In this paper we review selected international legal instruments, the effect, if any, that they have had on global health, and how these instruments might have contributed to the realization of health rights. We consider a number of instruments from the international health law field as well as two from the field of international environmental law.1 The latter two, in addition to the considerable link between health and climate/environment, are considered with the purpose of drawing more generalized lessons about what (...) contributes to the success or failure of an international legal instrument; the lessons are then applied to our analysis of the health law instruments that are the primary focus of our paper. (shrink)

Many global health issues, almost by definition, do not recognize state borders and therefore require bi-lateral, or more often multi-lateral international solutions. These latter solutions are articulated in international instruments (declarations, conventions, treaties, constitutions of international bodies, etc). However, the gap between formal adoption of such instruments by signatory states and substantive implementation of the articulated solutions can be very wide. This paper surveys a selection of international legal instruments, including those where the sought after positive outcomes have been achieved, (...) and those that have been ineffective, with little or no real progress being made. The paper looks for commonalities, both in the nature of the problems and the forms of the international legal instruments, to seek answers as to why some instruments ultimately succeeded where others failed. It also provides some guidance to law/ treaty makers to help ensure that they frame future instruments in such a way as to maximize the probability that those instruments will have a substantive positive impact on global health and health rights. (shrink)

Lovejoy (1873-1962) was America's foremost historian of ideas, a major participant in the philosophical debates of the twentieth century, and a prominent advocate of academic freedom. The product of an emotionally unsettled childhood and an evangelical father, Lovejoy reacted against his father by postulating the certainty of self-sufficient reason. He believed that only the principles of reason could order the world and so make our universe intelligible. Originally published in 1980. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions (...) use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value. (shrink)

Could there be an implicature whose content is not propositional? Grice's canon is somewhat ambivalent on this question, but such figures as Sperber & Wilson, Davis, and Lepore & Stone presume that there cannot be, and argue that this causes glaring failures within the Gricean programme. Building on work by McDowell and Buchanan, I argue that, on the contrary, the notion of non-propositional implicature is very much worth investigating. I show how the notion has promise to illuminate the content (...) of many sorts of complex utterance—from the cases of verbal irony, metaphorical usage, slurring, insinuation, and (some kinds of) humour, to various others which involve expressive or evaluative content. (shrink)

Struck by the absence of love affairs, adventures, travels, and political engagement in Immanuel Kant's life, a noted commentator describes him as unformed, to a degree surpassing all other philosophers, by challenging life events. Declaring that Kant 'can be understood only through his work in which he immerses himself with unwavering discipline,' the writer evokes the image of a body of writing demanding to be understood through text-internal analytical methods alone. The theme of the enclosed Kantian text is virtually irresistible. (...) It dominates in teaching practice and in a large percentage of the expository literature, where Kant's ideas are paraphrased in more, or even less transparent prose. It is attributable to the fact that Kant is a difficult author, a fact that, despite his scorn for popular philosophy, he knew and to some extent regretted. The commentator too is apt to immerse him or herself in Kant's writings with unwavering discipline, leaving little time and energy for a study of Kant's surrounding context. Like Wordsworth's Isaac Newton, whose innate powers enable him to teach the truth to himself, Kant is seen as a walled-off genius whose innovations nevertheless reached to the whole world. But Kant's famous domesticity and addiction to routine did not preclude contact with an external world. His mind was formed--as was Newton's, as is that of any one of us-- by his encounters with books and essays, by his exchanges with correspondents and dinner guests, from whom he learned and by whom he was provoked and challenged. The name index of the Academy Edition of Kant's works and the range of authors in the catalogue of Kant's library books published by Arthur Warda in 1922 leave no doubt as to the breadth of his personal and literary acquaintances. (shrink)

A great deal has been written during the past decade about the subject of sociobiology. The appearance of E. O. Wilson’s massive text, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, set off interdisciplinary tremors whose vibrations are still being felt in such exotic parts of the academic world as philosophy. Yet despite all the attention directed toward sociobiology within and beyond the university by both its admirers and detractors, some very basic issues pertaining to the subject remain notably obscure.

Recently, American Psychologist published a review of the evidence for parapsychology that supported the general claims of psi (the umbrella term often used for anomalous or paranormal phenomena). We present an opposing perspective and a broad-based critique of the entire parapsychology enterprise. Our position is straightforward. Claims made by parapsychologists cannot be true. The effects reported can have no ontological status; the data have no existential value. We examine a variety of reasons for this conclusion based on well-understood scientific principles. (...) In the classic English adynaton, “pigs cannot fly.” Hence, data that suggest that they can are necessarily flawed and result from weak methodology or improper data analyses or are Type I errors. So it must be with psi effects. What we find particularly intriguing is that, despite the existential impossibility of psi phenomena and the nearly 150 years of efforts during which there has been, literally, no progress, there are still scientists who continue to embrace the pursuit. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Our comment is based on a simple but, we believe, compelling principle. The proposed cognitive processes and functions that are components of Jablonka and Ginsburg’s Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) are real and are fundamental elements in the varieties of consciousness, cognition, problem solving, and sentience in the species they identify. But, from our perspective, they didn’t function as the metaphoric biomolecular ship that brought consciousness into being. The UAL functions are, and should be viewed as, evolutionary steps that built upon (...) a deeper and much older cognitive foundation. The appearance of UAL didn’t allow consciousness to emerge. It allowed it to change the manner in which sentience was instantiated − just as a host of other evolutionary developments did. In short, the emergence of UAL is a _token_ on a continuum of mental experience and not a distinct _type_ of mentation. (shrink)

We are sympathic with LeDoux’s primary goal here ─ to get a solid scientific grip on what has been dubbed one of the most elusive, important questions in scientific discourse, to identify the underlying biomolecular processes that give rise to consciousness. However, we have issues with the way he goes about it and have tried to present them in a constructive manner. Our commentary is built around our theory of the origins of minds, dubbed the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), (...) and the empirical research that supports it. The CBC is based on the proposition that life and sentience are co-terminous, that life without subjectivity, feeling, without valenced perception, without the capacity to learn and lay down memories would have been an evolutionary dead-end. It could not have survived in the hostile, chaotic world in flux that dominated our planet four billion years ago. The biological sciences operate on the principle that all species, extant and extinct, evolved from the first prokaryotes. The CBC theory is founded on the principle that all expressions of emotion, perception, and cognition did as well. (shrink)

The Cellular Basis of Consciousness theory places the first appearance of sentience at the emergence of life. It makes the radical, and previously unexplored, claim that prokaryotes, like bacteria, possess a primitive form of consciousness. The implications of the theory for the philosophy of mind, cell-biology, and cognitive neurosciences are explored.

I examine the phenomenon of implicit learning, the process by which knowledge about the rule-governed complexities of the stimulus environment is acquired independently of conscious attempts to do so. Our research with the two seemingly disparate experimental paradigms of synthetic grammar learning and probability learning, is reviewed and integrated with other approaches to the general problem of unconscious cognition. The conclusions reached are as follows: Implicit learning produces a tacit knowledge base that is abstract and representative of the structure of (...) the environment; such knowledge is optimally acquired independently of conscious efforts to learn; and it can be used implicitly to solve problems and make accurate decisions about novel stimulus circumstances. Various epistemological issues and related problems such as intuition, neuroclinical disorders of learning and memory, and the relationship of evolutionary processes to cognitive science are also discussed. (shrink)

In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one that lies at (...) the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance. (shrink)

The material in "TCU," as we've come to refer to this volume, began as a Master's Thesis that examined the manner in which knowledge of fairly complex, patterned material could be acquired without any conscious effort to learn it and with little to no awareness of what had been learned. It was dubbed implicit learning and, over a fifty-plus year span, became a vigorously researched area in the social sciences. TCU brings together several dozen scientists from a variety of backgrounds (...) and presents a broad (and deep) overview of how the exploration of the cognitive unconscious grew from that first study to a domain of research to which contributions have been made by sociologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, modelers, social and organizational psychologists, sport psychologists, primatologists, developmentalists, linguists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists, and measurement and assessment researchers. The core message seems fairly straightforward. Unconscious, implicit cognitive processes play a role in virtually everything interesting that human beings do. The implicit and explicit elements of cognition form a rich and complex interactive framework that make up who we are. The volume has contributions from over 30 distinguished authors from nine different countries and gives a balanced and thorough overview of where the field is today, a bit over a half-century since the first experiments were run. (shrink)

In recent decades it has become increasingly clear that a substantial amount of cognitive work goes on independent of consciousness. The research has been carried out largely under two rubrics, implicit learning and implicit memory. The former has been concerned primarily with the acquisition of knowledge independent of awareness and the latter with the manner in which memories not readily available to conscious recall or recognition play a role in behavior; collectively these operations comprise the essential functions of the cognitive (...) unconscious. This paper reviews the recent history of work on these issues, identifies some of the problems confronting researchers, and introduces a theoretical framework based on principles of evolutionary biology within which to view them. The argument is that the cognitive unconscious, despite its apparent sophistication, is of considerable evolutionary antiquity and antedates conscious cognitive systems by a considerable amount of time. Various entailments of this evolutionary perspective are explored including such issues as phylogeny and ontogeny of implicit processes, the robustness of the implicit functions as displayed by the capacity to resist disruptions from psychological and neurological disorders, the relationship between implicit cognition and intelligence, and individual differences in implicit cognitive abilities. (shrink)

Both individuals and organizations can engage in unethical behaviors. Across six experiments, we examine how people’s ethical judgments are affected by whether the agent engaging in unethical action is a person or an organization. People believe organizations are more unethical than individuals, even when both agents engage in identical behaviors. Using both mediation and moderation analytical approaches, we find that this effect is explained by people’s beliefs that organizations produce more harm when behaving unethically, even when they do not, as (...) well as people’s perceptions that organizations are relatively more blameworthy agents. We then explore how these judgments manifest across different kinds of organizations as well as how they produce discrepant punishments following ethically questionable business activities. Although society and the law often treat individuals and organizations as equivalent, people believe for-profit organizations’ behaviors are less ethical than identical individual behaviors. We discuss the ethical implications of this discrepancy, as well as additional implications concerning reputation management, punishment, and signaling in organizational contexts. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to put the work of the past several decades on the problems of implicit learning and unconscious cognition into an evolutionary context. Implicit learning is an inductive process whereby knowledge of a complex environment is acquired and used largely independently of awareness of either the process of acquisition or the nature of that which has been learned. Characterized this way, implicit learning theory can be viewed as an attempt to come to grips with the classic (...) epistemological issues of knowledge acquisition, representation and use. The argument is made that the process, despite its seeming cognitive sophistication, is of considerable evolutionary antiquity and that it antedates awareness and the capacity for conscious control of mentation. Various classic heuristics from evolutionary biology are used to substantiate this claim and several specific entailments of this line of argument are outlined. (shrink)

When everyone can be a publisher, what distinguishes the journalist? This article considers contemporary challenges to institutional roles in a digital media environment and then turns to three broad journalistic normative values - authenticity, accountability, and autonomy - that affect the credibility of journalists and the content they provide. A set of questions that can help citizens determine the trustworthiness of information available to them emerges from the discussion.

Cellular circadian clocks represent ancient anticipatory systems which co‐evolved with the first cells to safeguard their survival. Cyanobacteria represent one of the most ancient cells, having essentially invented photosynthesis together with redox‐based cellular circadian clocks some 2.7 billion years ago. Bioelectricity phenomena, based on redox homeostasis associated electron transfers in membranes and within protein complexes inserted in excitable membranes, play important roles, not only in the cellular circadian clocks and in anesthetics‐sensitive cellular sentience (awareness of environment), but also in the (...) coupling of single cells into tissues and organs of unitary multicellular organisms. This integration of cellular circadian clocks with cellular basis of sentience is an essential feature of the cognitive CBC‐Clock basis of cellular life. (shrink)

Companies often benefit from others’ attributions of moral conviction for prosocial behavior, for example, attributions that a company has a sincere moral desire to improve the environment when behaving sustainably. Across four studies, we explored how organizations’ changing resource positions influenced people’s attributions for the motivations underlying prosocial organizational behaviors. Observers attributed less moral conviction following prosocial behavior when they believed an organization was losing economic resources. This effect was primarily a “penalty” assessed against organizations that were losing resources, as (...) opposed to a “reward” given to organizations gaining resources. Finally, we found that this effect occurred because people perceive organizations that are losing resources as more situationally constrained, leading them to attribute less dispositional moral conviction. We discuss theoretical and practical implications stemming from how changes in resource access can lead people to be more skeptical of organizations’ motivations following prosocial behavior. (shrink)

Psycholinguistics re-emerged in an almost explosive fashion during the 1950s and 1960s. It then underwent an equally abrupt decline as an independent sub-discipline. This paper charts this fall and identifies five general factors which, it is argued, were responsible for its demise. These are: (a) an uncompromisingly strong version of nativism; (b) a growing isolation of psycholinguistics from the body psychology; (c) a preference for formal theory over empirical data; (d) several abrupt modifications in the Standard Theory in linguistics; and (...) (e) a failure to appreciate the strong commitment to functionalism that characterizes experimental psychology. In short, what looked like a revolution two decades ago turned out to be merely a local reformation that occurred along side of and largely independent from the real revolution in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the relations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the number of related dimensions or sources of variation. A unary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, because (...) both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working memory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by or In segmentation, tasks are broken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be processed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are to reduce their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of relational representations show that relations with more arguments have a higher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between the capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed. (shrink)

I think it will be agreed that there is a domain of investigation where physics and philosophy overlap. There are branches of philosophy which do not approach the subject-matter of physics, and a great part of the work of practical and theoretical physicists is not aimed at extending our knowledge of the fundamental nature of things; but questions which concern the general interpretation of the physical universe and the significance of physical law are claimed by both parties. I suppose that (...) ideally the physicist should be allowed to elucidate his own universe up to a point, and then hand it over to the philosopher to ascertain its exact status in relation to a wider outlook. (shrink)