Learning in natural environments is often characterized by a degree of inconsistency from an input. These inconsistencies occur, for example, when learning from more than one source, or when the presence of environmental noise distorts incoming information; as a result, the task faced by the learner becomes ambiguous. In this study, we investigate how learners handle such situations. We focus on the setting where a learner receives and processes a sequence of utterances to master associations between objects and their labels, (...) where the source is inconsistent by design: It uses both “correct” and “incorrect” object‐label pairings. We hypothesize that depending on the order of presentation, the result of the learning may be different. To this end, we consider two types of symbolic learning procedures: the Object‐Label (OL) and the Label‐Object (LO) process. In the OL process, the learner is first exposed to the object, and then the label. In the LO process, this order is reversed. We perform experiments with human subjects, and also construct a computational model that is based on a nonlinear stochastic reinforcement learning algorithm. It is observed experimentally that OL learners are generally better at processing inconsistent input compared to LO learners. We show that the patterns observed in the learning experiments can be reproduced in the simulations if the model includes (a) an ability to regularize the input (and also to do the opposite, i.e., undermatch) and (b) an ability to take account of implicit negative evidence (i.e., interactions among different objects/labels). The model suggests that while both types of learners utilize implicit negative evidence in a similar way, there is a difference in regularization patterns: OL learners regularize the input, whereas LO learners undermatch. As a result, OL learners are able to form a more consistent system of image‐utterance associations, despite the ambiguous learning task. (shrink)

The human masticatory system is a complex functional unit characterized by a multitude of skeletal components, muscles, soft tissues, and teeth. Muscle activation dynamics cannot be directly measured on live human subjects due to ethical, safety, and accessibility limitations. Therefore, estimation of muscle activations and their resultant forces is a longstanding and active area of research. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an adaptive learning strategy which is inspired by the behavioral psychology and enables an agent to learn the dynamics of (...) an unknown system via policy-driven explorations. The RL framework is a well-formulated closed-loop system where high capacity neural networks are trained with the feedback mechanism of rewards to learn relatively complex actuation patterns. In this work, we are building on a deep RL algorithm, known as the Soft Actor-Critic, to learn the inverse dynamics of a simulated masticatory system, i.e., learn the activation patterns that drive the jaw to its desired location. The outcome of the proposed training procedure is a parametric neural model which acts as the brain of the biomechanical system. We demonstrate the model’s ability to navigate the feasible three-dimensional (3D) envelope of motion with sub-millimeter accuracies. We also introduce a performance analysis platform consisting of a set of quantitative metrics to assess the functionalities of a given simulated masticatory system. This platform assesses the range of motion, metabolic efficiency, the agility of motion, the symmetry of activations, and the accuracy of reaching the desired target positions. We demonstrate how the model learns more metabolically efficient policies by integrating a force regularization term in the RL reward. We also demonstrate the inverse correlation between the metabolic efficiency of the models and their agility and range of motion. The presented masticatory model and the proposed RL training mechanism are valuable tools for the analysis of mastication and other biomechanical systems. We see this framework’s potential in facilitating the functional analyses aspects of surgical treatment planning and predicting the rehabilitation performance in post-operative subjects. (shrink)

Introductory students regularly endorse naïve skepticism—unsupported or uncritical doubt about the existence and universality of truth—for a variety of reasons. Though some of the reasons for students’ skepticism can be traced back to the student—for example, a desire to avoid engaging with controversial material or a desire to avoid offense—naïve skepticism is also the result of how introductory courses are taught, deemphasizing truth to promote students’ abilities to develop basic disciplinary skills. While this strategy has a number of pedagogical benefits, (...) it prevents students in early stages of intellectual development from understanding truth as a threshold concept. Using philosophy as a case study, I argue that we can make progress against naïve skepticism by clearly discussing how metadisciplinary aims differ at the disciplinary and course levels in a way that is meaningful, reinforced, and accessible. (shrink)

Oppressive ideology regularly misrepresents features of structural injustice as normal or appropriate. Resisting such injustice therefore requires critical examination of the evaluative judgments encoded in shared concepts. In this paper, I diagnose a mechanism of ideological misevaluation, which I call "hermeneutical misfit." Hermeneutical misfit occurs when thick concepts, or concepts which both describe and evaluate, mobilize ideologically warped evaluative judgments which do not fit the facts (e.g. "slutty"). These ill-fitted thick concepts in turn are regularly deployed as if they merely (...) describe--a phenomenon I call "descriptive masquerade." I argue that, via descriptive masquerade, ill-fitted thick concepts smuggle in warped evaluative judgments alongside apparently value-neutral ‘mere facts’, a process which both reinforces those judgments and increases the difficulty of critique. I investigate the concept "obesity" as an example: scientists and medical practitioners will deploy this concept as if it "merely" describes, enabling the smuggling of a host of warped evaluative judgments. I suggest that, to resist this process, we should develop collective consciousness and articulate "meta-hermeneutical resources," or thick concepts which encode critique of other, ill-fitted concepts (e.g. "slut-shaming" or "fat-shaming"). (shrink)

The vast expressive power of language is made possible by two principles: the arbitrary soundmeaning pairing underlying words, and the discrete combinatorial system underlying grammar. These principles implicate distinct cognitive mechanisms: associative memory and symbolmanipulating rules. The distinction may be seen in the difference between regular inflection (e.g., walk-walked), which is productive and open-ended and hence implicates a rule, and irregular inflection (e.g., come-came, which is idiosyncratic and closed and hence implicates individually memorized words. Nonetheless, two very different theories (...) have attempted to collapse the distinction; generative phonology invokes minor rules to generate irregular as well as regular forms, and connectionism invokes a pattern associator memory to store and retrieve regular as well as irregular forms. I present evidence from three disciplines that supports the traditional word/rule distinction, though with an enriched conception of lexical memory with some of the properties of a pattern-associator. Rules, nonetheless, are distinct from patternassociation, because a rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs or their sound patterns, but applies as the "default," whenever memory access fails. I present a dozen such circumstances, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words, in which people inflect the words regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, low-lifes, and Walkmans). A comparison of English to other languages shows that contrary to the connectionist account, default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory, but to a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation. (shrink)

Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. (...) In this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms. (shrink)

RATIONAL ALTRUISM. A PRUDENTIAL THEORY OF RATIONALITY AND ALTRUISM - STRUCTURE: "Rational altruism" is the attempt to develop and rationally justify moral principles - with a very strong emphasis on this justification. The concept of justification is developed in a metaethical part (ch. 2); it requires recourse to prudential decisions and to information about our decision-making procedures. The actual normative ethics (Ch. 6 and especially 7) is therefore still based on a prudential desirability theory (Ch. 4 and Sections 5.5-5.6) and (...) this in turn on an empirical action theory (Ch. 3 and Sections 5.1-5.4). - METAETHICS (Ch. 2): In the metaethical part of the book, conditions of adequacy for cogent moral justifications are first developed and justified, which demand, among other things, an information-stable motivation through cogent moral justifications (internalist moral justification). After an examination of various approaches to justification in ethics with regard to this adequacy condition and the negative outcome of this examination, an alternative solution strategy is presented. Among other things, the rationality requirements of profane rational reasoning approaches in ethics are to be systematically reinforced by a prudential desirability theory that aims at information-stable evaluations. - EMPIRICAL THEORY OF ACTION (Chapter 3 and Sections 5.1-5.4): The empirical theory of action developed here therefore provides a detailed analysis of the regularities and leeway of our decisions, especially the influence of information on decision-making paths. - PRUDENTIAL DESIRABILITY THEORY (Chapter 4 and Sections 5.5-5.6): In the prudential desirability theory, the 'individual desirability' of events, especially actions, is then defined in such a way that, of the various evaluation possibilities, the one that is stable in terms of information is always chosen. This procedure far exceeds the rationality requirements of rational decision theory, for example. - NORMATIVE ETHICS (chap. 6 and especially 7): Finally, in the actual normative ethics, a prioritarian standard for the moral evaluation of actions, norms and entire social orders is developed, called "Utilex". Utilex is based on compassion and, like compassion, is partial to the worse off, the poor and unfortunate, but without neglecting the interests of the better off. (shrink)

Physicalism holds that the laws of physics are inviolable and ubiquitous and thereby account for all of reality. Laws leave no “wiggle room” or “gaps” for action by numinous agents. They cannot be invoked, however, without boundary stipulations that perforce are contingent and which “drive” the laws. Driving contingencies are not limited to instances of “blind chance,” but rather span a continuum of amalgamations with regularities, up to and including nearly determinate propensities. Most examples manifest directionality, and their very definition (...) encompasses intentionality. Contingencies, via their interactions with laws, can reinforce and maintain one another, thereby giving rise to enduring, ordered configurations of constraints. All of ordered nature thus results from ongoing transactions between mutualistic contingencies that constrain possibilities and entropic chance events that degrade order but diversify opportunities. Laws do not of themselves determine reality; interactions among contingencies do. For believers, the robust abundance of indeterminacies provides ample latitude for divine intervention, free will, and prayer. The priority of contingency also affords some insight into the meaning of suffering and evil. (shrink)

In many Western capitalist economies, private indebtedness is pervasive, but it has received little attention from political philosophers. Economic theory emphasizes the liberating potential of debt contracts, but its picture is based on assumptions that do not always hold, especially when there is a background of structural injustice. Private debt contracts are likely to miss their liberating potential if there is deception or lack of information, if there is insufficient access to (regular forms of) credit, or if credit is (...) overly expensive. Markets for private debt can be mechanisms of structural injustice: rather than playing a neutral role, they reinforce injustices, because the failures of debt to be liberating disproportionately hit individuals in disadvantaged positions. By individualizing what are in fact structural problems, private debt can contribute to stigmatization, social exclusion and oppression. What is at stake, from a perspective of structural justice, is not only the distribution of income, but also the distribution of risk. The problems of private debt markets therefore require political attention. In addition to fighting the structural injustices that form the background condititions of private debt, it is also worth addressing private debt markets themselves. (shrink)

Photo ID 279661800 © Sidewaypics|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Decolonization is complex, vast, and the subject of an ongoing academic debate. While the many efforts to decolonize or dismantle the vestiges of colonialism that remain are laudable, they can also reinforce what they seek to end. For decolonization to be impactful, it must be done with epistemic and cultural humility, requiring decolonial scholars, project leaders, and well-meaning people to be more sensitive to those impacted by colonization and not regularly included in the discourse. (...) INTRODUCTION Decolonization is complex. To successfully achieve decolonization, projects should incorporate the voices of those subjugated or silenced. Including such voices requires sincerely exploring who has been affected by colonialism or neocolonialism and how, as well as cultural sensitivity. In its basic use, decolonization refers to countries under colonial rule gaining independence or freedom from forms of subjugation. Additionally, scholars use the term to refer to efforts to dismantle neocolonialism and vestiges of colonialism. The process includes de-silencing subjugated voices.[1] I use decolonization in the latter way to refer to countries with technical independence. While arguably colonization ended formally with independence from colonizing powers, neocolonialism is the indirect, informal, and sometimes subtle control of the people, their economy, and political life despite formal independence from colonizing authorities. I conceptualize neocolonialism as a system that involves direct and involuntary control of another’s political, economic, or social life, impacting their worldview and ways of encountering the world. Decolonization may target actions, places, or systems like health care or AI to overcome the ills of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also may target knowledge and require rethinking how people develop their knowledge base. For example, if people grew up seeing an outside colonizer as superior, they would need to change their knowledge of superiority. Decolonization may target power, for example, changing who owns and distributes COVID-19 vaccines and who distributors exclude in the distribution of vaccines. Decolonization could require looking at those disempowered in the distribution process. Additionally, decolonization may target autonomy of persons by freeing people, ensuring human and individual rights, and respecting cultural traditions. Decolonization projects that try to de-silence by including the voices of those affected by colonialism and neocolonialism must examine inclusiveness in the context of the culture of the subrogated individuals. Examples of decolonization projects include making datasets inclusive of diverse peoples and places, returning to traditional food and eating practices, making sure hospitals in developing countries are led by locals and respectful of cultural traditions, returning unethically obtained artefacts or objects. Another project would be laying the groundwork for equality in formerly colonized countries to ensure that business ownership, education, and financial success will flow fairly to those previously victimized by colonization. Summarily, there are many strategies for decolonizing. However, it is worth asking whether the strategies have risks that undermine the goal of decolonization. I. Understanding Decolonization Discourses Many fields, from AI to politics, economics, health care, aviation, and academia, discuss decolonization. The content of the discourse on decolonization depends on the region and field discussing it. Rather than just reporting on decolonization, the discussions may be calls to action. For example, decolonization discourses reflect activism for cognitive justice, such as equal consideration of Indian or African knowledge systems in global health discourses.[2] In politics and political science, some scholars frame decolonization as an anti-western, anti-colonial movement by Africans to emancipate Africa/ns from subjugation or shift the continent to postcolonialism and post-neo-colonialism. This framing walls off non-African participants and may undermine their capacity to benefit the conversation.[3] There are other political scientists who actively support decolonization and see it as a field of activism in support of anyone and countries where colonization harmed people and development.[4] The point is that two ways of conceptualizing decolonization in politics and political science are discernible. One conceptualization is less inclusive since it alienates scholars and professionals from Western, high-income, or developed countries. The other is more inclusive. In humanitarian studies, including philosophy, some decolonization articles and conversations are efforts to end the destructive force of colonization. They focus on either the form, such as ecocide, genocide, and many others, or the geographic location, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.[5] Finally, the feelings one brings into this conversation can adversely impact how one engages in them and who they listen to or are willing to hear from. For example, anger, rage, bitterness, and hatred are emotions that are not uncommon in spaces of decolonization conversations. Decolonization conversations that originate from a place of negativity risk deepening the psychological state of victimhood and prevent people from disrupting constructively or critically engaging in the conversation.[6] II. Understanding Decolonization Strategies Decolonization strategies mainly aim to de-silence victims of domination or subjugation. People have proposed many strategies for decolonizing. These strategies may be informed by what the target is for decolonization. Decolonization can target power relations in global health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health organizations noted the power imbalance in vaccine distribution. Decolonization could involve de-silencing those affected by neocolonialism to bring about a more balanced distribution of power and a more fair distribution of the vaccine. By analyzing who was adversely impacted by the distribution and who ought to wield power, those engaged in decolonizing advocated for positive change and equitable power relations. Equally, when being is the target of decolonization, the language of unlearning or relearning and mental decolonization take centre stage in the decolonization discourse. For example, the quest to decolonize colonized minds aims to demythologize African inferiority and Western superiority. Demythologizing African inferiority enables those engaged in the decolonization discourse to cultivate and foster African agency.[7] Finally, when knowledge production is the target of decolonization, scholars use inclusion and cognitive justice. For example, they try to alter the knowledge that underlies global health ethics.[8] “[D]decolonizing researchers aim to respectfully understand and integrate theory from Other(ed) perspectives, while also critically examining the underlying assumptions that inform their Western research framework.”[9] One common strategy that scholars use in decolonization is inclusion. It is worth asking, does including people who have been subrogated foster decolonization? Whether that is effective depends on whether included people are more heard or whether the strategies to include them create new forms of silencing. III. Inclusion and the Quest to Decolonize Evaluating how effective inclusion is in the quest to de-silence subjugated voices is important. First, inclusive strategies are not neutral. They are epistemically situated. This situatedness constrains meaning-making in different ways: how and what questions are asked, how social roles are constructed, organized or assigned, and who is admitted to the room where these conversations occur.[10] Inclusion strategies may reinforce (unchallenged) assumptions. For example, to address prejudices and stereotypes in global health images, Arsenii Alenichev and his colleagues[11] successfully inverted “one stereotypical global health image” by prompting a generative AI to produce “an image of a traditional Indian or African healer healing a White Child.” Although there were some problems with the image of the White child, this innovation is a significant, useful effort to de-embed or strip global health images of problematic pictures that mythologize White superiority and Black inferiority. Yet it is possible that using categories like traditional Indian or African reinforces unchallenged assumptions, raising key questions regarding how language and words create new stereotypes. It is common to define traditional as non-conventional, unorthodox, and informal. Yet studies continue to reveal that non-scientifically appraised healing approaches in India or Africa are not only effective but also real, meaningful, fundamental, and primary care-seeking behaviours in many communities in these regions.[12] Suppose inclusive strategies are not un-situated. These conversations may be had within the structures, language, and spaces built by or connected to colonialism. The spaces, language, places, and structures in which these conversations occur can limit who can participate and how they participate. Importantly, some conditions are not conducive to participation as equals. The allocated time for the discussion could also constrain how individuals express themselves. It is unclear who is ultimately heard. Furthermore, epistemic situatedness of inclusion can impact decolonization conversations when participants are beneficiaries of, products of, and trained by structures and systems they seek to dismantle. To enhance the decolonization project and its goals, a pressing task is to unveil and question how the circumstances may inhibit activism. If the vestiges of colonialism continue to structure the decolonization discourse invisibly, the vestiges may undermine decolonization. For example, a public health discussion that includes white Western doctors and Western pharmaceutical executives in Africa may have many local Africans at the table but could still effectively devalue their input based on built-in assumptions and biases that are vestiges of colonialism. Second, exclusion and inclusion are also not binary. Individuals may experience exclusion, even while included (the phenomenon called internal exclusion). In other words, inclusion can fail to be substantial or become a means of enhancing optics, “a way of (un)consciously weakening the radical claims being pursued.”[13] For example, in South Africa, many institutions have made significant efforts to diversify their faculties due to the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55.[14] The act requires South African institutions to implement employment equity that redresses the history of harmful discrimination in the country. The act further requires transforming departments and institutional administrations. Although many recognize and support the need to transform departments in South Africa, the rhetoric of transformation departs sharply from the lived experiences.[15] This misalignment between the plan and practice is evident in the underrepresentation of black people and females in senior management teams, professorships in many universities and health departments, and positions of power in some South African institutions. Those selected in the transformation of the departments have also complained of being overworked. The burden of extra work undermines their ability to develop agency and voice in the space they now occupy or fulfil key requirements that have implications for their career trajectory.[16] This is called the minority tax. Notably, "the minority tax… is the burden of extra responsibilities [placed] on faculty of colour to achieve diversity and inclusion and contributes to attrition and impedes academic promotion."[17] One challenge for decolonializing projects will be for decolonial scholars and those selected for decolonization objectives to have the humility to decline invitations, requests, roles, and platforms for which they are either unqualified or lack the capacity to fulfil. At its heart, decolonization strategies must empower those included rather than weaken them. Finally, inclusion can lead to a phenomenon known as elite capture.[18] Elite capture occurs when socially advantaged individuals in a group monopolize or exploit activism to their own benefit at the expense of the larger, struggling group. Elite capture weakens decolonization efforts from within, revealing that those likely to benefit from global inclusive efforts are those who fulfil globally constructed standards, those “already present in the room.” There is no better strategy to weaken decolonial movements than weakening the project from within by strategically positioning individuals who share physical properties with the victims of exclusion and silencing but intellectually, behaviourally, psychologically, and emotionally share more common ground with the colonizer. Such insiders may be unaware they are furthering neocolonial conditions rather than decolonizing. In relation to decolonization, particularly in global health, elite capture reveals that those whose voices are loudest in the room are not necessarily those more impacted by colonialism. They may benefit more from reinforcing colonialism. Opportunism weakens meaningful activism from within, preventing good initiatives and strategies from having their intended impact or taking substantive root.[19] This paper cannot do justice to elite capture, but it is worth noting its negative impacts. IV. Improving the Impact of Decolonization To end neo-colonialism, it is important to understand how it manifests and what to do at each level. Beyond the academic discourse, many tangible efforts exist to decolonize through de-silencing. Examples of these efforts include the ME2 movement that seeks to centre the concerns and experiences of sexually abused or harassed victims in the public discourse. At the funding level, many grant-awarding agencies like Wellcome Trust have dedicated huge budgets to studies that help them understand how they may have perpetrated colonialism or neocolonialism and what they can do differently going forward.[20] In South Africa, promulgating the Employment Equity Act 55 was a tangible attempt to entrench decolonization concerns in a country's regulatory framework. Yet, these decolonization efforts could fail to be substantive if they do not reflect cultural sensitivity. Two key components of cultural sensitivity are worth highlighting here: epistemic and cultural humility. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue described as knowing one’s limitations and the limitations of the learning methods employed. At its simplest, it is the ability to admit when one is wrong. Cultural humility includes genuine attempts to learn about and embrace other cultures. Epistemic and cultural humility are signs of academic excellence and strength. Epistemic and cultural humility seriously acknowledge how the state of our knowledge, cognitive limitations, experiences, and backgrounds, while constraining us, also invite us to listen, learn, grow, and change. The limitations-owing account of epistemic and cultural humility suggests that “a person who is aware of her cognitive limitations and owns them is much better positioned to achieve such epistemic goods as true beliefs and understanding than someone who… simply has insight into the epistemic status of her beliefs.”[21] Epistemic and cultural humility may help prevent decolonization projects that unintentionally reinforce what they seek to dismantle. Epistemic humility calls on decolonizers to defer tasks for which they are not qualified to suitably qualified persons. Beyond this, humility supports brave scholarship that imagines and reimagines how featuring the same voices, faces, and perspectives possibly introduces new forms of domination or silencing. Cultural knowledge can lead to a more intentional way of seeking out the right people or a more diverse group than those frequently featured in decolonization conversations. This would give others more opportunities to navigate these spaces and should do so in ways that are familiar to them. One ought to be more sensitive to those who would ordinarily not be included in these conversations. Unless we radically and boldly reimagine these discussions, we risk alienating those most negatively impacted by neocolonialism. CONCLUSION Decolonization conversations are complex and the subject of academic debate. The strategies employed to decolonize can harm or help the victims of neo-colonialism. Inclusion of previously silenced individuals may not be enough to overcome the vestiges of colonialism, leading to a false inclusion, where those included feel excluded or contribute in ways reflecting their own biases and circumstances. Inclusion of an elite or people who do not truly represent the subjugated can lead to elite capture. For decolonization strategies to be impactful, for example, in the context of global health, project leaders and participants must engage in conversations employing epistemic and cultural humility. In many ways, epistemic and cultural humility can help us demythologize our assumptions of any cultural superiority or cognitive authority, allowing for diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives to emerge without domination. - [1] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [2] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [3] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh 2023. Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university. Social Dynamics, 1-20. [4] Rianna Oelofsen 2015. Decolonisation of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon, 16, 130-146. [5] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [6] Pedro Alexis Tabensky 2008. The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27, 285-295. [7] Nicholas M. Creary 2012. African Intellectuals and Decolonization, Ohio, Ohio University Press. [8] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [9] Vivetha Thambinathan & Elizabeth Anne Kinsella 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211014766. [10] Abimbola Seye 2023. Knowledge from the global South is in the global South. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49, 337. [11] A. Alenichev, P. Kingori & K. P. Grietens 2023. Reflections before the storm: the AI reproduction of biased imagery in global health visuals. Lancet Glob Health. [12] Jonathan K. Burns & Andrew Tomita 2015. Traditional and religious healers in the pathway to care for people with mental disorders in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50, 867-877. [13] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh & Cornelius Ewuoso 2023. What type of inclusion does epistemic injustice require? Journal of Medical Ethics, jme-2023-109091. [14] 1998. Employment Equity Act. In: GOVERNMENT, S. A. (ed.) 19370. [15] Dina Zoe Belluigi & Gladman Thondhlana 2019. ‘Why mouth all the pieties?’ Black and women academics’ revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African university. Higher Education, 78, 947-963. [16] Juliet Ramohai & Khomotso Marumo 2016. Women in Senior Positions in South African Higher Education: A Reflection on Voice and Agency. 231, 135-157. [17] J. Trejo 2020. The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax. Mol Biol Cell, 31, 2752-2754. [18] Olufemi Taiwo 2020. Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher, 108, 7. [19] Margarita Kurbatova & Elena Kagan 2016. Opportunism of University Lecturers As a Way to Adaptate the External Control Activities Strengthening. Journal of Institutional Studies, 8, 116-136. [20] Jeremy Farrar. 2022. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme [Online]. Available from: https://wellcome.org/news/update-wellcomes-anti-racism-programme [Accessed August 10, 2022 2022]. [21] Katherine Dormandy 2018. Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292-304. (shrink)

Communication is an important component in the construction of workplace identities, including leader and group identities. Micro-level analysis of everyday workplace discourse provides valuable insights into the way leadership is constructed and how workplace culture is created, maintained, and changed. In this context, leaders and managers are inevitably significant and influential participants, with a crucial impact on workplace culture. Drawing on audio and video data collected in 12 meetings of an IT department, the analysis demonstrates ways in which two leaders, (...) who succeed each other in the role of Director, reinforce and shape the culture of the workplace in which they operate. While both leaders claim teamwork as an important cultural value for their teams, their respective instantiations of teamwork are rather different. To explore the leaders' effect on the culture of their department, this investigation of leadership change examines ways in which the leaders manage regular workplace meetings and how they contribute to workplace humour. The analysis provides detailed evidence of the ways in which a change in leadership style can create the conditions for a change in the culture of a community of practice. (shrink)

In international social science’s debate on power and rulership, Max Weber occupies a dominant position. There is hardly a study on power or rulership that does not refer to him, be it critical or affirmative. The sustainable success of Weber’s concept of power is based not least on the fact that he took up contemporary Nietzschean voluntaristic ideas and combined them with an action-related perspective. In doing so, he revolutionized the theory of power. This goes particularly for his category of (...) “chance”, with which he indicated power as a gradual and quantifiable phenomenon. The effect of this approach was so striking that it is still the most influential concept of power, shaping theorists like Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, and Heinrich Popitz. Furthermore, Weber moved the concept of rulership, as an institutionalised and reinforced form of power, into the focus of social sciences, providing a large-scale sociology of rule, which exposes the various types and motives of obedience. At the same time, however, the reception of the conceptual pair of power and rulership reveals a paradoxical phenomenon, since the two concepts are received worldwide, while they are still often used arbitrarily and regularly mixed up. (shrink)

Substantial evidence has shown that involvement in peer-to-peer farming networks influences whether a farmer decides to try a new practice. Formally organized farmer networks are emerging as a unique entity that blend the benefits of decentralized exchange of farmer knowledge within the structure of an organization providing a variety of sources of information and forms of engagement. We define formal farmer networks as farmer networks with a distinct membership and organizational structure, leadership that includes farmers, and an emphasis on peer-to-peer (...) learning. This study complements existing ethnographic research on the benefits of organized farmer networking by examining farmers in one longstanding formal farmer network, Practical Farmers of Iowa. Using a nested, mixed-method research design, we analyzed survey and interview data to understand how participation and forms of engagement in the network are associated with the adoption of conservation practices. Responses from 677 farmers from a regular member survey disseminated by Practical Farmers of Iowa in 2013, 2017, and 2020 were pooled and analyzed. GLM binomial and ordered logistic regression results indicate that greater participation in the network, particularly through in-person formats, has a strong and significant association with greater adoption of conservation practices. Logistic regression results show that building relationships in the network is the most important variable for predicting whether a farmer reported adopting conservation practices as a result of participation in PFI. In-depth interviews with 26 surveyed member farmers revealed that PFI supports farmers to adopt by providing information, resources, encouragement, confidence building, and reinforcement. In-person learning formats were more important to farmers relative to independent formats because they were able to have side conversations with other farmers, ask questions, and observe results. We conclude that formal networks are a promising way to expand the use of conservation practices, particularly through targeted efforts to increase relationship building in the network through face-to-face learning opportunities. (shrink)

Research has demonstrated that policing is a stressful occupation and has a negative impact on police officers’ mental and physical health, performance, and interactions with citizens. Mental health at the workplace has become a concern due to the costs of depression, anxiety, burnout, and even suicide, which is high among police officers.To ameliorate occupational health, it is crucial therefore to identify stress and burnout levels on a regular basis. However, the instruments frequently used to measure stress have not valorized (...) the specificity of policing tasks. This study aims: i) conducting a literature review, to identify questionnaires used to assess occupational stress and burnout among police officers; ii) to analyze the psychometric characteristics of a Portuguese version of Operational Police Stress Questionnaire (PSQ-Op); and, using the PSQ-op and other questionnaires, iii) to identify operational stress, burnout, and distress levels among Portuguese police officers. The literature review identified 108 studies, which use a multiplicity of questionnaires to measure burnout or occupational stress among police officers, but few studies use specific police stress questionnaires. Sample sizes were mostly below 500 participants and studies were mainly developed in the last decade in the USA and Brazil, but also in another 24 countries, showing the extent of the interest in this topic. This study applied to 2057 police officers from National Portuguese Police, a force policing urban centers, the PSQ-Op, as well the Spanish Burnout Inventory and the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale.The results show that the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of PSQ-Op are adequate. Factorial analysis revealed two dimensions defined as social and work issues, which were associated with measures of distress and burnout.Fit indices suggested a second-order solution called operational police stress. Overall, and considering the scale range of each questionnaire, the results showed moderate values of operational stress, distress, and burnout. However, considering their cut-off points, 85% of the sample presented high operational stress levels, 11% critical values for burnout, and 28% high distress levels, with 55% of the sample at risk of psychological disorder. These results reinforce the need to prevent stress and to invest in police officers’ occupational health. (shrink)

Since independence, at least 28 African countries have legalized some form of gambling. Yet a range of informal gambling activities have also flourished, often provoking widespread public concern about the negative social and economic impact of unregulated gambling on poor communities. This article addresses an illegal South African numbers game called fahfee. Drawing on interviews with players, operators, and regulatory officials, this article explores two aspects of this game. First, it explores the lives of both players and runners, as well (...) as the clandestine world of the Chinese operators who control the game. Second, the article examines the subjective motivations and aspirations of players, and asks why they continue to play, despite the fact that their aggregate losses easily outstrip their aggregate gains. In contrast with those who reduce its appeal simply to the pursuit of wealth, I conclude that, for the (mostly) black, elderly, working class women who play fahfee several times a week, the associated trade-off—regular, small losses, versus the social enjoyment of playing and the prospect of occasional but realistic windfalls—takes on a whole new meaning, and preferences for relatively lumpy rather than steady consumption streams help explain the continued attraction of fahfee. This reinforces the need to understand players’ own accounts of gambling utility rather than simply to moralistically condemn gambling or to dismiss gamblers behaviour as irrational. (shrink)

I define a social norm as a regularity in behavior whose persistence is causally explained by the existence of sanctioning attitudes of participants toward violations—without these sanctions, individuals have motive to violate the norm. I show how a universal precept "When in circumstances S, do action F" can be sustained by the conditional preference of each to conform, given that others do, of a convention, and also reinforced by the sanctions of a norm. I observe that a precept with moral (...) force can be reinforced by a social norm. I then consider constitutive norms and show by means of an example, competitive figure skating, how a type of activity or practice G can have a constitutive norm NG. An ongoing activity in a community is engagement in that practice only if NG is reinforced as a social norm by participants. I apply this to the case of assertion: the speech act type Assertion has a constitutive norm NA, and a practice of making speech acts in a community is one of making assertions only if it is controlled by NA enforced by the sanctions of a social norm. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for more systematic development of the strategic thinking, or 'meta thinking', competences of directors, as distinct from strategic planning. It reviews the historic development of the terms 'governance', 'directing' and 'learning'. It looks at the current political skewing towards board compliance through Codes, which are making the acquisition of strategic thinking skills more difficult, as well as the psychological blocks, both personal, and organisational which reinforce this. It proposes the development of regular and rigorous (...) 'director's homework' using both the PPESTT analysis and the Learning Board model. It ends with proposing three ways of encouraging the development of director's strategic thinking the encouragement of the use of 'intelligent naivety', the development of divergent thinking styles, and the profiling of Thinking Intentions. (shrink)

This article surveys five approaches to justice in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought: pure proceduralism, the sources thesis, the semiotic model, the social convention model, and the ‘law and...’ model. Each approach has associated justice with the foundation of the legal structure of rules, principles and the like. The foundation for pure proceduralism has rested in the conditions (such as majority will, freedom of expression, and political equality), external to the pure process. For the sources thesis, the foundation has been the (...) state institutions, such as courts and legislatures and ultimately to the state external to the legal structure. With the semiotic model, the structure of signifying concepts (rules, principles, doctrines and other intelligible objects) takes the foundation as a non-signified concept (such as Hans Kelsen’s Grundnorm) external to the signifying relations inside the structure. For the social convention model, the key has been the observation by a jurist of the regularity of a multiplicity of experienced events and the regularity, in turn, is a concept which abstracts from and unifies the multiplicity into a concept. The final approach, the law and…approach, has assumed that the foundation lies in the external and independent disciplinary discourse, thereby reinforcing the observed legal structure as given. -/- The foundation, in each context, has been considered external to the units and analytical reasoning of the legal structure. The foundation, that is, has been considered neither legal nor illegal. The consequence has been that jurists, working within the structure founded by an externality, cannot access justice. The clue to justice, I suggest, is concealed inside the structure itself: namely in the multiplicity of experienced events which the concepts and signifying relations have enclosed and forgotten. The Paper briefly fleshes out the latter sense of access to justice. (shrink)

The polling system of «Polls» in Belgium is a typical process of the political life. Its purpose is to elaborate into the political parties the voting lists, either with internal polling processes, or by mecanisms of cooptation, or simply by choices corresponding to the establishment of the Belgian society.The pre-voting process seems to be relevant and adapted to the technique of the proportional repartition of votes between the lists of the parties.In fact, only several organizations of the Belgian Socialist Party (...) utilize regularly this process for the structure of their lists of candidates before the legislature votes.It is a postulat of the political Democracy in Belgium of which the specific result is to reinforce the oligarchies. (shrink)

Background Policy instruments based on the working of markets have been introduced to empower consumers of healthcare. However, it is still not easy to become a critical consumer of healthcare. Objectives The aim of this study is to analyse the possibilities of the state to strengthen the position of patients with the aid of a new financial regime, such as personal health budgets. Methods Data were collected through in-depth interviews with executives, managers, professionals and client representatives of six long-term care (...) institutions. Results With the introduction of individual budgets the responsibility for budgetary control has shifted from the organisational level to the individual level in the caregiver-client relationship. Having more luxurious care on offer necessitates a stronger demarcation of regular care because organisations cannot simultaneously offer extra care as part of the standard care package. New financial instruments have an impact on the culture of receiving and giving care. Distributive justice takes on new meaning with the introduction of financial market mechanisms in healthcare; the distributing principle of ‘need’ is transformed into the principle of ‘economic demand’. Conclusion Financial instruments not only act as a countervailing power against providers insufficiently client-oriented, but are also used by providers to reinforce their own positions vis-à-vis demanding clients. Tailor-made finance is not the same as tailor-made care. (shrink)

In China, cultivation of the craftsmanship spirit is strongly advocated, but little attention is devoted to whether and how “working for the family” promotes heritage of this spirit. A configuration model of family motivation and organizational learning is proposed and expounded. Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis was used to further explore the conditional configuration. The results show that the fitting family motivation to organizational learning is important for promoting heritage of the craftsmanship spirit. There are two paths that promote efficient (...) heritage of this spirit: the institution-led path and the motivation-driven interpretation-led path. For the institution-led path, when apprentices have strong institution learning ability, the anterior-cause condition involves low family motivation, but this factor plays a weak role in promoting efficient heritage of the craftsmanship spirit. In a configuration consisting of intuition, interpretation, integration and institution, family motivation becomes irrelevant, which explains the phenomenon that organizational learning behavior reinforcement leads to a lack of family motivation. For the motivation-driven interpretation-led path, even without regular and institutionalized learning behaviors in the organization, the core conditions of high family motivation and high explanation learning, together with low intuition learning and low integration learning, will promote efficient heritage of the craftsmanship spirit. (shrink)

Before going further, it will be helpful to consider briefly the notion that novelty per se is a fundamental human need. Experiments with human beings, as well as with animals, indicate that the maintenance of normal, successful behavior depends upon an adequate level of incoming stimulation—or, as some have put it, of novelty.2 But lumping all novelty together is misleading. At least three kinds of novelty need to be distinguished. Some novel patterns arise out of, or represent, changes in the (...) fundamental rules governing the organization of musical processes and structures. By significantly weakening our comprehension of the musical relationships presented—undermining not only our understanding of what is past but our ability to envisage what is to come—such systemic change seriously threatens our sense of psychic security and competent control. Far from being welcome, the insecurity and uncertainty thus engendered is at least as antipathetic, disturbing, and unpleasant as stimulus privation. Novel patterns may also result from the invention of a new strategy that accords with prevalent stylistic rules. Though they may initially seem to threaten existing competencies, the function and significance of novel strategies within the larger set of stylistic constraints can usually be grasped without too much delay or difficulty. For a while the tensions produced by strategic innovation may seem disturbing. But in the end, when our grasp of the principles ordering events is confirmed and our sense of competency is reestablished and control is reinforced, tension is resolved into an elation that is both stimulating and enjoyable. Most novel patterns—original themes, rhythms, harmonic progressions, and so forth—involve the innovative instantiation or realization of an existing strategy or schema .3 Novelties of this kind not only enhance our sense of control—a feeling that we know how things really “work”—but provide both the pleasure of recognition and the joy of skillfully exercising some competency. We enjoy novelty—the stimulation of surprise, the tension of uncertainty—as long as it can be accommodated within a known and understandable set of constraints. When the rules governing the game are abrogated or in doubt—when comprehension and control are threatened—the result is usually anger, anguish, and desperation.These responses to novelty are consequences of fundamental and poignant verities of the human condition: the centrality of choice in human behavior. Because only a minute fraction of human behavior seems to be genetically specified, choice is inescapable.While in lower organisms, behavior is strictly determined by the genetic program, in complex metazoa the genetic program becomes less constraining, more “open” as Ernst Mayr puts it, in the sense that it does not lay down behavioral instructions in great detail but rather permits some choice and allows for a certain freedom of response. Instead of imposing rigid prescriptions, it provides the organism with potentialities and capacities. This openness of the genetic program increases with evolution and culminates in mankind.4The price of freedom is the imperative of choice. Human beings must choose were to sow and when to reap, when to work and where to live, when to play and what to build. Intelligent, successful choices are possible only if alternative courses of action can be imagined and their consequences envisaged with reasonable accuracy. 2. For further discussion, see my Music, the Arts, and Ideas , p. 50.3. Rules are transpersonal but intracultural constraints—for instance, the pitch/time entities established in some style, as well as grammatical and syntactic regularities. Strategies are general means for actualizing some of the possibilities that are potential in the rules of the style. The rules of a style are relatively few, while the number of possible strategies may, depending upon the nature of the rules, be very large indeed. The ways of instantiating a particular strategy are, if not infinite, at least beyond reckoning.4. François Jacob, The Possible and the Actual , p. 61. See also Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin , p. 257. (shrink)

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has transgressed biomedical categories. According to Horton, it turned out to be a 'syndrome' that infected virtually all spheres of social life. The pandemic has created toxic social atmosphere highly unfavorable to clinical and clinic-ethical decision making. Constraints and pressures related to micro-, meso-, exo- and macro-environments framing doctors, nurses, and medical students in training were identified. These factors exacerbated moral distress (moral injury) amongst clinicians. In a joint Polish-Lithuanian project (IDUB 2020-2022) we examined predictors of moral (...) distress in pandemic clinical contexts. A survey-based, real-time, correlational and comparative study was conducted in Poland and Lithuania after the first year of pandemic with N=227 participants. Unexpected differences on regular and pandemic-type moral distress levels were found between the two national samples. Polish participants showed significantly higher moral distress levels than their Lithuanian counterparts. The following article discusses these findings and recommends the reinforcement of resilient medical decision making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editor’s NoteJessica HeybachThis final installation of Education and Culture’s special theme issue on Dewey, Data, and Technology coincides with what feels like a technological paradigm shift. As I sat down to write this editor’s note, a former student forwarded me Stephen Marche’s December 6, 2022 piece in The Atlantic titled “The College Essay is Dead” wherein he offers a critique of the humanities as dependent on traditional forms of (...) assignments and assessment (i.e. writing), and their historically persistent inability to sufficiently respond to technology and be in conversation with the technologists. Ultimately Marche argues that the humanists and technologists need each other now more than ever with the development of naturallanguage processing. In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT (GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer), a large language model chatbot capable of answering any question posed by a user. From “What was John Dewey’s theory of experience?” to chocolate cake recipes, ChatGPT offers users answers to their questions by predicting text (similar to autocorrect). The chatbot can answer fairly sophisticated questions, translate text, and write code, all of which previously used to require a human curator to achieve. Interestingly, ChatGPT was trained through a model of learning reflective of what B.F. Skinner (1938) proposed in The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis.1 Specifically, to train ChatGPT, creators utilized reinforcement learning and a system of rewards: “a human ‘labeler’ assigns rewards to various outputs the model generates by ranking them from the best to the worst. Thus, ChatGPT is trained by incorporating human intuition—specifically in terms of preferences in verbal combinations—and learning from it.”2Like all educational technologies, ChatGPT has been met with polarizing reactions—you either love it or hate it. Yet without much debate, educators and educational consultants immediately absorbed the technology as an educational good and started proselytizing. With little regard as to how the technology works, who created it, or why it was created, many educators have become early adopters. What is most curious about educators’ response is how many are not alarmed by the inaccuracy of the text produced by ChatGPT (imagine if calculators gave us wrong answers), or the issues of privacy inherent in becoming a user of AI (imagine if the overhead projector sold our behavioral data to other corporate entities), or the notion of academic integrity and thought itself in the face of AI (imagine if the blackboard became a coauthor). Rather, our addiction to novelty and technological fantasies is on display in this technological paradigm shift. Most universities now have webpages filled with links to resources and have filled their professional development calendars with AI-related webinars related to revising [End Page 1] assignments and assessments and creating syllabus policies for AI-produced materials.Although there is much to debate and decades of scholarship will interrogate ChatGPT in all disciplines, for the purposes of this editor’s note I want to pause and focus on the reactive early adopters of ChatGPT. As a regular observer of the educational Twitter-verse, I’m struck by how quickly this technology has been championed by school leaders and classroom educators. Since educators are users only, rather than the designers of said technology, ChatGPT in the classroom can be seen as the ultimate form of outsourcing available to date. I want to emphasize that ChatGPT is different than the calculator, overhead projector, or blackboard, as it is part of a culture already in motion that is interested in the destruction of the teaching profession writ large. Of course, Dewey would caution us against either/or thinking and the fatalism embedded in my own early reaction to ChatGPT, but I implore educators to consider ChatGPT in light of recent political attacks in P-20 educational settings and the increasing legislative moves to destroy progressive and reconstructive educational aims of education.One educational consultant declared just one month after its release: “#ChatGPT is here to stay and efforts against it are futile.” This consultant goes on to list its usefulness in the following tasks: “generating lesson plans, creating quizzes, providing feedback on student writing, summarizing and paraphrasing texts, personalized learning, grading student work, generating... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Operating Through HatredAndrew G. Shuman“You’re not cutting my ***ing neck. The cancer is in my ***ing mouth.”While many patient encounters are memorable, Mr. K’s introduction to the head and [End Page 20] neck surgical oncology clinic is indelibly imprinted into the minds of all of the clinicians present on that certain autumn morning. This was, quite simply, a man who resonated hate. He was rude and disruptive. He insisted (...) on an expedited workup “without any waiting.” He questioned the ethnicity and nationality of his care providers. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that he did not appreciate my Jewish heritage—the swastika tattooed on his bicep underscored the point. He bragged about his recent incarceration for armed robbery. While my colleagues and I were tempted to simply refuse to assume his care, Mr. K had a bad problem—his recurrent tongue cancer required a major operation in order to offer him any hope for cure.Mr. K initially received an abbreviated course of radiation at an outside institution, which was limited by his non–compliance. While one might debate the wisdom of this decision in retrospect—in general, surgery is preferred for his type of tumor—the die was already cast. A heroic attempt at surgical salvage was now his only curative option. He previously sought care elsewhere... only to be fired by this original surgeon when Mr. K physically threatened him in the outpatient office during preoperative consultation. [It was the doctor’s fault for insulting him in the first place, Mr. K maintained... and no charges were filed.] We were, indeed, his last resort. Other than his recurrent cancer, Mr. K was robust; he was in his sixth decade, physically fit, and on the whole, fairly healthy. In the classic surgical lexicon, he was a reasonable surgical candidate. But was it reasonable to operate on such a person?I remember thinking, at the time, about our obligation to care for such an individual. Of course, being a medical professional carries with it many obligations, including a judicious assumption of personal risk. And, working in a tertiary care center begets the responsibility to assist referring clinicians in the management of difficult cases. Although professional obligations certainly have their limits, defining their bounds is decidedly more difficult. Paramount is creating an atmosphere of mutual trust and acceptance. Naturally, this was easier said than done in regard to Mr. K.Perhaps against our better judgment, we agreed to operate under the condition that he abide by strict behavioral ground rules, on our terms. We agreed upon the extent of the necessary operation (which indeed involved cutting his ***ing neck, much to his chagrin and reluctant acceptance). Mr. K promised to follow instructions for postoperative care. He assured us that he would not swear or yell (again). And, in the presence of hospital security, who reinforced our institutional policies regarding patient behavior, he guaranteed that he would not be verbally or physically violent or inappropriate, and would not make disparaging comments to other patients or staff. It seemed, at least, that we had an understanding.Needless to say, these rules were broken shortly after he awoke from surgery. I vividly remember being summoned from the OR when he threatened to murder his impressionable and terrified nurse a few days later, who would not acquiesce to his unreasonable demands. From that point onward, hospital security was deployed to his room regularly, and anything resembling a potential weapon was safeguarded. Any semblance of a mutual doctor–patient bond was shattered. At this point, everyone’s goal was simply to get Mr. K home.My visceral reactions to his behavior, while intense, were not unexpected, and fell in line with those of the entire team of clinicians caring for him. His antics brought his healthcare team together in collective unity (and condemnation). However, my surgical colleagues and I also felt somewhat guilty and responsible. While surgeons can choose to assume some degree of inherent personal danger in caring for a violent and angry patient, we also put the safety and soundness of the entire perioperative team in jeopardy, without necessarily seeking their input. But once we had decided to... (shrink)

The notion of role morality suggests individuals may adopt a different morality depending on the roles they undertake. Investigating role morality is important, since the mentality of role morality may allow agents to believe they can abdicate moral responsibility when acting in a role. This is particularly significant in the literature dealing with professional morality where professionals, because of their special status, may find themselves at odds with their best moral judgments. Here I tell four stories and draw out some (...) distinctions. I conclude that role morality is a genuine and useful distinction. However, I suggest that the purported distinction between role morality and professional morality is over‐determined. Therefore, alleged conflicts between the demands of role and profession (such as the different pressures on Pinto designers as employees and as engineers) are not conflicts between different kinds of demands, but rather conflicts arising from divergent roles that most workers will encounter regularly. Another analytical perspective is to look at moral choices at work in terms of power and the ability to bring about change. Finally, I draw the implication that we should stress moral awareness at a fairly abstract level for all employees and reinforce the moral primacy of individual choice. (shrink)

Aaron Snyder and Fred Dretske present an argument for the proposition that singular causal sequences, such as S caused b, need not be related to a general regularity, that an event of type S is always followed by an event of type b. Therefore, they assert that a claim of causal relation does not require a regular observation of effect following cause or cause preceeding effect. To reinforce their assertion, they present the following case: Box R contains a randomizing (...) device; once activated it proceeds, in a perfectly random manner, to one of its one hundred different terminal states. Each of the terminal states may be supposed to be equally probable so that the probability of the box ending in state number 17 is.01. One can think of the device as embodying certain quantum mechanical processes—e.g. the emission of an electron … toward a screen which has one hundred different areas suitably marked off as terminal sights. Attached to Box R is a loaded revolver which fires when the terminal state happens to be number 17. We take this device and place it next to a cat, point the revolver at the cat and activate the box. Things go badly for the cat; the improbable occurs and the cat is killed. The cat's master, if informed of our doings, would almost certainly insist that we had killed his cat… Though we designate our actions as the cause, and the cat's death as the result, there is no regular or uniform connection between actions of the first sort and results of the latter sort … We seem to have a situation which we are inclined to describe in a way which implies the presence of a causal connection between C and E and, yet, a situation in which it is clear that in identical circumstances something of type C will not even generally be followed by something of type E. (shrink)

From an early age, exposure to a spoken language has allowed us to implicitly capture the structure underlying the succession of speech sounds in that language and to segment it into meaningful units. Statistical learning, the ability to pick up patterns in the sensory environment without intention or reinforcement, is thus assumed to play a central role in the acquisition of the rule-governed aspects of language, including the discovery of word boundaries in the continuous acoustic stream. Although extensive evidence (...) has been gathered from artificial languages experiments showing that children and adults are able to track the regularities embedded in the auditory input, as the probability of one syllable to follow another syllable in the speech stream, the developmental trajectory of this ability remains controversial. In this work, we have collected Event-Related Potentials while 5-year-old children and young adults were exposed to a speech stream made of the repetition of eight three-syllable nonsense words presenting different levels of predictability to mimic closely what occurs in natural languages and to get new insights into the changes that the mechanisms underlying auditory statistical learning might undergo through the development. The participants performed the aSL task first under implicit and, subsequently, under explicit conditions to further analyze if children take advantage of previous knowledge of the to-be-learned regularities to enhance SL, as observed with the adult participants. These findings would also contribute to extend our knowledge of the mechanisms available to assist SL at each developmental stage. Although behavioral signs of learning, even under explicit conditions, were only observed for the adult participants, ERP data showed evidence of online segmentation in the brain in both groups, as indexed by modulations in the N100 and N400 components. A detailed analysis of the neural data suggests, however, that adults and children rely on different mechanisms to assist the extraction of word-like units from the continuous speech stream, hence supporting the view that SL with auditory linguistic materials changes through development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MIMETIC VIOLENCE AND NELLA LARSEN'S PASSING: TOWARD A CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF RACISM Martha Reineke University ofNorthern Iowa In her recent essay, "Working through Racism: Confronting the Strangely Familiar," Patricia Elliot proposes that members of dominant groups who want to contest racism1 not only challenge economic, political, and social processes within society that produce racism, but also address personal claims they make on institutional structures which help to maintain it (...) (63). Sympathetic with an anti-racist strategy that concerns itself not only with racism at the institutional level but also with racism on a more intimate scale, Elliot nevertheless laments that individual complicity in racism is frequently attributed to aproblematic attitude. As a consequence, anti-racist work among members of dominant groups often is arrayed along a narrow spectrum: in workshops or in-service seminars participants attempt to identify and acknowledge biased and discriminatory views. Elliot fears that consciousness-raising efforts ofthis kind are unlikely to effect social change ifthose who participate continue to favor the confessional stance. Urging her readers to develop a "critical consciousness," a concept she takes from bell hooks (hooks 118), Elliot asks that members ofdominant groups who desire to promote social change not only combat institutional racism, but also divest themselves oisubjective investments in racism (63). Only as persons commit 1 Racism "involves the subordination ofpeople ofcolor by white people" (Rothenberg 6). Marked by discrimination and prejudice, racism entails also the exercise ofpower (conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional) by which white people maintain positions of privilege over persons ofcolor (Rothenberg 7). Martha Reineke75 themselves to a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of white complicity in structures of domination in order to grapple with racism at multiple levels—includingidentityformation, maintenance, and transformation—can members ofdominant groups actually tackle and begin to dismantle it (Elliot 63). Elliot's call to critical consciousness is laudable, but the goal she sets forth is not easily attained. As 1 struggle to achieve hook's critical consciousness of racism, like Elliot (64), I find difficult the task ofexploring the construction ofmy own identity as a white academic.2 For example, when I discuss issues in women's lives in the classroom or at professional conferences, I not infrequently am challenged by women of color who note that unexamined privilege (race and class) skews my perspective.3 1 also find myselfspeaking for others, assuming their voices, when I should speak only for myself. As a consequence, I regularly have cause to ponder whether, under the guise of contributing to anti-racistwork, I am appropriating others' voices in ways that reinforce racism rather than challenge it. For instance, on what grounds do I, a white woman, in this essay propose to address the problem of racism by reflecting on a novella written by an African-American woman? Does white privilege foreground my choice, precluding me from reading a work of literature in ways that might challenge rather than further racism? Grappling with these issues while reflecting on the theme of a critical consciousness ofracism, I find instructive the Girardian notion of mimesis. The dynamics of mimesis account well for agents of racism who, simultaneously recognizing and denying difference, act in ways that inhibit social and subjective transformation. Were members ofdominant groups to 2 Ofcourse, a professional affiliation is only one facet ofone's identity. I focus on that facet here because, through conversations with students about literature, I seek to contribute to antiracist work. 3Recent publications record similar conversations among women ofcolor and white women about white privilege. In White Women, RaceMatters: The Social Construction ofWhiteness, Ruth Frankenberg offers an ethnographic analysis ofthe dynamics ofprivilege in white women's lives. In The Color ofPrivilege: Three Blasphemies on Race andFeminism, Aída Hurtado offers a reflexive theory ofgender subordination which focuses on unwritten rules, inclusive of daily practices and psychological processes, that maintain power for whites as a group. Contributors to Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity consider the ethics and political legitimacy ofspeaking as someone (e.g., a speaker identifies herselfas white, middleclass, and heterosexual before offering her views) oxfor someone (e.g., a white Canadian author writes first person accounts ofthe lives ofNative Canadian women but stops when a group of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tokyo School of Philosophy? A Preliminary ReflectionThomas P. KasulisIntroductionPhilosophical circles worldwide have recognized the so-called Kyoto School for decades. Can we also speak of a modern Tokyo School and, if so, of its distinguishing nature? That question drives most articles in this journal’s special issue. Before beginning my inquiry, however, I have two preliminary questions. First, why is it important to ask whether there is, was, or even ever (...) will be something legitimately considered a Tokyo School? Second, how do the Japanese think in terms of schools, and what words might specifically designate a school of philosophy? I will try to answer these questions, not in an abstract or general way, but one that uses the Japanese cultural context for its point of departure.Japanese Regionalism and Japanese PhilosophyLet us start with the first issue: why ask whether there is a Tokyo School? One possibility, of course, is regional bragging rights between Kansai and Kantō as we find in, for example, sumō rivalries. That may seem like a joke, but we need to go back only a couple of centuries for concrete evidence of just such a competitive spirit. Examine this broadside published in Japan during the height of the Edo period.1 [End Page 5] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.1.Gakusha kakuryoku shōbu tsuki hyōban (学者角力勝負附評判) (Standings Assigned to a Sumō Match of Scholars).As a sumō program, this banzuke divides the philosophical competitors between those from East Japan (Edo, today’s Tokyo) and West Japan (Kyoto-Osaka).2 Along the top are the typical sumō hierarchies of ranks (ōzeki, sekiwake, komusubi, etc.),3 but here they correspond not to wrestlers but philosophers. In this version, for example, Kumazawa Banzan 熊沢蕃山 is the ōzeki and Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 the sekiwake of the East, while the equivalents in the West are Arai Hakuseki 新井白石 and Itō Jinsai 伊藤仁斎.Such artifacts confirm a long history of East–West philosophical rivalries within Japan, but that hardly justifies our quest for a Tokyo School. Still, let us not too quickly dismiss the banzuke as simply an idiosyncratic curiosity; it has something more to teach us. If nothing else, it shows that at least in the Edo period, some intellectuals assumed a correlation between geographical location and philosophical perspective. That brings to light two common [End Page 6] present-day misconceptions, one about Japanese culture and one about philosophy.The first misconception is that Japanese culture is monolithic, or if it is not, that the Japanese like to think of their identity in that way. That mistaken view overlooks a potent force shaping Japanese identity: regionalism. The Japanese delight in celebrating the distinctive foods, crafts, scenery, dialects, festivals, and social customs of the different locales within the country. Even today, weeklong regional themes play out on morning TV shows as they broadcast on site from different locales throughout Japan. Undoubtedly a marketing ploy to encourage tourism, the shows also reinforce the Japanese sense of regional differences within their country. Grocery or department stores join in with weeklong “matsuri” campaigns dedicated to particular Japanese regions, highlighting sales of specialties in foods and crafts. If you go on a trip within Japan, your family and coworkers expect you to bring back omiyage as gifts—souvenirs or edibles distinctive to the place you visited. As a convenience for the harried traveler, train stations sell the omiyage associated with the specific locale.The recognition of regional differences within a single national identity traces back at least to the Nara period when the newly established central government began regularly compiling Fudoki 風土記 for each of the provinces. Those almanacs or gazetteers included details about the local demography, climate, agriculture, topography, dialects, local customs, festivals, folklore, and so forth. The East vs. West, Kantō vs. Kansai, or Tokyo (Edo) vs. Kyoto-Osaka contrast that interests us here became most prominent in the Edo period as Tokyo vied with Kyoto for prominence as the cultural center of Japan.4Centuries before anyone identified a “Kyoto School” of philosophy, the banzuke suggests that at least some intellectuals assumed that philosophizing in Kyoto-Osaka differed in some respects from philosophizing in Edo. This does not imply... (shrink)

[Eve] Sedgwick examines from an explicitly feminist, implicitly Marxist perspective the relation of homosexuality to more general social bonds between members of the same sex . She argues that the similarity between homosocial desire and homosexuality lies at the root of much homophobia. Moreover, she sees this tension as misogynist to the extent that battles fought over patriarchy within the homosocial world automatically exclude women from that patriarchal power. Thus she places homosexuality and its attendant homophobia within a wider dynamic (...) of social relationships.1Yet even as Sedgwick invents a more sophisticated definition of “homophobia,” she may permit misreading of a more elementary sort. Her use of vocabulary is troubling. In a slangy prose that regularly juxtaposes James Hogg and Louis Lepke, Tennyson and Howard Keel, references to the “campiness” of Thackeray’s “bitchy” bachelors or the “feminized” cuckolds of Wycherley’s The Country Wife seem tame enough. Yet there is a political difference between the jokes. One can burlesque fifties musicals or organized crime with impunity; to refer to sexually embattled men with feminine adjectives, however, is to reinforce a sexual stereotype that sees in the supposed effeminacy of homosexuals a sign of their deviance. Nor are women empowered when terms of female degradation like “bitch” are turned back against men: the ironic reversal does not challenge the terms’ validity but reaffirms it, showing they have an even wider range of applicability than had been thought. 1. Throughout my analysis, I use “homosexual” and “gay” exclusively in reference to male sexuality. I do so in part to echo Sedgwick’s emphasis and in part because the logic of my own argument does not empower me to speak on female homosexuality. David Van Leer is associate professor of English and American literature at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays and articles on American literature and popular culture. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 22-25. The Author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento do Ensino Superior), Brazil. From the multifarious subdivisions of semiotics, be they naturalistic or culturalistic, the realm of semiotics of value is a ?eld that is getting more and more attention these days. Our entire political and economic systems are based upon structures of symbolic representation that many times seem not only to embody monetary value but also to determine it. The connection between monetary (...) and linguistic exchanges is self-evident: the former requires the latter and develops in direct relation to it. Creative experimentation and design of digital systems of value exchange are blossoming on the web. Dr. Gilson Schwartz, an economist turned media theorist and professor at the University of São Paulo, adopted the concept of Iconomics, originally created by Michael Kaplan, an author concerned with the linguistics of economic value. Empowering local communities and unlocking new levels of value creation and representation via digital technologies are the main goals of Dr. Schwartz’s projects, aiming at the re-designing of our relationship to the economic value of imagination and the social control of property. Schwartz is Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, a former Chief Economist at BankBoston, Brazil and Advisor to the President of the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). FURTHER READING: Kaplan, Michael. “Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation.” Public Culture . 15.3 (2003): 477-493. Renata Lemos-Morais: You have recently produced and directed a short documentary about Creative Currencies in Latin America. Could you tell us a bit about its process and its findings? Gilson Schwartz: The “Creative Currencies” project is a work-in-progress platform which unfolds as an action research agenda connected both to the production of audiovisual content and the development of social currency software. The initiative dates back to 2003 when I led an experimental project supported by the Presidency of Brazil. At that time, we issued paper currency in a small, touristic village in the Northeast Region which stimulated local cultural projects. But it was only in 2009 that the Central Bank of Brazil acknowledged “social currencies” as a legitimate economic agenda, calling for more debate at the I Financial Inclusion Forum. This year, the monetary authorities organized a second forum that also opened the room to discussions on mobile payment systems and new perspectives on poverty alleviation via State subsidies. The Ministry of Culture funded the “Creative Currencies” project in 2009-2010 and our next stage in this discovery process is to be supported by the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). In short, there is genuine interest among public officials in different areas and public funding for social currencies is on the rise in Brazil. However, after all these years we are still at a very early stage of research and practice. Some of the most successful initiatives (such as Banco Palmas) actually evolved out of local monetary creation to become correspondent banking operations for commercial banks and other financial groups. After eight years of price stability and social inclusion, Brazil stands out as a major opportunity for social experimentation, even the Grameen Bank is now entering the Brazilian market and many NGOs are geared towards different forms of entrepreneurialism in the base of the pyramid, riding solidarity economic models, microfinance and microcredit for local development. It is yet to be seen, however, whether these developments are just one more stage of “bankarization”, that is to say, an extension of regular banking services or actually a new form of social and symbolic self-determination at the local level. So far, the Central Bank of Brazil is open to new forms of credit and local finance as long as they are strictly territorial and very close to barter among the poor. In other words, whether the process of monetary creation could be made to fit an open source paradigm is yet to be seen. Community banking and social currencies might as well end up as just another channel for access to and use of banking services. The “Creative Currencies” project aims at promoting the discussion of more fundamental issues, such as the limits of central banking, the prospects for local financial development and the possibility of creating and managing financial icons as cultural assets. The purpose of this project is to produce short documentaries that will bear testimony to this evolving regulatory framework while inducing more discussion about the fundamental iconomic issues concealed in the process of money and wealth creation. RLM: What new potential is there in applying digital technologies to currency creation? GS: Globalization is a result of the virtualization of money, that is, the overcoming of illusions such as the “gold standard”. Money is an icon created by institutions, not on supposedly natural or material foundations but out of political and financial interests. The “dollar standard” is an outstanding evidence of this phenomenon and Kaplan´s paper, the first to use the expression “iconomics”, insists on the rhetoric and semiotic effects associated to a supposedly scientific model of money creation and management. This is a fundamental change that was perceived and discussed much before the digitalization of the world by unorthodox economists such as John Maynard Keynes since the early 20th century. The digitalization of global financial flows accelerated this immateriality and the creation of the Euro was yet another evidence of the political foundations of currencies. The banking establishment, however, is keen on the idea that scientific formulae hold the key to sound money creation. Keynesianism has been repeatedly associated to “inflationism” while the supposedly sound monetary policies of the Orthodoxy serve well the political and financial interests of a technocratic elite. Corporate media also serve this fictitious depiction of the monetary process despite the cyclical bust of monetary rules and financial regulations. The internet, however, has created numerous opportunities for the disintermediation in industries such as film, music and commodities. There is no reason to doubt that the financial industry can also be transformed by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructures. Money is media as well. Credit is but confidence. Once people realize that the distributed computing power of networks can also be the platform to weave new monetary and credit operations, there is room for grassroots emancipation out of the established owners of monetary institutions. So far, however, there has been a privatization of monetary management and there is not a clear path or model for the emergent (P2P) property democratization that is inherent to the internet. Digital assets, however, clearly have an inherent potential to escape central control and proprietary regulatory frameworks. RLM: How are social networks transforming the ways in which we exchange value? Do you believe that online influence and reputation might be translated into a new kind of currency? GS: The foundation for social currencies as envisaged by solidarity economics is the territory. Authorities are willing to concede local monetary creation as long as it is restricted to poor neighborhoods, as a proxy to barter. In this relevant but limited context, reputation, personal knowledge and informal ties form the matrix of local or “proximity” finance which are expected to keep credit and leverage to a sustainable level. Anything beyond that should and would lead to an integration of local finance into the established banking system. However, inasmuch as the internet promotes virtual territories and reputation is now subject to all sorts of digital manipulation and stardom becomes an everyday cultural process among teenagers and elders alike, the territorial “foundation” is substituted for more complex patterns of solidarity, cooperation and exchange that reach beyond the physical territory and even the “human.” Digital assets embody knowledge, technology, cultural and educational values that are exchanged at a global scale beyond the control of democratic States (Chinese-like intervention is the exception, not the rule). Hacktivism is unstoppable and so is monetary hacktivism. Especially in the Third World, mobile communications fast became conveyors of money transfers and other appropriation strategies. Banking and telecom sectors already battle for the control of these emerging markets and, as a matter of fact, have so far contributed to the containment of these processes. Governments serve these moguls and have usually adopted a wait-and-see attitude. If open source hardware and grassroots social movements combine to challenge these proprietary battles, then social networks may evolve into new forms of social capital and thus form the ground on which to design and implement social currencies. The global financial crisis, as well as the dollar demise, are an event of such a proportion that social networks may open the path for emancipator subjects to seize the opportunity. RLM: What are some of the social experiments that you think are revolutionizing the way in which value is exchanged? GS: There is a broad evolution of economic systems towards the valuation of intangible assets such as knowledge, reputation and sustainability. There are many examples of local as well as global events that call the traditional systems of exchange into question, from carbon credits to educational bonuses, digital barter frameworks and locally based solidarity and fair trade networks. These emerging examples, no matter how different in nature or scale, represent a challenge to the traditional value creation schemes and theories which are based on use and exchange value, supply and demand. This is not to say that utility and labour or scarcity are to be totally dismissed, but there is now an emerging perception that value is also a function of behavioral codes, symbolic patterns and the energy of institutional frameworks. The plasticity of digital platforms is relevant insofar as intellectual property becomes the central source of value creation. But when you discuss the property rights of public goods such as the environment or basic social rights (of minorities or localities), then a new paradigm seems to emerge. RLM: Are gaming and online storytelling digital practices that might have an impact on the way new currencies are created and developed? GS: “Play money” has been one of the early and most intriguing phenomena associated to the diffusion of virtual worlds. These virtual currencies have also been prone to “boom and bust” dynamics, speculation and pure theft (Second Life scams were common and led to “intervention” by the owners of the game). Storytelling is a major source of value, that is, the value of attention and the markets for audience. There are plenty of private monies created and managed by corporate entertainment groups, telecom operators (via mobile virtual network operators) and marketing frameworks. The casino economy, as already depicted by Keynes and other unorthodox economists, is always storytelling about future states of the world, confidence building and leverage of animal spirits. The novelty of current events is not the fictitious nature of any form of capital, but the potential for digital democratization of controls over the imaginary nature of value creation. But this is just a potential, a possibility, a figment that more often than not is appropriated by centralized and opaque private powers. The game industry is a testbed for new connections between storytelling and money creation. RLM: Monetary value was originally connected to the scarcity of precious metals, such as gold. Our entire monetary system seems therefore to function according to a logic of scarcity. Do you believe it is possible to reverse this logic into a logic of abundance? GS: The gold standard was a fiction itself, the “scarcity” is always produced by institutions that regulate confidence and access to credit. The key issue is not to fabricate abundance, but to question the institutions which produce scarcity out of any standard, gold or whatever. Central banks are at the service of private banks in the creation and management of scarcity. RLM: The promise that nanotechnology holds for our future is one of radical abundance (or so say transhumanists). The possibility of creating any kind of material substance through nanoengineering seems each day more feasible. What would this possibility entail in terms of systems of value exchange? GS: Nanotechnology, environmental concerns and grassroots appropriation of distributed knowledge are the frontiers of a new horizon of energy creation and management. Social groups in charge of managing scarcity for the sake of wealth and power concentration must be held accountable for the destruction of our future. Once this key political conundrum is accounted for, new systems of value exchange and even a non-mercantile society will come into existence. Revolutionary theorists such as Marx envisaged transformation via the extreme clash of contradictions between capital and labour. This approach has never led to a change in the systemic logic of scarcity for the sake of social control. We are once again facing the threshold of large scale societal change, but the outcome of the current crisis should come from our imagination, not from yet another paradox of abundance and scarcity. As long as we remain attached to the materiality of value, the illusion of freedom will but reinforce the massive manipulation of necessity. RLM: What do you think is the role of crowdfunding in this context? GS: Crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding are examples of the peer to peer opportunities that come along with distributed computer power. However, the power structure behind wealth and scarcity creation may or may not be changed by crowd management. But it should not be taken at face value, so to speak. The stock market of course is an early form of crowdfunding without calling into question the proprietary framework of the companies offering their investment projects to the market. Any market is a form of crowdsourcing, that is to say, of distributed forms of supply and demand matchmaking. The wealth of networks, however, depends on the contractual ecosystem, the institutional framework, the channeling of social imagination, not on the purely quantitative distribution of bids and offers. I see economics as supply, demand and code. Once you have access to the code, once openness becomes part of the game, then there is a chance of crowd behavior becoming collective intelligence and sustainable imagination. RLM: Is the development of digital currencies headed towards a pluralistic ecology in which many micro currency systems co-exist, or is it penetrating the mainstream monetary system? If it is affecting the mainstream financial system, what would be its effect in the long-term? GS: The same issue is at stake both at local and global levels. The global system is, as a matter of fact, an unstable ecosystem of “micro currencies” whereas the dollar has so far exerted an overwhelming influence. Local currencies and private monies coexist with national currencies only to the extent that the Central Bank admits, for instance, that grassroots monetary emissions remain territorial and strictly connected to poverty. However, the question of how new developments in digital technologies and nanotechnologies might alter not only our current monetary systems but also our understanding of value in itself, is still an open question. (shrink)

We make two major comments. First, negative reinforcement contingencies may generate some apparent “drug-like” aspects of money motivation, and the operant account, properly construed, is both a tool and drug theory. Second, according to Lea & Webley (L&W), one might expect that “near-money,” such as frequent-flyer miles, should have a stronger drug and a weaker tool aspect than regular money. Available evidence agrees with this prediction. (Published Online April 5 2006).

Building on a model first proposed by Gary Johnson, it is hypothesized that religious institutions demanding celibacy and other forms of altruism from members take advantage of human predispositions to favor genetic relatives in order to maintain and reinforce these desired behaviors in non-kin settings. This is accomplished through the institutionalization of practices to manipulate cues through which such relatives are regularly identified. These cues are association, phenotypic similarity, and the use of kin terms. In addition, the age of recruits (...) and their contact with actual kin are factors that relate to kinship recognition and that are similarly manipulated by institutions in order to reinforce altruistic behavior directed toward non-kin. Support for this set of predictions is presented from historical and ethnographic sources on monastic life in Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, as well as Islamic dervish groups, the Essenes, Shakers, and others. Potential implications of the model for understanding the development of religious institutions are preliminarily explored by reviewing Joachim Wach's model of religious developmental stages as well as some of the literature on the relationship between individualism and communalism in incipient religious organizations, in light of the kin-cue manipulation model. (shrink)

Unsustainability is an old problem - human societies have collapsed with disturbing regularity throughout history. I argue that a genetic predisposition for unsustainability is encoded in certain human physiological, social and behavioral traits that once conferred survival value but are now maladaptive. A uniquely human capacity - indeed, necessity - for elaborate cultural myth-making reinforces these negative biological tendencies. Our contemporary, increasingly global myth, promotes a vision of world development centered on unlimited economic expansion fuelled by more liberalized trade. This (...) myth is not only failing on its own terms but places humanity on a collision course with biophysical reality - our ecological footprint already exceeds the human carrying capacity of Earth. Sustainability requires that we acknowledge the primitive origins of human ecological dys-function and seize conscious control of our collective destiny. The final triumph of enlightened reason and mutual compassion over scripted determinism would herald a whole new phase in human evolution. (shrink)

Background Medical schools are grappling with how best to manage industry involvement in medical education.Objective To describe a case study of industry-supported undergraduate medical education related to opioid analgesics.Method Institutional case study.Results As part of their regular curriculum, Canadian medical students attended pain pharmacotherapy lectures that contained questionable content about the use of opioids for pain management. The lectures were supported by pharmaceutical companies that market opioid analgesics in Canada and the guest lecturer was a member of speakers bureaus (...) of the same companies. These conflicts of interests were not fully disclosed. A reference book that reinforced some of the information in the lectures and that was paid for by a sponsoring company was made available to students. This is the first report of an association between industry sponsorship and the dissemination of potentially dangerous information to medical students.Conclusions This case demonstrates the need for better strategies for preventing, identifying and dealing with problematic interactions between the pharmaceutical industry and undergraduate medical education. These might include the avoidance of unnecessary conflicts of interest, more disclosure of conflicts, an open process for dealing with recognised problems and internationally harmonised conflict of interest policies. (shrink)

In philosophical circles, but not only there, Chomsky's views on natural language regularly fall a prey to misrepresentation. Very often the confusion involves the creative aspect of language use, an aspect of linguistic performance, which tends to be confounded with the notion recursivity, a property of the grammatical competence system. The present article clears away the most deep-seated confusions and proves that criticism of generative grammar based upon them cannot be upheld. In particular, it shows that the existence of metaphors, (...) and deviations from rules more generally, reinforces rather than refutes Chomsky's theory so long as the crucial distinction between knowledge of language (competence) and language use (performance) is taken heed of. It is argued that theories which deny this distinction and view human language as a set of dispositions or as an ability are misguided. The final section illustrates some properties of Universal Grammar (UG) by means of data from the domain of negative polarity and subject-object asymmetries. Though these phenomena are far from being fully understood, the present level of our insight warrants the conclusion that they lend considerable support to the Chomskyan conception of UG as a highly complex and richly articulated linguistic genotype. (shrink)

Thirty Israeli disabled people were asked to describe their most memorable interactions with mass mediated images of disability as part of a tentative endeavor to delve into their reception patterns. Two stereotypes are discussed in this paper, namely the supercrip and the pitiful disabled. The interviewees seek examples to corroborate their belief that physical, social, and cultural obstacles can be overcome. Highly regarded supercrips embody one example as ‘regular’ people are especially coveted. Well-known, successful disabled people are put on (...) a pedestal for their demonstrated ability to triumph. This triumph is used to validate the disabled individual and to alter societal perceptions. Consequently, the wish to see disabled who ‘have done it’ is particularly intense while the pitiful disabled trigger antipathy because they reproduce and reinforce disabled people's inferior positionality and exclusion. (shrink)

In this article I offer an analysis of harms associated with sexual objectification. Objectification can be benign, but harm tends to occur in three circumstances: (i) when objectification is non-consensual, (ii) when a phenomenon that I term ‘context-creeping’ occurs, and (iii) when the objectification is also enacting or reinforcing some kind of oppression. I defend the view that objectification is not always harmful, and I explain the popular intuition to the contrary by demonstrating that these three harm-generating circumstances are especially (...) prevalent. The phenomenon of ‘context-creeping’ objectification is introduced to capture what is intuitively wrong with much objectification in media and advertising. This phenomenon describes when instances of sexual objectification (which may be, in themselves, benign) regularly occur outside sexual contexts, in a way that reinforces particular rape myths and thereby contributes to harms. This means that the ubiquity of discussion of pornography in the objectification literature is misleading, and a shift in focus to other media is warranted. I end with a warning, though: we should be very careful in how we respond to these problems, as attempts to mitigate any harms associated with objectifying media can badly misfire. (shrink)

This paper is as much about a particular depiction of the tribune P. Sulpicius Rufus as it is about Cicero's De Oratore, a dialogue regularly called upon by historians to give evidence on the 90s b.c. and the characters who take part in the conversation it depicts. My main focus is literary: I will argue that, given what we know about the historical Sulpicius, Cicero's choice of Sulpicius for a prominent minor role in De Oratore drives the tragic historical framework (...) that undercuts the optimism expressed within the dialogue by the main protagonist L. Licinius Crassus for the civic value of oratory. The Rhetorica ad Herennium illustrates a certain type of allegory with the statement ‘as if one should call Drusus a “faded reflection of the Gracchi”’. In De Oratore, Drusus’ friend and successor Sulpicius functions as a reflection of the Gracchi and his eloquence reinforces the problem posed by such orators as the notoriously eloquent Gaius Gracchus for any such grand claims about the civic value of oratory. By examining Cicero's use of relatively recent history, we therefore discover that De Oratore is significantly more pessimistic than it may at first seem. This pessimism, however, has important implications for historians, since expanding our understanding of De Oratore as a literary construct should encourage historians to be significantly more cautious about using the text as a historical source. As Görler points out with regard to Crassus’ swansong at De or. 3.4–5, although ‘a naive reader of Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta could be left with the impression that some sentences are quite well attested’, most of the fragments of Crassus’ speech can actually be traced back to De Oratore. Likewise, a significant proportion of the standard elements in Sulpicius’ backstory go back to De Oratore and become a great deal less convincing once we accept De Oratore as a sustained fictional account featuring people who were neither as politically ‘safe’ nor as intellectually united as Cicero would have them be. My secondary focus in this paper is therefore on the broader lessons to be drawn from Sulpicius’ role in De Oratore. I will begin by outlining the historical context of the dialogue, which was written in the mid 50s but is set in 91, a few weeks before the natural death of Crassus, one of its two protagonists. Next, I will discuss the dialogue's literary context, specifically the Platonic allusions Cicero embeds within the text. These allusions encourage us to treat De Oratore’s historical framework carefully, if not sceptically, and I will outline the ‘off notes’ struck by references to the Gracchi and by the presentation of Crassus and Antonius before examining the problem Sulpicius poses for a straightforwardly optimistic reading of De Oratore. I will conclude by considering first the literary implications for De Oratore of accepting that Sulpicius is a deliberately problematic character and then the historical implications of taking a sceptical approach towards De Oratore as an historical source for our picture of Sulpicius. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume, Shaftesbury, and the Peirce-James Controversy EDMUND G. HOWELLS I. ACCORDING TO HUME, the "religious hypothesis" is "a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe''1 that is "mere conjecture and hypothesis," (Enquiry, 145) and "both uncertain and useless" (Enquiry, 142). But there was one version of this hypothesis that seemed to pose particular difficulties for him in making these claims convincing. This was Shaftesbury 's (...) view of the world as the object of "divine passion." Besides Shaftesbury's massive influence at the time, Hume was wrestling with the peculiar disadvantage of having agreed with him on so many points, particularly in the attempt to solve the problem of personal identity. He attempted to discredit Shaftesbury's "particular method" on several levels: viz., it cannot be rationally justified, deductively or inductively ; it is not really a belief, so afortiori it is not a natural belief; to the extent it is confused with a genuine belief, its effects are very rare and transitory unless it degenerates into superstition or enthusiasm, which are demonstrably pernicious. 2 These attacks were frequently reinforced with arguments ad hominem. Shaftesbury's theism is extremely ambiguous. In the Essay Concerning Virtue or Merit he pronounced, "to believe therefore that everything is governed, ordered, or regulated for the best, by a designing principle or mind, necessarily good or permanent, is to be a perfect theist" (CH I:240). This is merely the least common denominator of what all eighteenth-century natural theologians agreed could be inferred a posteriori from some form of design argument. Shaftesbury used several analogies to support this view, each based upon a comparison of a part of the universe to the whole:(l) an artifact, for example, a watch (CH I: 190), a ship (CH i Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge,2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902),p. 139;hereafter cited as Enquiry. The quotes in my opening statement are technically not from Hume himself but from his "sceptical friend who lovesparadoxes." But the closest Hume comes to a single refutation of all forms of the "religious hypothesis," comparable to Cleanthes' "entirely decisive" refutation of Demea's version of the ontological argument (Dialogues, 189),is stated by Hume in his own person in the final paragraph of this section (Enquiry, XI). Other abbreviations used in this paper are: Treatisefor.4 Treatiseof Human Nature, ed. L. A. SelbyBigge {Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949);Abstract for An Abstract of a Treatiseof Human Nature, 1740, ed. J. M. Keynesand P. Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938);G&G for David Hume: The Philosophical Works, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 4 vols. (London, 1886); Dialogues for Dialogues ConcerningNatural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947); Letters for The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Grieg, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932); CH for Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. J. M. Robertson, 2 vols. (Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). A roman numeral followed by a colon denotes volume; other roman numerals denote parts or sections; arabic numbers denote pages. 2For a striking exampleof one of their many points of agreement cf. Hume's essay(G&G 111: 144-150) with CH 11: 178-180. [4491 450 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY II:66), "a pile of regular architecture" (CH II:66-67), is to the artisan as the universe is to God. (2) A work of art, for example, a symphony (CH II :66), is to the artist as the universe is to God. (3) An organ is to the organism as the organism or species is to the teleologically structured and intelligent whole (CH I:243ff.) 3 (4) Microcosm (man) to Macrocosm (God), that is, man's mind is the governing principle over the other parts of his nature as God's mind is to the universe: though "all else may be only dream and shadow. All which even sense suggests may be deceitful.... Reason subsists." We are "in a manner conscious" that our reason is part of the pervasive world soul which inhabits our own, and "all nature's wonders serve to excite and perfect this idea of their author" (CH II : 112). In keeping with... (shrink)

Active labor-market policies have developed significantly over the past two decades across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, with substantial cross-national differences in terms of both extent and overall orientation. The objective of this article is to account for cross-national variation in this policy field. It starts by reviewing existing scholarship concerning political, institutional, and ideational determinants of ALMPs. It then argues that ALMP is too broad a category to be used without further specification, and it develops a typology (...) of four different types of ALMPs: incentive reinforcement, employment assistance, occupation, and human capital investment. These are discussed and examined through ALMP expenditure profiles in selected countries. The article uses this typology to analyze ALMP trajectories in six Western European countries and shows that the role of this instrument changes dramatically over time. It concludes that there is little regularity in the political determinants of ALMPs. In contrast, it finds strong institutional and ideational effects, nested in the interaction between the changing economic context and existing labor-market policies. (shrink)

In times of crisis, connections among people, cultures, and societies seem to be the main antidotes available against the risks of individualism, auto-referentiality, and a revenge culture. Connectivity offers opportunities to nurture human generativity (Santi, 2021) in the service of better futures and cosmopolitan scenarios, contrasting the delusion of autarchical economies, the rhetoric of political nationalism, and the reinforcement of social polarization by way of competition/marginalization, which applies to education as well. The pandemia that occurred in 2020 brought both (...) risks of isolation and opportunities for connection: it has been a paradoxical and even paroxysmal situation that has challenged us to think about forms of dependence, especially in instructional contexts. The stimulus for an inquiry that was carried out with 817 students at the University of Padova was the provocative title of an album by well-known musicians: “Declaration of Dependence.” The aim was to think about dependencies in the form of regular roles such as “study/student” that are important for our human existence, and which were profoundly upset by the “sindemia” (Singer, 2009). Our aspiration was to explore what it means to belong to a thriving university whose over-arching goal is to serve the dependencies of people in a generative community of future horizons. Our efforts led to the drafting of the “Declaration of Dependence,” a shared manifesto by the research group that enumerated a thorough list of the students' self-declared dependencies, and which was later shared with the university community in multiple languages. This led, in turn, to the use of the Declaration to launch multiple focus groups, which discussed these dependencies in a setting devoted to dialogue and the practice of complex thinking. Subsequently, in a workshop carried out in 2020 at the 20th Biennial Conference of the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC) in Tokyo, we opened an international dimension on the reflections that had preoccupied us in the Padova University context. Here, the aim was to reflect on the personal, collective and educational dependencies of the present historical moment through the practice of community of philosophical inquiry, which offers a paradigmatic time and space for sharing, listening, questioning, and gaining perspective. The conference workshop offered an international group of scholars and practitioners from various socio-political contexts the opportunity to deliberate on how the pandemic has impacted both their local and the global community. Considering the new educational and philosophical challenges presented by the pandemic, the group expressed an urgent need to deconstruct established boundaries and return to “origins.” Invoking metaphors taken from the natural world (Roversi et al, 2022), an inquiry into the nature and scope of our fundamental dependencies reminds us that we are part of a socio-cultural ecology that is grounded and nurtured in our relationship with others. A community that understands its dependencies as gifts that call us to the design of a better future could in fact represent a foreshadowing of a better tomorrow. (shrink)

In November 2011, Citizenship and Immigration Canada paused the parents/grandparents (PGP) sponsorship immigration and announced a new Super Visa program simultaneously to facilitate family reunification, specifically among older adults waiting to be reunified with their children in Canada. We conducted a qualitative study to understand the experiences of immigrant families with the Super Visa Program. In total, 19 semi-structured interviews were conducted in Toronto with Chinese immigrants and parents holding a Super Visa. Our findings revealed that Super Visa program is (...) helpful for family reunification, especially for those whose regular visa applications are not successful. However, Super Visa is still a visitor visa and parents/grandparents have to leave after a maximum of two years. This temporary status of their parents does not promote among immigrants a sense of belonging in Canada, but reinforces their feeling of being treated as “foreigner”. They also debunked the stigma that older parents/grandparents come to Canada for better welfare and are non-contributor and a burden to Canadian society. We observe older parents/grandparents are categorized as “undesirable” and their unpaid contributions to immigrant family and Canada society are rendered invisible. We argue there exits an inherent link between PGP policy changes and social injustice. Behind the negative portrayal of older parents/grandparents and policy changes on them is State’s neoliberal governmentality grounded upon market norms and mechanism. The immigration and social injustice inflicting on older PGP migrants manifests that neoliberal immigration regime is still structurally raced, gendered, classed, and may be intertwined with other stigmatizing dynamics such as ageist, ableist etc. within the State’s power relationship. (shrink)

Language change can be conceptualized as a cyclical process of continuous renewal of the involved elements which somehow change their nature, with respect to phonological or lexico-grammatical features. A crucial aspect of such diachronic evolution is that cyclical change takes place systematically and follows regular and unidirectional patterns of development. Once the change is complete, the same developmental path will be undertaken by new linguistic items in the same cyclical fashion. In this paper, we illustrate the concept of cyclical (...) change by discussing two examples of linguistic cycles. A first instance of cyclical development is displayed at the phonological level by the diachronic changes in the obstruent consonant system taking place from Indo-European to German through the First and the Second Sound Shift: the cycle is completed in the Cimbrian dialects. A second instance is provided by the diachronic process known as Jespersen’s cycle ([1917] 1966): sentential negation, initially expressed through a single negative marker, is later reinforced by an additional one; eventually, this second element becomes the only negative marker available in the sentence while the original marker is deleted. The discussion of the negative cycle takes also into consideration the results of an empirical research conducted on two varieties of an Italo-Romance dialect spoken in northern Italy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Subtlety and Moral Vision in FictionEileen JohnIIn Martha Nussbaum’s work in Love’s Knowledge, the subtlety of literary fiction is given a prominent role in explaining literature’s moral influence. 1 Nussbaum argues that the subtlety displayed in certain works of literary fiction can help readers develop habits of perception such that they will perceive their actual moral world more finely and respond to it with a more nuanced range of (...) feeling. We are encouraged to perceive in this way both by encountering good examples of subtle, sensitive moral agents, in characters such as James’s Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, and by undergoing the perceiving, responding activity that can be required of a reader. The overarching assumption is that, as moral agents, we need finely-tuned perceptions and felt responses if we are to pick up on the morally relevant elements of our circumstances. We cannot count on finding bold, neat and regular moral patterns to follow; we are rather likely to find ourselves in a complex web of particular contexts, each demanding special moral attention. 2Nussbaum develops these claims in close conversation with the fiction and literary essays of Henry James. 3 Through examples from his novels, she illustrates and elaborates upon the ideal he points to in his essays, the ideal of “being finely aware and richly responsible,” of being a person “on whom nothing is lost.” 4 It seems quite appropriate to dwell on the works of Henry James as displaying—and as demanding from readers—a finer discrimination of elements of experience than we [End Page 308] ordinarily achieve. Discussing the “we” of James’s readers (and leading with a phrase of James’s), Nussbaum puts it: “‘Participators by a fond attention’ in the lives and dilemmas of his participants, we engage with them in a loving scrutiny of appearances. We actively care for their particularity, and we strain to be people on whom none of their subtleties are lost, in intellect and feeling” (p. 162). Having experienced this as readers, we are supposed to be better prepared to approach our own lives and dilemmas with equally scrupulous and caring attention.In general, I am less confident than Nussbaum about the connections between responsible reading of excellent fiction and the pursuit of a responsible moral life. The effects of intense appreciation of fictional moral contexts on real-life decision-making and action are probably quite indirect, requiring encouragement from real-life experiences, from practice with situations in which we have something at stake. But for the moment, I want to develop a suggestion that assumes, in agreement with Nussbaum, that one may take habits of perception learned as a reader and make them count in one’s larger moral life—albeit with reinforcement from one’s judgments and actions in that life.My suggestion involves seeing literary fiction as sometimes playing a subversive role with regard to subtlety. In saying that literary fiction can be “subversive” of subtlety, I am trying to capture the ways in which reading fiction can disrupt a working standard of subtlety. Works of fiction do not provide “normal” perceptual fields, and readers do not approach them with precisely “normal” perceptual habits, so, roughly stated, the reader-fiction interaction has plenty of potential for disrupting epistemic standards of subtlety, bluntness, opacity and so forth. I will illustrate two sorts of subversions of subtlety with an example from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. In one case, I will argue that the subversion of the standard of subtlety has moral import—this will provide a case to contrast with Nussbaum’s Jamesian examples.By bringing in an example from a non-Henry James novel, I hope to open up the discussion of moral vision in fiction to encompass epistemic qualities besides subtlety. It does not seem that the ideals of subtlety, fine awareness, and missing nothing can be the only epistemic qualities which serve to support literary works’ moral influence. 5 Nussbaum herself acknowledges that, by focusing on one literary paradigm, she pursues only one strand of a larger project (pp. 45–46). Since I here consider just one example from a different style of novel... (shrink)

Mammalian outer hair cells generate mechanical forces at acoustic frequencies and can thus amplify the sound stimulus within the inner ear. The mechanism of force generation depends upon the plasma membrane potential but not upon either calcium or ATP. Forces are generated in the lateral cortex along the full length of the cell. The cortex includes a two‐dimensional cytoskeletal lattice composed of circumferential filaments 6–7 nm thick that are cross‐linked by filaments 3–4 nm thick and 40–60 nm long. The two (...) filament types may, respectively, be actin and some form of spectrin. The lattice reinforces the cylindrical shape of the cell and permits limited changes in length. Beneath it lie the lateral cisternae, a regular system of multi‐layered membranes. Force–generation may depend upon voltage‐dependent shape changes in proteins that lie either in the plasma membrane or in the cytoskeletal lattice. (shrink)