful but also manifest the way man makes sense of the world; thus myth, religion, and art are considered general symbolic forms. On the other hand, it captures the formal structures (...) and semiotic tools thanks to which meaning is constructed within each general symbolic form (Cassirer called these structures "modes of objectivation"); thus, in art, perspective or the golden section are well-known examples of symbolic forms, now in a narrow sense, i.e. they are means to configure parts into an organized, meaningful whole. The paper will comment on art along both these two dimensions, but its main goal is to provide with concrete examples of aesthetic symbolic forms in the narrow sense in order to show how conceptual meaning can be inscribed in the space of aesthetic intuition. (shrink)

Much is said about Middle Eastern and North African publics opposing gender equality, often referring to patriarchal Islam. However, nuanced large-scale studies addressing which specific aspects of religiosity affect support for gender equality across the MENA are conspicuously absent. This study develops and tests a gendered agentic socialization framework that proposes that MENA citizens are not only passively socialized by religion but also have agency. This disaggregates the influence of religiosity, highlights its multifacetedness, and theorizes the moderating roles that gender (...) and sociocognitive empowerment play via gendered processes of agentic dissociations. Using 15 World Values Surveys and multilevel models, our analyses show that most dimensions of religiosity fuel opposition to gender equality. However, the salience of religion in daily life is found to increase women’s support for gender equality and cushion the negative impact of religious service attendance. Also, gender and education moderate the impacts of several religiosity dimensions; for instance, women’s support for gender equality more sharply declines with increased service attendance than men’s. Altogether, this study finds that religious socialization is multifaceted and gendered, and that certain men and women are inclined and equipped to deviate from dominant patriarchal religious interpretations. (shrink)

An important mechanism for the evolution of phenotypic complexity, diversity and innovation, and the origin of novel gene functions is the duplication of genes and entire genomes. Recent phylogenomic studies suggest that, during the evolution of vertebrates, the entire genome was duplicated in two rounds (2R) of duplication. Later, ∼350 mya, in the stem lineage of ray‐finned (actinopterygian) fishes, but not in that of the land vertebrates, a third genome duplication occurred—the fish‐specific genome duplication (FSGD or 3R), leading, at least (...) initially, to up to eight copies of the ancestral deuterostome genome. Therefore, the sarcopterygian (lobe‐finned fishes and tetrapods) genome possessed originally only half as many genes compared to the derived fishes, just like the most‐basal and species‐poor lineages of extant fishes that diverged from the fish stem lineage before the 3R duplication. Most duplicated genes were secondarily lost, yet some evolved new functions. The genomic complexity of the teleosts might be the reason for their evolutionary success and astounding biological diversity. BioEssays 27:937–945, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Some philosophers working on the epistemology of disagreement claim that conciliationist responses to peer disagreement embody a kind of intellectual humility. Others contend that standing firm or “sticking to one’s guns” in the face of peer disagreement may stem from an admirable kind of courage or internal fortitude. In this paper, we report the results of two empirical studies that examine the relationship between conciliationist and steadfast responses to peer disagreement, on the one hand, and virtues such (...) as intellectual humility, courage, grit, and actively open-minded thinking, on the other. We observed positive correlations between measures of conciliationism, intellectual humility, and actively open-minded thinking but failed to find any reliable association between steadfastness, courage, and grit. Our studies reveal that there are at least two important intellectual virtues associated with conciliationist responses to peer disagreement (viz., intellectual humility and actively open-minded thinking) and two vices associated with steadfast responses (intellectual arrogance and myside bias). These findings shed new light on the overall epistemic goodness of the conciliationist perspective. -/- keywords: disagreement, conciliationism, steadfastness, intellectual humility, courage, actively open-minded thinking. (shrink)

This paper explores the connections between two common circulating discourses about queer youth and the ways that these discourses are wielded in the name of creating safe spaces for queer youth. First, the discourse of innocence is still applied to queer youth, however, the application has shifted to focus largely on the ways that queer youth are innocent victims in a society structured around heteronormativity. Second, a common response to this innocent victim discourse has been to position queer youth within (...) a discourse of activist educators. “Discourses not only represent the world as it is, they are also projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world, and tied into projects to change the world in particular directions”. Gay Straight Alliances are one example; GSAs have sprung up across the country because adults, queer adults and allies in particular, have employed both of these discourses in policy decisions and discussions regarding queer students. This paper will highlight some of the ways the discourses of innocent victims and activist educators have been used in the GSA movement. The paper will apply a queer theory lens to the relationship between these discourses and the GSAs to tease out the ways that they work to simultaneously support queer students and serve to limit how queer students and their schools are imagined. The paper will conclude with a discussion of some possibilities for reworking, rupturing, or transforming these discourses so that schools, as well as the queer students and teachers within them, might be better served. (shrink)

In this article we offer an ontological theorization of care. The article interrogates the self-evident quality of everyday meanings for ‘care’ that might be generated from psychological or biological discourses; we aim to question the way that ‘care’ is applied in a technical or an emotional sense within the field of early childhood education. The article works towards offering a new theorization that does not treat the meaning of ‘care’ as self-evident. If ‘care’ is a way of addressing concern for (...) ourselves as human beings, we think that deepening the theoretical parameters of this concept will add to how we understand the complexity of gender and race relations. By articulating Heidegger’s use of ‘care’ and comparing it to Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger’s work on this concept, we hope to enable professionals and families to view conceptions of ‘care’ outside the familiar definitions applied in everyday discourse. The article treats early childhood education professional practice as an instance of how both gender and race delimit the way in which human relationships can be understood. (shrink)

The implementation in 2009–10 of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) spearheaded the efforts of the Australian Commonwealth government to institute a national curriculum. The theme of the new early childhood framework follows three guiding concepts: Belonging, Being and Becoming. In this article, we discuss these three concepts in order to provide a theoretical context to the Early Years Learning Framework and to enrich the debate surrounding its writing and implementation. In particular, we address the significance of posing Belonging in (...) contiguity with the concepts of Being and Becoming. The authors suggest a strategy to cultivate a deeper appreciation of the dialectical relationships between sameness and difference, belonging and nothingness. Our premise is that ‘belonging’ refers essentially to different beings, and implicitly to the prospect of a ‘together-ness’ or identity according to which different beings are located, understood and associated, in order that Becoming can take effect. We offer these commentaries as a means of deepening conversation about the importance of scholarly approaches to philosophy for early childhood research, and especially with respect to curriculum and pedagogy. (shrink)

In two decisions delivered inFebruary and March 2001, the German FederalConstitutional Court voided the maritalagreements struck between a man and a pregnantwoman on the grounds that they were the productof an inequality of bargaining power betweenthe parties. These findings, involving anapplication of the fundamental rightsprovisions of the German Basic Law to privateagreements, demonstrate the creeping competenceof the F.C.C. into the sphere of contractualrelations and an ongoing questioning ofthe traditional public/private law divide. Exploring some of the implications of applyingpublic values and (...) constitutional reviewstandards to private agreements, this notecontextualises the decisions within the debateupon competing (and ultimately colliding)social systems of the family and the market. (shrink)

The present investigation challenges the traditional distinction between cohesion and coherence; i.e., the distinction between the syntactical rules governing the composition of lexical units within the scope of the clause and the semantic-pragmatic rules guiding the composition of text units beyond the scope of the clause. To this end it exposes two major principles of semantic combination that are active through all levels of linguistic composition: viz. frame-schematic structure and narrative structure. These principles are considered as being components of a (...) semantic combinatorial system to be determined in terms of dependency relations. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscientists have anticipated the union of neural and behavioral science with ethics. The identification of an ethical rule—the dictum that we should treat others in the manner in which we would like to be treated—apparently widespread among human societies suggests a dependence on fundamental human brain mechanisms. Now, studies of neural and molecular mechanisms that underlie the feeling of fear suggest how this form of ethical behavior is produced. Counterintuitively, a new theory presented here states that it is actually (...) a loss of social information that leads to sharing others' fears with our own, thus allowing us to treat others as we would like to be treated. Adding to that hypothetical mechanism is the well-studied predilection toward affiliative behaviors. Thus, even as Chomsky hypothesizes that humans are predisposed to utter grammatical sentences, we propose that humans are ‘wired for reciprocity’. However, these two neural forces supporting ethical behavior do not explain individual or collective violence. At any given moment, the ability to produce behavior that obeys this ethical rule is proposed to depend on a balance between mechanisms for prosocial and antisocial behaviors. That balance results not only from genetic influences on temperament but also from environmental effects particularly during critical neonatal and pubertal periods. (shrink)

As the debate over how to manage or discourage physicians’ financial conflicts of interest with the drug and medical device industries has become more heated, critics have questioned or dismissed the concept of “conflict of interest” itself. A satisfactory definition relates conflict of interest to concerns about maintaining social trust and distinguishes between breaches of ethical duty and temptations to breach duty. Numerous objections to such a definition have been offered, none of which prevails on further analysis. Those concerned about (...) conflicts of interest have contributed to misunderstandings, however, by failing to demonstrate when social arrangements leading to temptations to breach duties are in themselves morally blameworthy. Clarifying “conflict of interest” is important if we are eventually going to develop productive modes of engagement between medicine and for-profit industry that avoid the serious ethical pitfalls now in evidence. (shrink)