This article challenges the generally accepted dogma that reliance is an essential ingredient in contractual formation. We argue that this view has resulted from an erroneous interpretation of the relevant case law, failure to cite contrary authority, and the elevation of often oblique judicial references to the need for reliance to the status of fundamental contractual principle. Contractual theory and clear policy reasons support our position that in English law a contractual obligation subsists when a person, knowing of a promise, (...) performs the stipulated act (or gives the promise) requested by the promisor, even though that person has not relied on the promise. (shrink)

Paul Lewis and Walter Gulick summarize and evaluate Mark Micthell’s new book, Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing, and Mitchell responds to their comments in this symposium article.

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich (...) Nietzsche to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma challenges us to justify the moral difference between enacting virtual murder and virtual child molestation in video games. The Dilemma relies for its argumentative force on the claim that there is an intuitive moral difference between these acts, with the former intuited as morally acceptable and the latter as morally unacceptable. However, there has been no empirical investigation of these claims. To explore these issues, we developed an experimental survey study in which participants were asked to reflect (...) on imaginary video game scenarios as part of a 2 (undertake virtual murder or molestation) X 2 (against an adult or child) X 2 (in a high or low realism virtual environment) factorial design. We found that there was a significant difference between people’s views about virtual murder and virtual molestation. Whether the virtual act was performed against an adult or child was non-significant in most conditions, whereas whether it was performed in a high or low realism virtual environment was significant in most conditions. Gender did not impact these results, whereas perceived gaming experience, hours of video game play per week, and integrity did. These results provide an empirical grounding for future discussions of the Gamer's Dilemma. (shrink)

We investigate how epistemic injustice can manifest itself in mathematical practices. We do this as both a social epistemological and virtue-theoretic investigation of mathematical practices. We delineate the concept both positively—we show that a certain type of folk theorem can be a source of epistemic injustice in mathematics—and negatively by exploring cases where the obstacles to participation in a mathematical practice do not amount to epistemic injustice. Having explored what epistemic injustice in mathematics can amount to, we use the concept (...) to highlight a potential danger of intellectual enculturation. (shrink)

Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved participants playing a custom-built (...) visual novel game (The Great Fire) with different intuitive and counter-intuitive morality meter settings. Overall, we found that players’ attitudes towards the morality meter in this game was complex, context sensitive and variable throughout gameplay and that the intuitiveness of the meter encouraged participants to treat the meter more ‘as a moral guide’ that prompts reflection and less ‘as a score’ to be engaged with reactively. (shrink)

Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved participants playing a custom-built (...) visual novel game (The Great Fire) with different intuitive and counter-intuitive morality meter settings. Overall, we found that players’ attitudes towards the morality meter in this game was complex, context sensitive and variable throughout gameplay and that the intuitiveness of the meter encouraged participants to treat the meter more ‘as a moral guide’ that prompts reflection and less ‘as a score’ to be engaged with reactively. (shrink)

The four volumes of this set bring together key contributions to the study of Shi’ism, giving access to material that has hitherto been scattered and difficult to locate. While the majority of the material stems from the past fifty years, earlier studies are included, providing insight into the field’s development. This collection reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of today’s Shi’ite studies. Volume One covers the birth of Shi’ism and traces its development. The emphasis is on the socio-political history of communities (...) self-identifying as Shi’ite, focusing largely on the majority ‘Twelvers’, but also covering ‘offshoot’ sects. Volume Two consists of articles which explore the theologies and philosophical ideals of Shi’ism. Particular emphasis is given to those aspects of Shi’ite orthodoxy and orthopraxy which distinguish them from the Sunni majority. Volume Three is devoted to Shi’ite law, with special reference to the evolution of ‘independent reasoning’ – the principle which underpins the inherent dynamism of Shi’ite jurisprudence and which has ensured continuation of development down to the present day. Volume Four concentrates on the development of theories of government among the Shi’ite scholarly milieu, tracing political Shi’ism from its turbulent beginnings to its pre-modern and contemporary manifestation. (shrink)

Medicine is often thought of as a science of the body, but it is also a science of data. In some contexts, it can even be asserted that data drive health. This article focuses on a key piece of data technology central to contemporary practices of medicine: the medical record. By situating the medical record in the perspective of its history, we inquire into how the kinds of data that are kept at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational (...) requirements that originate well outside of the clinic, in particular in health insurance records systems. Although this dependency of today's electronic medical records on billing requirements is widely lamented by clinical providers, its history remains little studied. Following the archaeology of medicine developed by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic and expanding his methodology in light of more recent contributions to the field of media archaeology, this article excavates some of the underexplored technological conditions that help constitute today's electronic medical record. If in some contexts, it is true that data drive health, then an archaeology of medical records helps reveal how health insurance records often impact clinical care and, by extension, health and disease. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The “Traditional” Picture The “Progressive” Picture The General Change of Society Childhood and Modern Marriage Childrens's Rights Parents' Rights and the Nature of Child‐rearing Educational Practice Nowadays: A Tentative Interpretation Lyotard and the “Inhumanity” of the Child: Taking a Radical Inspiration for Philosophy of Education.

This short paper provides preliminary findings into the level of moral development and ethical decision-making patterns of public relations practitioners inAustralia and New Zealand. Our findings suggest that most PR practitioners rely on their own sense of right or wrong when addressing ethical dilemmas. However, these practitioners also only exhibit very low levels of concern for Kohlberg’s postconventional stages of moral reasoning.

When individuals learn from what others tell them, the information is subject to transmission error that does not arise in learning from direct experience. Yet evidence shows that humans consistently prefer this apparently more unreliable source of information. We examine the effect this preference has in cases where the information concerns a judgment on others’ behaviour and is used to establish cooperation in a society. We present a spatial model confirming that cooperation can be sustained by gossip containing a high (...) degree of uncertainty. Accuracy alone does not predict the value of information in evolutionary terms; relevance, the impact of information on behavioural outcomes, must also be considered. We then show that once relevance is incorporated as a criterion, second-hand information can no longer be discounted on the basis of its poor fidelity alone. Finally we show that the relative importance of accuracy and relevance depends on factors of life history and demography. (shrink)

The defence of qualified privilege emerged in the 1760s in cases involving domestic servants suing their masters for bad references. Its function was to reverse the burden of proof of malice—transferring it from the defendant to the plaintiff—and it was based on the ‘occasion’ of speaking. The evidence suggests that this meant ‘cause’, but later cases interpreted it as meaning ‘situation’ and appeared to hold that there must be a duty or interest in both the publisher and publishee in order (...) for the defence to be raised. This interpretation proved controversial because it denied a defence when the defendant mistakenly believed that he had a duty or interest. In the 1890s it was finally settled that a duty or interest in both publisher and publishee was an essential requirement of the defence; perhaps this was due to parallel developments relating to similar concepts in the torts of deceit and negligence. (shrink)

According to classical arguments, language learning is both facilitated and constrained by cognitive biases. These biases are reflected in linguistic typology—the distribution of linguistic patterns across the world's languages—and can be probed with artificial grammar experiments on child and adult learners. Beginning with a widely successful approach to typology (Optimality Theory), and adapting techniques from computational approaches to statistical learning, we develop a Bayesian model of cognitive biases and show that it accounts for the detailed pattern of results of artificial (...) grammar experiments on noun-phrase word order (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012). Our proposal has several novel properties that distinguish it from prior work in the domains of linguistic theory, computational cognitive science, and machine learning. This study illustrates how ideas from these domains can be synthesized into a model of language learning in which biases range in strength from hard (absolute) to soft (statistical), and in which language-specific and domain-general biases combine to account for data from the macro-level scale of typological distribution to the micro-level scale of learning by individuals. (shrink)

This paper outlines limitations to integrating social meaning into cognitive models of speech production and processing. The authors remind the reader that acoustic space is not the same as articulatory or auditory space and they point to the benefits of using relatively uncommon dynamic methods of acoustic analysis. Further, the authors argue in favor of a more complex and socially‐informed conception of ‘style’ than is typically used in work on language cognition.

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

A B S T R A C T Detailed examination of audio recordings of business-to-business `field-sales' encounters are used to report one way in which salespeople elicit verbal expressions of affiliation from their prospective customers — by reciprocating second assessments which affiliate with, trade off and build on prospects' own assessments. This article outlines the prototypical features of these junctures of assessment-affiliation and describes how salespeople can mobilize such assessments to build extended sequences of `rapport' that take the form of (...) adjacent and mutual expressions of substantive verbal affiliation. Consideration is also given to explicating both the interactional basis of these sequences as well as the socially obligating influence such affiliation and rapport can have on sales outcomes. (shrink)

_BMC Medical Ethics_ is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in relation to the ethical aspects of biomedical research and clinical practice, including professional choices and conduct, medical technologies, healthcare systems and health policies. _BMC __Medical Ethics _is part of the _BMC_ series which publishes subject-specific journals focused on the needs of individual research communities across all areas of biology and medicine. We do not make editorial decisions on the basis of the interest of a study or (...) its likely impact. Studies must be scientifically valid; for research articles this includes a scientifically sound research question, the use of suitable methods and analysis, and following community-agreed standards relevant to the research field. Specific criteria for other article types can be found in the submission guidelines. _BMC series - open, inclusive and trusted_. (shrink)

The United Kingdom is a leader in genomics research, and the presence of numerous types of biobanks and the linking of health data and research within the UK evidences the importance of biobank-based research in the UK. There is no biobank-specific law in the UK and research on biobank materials is governed by a confusing set of statutory law, common law, regulations, and guidance documents. Several layers of applicable law, from European to local, further complicate an understanding of privacy protections. (...) Finally, biobanks frequently contain data in addition to the samples; the legal framework in the UK generally differentiates between data and samples and the form of the data affects the applicability of legal provisions. Biobanks must be licensed by the Human Tissue Authority; certain projects must be reviewed by Research Ethics Committees, and all projects are encouraged to be reviewed by them. Data Access Committees in biobanks are also common in the UK. While this confusing array of legal provisions leaves privacy protections in biobanking somewhat unclear, changes at the EU level may contribute to harmonization of approaches to privacy. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

In its comprehensive overview of Alain Locke's pragmatist philosophy this book captures the radical implications of Locke's approach within pragmatism, the critical temper embedded in Locke's works, the central role of power and empowerment of the oppressed and the concept of broad democracy Locke employed.