This paper takes a stand on Hamblin semantics and its relation to the semantics-to-pragmatics interface. Biased questions, where the speaker finds one of the options more likely and expects the confirmation that p is true, raise a concern about the limits of Hamblin semantics. I argue that biased questions have modified Hamblin semantics, while unbiased questions have unconstrained Hamblin semantics. The optional bias feature explains compositionally. It is triggered by likelihood presuppositions ranging Hamblin sets and highlighting the preferred alternative(s). Biased (...) effects are exceptionally possible in alternative and wh-questions, but only in polar questions, they can be encoded lexically and grammatically. I argue that Hamblin semantics covers all core types of questions, while some of its applications for non-questions are problematic. (shrink)

Audiovisual communication is greatly contributing to the emerging research field of affective computing. The use of audiovisual stimuli within immersive virtual reality environments is providing very intense emotional reactions, which provoke spontaneous physical and physiological changes that can be assimilated into real responses. In order to ensure high-quality recognition, the artificial intelligence system must be trained with adequate data sets, including not only those gathered by smart sensors but also the tags related to the elicited emotion. Currently, there are (...) very few techniques available for the labeling of emotions. Among them, the Self-Assessment Manikin devised by Lang is one of the most popular. This study shows experimentally that the graphic proposal for the original SAM labelling system, as devised by Lang, is not neutral to gender and contains gender biases in its design and representation. Therefore, a new graphic design has been proposed and tested according to the guidelines of expert judges. The results of the experiment show an overall improvement in the labeling of emotions in the pleasure–arousal–dominance affective space, particularly, for women. This research proves the relevance of applying the gender perspective in the validation of tools used throughout the years. (shrink)

Biases in cognition are ubiquitous. Social psychologists suggested biases and stereotypes serve a multifarious set of cognitive goals, while at the same time stressing their potential harmfulness. Recently, biases and stereotypes became the purview of heated debates in the machine learning community too. Researchers and developers are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that some biases, like gender and race biases, are entrenched in the algorithms some AI applications rely upon. Here, taking into account several (...) existing approaches that address the problem of implicit biases and stereotypes, we propose that a strategy to cope with this phenomenon is to unmask those found in AI systems by understanding their cognitive dimension, rather than simply trying to correct algorithms. To this extent, we present a discussion bridging together findings from cognitive science and insights from machine learning that can be integrated in a state-of-the-art semantic network. Remarkably, this resource can be of assistance to scholars (e.g., cognitive and computer scientists) while at the same time contributing to refine AI regulations affecting social life. We show how only through a thorough understanding of the cognitive processes leading to biases, and through an interdisciplinary effort, we can make the best of AI technology. (shrink)

Research misconduct is of growing concern within the scientific community. As a result, organizations must identify effective approaches to training for ethics in research. Previous research has suggested that biases and compensatory strategies may represent important influences on the ethical decision-making process. The present effort investigated a training intervention targeting these variables. The results of the intervention are presented, as well as a description of accompanying exercises tapping self-reflection, sensemaking, and forecasting and their differential effectiveness on transfer to an (...) ethical decision-making task. (shrink)

Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent‐ordering patterns to indicate “who did what to whom,” yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language conventions, revealing apparent biases underpinning word order usage, based on the semantic properties of the information to be conveyed. We extend the scope of these studies by focusing, experimentally and computationally, on the (...) interpretation of silent gesture. We show cross‐linguistic experimental evidence that people use variability in constituent order as a cue to obtain different interpretations. To illuminate the computational principles that govern interpretation of non‐conventional communication, we derive a Bayesian model of interpretation via biased inductive inference and estimate these biases from the experimental data. Our analyses suggest people's interpretations balance the ambiguity that is characteristic of emerging language systems, with ordering preferences that are skewed and asymmetric, but defeasible. (shrink)

Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent‐ordering patterns to indicate “who did what to whom,” yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language conventions, revealing apparent biases underpinning word order usage, based on the semantic properties of the information to be conveyed. We extend the scope of these studies by focusing, experimentally and computationally, on the (...) interpretation of silent gesture. We show cross‐linguistic experimental evidence that people use variability in constituent order as a cue to obtain different interpretations. To illuminate the computational principles that govern interpretation of non‐conventional communication, we derive a Bayesian model of interpretation via biased inductive inference and estimate these biases from the experimental data. Our analyses suggest people's interpretations balance the ambiguity that is characteristic of emerging language systems, with ordering preferences that are skewed and asymmetric, but defeasible. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher rejects the global pessimists' view that the conclusions reached in inquiry are determined by the interests of some segment of the population, arguing that only some inquiries, for example, inquiries into race and gender, are adversely affected by interests. I argue that the biases Kitcher believes affect such inquiries are operative in all domains, but the prevalence of such biases does not support global pessimism. I argue further that in order to address the global pessimists' concerns, (...) the scientific community needs criticism from people with diverse interests and background assumptions. (shrink)

Sex-biased investment in children has been explored in a historic population in northern England, 1600 to 1800, following a family reconstitution study. An examination of the wills and other available data identified three social groups: the elite, tradesmen, and subsistence farmers. The community lived under marginal conditions with poor and fluctuating levels of nutrition; infant and child mortalities were high. Clear differences were found between the social groups, and it is suggested that the elite wetnursed their daughters whereas the elite (...) mother breast-fed her sons for only a short period and introduced supplementary feeding early. The wives of the tradesmen probably breast-fed both sexes for the same length of time. Subsistence farmers may have weaned their sons earlier than daughters. The results are discussed in terms of possible differences in investment strategies. The investment strategy of the elite group was probably male-biased but may, in practice, have favored the female offspring. (shrink)

A long-standing observation about the interface between emotion and language is that positive words are used more frequently than negative ones, leading to the Pollyanna hypothesis which alleges a predominantly optimistic outlook in humans. This paper uses the largest available collection of affective ratings as well as insights from linguistics to revisit the Pollyanna hypothesis as it relates to two dimensions of emotion: valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity). We identified systematic patterns in the distribution of words over a bi-dimensional affective (...) space, which (1) run counter to and supersede most prior accounts, and (2) differ drastically between word types (unique, distinct words in the lexicon) and word tokens (number of occurrences of available words in the lexicon). We argue for two factors that shape affect in language and society: a pro-social benevolent communication strategy with its emphasis on useful and dangerous phenomena, and the structure of human subjective perception of affect. (shrink)

In recent years the social nature of scientific inquiry has generated considerable interest. We examine the effect of an epistemically impure agent on a community of honest truth seekers. Extending a formal model of network epistemology pioneered by Zollman, we conclude that an intransigently biased agent prevents the community from ever converging to the truth. We explore two solutions to this problem, including a novel procedure for endogenous network formation in which agents choose whom to trust. We contend that our (...) model nicely captures aspects of current problems in medical research and gesture at some morals for medical epistemology more generally. (shrink)

This article conceptualizes the evolution of the German political economy as the codevelopment of technological and institutional change. The notion of skill-biased liberalization is introduced to capture this process and contrasted with the two dominant theoretical frameworks employed in contemporary comparative political economy scholarship—dualization and liberalization. Integrating theories from labor economics, the article argues that the increasing centrality of high skills complementary in production to information and communications technology has weakened the traditional complementarity among specific skills, regulated industrial relations, and (...) generous social protection in core sectors. The liberalization of industrial relations and social protection is shown in fact to be instrumental for high-end exporting firms to concentrate wages and benefits on increasingly important high-skilled workers. Strong evidence based on descriptive statistics, union and industry documents, and twenty-one elite interviews is found in support of the article’s alternative perspective. (shrink)

An empirically sensitive formulation of the norms of transformative criticism must recognize that even public and shared standards of evaluation can be implemented in ways that unintentionally perpetuate and reproduce forms of social bias that are epistemically detrimental. Helen Longino’s theory can explain and redress such social bias by treating peer evaluations as hypotheses based on data and by requiring a kind of perspectival diversity that bears, not on the content of the community’s knowledge claims, but on the beliefs and (...) norms of the culture of the knowledge community itself. To illustrate how socializing cognition can bias evaluations, we focus on peer-review practices, with some discussion of peer-review practices in philosophy. Data include responses to surveys by editors from general philosophy journals, as well as analyses of reviews and editorial decisions for the 2007 Cognitive Science Society Conference. (shrink)

When environmental science acts by enlightenment rather than instrumental use, that is, by changing the aims and values of politics rather than its means, adequate communi cation to the general public is crucially important. Based on the study of two issues, forest death from acid rain and the size of whale stocks, this article shows how the "constraints" of commercial mass media can be contrary to the task of enlightenment. It is also argued that skeptical and relativist views of science (...) contribute indirectly to bias by undermining criticism. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher rejects the global pessimists' view that the conclusions reached in inquiry are determined by the interests of some segment of the population, arguing that only some inquiries, for example, inquiries into race and gender, are adversely affected by interests. I argue that the biases Kitcher believes affect such inquiries are operative in all domains, but the prevalence of such biases does not support global pessimism. I argue further that in order to address the global pessimists' concerns, (...) the scientific community needs criticism from people with diverse interests and background assumptions. (shrink)

It is well known that languages differ in how they encode motion. Languages such as English use verbs that communicate the manner of motion (e.g., climb, float), while languages such as Greek often encode the path of motion in verbs (e.g., advance, exit). In two studies with English- and Greek-speaking adults and 5-year-olds, we ask how such lexical constraints are used in combination with structural cues in hypothesizing meanings for novel motion verbs cross-linguistically. We show that lexicalization biases affect (...) the interpretations of motion verbs in both young children and adults across different languages; furthermore, their scope of application is larger than previously thought, since they also extend to the domain of caused motion events. Crucially, we find that the language-specific effects of such biases interact with universal mappings between syntactic structure and semantic content. Finally, we demonstrate that the combined effects of lexical and structural cues shift non-linguistic biases observed during event categorization: even though speakers of English and Greek share non-linguistic preferences in categorizing spontaneous and caused motion, they focus on different components of motion events when building hypotheses about the meaning of novel motion verbs. (shrink)

This article focuses on emergency medical care in black urban populations, suggesting that the classification of a "community" within clinical trial language is problematic. The article references a cultural history of black Americans with pre-hospital emergency medical treatment as relevant to contemporary emergency medicine paradigms. Part I explores a relationship between "autonomy" and "community." The idea of community emerges as a displacement for the ethical principle of autonomy precisely at the moment that institutionalized medicine focuses on diversity. Part II examines (...) a clinical trial for the blood substitute PolyHeme® (Northfield Laboratories, Inc., Evanston, IL). It illustrates the ways in which bias in research paradigms and Institutional Review Board decisions attach to the notion and utility of the language of "community." The conclusion's contemporary anecdote makes apparent the vitality of the issues of prehospital emergency medical care and the ways in which decisions and practices fall too easily into a narrative of culturally biased treatment. (shrink)

In this paper, I use a framework from computational linguistics, the Rational Speech Act framework, to model deceptive probabilistic communication. This account allows agents to discount for the biases they perceive their interlocutors to have. This way, agents can update their credences with the perceived interests of others in mind.

The notion of moral expertise poses a variety of challenges concerning both the question of existence of such experts and their identification by laypeople. I argue for a view of ethics expertise, based on moral understanding instead of on moral knowledge, that is less robust than genuine moral expertise and that does not rely on deference to testimony. I propose identification criteria that focus mainly on the awareness and communication of implicit biases and situated ignorance. According to the (...) account of ethics expertise presented in this paper, the expert's testimony is not an epistemic reason for the layperson's belief, but merely an epistemic influence. The epistemic reasons for the layperson's belief are largely independent from the expert. But there is still some epistemic risk involved in the proposed method of knowledge transfer, and therefore criteria for the identification of a trustworthy expert are necessary. The risk involved in knowledge transfer can be both due to willful manipulation and due to the expert's implicit biases and situated ignorance. While willful manipulation cannot really be avoided, the influence from biases and ignorance can be minimized. I argue that the best way to do this is if the expert is aware of their own biases and ignorance and communicates them. Combined with evidence of the expert's education in moral philosophy and experience with the topic in question, this gives the layperson the best chance to identify someone who can really help them consider all relevant aspects of a situation and come to a better justified decision. (shrink)

This paper starts by acknowledging that pragmatists agree with multiculturalists when they assert that individuals are grounded in local communities that give rise to different ways of seeing the world. Where pragmatists part company with many multiculturalists, however, is in our willingness to carry through with the logic entailed in this claim. When pragmatists assert that all ways of knowing are situated, we mean fully situated. In our view, multiculturalists can ask their auditors to celebrate or tolerate differences, but they (...) cannot claim to be multicultural (in the strongest sense of that word) because they necessarily read, write and think from a set of provincial assumptions not global ones. The conclusion a pragmatist draws from this is simple: Multicultural discourse (whether it be conservative, liberal or radical) will always be biased and limited because its knowledge claims are necessarily grounded in a historical and local context that guarantees a limited understanding of ofher cultures. (shrink)

The notion of moral expertise poses a variety of challenges concerning both the question of existence of such experts and their identification by laypeople. I argue for a view of ethics expertise, based on moral understanding instead of on moral knowledge, that is less robust than genuine moral expertise and that does not rely on deference to testimony. I propose identification criteria that focus mainly on the awareness and communication of implicit biases and situated ignorance. According to the (...) account of ethics expertise presented in this paper, the expert's testimony is not an epistemic reason for the layperson's belief, but merely an epistemic influence. The epistemic reasons for the layperson's belief are largely independent from the expert. But there is still some epistemic risk involved in the proposed method of knowledge transfer, and therefore criteria for the identification of a trustworthy expert are necessary. The risk involved in knowledge transfer can be both due to willful manipulation and due to the expert's implicit biases and situated ignorance. While willful manipulation cannot really be avoided, the influence from biases and ignorance can be minimized. I argue that the best way to do this is if the expert is aware of their own biases and ignorance and communicates them. Combined with evidence of the expert's education in moral philosophy and experience with the topic in question, this gives the layperson the best chance to identify someone who can really help them consider all relevant aspects of a situation and come to a better justified decision. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Understanding how extremist Salafists communicate, and not only what, is key to gaining insights into the ways they construct their social order and use psychological forces to radicalize potential sympathizers on social media. With a view to contributing to the existing body of research which mainly focuses on terrorist organizations, we analyzed accounts that advocate violent jihad without supporting any terrorist group and hence might be able to reach a large and not yet radicalized audience. We constructed a critical (...) multimodal and multidisciplinary framework of discourse patterns that may work as potential triggers to a selection of key cognitive biases and we applied it to a corpus of Facebook posts published by seven extremist Salafists. Results reveal how these posts are either based on an intense crisis construct or on simplistic solutions composed of taken-for-granted statements. Devoid of any grey zone, these posts do not seek to convince the reader; polarization is framed as a presuppositional established reality. These observations reveal that extremist Salafist communication is constructed in a way that may trigger specific cognitive biases, which are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

The paper briefly summarises and critiques Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Thinking. After offering an overview of the book, the paper focusses on one particular part of Tomasello’s proposal on the evolution of uniquely human thinking and raises two points of criticism against it. One of them concerns his notion of thinking. The other pertains to empirical findings on egocentric biases in communication.

This article focuses on emergency medical care in black urban populations, suggesting that the classification of a ?community? within clinical trial language is problematic. The article references a cultural history of black Americans with pre-hospital emergency medical treatment as relevant to contemporary emergency medicine paradigms. Part I explores a relationship between ?autonomy? and ?community.? The idea of community emerges as a displacement for the ethical principle of autonomy precisely at the moment that institutionalized medicine focuses on diversity. Part II examines (...) a clinical trial for the blood substitute PolyHeme? (Northfield Laboratories, Inc., Evanston, IL). It illustrates the ways in which bias in research paradigms and Institutional Review Board decisions attach to the notion and utility of the language of ?community.? The conclusion's contemporary anecdote makes apparent the vitality of the issues of prehospital emergency medical care and the ways in which decisions and practices fall too easily into a narrative of culturally biased treatment. (shrink)

English abstract: Feminist philosophers of science have argued that various biases can and do influence the results of scientific investigations. Two kinds of arguments have been most influential: On the one hand, it has been argued that biased assumptions frequently bridge the gap between observation and theory associated with ‘the underdetermination thesis’. On the other hand, it has been argued that biased value judgments determine when the evidence in favor of a particular theory is considered sufficiently strong for the (...) theory to be accepted as true. This paper argues that bias can influence the results of scientific investigations via a third route. Briefly, biases can and do influence which theories are seriously proposed and considered in scientific communities, which in turn leads to otherwise promising theories being ignored when scientists are choosing between such theories. In the final section, I suggest that this result speaks in favor of taking a quite radical approach to eliminating unwanted biases in science. (shrink)

In times of crisis and social turbulence, the mass media play a crucial role. This becomes particularly evident in economic crises within the European Union. The (biased) way the crisis is reported shapes people’s understanding of the crisis and the parties involved. In this study, the coverage of the Greek sovereign debt crisis in the German newspapersBILD,Die Welt,Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,Süddeutsche Zeitung,tageszeitungandDer Spiegel (online)is examined for the quality criteria relevance, neutrality, balance, and analytical quality. The results show that the reporting is (...) appropriate to the relevance of the topic, but shows deficits in the criteria of balance, neutrality, and analytical quality. During the study period, coverage focuses on a small number of topics, journalists include their value judgments in news and reports. Overall, there is an obvious media bias against the Greek government’s position. (shrink)

Feminist critiques of science show that systematic biases strongly influence what scientific communities find salient. Features of reality relevant to women, for instance, may be under-appreciated or disregarded because of bias. Many feminist analyses of values in science identify problems with salience and suggest better epistemologies. But overlooked in such analyses are important discussions about intellectual virtues and the role they play in determining salience. Intellectual virtues influence what we should find salient. They do this in part by managing (...) the emotions, which are cognitively involved in what we actually do find salient. One reason intellectual virtues do not factor more strongly in feminist epistemology is the mistaken assumption that they could not serve as explicit epistemic community standards for scientific inquiry. There are good reasons, however, to think in terms of community intellectual virtue and consequently, to advance explicit public standards of intellectual virtue for scientific research. To show how explicit public standards for intellectual virtue might improve reasoning in biased conditions, I analyze a striking oversight in several evolutionary immunological hypotheses concerning women's reproduction and sexuality. I conclude that feminist epistemology would benefit from greater consideration of intellectual virtues, particularly in connection with social epistemological insights. (shrink)

Teaching is hypothesized to be a species-typical behavior in humans that contributed to the emergence of cumulative culture. Several within-culture studies indicate that foragers depend heavily on social learning to acquire practical skills and knowledge, but it is unknown whether teaching is universal across forager populations. Teaching can be defined ethologically as the modification of behavior by an expert in the presence of a novice, such that the expert incurs a cost and the novice acquires skills/knowledge more efficiently or that (...) it would not acquire otherwise. One behavioral modification hypothesized to be an adaptation for teaching is ostensive communication—exaggerations of prosody and gesture that signal intent to transmit generalizable knowledge and indicate the intended receiver. On this view, the use of ostensive communication in conjunction with the transmission of generalizable knowledge constitutes evidence of teaching. Oral storytelling appears to meet these criteria: Indigenous peoples regard their traditions as important sources of ecological and social knowledge, and oral storytelling is widely reported to employ paralinguistic communication. To test this hypothesis, descriptions of performed narrative in forager societies were coded for the use of 14 ostensive-communicative behaviors and the presence of generalizable knowledge. Although biased toward North America, the study sample comprised 53 forager cultures spanning five continents, 34 language families, and diverse biomes. All cultures evinced the predicted behaviors. Results suggest that foragers use storytelling as a mode of instruction, thus providing cross-cultural evidence of teaching in forager populations. (shrink)

As I organize a pile of ethics consult chart notes in New York City in mid‐April 2020, I look at the ten cases that I have co‐consulted on recently. Nine of the patients were found to be Covid positive. The reasons for the consults are mostly familiar—surrogate decision‐making, informed refusal of treatment, goals of care, defining futility. But the context is unfamiliar and unsettling. Bioethicists are in pandemic mode, dusting off and revising triage plans. Patients and potential patients are fearful—of (...) the disease itself and of the amplification of health disparities and inequities. There is much to contemplate, but as I go through my cases, I worry about disability, about biases and racist stereotypes. In this pandemic, historically marginalized communities are at risk of further disenfranchisement. (shrink)

Collaborative filtering is being used within organizations and in community contexts for knowledge management and decision support as well as the facilitation of interactions among individuals. This article analyzes rhetorical and technical efforts to establish trust in the constructions of individual opinions, reputations, and tastes provided by these systems. These initiatives have some important parallels with early efforts to support quantitative opinion polling and construct the notion of “public opinion.” The article explores specific ways to increase trust in these systems, (...) albeit a “guarded trust” in which individuals actively seek information about system foibles and analyze the reputations of participants. (shrink)

Extremists often aim to paint a biased picture of the world. Radical narratives, for instance, in forms of internet memes or posts, could thus potentially trigger cognitive biases in their users. These cognitive biases, in turn, might shape the users’ formation of extremist attitudes. To test this association, an online experiment (N=392) was conducted with three types of right-wing radical narratives (elite-critique, ingroup-outgroup, violence) in contrast to two control conditions (nonpolitical and neutral political control condition). We then measured (...) the impact of these narratives on the activation of three cognitive biases of relevance in the formation of extremist attitudes: the ingroup-outgroup bias, the negativity bias, and the just-world hypothesis. The results indicate that violence narratives seem to be particularly harmful as they heighten participants’ negativity bias and increase just-world views. Just-world views in turn show a positive relationship to extremist attitudes, which highlights the need of regulating violence invocations on social media. (shrink)

The manuscript presents a summary of the results of the linguistic semantics study of Covid-19 related quarantine. Research conducted on a sample of Russian speaking Ukrainians. Found content and structure of the respective discursive field. Described features of inter-discourse connections. Established that the actualization of some discourses is accompanied by the deactivation of others, what makes quarantine semantics biased. Also, it was suggested that some of the discourses are indirectly positively associated and form the semantic core of the quarantine concept.

How do cognitive biases and mechanisms from learning and use interact when a system of language conventions emerges? We investigate this question by focusing on how transitive events are conveyed in silent gesture production and interaction. Silent gesture experiments have been used to investigate cognitive biases that shape utterances produced in the absence of a conventional language system. In this mode of communication, participants do not follow the dominant order of their native language, and instead condition the (...) structure on the semantic properties of the events they are conveying. An important source of variability in structure in silent gesture is the property of reversibility. Reversible events typically have two animate participants whose roles can be reversed. Without a syntactic/conventional means of conveying who does what to whom, there is inherent unclarity about the agent and patient roles in the event. In experiment 1 we test a novel, fine-grained analysis of reversibility. Presenting a silent gesture production experiment, we show that the variability in word order depends on two factors that together determine how reversible an event is. We relate our experimental results to principles from information theory, showing that our data support the “noisy channel” account of constituent order. In experiment 2, we focus on the influence of interaction on word order variability for reversible and non-reversible events. We show that when participants use silent gesture for communicative interaction, they become more consistent in their usage of word order over time, however, this pattern less pronounced for events that are classified as strongly non-reversible. We conclude that full consistency in word order is theoretically a good strategy, but word order use in practice is a more complex phenomenon. (shrink)

There are many ways in which biases can enter processes of scientific reasoning. One of these is what Ludwik Fleck has called a “harmony of illusions”. In this paper, Fleck’s ideas on the relevance of social mechanisms in epistemic processes and his detailed description of publication processes in science will be used as a starting point to investigate the connection between cognitive processes, social dynamics, and biases in this context. Despite its usefulness as a first step towards a (...) more detailed analysis, Fleck’s account needs to be updated in order to take the developments of digital communication technologies of the 21st century into account. Taking a closer look at today’s practices of science communication shows that information and communication technologies (ICTs) play a major role here. By presenting a detailed case study concerning the database SCOPUS, the question will be investigated how such ICTs can influence the division of epistemic labour. The result will be that they potentially undermine the epistemic benefits of social dynamics in science communication due to their inherent tendency to reduce the diversity of scientific hypotheses and ideas. (shrink)

The community mining space remains contested for a range of complex reasons. This inherently difficult discursive space is made most apparent in the context of international development where mining is often viewed as a potential lever in the effort to lift poorer nations out of poverty. In this article, the authors offer a critical review of community development (CD) approaches that are currently being applied by the mining sector. While the authors acknowledge recent positive developments in this domain, there remains (...) a good deal of scope for improving the internal standing of, and the external influence over, CD practice in mining. Drawing on the contemporary CD literature, the authors assert “assets” as one possible heurism for enhancing this discursive space by highlighting the ways in which community and company representatives may be able to participate more actively in dialogical processes—both between and within company and community—where development discourse is not prefigured or biased against participating parties. (shrink)

Racial bias and language discrimination are recognized in the health sector in countries such as Sri Lanka. This may extend to images used in health communication and educational literature. We analyzed the racial and ethnic representation in a sample of newspapers and websites related to health obtained over a period. Most of the human figures in health-related messages in newspapers had an overrepresentation of Caucasians. This trend was absent in websites where 73% of the images of Sri Lankans. The (...) reasons for this pattern could be due to the availability of image-quality photographs and exposure to a norm that is racially biased. For example, a majority of images in medical textbooks and prestigious journals are of white Caucasians. A predominance of such images could have two impacts. At an individual level, it would affect acquiring skills of visual diagnoses. At a societal level, it may reinforce a view that most forms of health-related knowledge are created in the West and could add to existing discrimination based on skin color (i.e., colorism). The latter is a known psychosocial stressor that contributes to psychological distress among socially disadvantaged populations and promotes behaviors adverse to health and residential segregation. These may contribute to poorer physical, mental, and infant health outcomes in dark-skinned individuals compared to lighter-skinned in the USA and Canada. Such discrimination within the health system would compromise basic human dignity, disempower patients, and violate the principle of autonomy. Sri Lankan media, the healthcare profession, and educationists need to recognize the relevance and importance of using images that appropriately reflect the realities of their own environment, its people, and patients. (shrink)

This study examines the communication strategies employed by MeritCare's public relations staff during the fen-phen case. The ethic of significant choice was the primary lens for the study. The study revealed that MeritCare's public relations staff members believed they did, in fact, follow the ethic of significant choice. Specifically, they perceived that the biases held by staff helped maintain the public's safety as the primary issue during the fen-phen events. They also believed that their communication strategies allowed (...) them to avoid ambiguity and emotionalized language. Finally, the staff members felt that teaming with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota enabled them to influence the marketplace of ideas by capitalizing on the credible standing of Mayo Clinic. (shrink)

Selective mutism (SM) is a developmental disorder characterized by a child’s inability to speak in certain contexts and/or in the presence of unfamiliar interlocutors. This work proposes a critical discussion of the most recent studies on SM, with respect to clinical and diagnostic features, as well as the etiology and treatment of this disorder. At present, all research work supports the hypothesis that SM is a complex anxiety disorder with multifactorial etiology (interaction among biological and environmental causes). The latest edition (...) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) places SM mutism among “Anxiety Disorders”, and no longer among “Other Childhood, Infant and Adolescent Disorders” (as in DSM-IV). Other important aspects relate to cognitive biases and emotional states at the base of SM, which partly explain the disorder’s persistence and represent an important objective of intervention work. No data in the literature point to a total remission of SM, but good results are achieved with cognitive behavior intervention and multimodal therapy (MMT) involving a variety of child interaction contexts. (shrink)

This article explores how racist propaganda works in visual communication and how such propaganda can be resisted. The article analyzes how photography has created new possibilities for the insidious dissemination of racist messages and discusses ways of resisting these visually transmitted propagandistic messages. The two sections of the article focus on examples of racist propaganda in visual culture: in section 1, the focus is on the propagandistic use of photography in the early twentieth century by the pro‐lynching movement; and (...) in section 2, the focus is on racist subtexts in communication that is both visual and verbal in mass media in recent decades. In both sections, the paper discusses how to neutralize and counter propaganda in visual culture by means of what the author terms “epistemic activism,” which consists in practices of interrogation and resistance that unmask, disrupt, and uproot biases and insensitivity. The article discusses different instances of epistemic activism that make explicit and effectively criticize racist subtexts in visual communication. The instances of epistemic activism discussed include the pamphlets of the anti‐lynching movement, critiques of visual artists and scholars, and the critical responses of online activists. The article argues that epistemic activism can produce critical viewership by disrupting the passive reception of visual messages and triggering more active and critical modes of viewing images. The author concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for epistemic activism that promotes critical awareness of the subtexts embedded in visual communication and a sense of critical responsibility in the production, consumption, and recirculation of images. (shrink)

The two last chapters of the book are a personal addition of Aquino giving a communal dimension to the illative sense and mapping how people ordinarily reach certitude by transmission of knowledge and by relying on the reason of others. He leaves behind certain limitations of Newman, his “personality quirks and cultural biases”, and stresses the need of the virtues and the damaging influence of the vices on the illative sense. Christian wisdom is a mature form of the illative (...) sense. In chapter 5 we are told that even in theology one needs this communal exchange to reach an informed judgment. Instead of solitary theological discernment we must form “communities of theological judgment.” This part of the book describes what happens in teaching and learning as an application of Newman’s illative sense. A good number of modern authors are quoted to strengthen the argument. (shrink)

The paper introduces the communication view on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which regards CSR as communicatively constructed in dynamic interaction processes in today’s networked societies. Building on the idea that communication constitutes organizations we discuss the potentially indeterminate, disintegrative, and conflictual character of CSR. We hereby challenge established mainstream views on CSR such as the instrumental view, which regards CSR as an organizational instrument to reach organizational aims such as improved reputation and financial performance, and the political-normative view (...) on CSR, which highlights the societal conditions and role of corporations in creating norms. We argue that both the established views, by not sufficiently acknowledging communication dynamics in networked societies, remain biased in three ways: control-biased, consistency-biased, and consensus-biased. We discuss implications of these biases and propose a future research agenda for the communication view on CSR. (shrink)

Mechanisms for QoS provisioning in communication networks range from flow-based resource reservation schemes, providing QoS guarantees, through QoS differentiation based on reservation aggregation techniques to adaptation of applications, compensating for incomplete reservations. Scalable, aggregation-based reservations can also be combined with adaptations for a more flexible and robust overall QoS provisioning. Adaptation is particularly important in wireless networks, where reservations schemes are more difficult to realize. It is widely accepted that usability of Cellular or Mobile IP can be largely improved (...) if adaptation is incorporated. Adaptation, in turn, depends on coding techniques involved and on user requirements. Those impose certain preferences and ordering relations on QoS hierarchies or degradation paths to be followed along when adaptation is performed. With the advent of MPEG4 coding techniques, more sophisticated adaptation schemes are more likely to be supported in the future. (shrink)

This paper studies information transmission between an uninformed decision maker and an informed agent who have asymmetric beliefs on the sender’s ability to observe the state of nature. We find that even when the material payoffs of the players are perfectly aligned, the sender’s over- and underconfidence on his information give rise to information loss in communication, although they do not by themselves completely eliminate information transmission in equilibrium. However, an underconfident sender may prefer no communication to informative (...) communication. We also show that when the sender is biased, overconfidence can lead to more information transmission and welfare improvement. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the objectivity of persons is best understood in terms of intellectual virtue, the telos of which is an enduring commitment to salient and accurate information about reality. On this view, an objective reasoner is one we can trust to manage her perspectives, beliefs, emotions, biases, and responses to evidence in an intellectually virtuous manner. We can be confident that she will exercise intellectual carefulness, openmindedness, fairmindedness, curiosity, and other intellectual virtues in her reasoning. (...) I argue further that the cultivation and exercise of such virtues is a social phenomenon and thus challenge highly individualistic notions of intellectual character, epistemic autonomy, and personal objectivity. An advantage of this account of objectivity is that it better enables us to address bias in scientific research, science policy, and public debates about science. (shrink)

Online, or platform economy, is no different than offline economy. Platforms are in this day and age what land was in agrarian times and the means of production for the industrial revolution period — i.e., basic resources. As such, the prime questions to be addressed are the same as ever: who owns the resources, who controls them, who profits from them, and who makes the decisions regarding all of the above. Analyzing online economy by these parameters elicits three major categories: (...) Online Capitalism — economic activities designed to maximize profits; Sharing Economy, using a substance-based definition — allowing underused resources to be used by others and adding social value: connecting people, contributing to the environment, and creating communities; and Platform Cooperativism — using online technology to promote economic and social goals and interests, as in the sharing notion, adding power-building components: ownership, control – democracy. This classification is both an identifying tool that allows for an objective evaluation of enterprises and a basis for future legislation and public policy that favors democratic and community-based enterprises. Platform Economy poses great threats: It allows for concentration of power, wealth and control, but it also holds great opportunities as it constructs mechanisms that enable mass participation in decision-making, and thus allows to develop a new and exciting future in which democracy re-claims its front seat, and people regain the power to make a difference. (shrink)

In this paper, we report the case of an Inclusive Design workshop. Inclusive Design is a design method that includes elderly and disabled people not only in interviews, but also in the upstream design process such as basic design and survey analysis. In the workshop, participants designed scientific educational materials that visually impaired and sighted people can use together. To work together regardless of visual disability, participants used the image-processing system and the stereo copying machine to make images tactile. We (...) think that collaborative work with elderly and disabled people in Inclusive Design can teach participants different perspectives and help to correct their biased view of each other. In fact, participants of the workshop noticed several facts that they were not aware of before. That is, the Inclusive Design workshop can improve social awareness. (shrink)

The article proposes that the objects of study in the social sciences are built into routines of interactions that we named interpretative communities. These adopt different qualities from those of an interview, because they are beyond the negotiations and agreements established by individuals to point out their positions in the development of knowledge. Moreover, from the perspective of interpretive communities, it becomes possible to identify biases that occur in the absence of epistemological vigilance in the task of specifying the (...) theoretical objects to achieve interpretive models, and promotes the use of reflexivity in community processes that report ontological security and reintegrate daily life. To develop these arguments a narrative axis is presented of the social scientist movements from a methodical solipsism towards a collective construction of knowledge. On this trajectory, life story helps to broaden the interview, also the dialogue facilitates the recognition of operational consensus that secures a sense of belonging and opens up the possibility to review the community appropriation by two perspectives, one of the subject co-producer of knowledge and one of the operating groups. El artículo propone que los objetos de estudio en las ciencias sociales se construyen dentro de rutinas de interacciones denominadas comunidades interpretativas, las cuales adoptan calidades distintas a las de una entrevista porque están más allá de las negociaciones y acuerdos que establecen los individuos para precisar sus posiciones en la elaboración de conocimientos. Además, desde la perspectiva de las comunidades interpretativas se hace posible identificar los sesgos que se producen por la ausencia de la vigilancia epistemológica en la tarea por especificar los objetos teóricos para lograr modelos interpretativos, y se promueve el uso de la reflexividad en los procesos comunitarios que reportan seguridad ontológica y reintegran el mundo de la vida. Para desarrollar estos argumentos se fija un eje narrativo en los desplazamientos del científico social desde un solipsismo metódico hacia la construcción colectiva de conocimiento. En su trayecto la historia de vida ayuda a ampliar la concepción de la entrevista y el tratamiento del diálogo facilita el reconocimiento de los consensos operativos que fijan un sentido de pertenencia y abren la posibilidad para revisar su apropiación comunitaria mediante dos perspectivas, la de los sujetos coproductores de conocimiento y la del grupo operativo. (shrink)

This paper examines, on the basis of a longitudinal corpus of 50 early modern authors, how change at the aggregate level of the community interacts with variation and change at the micro-level of the individual language user. In doing so, this study aims to address the methodological gap between collective change and entrenchment, that is, the gap between language as a social phenomenon and the cognitive processes responsible for the continuous reorganization of linguistic knowledge in individual speakers. Taking up the (...) case of the prepositional passive, this study documents a strong community-wide increase in use that is accompanied by increasing schematicity. A comparison of the 50 authors reveals that regularities arising at the macro-level conceal highly complex and variable individual behavior, aspects of which may be explained by studying the larger (social) context in which these individuals operate (e. g., age cohorts, community of practice, biographical insights). Further analysis, focusing on how authors use the prepositional passive in unique and similar ways, elucidates the role of small individual biases in long-term change. Overall, it is demonstrated that language change is an emergent phenomenon that results from the complex interaction between individual speakers, who themselves may change their linguistic behavior to varying degrees. (shrink)

For most nurses world-wide, activities are centred around working directly with patients and so the nurse-patient relationship is of the greatest importance. Ethnocentrism on the part of the health care community has led to misdiagnosis, mistreatment and undertreatment of culturally diverse individuals world-wide. This author discusses a tool, Greipp's Model of Ethical Decision-Making, which can be used to assist nurses in analysing the effects of culture, beliefs and diversity upon the caregiver and care recipient within an ethical framework.

Fundamental terms in the field of ecology are ambiguous, with multiple meanings associated with them. While this could lead to confusion, discord, or even tests that violate core assumptions of a given theory or model, this ambiguity could also be a feature that allows for new knowledge creation through the interconnected nature of concepts. We approached this debate from a quantitative perspective, and investigated the cost of ambiguity related to definitions of ecological units in ecology related to the general term (...) “community.” We did a meta-analysis of tests associated with two bodies of literature, Hubbell’s unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography and Diamond’s assembly rules, that rely on a specific ecological unit that assumes that species are existing within a local area and that they have overlapping resource needs. We predicted that if ambiguous terminology is widespread, then researchers will have tested them with many different ecological units, that in addition some of these ecological units will violate the core assumptions of the theory, and finally that the overall level of support for a theory will be stronger if appropriate ecological units were used. We found that indeed multiple different ecological units were used in the literature to test both theories, with 65 percent appropriate ecological units for neutral theory tests, and only 6 percent for assembly rule tests. Finally, there was some evidence that the support for a theory depended on whether appropriate ecological units were used for neutral tests, but there was not enough data for the assembly rule tests. These results thus show that ambiguous terminology in ecology is having measurable effects on research and is not of solely philosophical concern. We advocate that authors be explicit in their writing and outline core assumptions of theories, that researchers apply these consistently in their tests, and that readers be attentive to what is written and cognizant of their potential biases. (shrink)

Internal due process systems are the formal mechanisms thatmany organizations use to address and resolve ethics conflicts.Problematical due process systems such asinvestigation-punishment and grievance-arbitration systemsnarrowly constrain the political and moral space needed formeaningful ethics voice, praxis, and community. The relativelyuncommon employee board and mediator-counselor types of systemscan help solve such problems. The employee board andmediator-counselor systems permit questioning not only of guiltwith respect to policy violations but also the appropriateness ofthe policies as well as potential biases in an organization'sembedded (...) tradition-system that may be contributing to unethicalbehavior. Theoretical implications for organization ethics,praxis, community, and integrative social contracts theories areexplored. Several case examples are discussed. (shrink)