In this paper, we use motion tracking technology to document the birth of a brand new language: Nicaraguan Sign Language. Languages are dynamic entities that undergo change and growth through use, transmission, and learning, but the earliest stages of this process are generally difficult to observe as most languages have been used and passed down for many generations. Here, we observe a rare case of language emergence: the earliest stages of the new sign language in Nicaragua. By comparing the signing (...) of the oldest and youngest signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language, we can track how the language itself is changing. Using motion tracking technology, we document a decrease in the size of articulatory space of Nicaraguan Sign Language signers over time. The reduction in articulatory space in Nicaraguan Sign appears to be the joint product of several decades of use and repeated transmission of this new language. (shrink)

This book presents the first systematic account of dependency care in a liberal theory of justice. Despite the fact that receiving dependency care is necessary for human survival, the practices with which we meet society’s care needs are seldom recognized for their functional role. Instead, norms about gender and race obscure and shape expectations about whose needs for care are legitimate as well as about whose caregiving labor more advantaged members of society will receive. These opaque arrangements must be made (...) visible if we are to remedy skewed intuitions and judgements about care. Freedom to Care develops a modified form of social contract theory with which to evaluate society’s caregiving arrangements. Building on work by feminist liberals and care ethicists, it reframes debates about care to move beyond gender with an inequality-tracking framework that can be employed in any culture. Because care provision has been enmeshed in the subordination of women and people of color, eliminating the invisibility of these forms of labor yields a critical liberal theory of justice with feminist and anti-racist aims. (shrink)

We can easily discriminate self-produced from externally generated sensory signals. Recent studies suggest that the prediction of the sensory consequences of one’s own actions made by forward model can be used to attenuate the sensory effects of self-produced movements, thereby enabling a differentiation of the self-produced sensation from the externally generated one. The present study showed that attenuation of sensation occurred both when participants themselves performed a goal-directed action and when they observed experimenter performing the same action, although they clearly (...) reported that the tones were produced by other during action observation and by themselves during their own action. These results suggest that sensory prediction of action modulates ongoing auditory processing irrespective of who produces the sounds and that the explicit judgment of agency does not necessarily rely on the same mechanisms on which implicit perceptual measures such as sensory attenuation rely. (shrink)

The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on ‘choice’ signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation (...) of the ‘self’. The paper illustrates how young women's narratives about marriage appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which ‘a choosing person’ is consciously created as a mark of the family's modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the ‘choosing person’ is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the ‘right’ choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised ‘choosing person’ reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship. (shrink)

Invested with the capacity to reinstate physiological order, medicines are at the centre of contemporary health care. Their purpose and efficacy are generally seen as predictable and concrete: disease = therapy = outcome. These culturally specific understandings shape the practices and meanings of taking medicines. This article, however, queries what actually takes place when human bodies and medical drugs converge. Is it a solely therapeutic affair, a restoration of bodily normality, or one of multiple transformations? The ambivalent meaning of the (...) original Greek word for drug, pharmakon, intimates the potential of medicines to act as ‘remedy’ as well as ‘poison’. Using pharmakon as a conceptual tool, the article explores the complex, and often paradoxical corporeal effects of HIV combination therapy, with particular focus on lipodystrophy, a peculiar change in people‘s body shape. This unintended and frequently distressing iatro-genic phenomenon challenges common notions of therapeutic efficacy and causality and foregrounds the productive dimension of medical drugs - their capacity to reconfigure bodies, diseases and identities in multiple, unpredictable ways. (shrink)

A person’s financial well-being is the complete contentment gained from one’s present financial condition. This has a powerful impact on the entire achievement of an employee’s “well-being.” Researchers, financial analysts, financial planners, educationists, and economists have explored the “enablers” to improve employees’ living standards by investigating the possible “FWB” resources for decades. There is no literature available to show the connection between social capital theory, social exchange theory, social cognitive theory, financial literacy and FWB, and employees’ financial knowledge sharing a (...) moderator to expand the complete FWB. (shrink)

With the advent of social media and increase in networked publics, context collapse has emerged as a critical topic in the discussion of imagined audiences and blurring of the private and the public. The meshing of social contexts portends problematic issues as messages inadvertently reach unimagined audiences causing shame and leading to loss of ‘face’. In this article, we specifically study the impact of context collapse on some celebrities ‘who had it all’ yet, lost ‘it some’ to the world of (...) networked public. The article examines celebrities sharing identity information across multiple contexts and explores situations of lost fame when ‘face’ is threatened, usage falters and breaks some of the well-established norms of interactivity. It concludes that lack of prudence in separating social contexts, loss of ‘face’ and social approval can dampen online celebrity presence. It proposes the use of ‘polysemy’ to simultaneously appeal to audiences from different contexts. (shrink)

The number of competing-brands changes by new product's entry. The new product introduction is endemic among consumer packaged goods firm and is an integral component of their marketing strategy. As a new product's entry affects markets, there is a pressing need to develop market response model that can adapt to such changes. In this paper, we develop a dynamic model that capture the underlying evolution of the buying behavior associated with the new product. This extends an application of a dynamic (...) linear model, which is used by a number of time series analyses, by allowing the observed dimension to change at some point in time. Our model copes with a problem that dynamic environments entail: changes in parameter over time and changes in the observed dimension. We formulate the model with framework of a state space model. We realize an estimation of the model using modified Kalman filter/fixed interval smoother. We find that new product's entry (1) decreases brand differentiation for existing brands, as indicated by decreasing difference between cross-price elasticities; (2) decreases commodity power for existing brands, as indicated by decreasing trend; and (3) decreases the effect of discount for existing brands, as indicated by a decrease in the magnitude of own-brand price elasticities. The proposed framework is directly applicable to other fields in which the observed dimension might be change, such as economic, bioinformatics, and so forth. (shrink)

This article assesses which policies for addressing antibiotic resistance as part of a multi-pronged approach would benefit from legalization through an international legal agreement. Ten candidate policies were identified based on a review of existing literature, especially The Lancet Series on Antimicrobial Resistance, The Lancet Infectious Diseases Commission on AMR, and the World Health Organization Global Action Plan for AMR. These policies were then grouped under the headings of access, conservation, and innovation.Each of the ten policies were assessed using four (...) criteria developed by Hoffman, Røttingen, and Frenk to help consider why their legalization may be helpful, necessary and/or justified. These criteria are: the problem has a significant transnational dimension; the goal justifies the coercive nature of law; the outcome is likely to be beneficial; and legalization represents the best commitment mechanism among competing alternatives. (shrink)

Crew Pairing is one of the most important and difficult problems for airline companies. Nets to fuel costs, the crew costs constitute the largest cost of airlines, and the crew costs depend on the quality of the solution to the pairing problem. Conventional systems have been used to solve a daily model, which handles only regular flights with many simplifications, so a lot of corrections are needed to get a feasible solution and the quality of the solution is not so (...) high. A fully dated model, which handles regular flights and irregular flights simultaneously, is extremely hard and has not been solved directly hitherto. The number of irregular flights tend to increase in Europe and Japan, hence the resolution of the practical fully dated pairing system is desired. This paper presents a new approach which solves directly the fully dated crew pairing by Genetic Algorithms. GA is improved with stochastic processes to attack the fully dated model, and many heuristics are included in the decoding mecanism of the GA. For several hundred flights per day for fully dated 2 months scheduling period, the system found better or equivalent solutions to the human scheduler’s without any simplification from 5 to 20 times faster. (shrink)

Schedule planning is one of the most crucial issues for any airline company, because the profit of the company directly depends on the efficiency of the schedule. This paper presents a novel scheduling method which solves problems related to time scheduling, fleet assignment and maintenance routing simultaneously by Genetic Algorithms. Every schedule constraint is embeded in the fitness function, which is described as an object oriented model and works as a simulater developing itself over time, and whose solution is executable (...) without human correction. The schedular is able to solve the problems involving several hundred flights in a few hours, and the solutions are superior or equivalent to those by human experts in terms of the estimated profit. (shrink)

This author’s reply addresses critiques by Daniel Engster, Kelly Gawel, and Andrea Westlund about my 2020 book, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture. I begin with a statement of my commitment to liberalism. In section two, I defend the value of a distinction between conceptions of persons in the real world and in contract theory to track inequalities in care when indexed to legitimate needs. I argue, as well, that my variety of contract theory supplies the normative content (...) needed to reject the subordination of women of color. Acknowledging the enduring danger of expressive subordination, I emphasize my theory’s compatibility with the full social inclusion of people with disabilities. Section three then defends liberal dependency care’s compatibility with radical critique and transformative change by emphasizing the abstract nature of its core theoretical module. Finally, in section four, I reaffirm conceptual distinctions between autonomy skills, care skills, and a sense of justice by explicating their theoretical roles. In that section, I also embrace Westlund’s insight that theorists of justice need to have skills enabling responsiveness to other perspectives. To this new requirement for actual theorists of justice, I further add that we must attain capacities to engage critically with our society’s norms. Thus, the final section of this article supplements the justificatory module of liberal dependency care, building from the necessary conditions specified as two-level contract theory toward an account of necessary and sufficient conditions for this liberalism’s justificatory module. (shrink)

Inequalities in expectations to receive care permeate social structures, reinforcing racialized and gendered hierarchies. Harming the people who are overburdened and disadvantaged as caregivers, these inequalities also shape the subjectivities and corporeal habits of the class of people who expect to receive care from others. With three examples, I illustrate a series of justificatory asymmetries across gender and racial lines that illustrate asymmetries in deference and attendance to the needs of others as well as assertions of the rightful occupation of (...) space. These justificatory asymmetries are cogent reasons to evaluate the justice of caregiving arrangements in a way that tracks data about who cares for whom, which can be understood by the concept of the arrow of care map. I suggest, therefore, that the arrow of care map is a necessary component of any critical care theory. In addition, employing a method called living counterfactually, I show that when women of color assert full claimant status, we are reversing arrows of care, which then elicits resistance and violence from varied actors in the real world. These considerations together contribute to further defense of the theory of liberal dependency care’s constructivism, which combines hypothetical acceptability with autonomy skills in the real world. Each level, in turn, relies on the transparency of care practices in the real world as enabled by the arrow of care map. (shrink)

Dependency care is an asymmetric good; everyone needs to receive it, but it is not the case that we all have to provide it. Despite ethicists’ of care’s theorizing about the importance of dependency care, it has yet to be theorized within a form of liberalism. This paper theorizes two components of a liberal theory of dependency care. First, it advances a liberal justification to include the receipt of dependency care among the benefits of social cooperation. Then, it advances an (...) autonomy-based principle to guide how care should be provided (“strong proceduralism”). Strong proceduralism is based on an account of autonomy that incorporates the significance of a person’s skills when he parses options. Strong proceduralism consequently requires educational efforts to teach care-giving skills to groups who have not previously possessed them. I hypothesize that strong proceduralism will secure adequate care provision as the outcome of autonomous choice, but if an inadequate number of people choose to provide care, then a secondary stage of deliberations will be necessary. If the outcome of those secondary deliberations is that people want to have their care needs met, then a fair process for distributing infringements on autonomy must be devised. (shrink)

We highlight that the connection of well-foundedness and recursive definitions is more than just convenience. While the consequences of making well-foundedness a sufficient condition for the existence of hierarchies have been extensively studied, we point out that well-foundedness is a necessary condition for the existence of hierarchies e.g. that even in an intuitionistic setting α⊢wfwhereα\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${_\alpha \vdash \mathsf{wf}\, {\rm where}\, _\alpha}$$\end{document} stands for the iteration of Π10\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} (...) \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\Pi^0_1}$$\end{document} comprehension along some ordinal α\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\alpha}$$\end{document} and wf\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf{wf}}$$\end{document} stands for the well-foundedness of α\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\alpha}$$\end{document}. (shrink)

We introduce a new axiom called inductive dichotomy, a weak variant of the axiom of inductive definition, and analyze the relationships with other variants of inductive definition and with related axioms, in the general second order framework, including second order arithmetic, second order set theory and higher order arithmetic. By applying these results to the investigations on the determinacy axioms, we show the following. (i) Clopen determinacy is consistency-wise strictly weaker than open determinacy in these frameworks, except second order arithmetic; (...) this is an enhancement of Schweber–Hachtman separation of open and clopen determinacy into the consistency-wise separation. (ii) Hausdorff–Kuratowski hierarchy of differences of opens is faithfully reflected by the hierarchy of consistency strengths of corresponding parameter-free determinacies in the aforementioned frameworks; this result is valid also in second order arithmetic only except clopen determinacy. (shrink)

This essay assess the compatibility of Eva Kittay's dependency critique with Rawlsian political liberalism. I argue for the inclusion of a modified version of Kittay's revisions within Rawlsian theory in order to yield a theory that suppports a substantial subset of dependency work. Beyond these selected changes, however, I argue that Kittay's other proposed changes should not be included because they are incompatible with Rawls, and furthermore, their incorporation does not yield a theory that includes utter dependents.

This paper advances a framework to conceptualize societal care-giving arrangements abstractly. It is abstract in that it brackets the meaning of our particular relationships. This framework, which I call “the arrow of care map”, is a descriptive tracking model that is a necessary component of a theory of justice, but it is not a normative prescription in itself. The basic idea of the map is then multiply specifiable to track various ascriptive identity categories as well as different categories of care (...) labor. In this way, the idea of the arrow of care map serves as a conceptual frame within which to begin to understand every human society’s care-giving arrangement. I characterize it as a component of “ideal theory” insofar as it seeks to clarify our values, without the immediate aim of formulating principles to govern a just society. The resultant partial theory of justice is one that responds to non-ideal theory’s critiques of the ideological nature of liberal contractarianism’s idealizations and abstractions while moving towards new visions of a just society. (shrink)

This article reports that some robustness of the notions of predicativity and of autonomous progression is broken down if as the given infinite total entity we choose some mathematical entities other than the traditionalω. Namely, the equivalence between normal transfinite recursion scheme and newdependent transfinite recursionscheme, which does hold in the context of subsystems of second order number theory, does not hold in the context of subsystems of second order set theory where the universeVof sets is treated as the given (...) totality. (shrink)

This paper advances a Millian concept of care by re-evaluating his defense of the “common arrangement,” or a gendered division of labor in marriage, in connection with his views about traditionally feminine capacities, time use, and societal expectations. Informed by contemporary care ethics and liberal feminism, I explicate the best argument Mill could have provided in defense of the common arrangement, and I show that it is grounded in a valuable concept of care for care-givers. This dual-sided concept of care (...) theorizes care-giving both as a domain of human excellence and as labor with accompanying burdens. Liberal feminists should adopt this Millian concept of care, which can then inform principled thinking about distributive arrangements. (shrink)

The main concern in this paper is to explore the relationship between Jaina ethics and meditation techniques proposed in the Jaina scriptures and its foundations. Meditative practices have been practiced in Jaina tradition for centuries. We also find a difference between the interpretation of scriptures regarding meditation, and it also sometimes gets translated into the practice of meditation. In the case of Jaina tradition, it is challenging to separate ethics from the spiritual path of liberation and meditation as a practice. (...) In this paper, based on Tattvartha Sutra, Uttaradhyayana, and Acaranga Sutra, I have tried to show that ethics in its restricted sense can be seen as only one aspect of meditation, but in its broader sense, the whole spiritual path suggested in the Jaina scriptures can be seen as meditation. The fourteen stages suggested in the Jaina scriptures can be considered the stages of ethical path or meditation. We can see preksha dhyana - a recent form of meditation that translates these stages into more acceptable to the laymen - a popular and simple form of the spiritual path in modern times. Nevertheless, in the end, the ultimate aim remains the same - self-purification through the Karmic cycle. (shrink)

... because the thing-in-itself has no abnormality. Anything unusual will appear, after I myself see it: Abnormality belongs not to the thing-in-itself, but to myself. Kuo P'u (276-324), Shan-hai ching (Scriptures of the Mountains and the Seas).

Caring for Liberalism brings together chapters that explore how liberal political theory, in its many guises, might be modified or transformed to take the fact of dependency on board. In addressing the place of care in liberalism, this collection advances the idea that care ethics can help respond to legitimate criticisms from feminists who argue that liberalism ignores issues of race, class, and ethnicity. The chapters do not simply add care to existing liberal political frameworks; rather, they explore how integrating (...) dependency might leave core components of the traditional liberal philosophical apparatus intact, while transforming other aspects of it. Additionally, the contributors address the design of social and political institutions through which care is given and received, with special attention paid to non-Western care practices. This book will appeal to scholars working on liberalism in philosophy, political science, law, and public policy, and it is a must-read for feminist political philosophers. (shrink)

We introduce a new simple way of defining the forcing method that works well in the usual setting under FA, the Foundation Axiom, and moreover works even under Aczel's AFA, the Anti-Foundation Axiom. This new way allows us to have an intuition about what happens in defining the forcing relation. The main tool is H. Friedman's method of defining the extensional membership relation ∈ by means of the intensional membership relation ε .Analogously to the usual forcing and the usual generic (...) extension for FA-models, we can justify the existence of generic filters and can obtain the Forcing Theorem and the Minimal Model Theorem with some modifications. These results are on the line of works to investigate whether model theory for AFA-set theory can be developed in a similar way to that for FA-set theory.Aczel pointed out that the quotient of transition systems by the largest bisimulation and transition relations have the essentially same theory as the set theory with AFA. Therefore, we could hope that, by using our new method, some open problems about transition systems turn out to be consistent or independent. (shrink)

The value of autonomy is a hallmark of liberal doctrine. It would seem to follow that liberals must reject the practice of “arranged marriage” on the grounds that the “arranging” component of the practice eschews autonomy and individuality. However, in policy debates in Great Britain, the difference between “arranged marriage” and “forced marriage” has been defined as the presence of autonomy or free choice for an arranged marriage and their absence in cases of forced marriage. A paradox seems to result: (...) arranged marriage is defined as a marriage practice that both rejects autonomy and requires autonomy. In this article, I will show that the resultant paradox arises from the inadequacy of the autonomy analysis rather than from any intrinsically puzzling feature of arranged marriage. I then offer an alternative normative framework to assess arranged marriage’s potential contribution to a just society. My tri-metric analysis for arranged marriage includes the autonomy of the participants (Metric 1), as well as two societal metrics: the fairness of the distribution of care-giving labor (Metric 2) and the degree to which the society meets its members’ legitimate needs for care (Metric 3). (shrink)

This essay responds to Jan Narveson’s libertarian commentary on my earlier work “Liberal Dependency Care.” There, I argued that the underlying logic of the circumstances of justice warrants adding care to a liberal theory of justice. In this essay, I rebut Narveson’s skeptical claims about the liberal credentials of my justificatory argument by identifying the extent to which my view shares the same reasonable constraints on liberty as those defended by John Stuart Mill. I also suggest that a libertarian refusal (...) to add care to the core functions of the state is plausible only if women’s labor remains invisible. Finally, I refute Narveson’s contention that my strong procedural principle of care provision is incipiently totalitarian. The case for public support to teach basic levels of attentiveness and responsiveness is analogous to the case for teaching the foundational skills of arithmetic, which are legitimately taught in primary and secondary schools. (shrink)

Utterances of explicit performatives, such as “I order you to close the door,” have the forces named by the appearing verbs; here, the utterance has the force of ordering. These utterances utilize declarative sentences, which usually indicate the force of statements, rather than of any verbs contained in them. This leads many to theorize that explicit performatives are statements that cause their hearers to infer the forces they name. This article argues against this account on the grounds that it is (...) based on the false premise that hearers can unconsciously recognize illocutionary forces. Instead, I put forward the account that explicit performatives are nothing but the acts with the forces that they name. (shrink)

Plagiarism is increasingly evident in business and academia. Though links between demographic, personality, and situational factors have been found, previous research has not used actual plagiarism behavior as a criterion variable. Previous research on academic dishonesty has consistently used self-report measures to establish prevalence of dishonest behavior. In this study we use actual plagiarism behavior to establish its prevalence, as well as relationships between integrity-related personal selection and workplace deviance measures. This research covers new ground in two respects: (a) That (...) the academic dishonesty literature is subject to revision using criterion variables to avoid self bias and social desirability issues and (b) we establish the relationship between actual academic dishonesty and potential workplace deviance/white-collar crime. (shrink)

This summary of Freedom to Care begins with the core claims and conceptualizations upon which the theory of liberal dependency care rests. It then summarizes the book’s chapters. The first five chapters (Part I) delineate its theoretical foundations, which include the two-level contract theory approach to distributive justice for caregiving arrangements. In Part II of the book, chapters six through nine, I formulate liberal proposals for justice-enhancing social change before identifying cross-cultural metrics of justice for the internal evaluation of caregiving (...) arrangements. (shrink)

We study filters in residuated structures that are associated with congruence relations (which we call -filters), and develop a semantical theory for general substructural logics based on the notion of primeness for those filters. We first generalize Stone’s sheaf representation theorem to general substructural logics and then define the primeness of -filters as being “points” (or stalkers) of the space, the spectrum, on which the representing sheaf is defined. Prime FL-filters will turn out to coincide with truth sets under various (...) well known semantics for certain substructural logics. We also investigate which structural rules are needed to interpret each connective in terms of prime -filters in the same way as in Kripke or Routley-Meyer semantics. We may consider that the set of the structural rules that each connective needs in this sense reflects the difficulty of giving the meaning of the connective. A surprising discovery is that connectives , ⅋ of linear logic are linearly ordered in terms of the difficulty in this sense. (shrink)

RésuméDans cet article, je réponds à Clark Wolf, Elizabeth Edenberg et Helga Varden. Partageant des sympathies pour le libéralisme opposé à l'oppression et pour la théorie du contrat social, ils me recommandent avec insistance de développer ma théorie dans des directions nouvelles — respectivement comme une forme de justice pour tous les sujets, avec une justification politique libérale, et suivant la conception kantienne de « droit privé ». Je réponds en expliquant que l'inclusivité est incorporée dans l'idée même du schéma (...) des relations de soin (« arrow of care map ») que je mets de l'avant, comme elle est inscrite dans la variété des théories contractuelles que je soutiens. De plus, j'insiste sur le fait que le libéralisme qui rejette l'oppression ne doit pas formuler ses arguments seulement dans les termes de la politique libérale. (shrink)

A standard methodology in philosophy of language is to use intuitions as evidence. Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich challenged this methodology with respect to theories of reference by presenting empirical evidence that intuitions about one prominent example from the literature on the reference of proper names vary between Westerners and East Asians. In response, Sytsma and Livengood conducted experiments to show that the questions Machery and colleagues asked participants in their study were ambiguous, and that this ambiguity affected the responses (...) given by Westerners. Sytsma and Livengood took their results to cast doubt on the claim that the current evidence indicates that there is cross-cultural variation in intuitions about the Gödel case. In this paper we report on a new cross-cultural study showing that variation in intuitions remains even after controlling for the ambiguity noted by Sytsma and Livengood. (shrink)

This study examined how different components of working memory are involved in the acquisition of egocentric and allocentric survey knowledge by people with a good and poor sense of direction (SOD). We employed a dual-task method and asked participants to learn routes from videos with verbal, visual, and spatial interference tasks and without any interference. Results showed that people with a good SOD encoded and integrated knowledge about landmarks and routes into egocentric survey knowledge in verbal and spatial working memory, (...) which is then transformed into allocentric survey knowledge with the support of all three components, distances being processed in verbal and spatial working memory and directions in visual and spatial working memory. In contrast, people with a poor SOD relied on verbal working memory and lacked spatial processing, thus failing to acquire accurate survey knowledge. Based on the results, a possible model for explaining individual differences in spatial knowledge acquisition is proposed. (shrink)

The negative health effects of stress are well documented in medical and psychological research, but these effects are underexplored in political philosophy. This essay evaluates these effects in relation to the explanatory and normative value of the concept that I call “being at home.” The phenomenological description of the state of being at home is the sense of feeling safe and at ease in your context, and therefore able to relax. Although it characterizes a particular state of being for an (...) individual person, its conditions are relational. I show how the normative value of being at home can guide nonideal action-guiding recommendations to respond to racism in light of the claim that one of the negative effects of racism is a steady stream of disruptions to a person’s sense of ease in the world. Racism and microaggressions create stress, which then causes further negative health effects to the minority body. Consequently, the physical harms perpetrated by racist and sexist societies on the members of oppressed identities can be as great as the effects of actions standardly understood as violence. Demonstrating that a nonideal theoretical approach to bioethics is well suited to evaluating the philosophical ramifications of the bodily damage incurred by microaggressions, I recommend selective and episodic separatism from the perpetrators of microaggressions as a health-protective response to the realities of living in an unjust world. (shrink)

This summary of Freedom to Care begins with the core claims and conceptualizations upon which the theory of liberal dependency care rests. It then summarizes the book’s chapters. The first five chapters (Part I) delineate its theoretical foundations, which include the two-level contract theory approach to distributive justice for caregiving arrangements. In Part II of the book, chapters six through nine, I formulate liberal proposals for justice-enhancing social change before identifying cross-cultural metrics of justice for the internal evaluation of caregiving (...) arrangements. (shrink)

This author’s reply addresses critiques by Daniel Engster, Kelly Gawel, and Andrea Westlund about my 2020 book, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture. I begin with a statement of my commitment to liberalism. In section two, I defend the value of a distinction between conceptions of persons in the real world and in contract theory to track inequalities in care when indexed to legitimate needs. I argue, as well, that my variety of contract theory supplies the normative content (...) needed to reject the subordination of women of color. Acknowledging the enduring danger of expressive subordination, I emphasize my theory’s compatibility with the full social inclusion of people with disabilities. Section three then defends liberal dependency care’s compatibility with radical critique and transformative change by emphasizing the abstract nature of its core theoretical module. Finally, in section four, I reaffirm conceptual distinctions between autonomy skills, care skills, and a sense of justice by explicating their theoretical roles. In that section, I also embrace Westlund’s insight that theorists of justice need to have skills enabling responsiveness to other perspectives. To this new requirement for actual theorists of justice, I further add that we must attain capacities to engage critically with our society’s norms. Thus, the final section of this article supplements the justificatory module of liberal dependency care, building from the necessary conditions specified as two-level contract theory toward an account of necessary and sufficient conditions for this liberalism’s justificatory module. (shrink)