This paper examines how scientific understanding is enhanced by virtual entities, focusing on the case of the synthetic cell. Comparing it to other virtual entities and environments in science, we argue that the synthetic cell has a virtual dimension, in that it is functionally similar to living cells, though it does not mimic any particular naturally evolved cell (nor is it constructed to do so). In being cell-like at most, the synthetic cell is akin to many other virtual objects as (...) it is selective and only partially implemented. However, there is one important difference: it is constructed by using the same materials and, to some extent, the same kind of processes as its natural counterparts. In contrast to virtual reality, especially to that of digital entities and environments, the details of its implementation is what matters for the scientific understanding generated by the synthetic cell. We conclude by arguing for the close connection between the virtual and the artifactual. (shrink)

We explore the computational complexity of justification, stability and relevance in incomplete argumentation frameworks (IAFs). IAFs are abstract argumentation frameworks that encode qualitative uncertainty by distinguishing between certain and uncertain arguments and attacks. These IAFs can be completed by deciding for each uncertain argument or attack whether it is present or absent. Such a completion is an abstract argumentation framework, for which it can be decided which arguments are acceptable under a given semantics. The justification status of an argument in (...) a completion then expresses whether the argument is accepted (in), not accepted because it is attacked by an accepted argument (out) or neither (undec). For a given IAF and certain argument, the justification status of that argument need not be the same in all completions. This is the issue of stability, where an argument is stable if its justification status is the same in all completions. For arguments that are not stable in an IAF, the relevance problem is of interest: which uncertain arguments or attacks should be investigated for the argument to become stable? In this paper, we define justification, stability and relevance for IAFs and provide a complexity analysis for these problems under grounded, complete, preferred and stable semantics. (shrink)

The decades following the civil rights and decolonization movements of the sixties and seventies - termed the post-soul era - created new ways to understand the aesthetics of global racial representation. Daphne Lamothe shows that beginning around 1980 and continuing to the present day, Black literature, art, and music resisted the pull of singular and universal notions of racial identity. Developing the idea of 'Black aesthetic time' - a multipronged theoretical concept that analyzes the ways race and time collide (...) in the process of cultural production - she assesses Black fiction, poetry, and visual and musical texts by Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Dionne Brand, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Stromae, among others. Lamothe asks how our understanding of Blackness might expand upon viewing racial representation without borders - or, to use her concept, from the permeable, supple place of Black aesthetic time. Lamothe purposefully focuses on texts told from the vantage point of immigrants, migrants, and city dwellers to conceptualize Blackness as a global phenomenon without assuming the universality or homogeneity of racialized experience. In this new way to analyze Black global art, Lamothe foregrounds migratory subjects poised on thresholds between not only old and new worlds, but old and new selves. (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue "Phenomenology and Critique.".

This chapter provides a review of the hypothesis that synesthetic-like perception is present in infants and toddlers. Infants and very young children exhibit evidence of functional hyperconnectivity between the senses, much of which is reminiscent of the cross-sensory associations observed in synaesthetic adults. As most of these cross-sensory correspondances cannot be easily explained by learning, it is likely that these represent natural associations between the senses. In average adults, these 'natural associations' are felt only intuitively rather than explicitly. These observations (...) have led to the proposal of the 'neonatal synaesthesia hypothesis', which purports that all individuals are born synaesthetic, with explicit conscious perception of these natural cross-modal associations dissipating over development in typical individuals. This dissipation is likely the result of experience-dependent synaptic pruning and/or inhibition of cross-sensory neural connections. At the same time, cross-modal associations matching those common in the environment might be assumed to be learned. This hypothesis is re-evaluated in light of recent research findings, and is examined in the context of current evolutionary models of neuronal recycling and emerging evidence of longitudinal changes in children with synaesthesia. (shrink)

Mental health-care clinicians report that they hold patients responsible for morally objectionable behaviour but at the same time consider blaming attitudes to be inappropriate. These practices present a conundrum for all Strawsonian theories of responsibility. In response to this conundrum, Pickard has proposed severing the Strawsonian connection between being responsible and being an appropriate target of blaming attitudes. In this article I will argue that her solution fails to explain the practices at stake and provide an alternative solution that uncovers (...) an under-theorized stance we take towards those whose abilities are underdeveloped or compromised. (shrink)

Communication and cultivation accounts of responsibility argue that blaming has an important communicative and agency-cultivating function when addressed at someone we consider to be deserving of blame. On these accounts, responsible agents are agents who can understand negative reactive attitudes and are sensitive to their moral-agency cultivating function. In this paper I examine our reproachful engagements with agents whose moral agency is underdeveloped or compromised. I discuss how these engagements compare to blaming on CC accounts and argue reproachful engagements can (...) have an important communicative and agency-cultivating pointe. I then go on to propose an addition to CC-accounts that explains how underdeveloped and compromised agents can be held responsible. I will show how this addition resolves ambiguities in accounts from McKenna, Vargas and McGeer. I conclude the paper by anticipating an objection CC accounts could raise: that reproach and blame are co-extensive. (shrink)

In their article on the limited duty to reinterpret genetic variants, Watts and Newson argue that clinical labs are not morally obligated to conduct routine reinterpretation despite its potential clinical and personal value.1 We endorse the authors’ argument for a circumscribed duty to reclassify genomic variants in certain cases, including to promote diagnostic equity for racial and ethnic minority populations that have been historically excluded from and exploited by genomic research and medicine. However, given the history and resilience of scientific (...) racism, the use of socially constructed racial and ethnic categories to enhance diagnostic equity raises several ethical and practical challenges. In the short term, using socially constructed racial and ethnic categories to identify patients for variant reclassification is a practical approach for addressing concerns of diagnostic equity. In contrast, diagnostic accuracy depends on patients’ genetic similarity to reference genomes, rather than their socially determined race or ethnicity.2 Thus, in the long term, securing both diagnostic equity and diagnostic accuracy through targeted variant reclassification will require a shift away from relying on race and ethnicity and towards assessing genetic similarity. Critically, the identification of patients for genomic variant reclassification using socially constructed race or ethnicity runs the risk of perpetuating the harmful …. (shrink)

This article provides somephilosophical ``groundwork'' for contemporary debatesabout the status of the idea(l) of critical thinking.The major part of the article consists of a discussionof three conceptions of ``criticality,'' viz., criticaldogmatism, transcendental critique (Karl-Otto Apel),and deconstruction (Jacques Derrida). It is shown thatthese conceptions not only differ in their answer tothe question what it is ``to be critical.'' They alsoprovide different justifications for critique andhence different answers to the question what giveseach of them the ``right'' to be critical. It is arguedthat (...) while transcendental critique is able to solvesome of the problems of the dogmatic approach tocriticality, deconstruction provides the most coherentand self-reflexive conception of critique. A crucialcharacteristic of the deconstructive style of critiqueis that this style is not motivated by the truth ofthe criterion (as in critical dogmatism) or by acertain conception of rationality (as intranscendental critique), but rather by a concern forjustice. It is suggested that this concern should becentral to any redescription of the idea(l) ofcritical thinking. (shrink)

This paper presents the NeoCrawler – a tailor-made webcrawler, which identifies and retrieves neologisms from the Internet and systematically monitors the use of detected neologisms on the web by means of weekly searches. It enables researchers to use the web as a corpus in order to investigate the dynamics of lexical innovation on a large-scale and systematic basis. The NeoCrawler represents an innovative web-mining tool which opens up new opportunities for linguists to tackle a number of unresolved and under-researched issues (...) in the field of lexical innovation. This paper presents the design as well as the most important characteristics of two modules, the Discoverer and the Observer, with regard to the usage-based study of lexical innovation and diffusion. (shrink)

We investigated the automaticity of implicit sequence learning by varying perceptual load in a pure perceptual sequence learning paradigm. Participants responded to the randomly changing identity of a target, while the irrelevant target location was structured. In Experiment 1, the target was presented under low or high perceptual load during training, whereas testing occurred without load. Unexpectedly, no sequence learning was observed. In Experiment 2, perceptual load was introduced during the test phase to determine whether load is required to express (...) perceptual knowledge. Learning itself was unaffected by visuospatial demands, but more learning was expressed under high load test conditions. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that perceptual load is not required for the acquisition of perceptual sequence knowledge. These findings suggest that perceptual load does not mediate the perceptual sequence learning process itself, supporting the automaticity of implicit learning, but is mandatory for the expression of pure perceptual sequence knowledge. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is often seen as the engineering turn in biology. Philosophically speaking, entities created by synthetic biology, from synthetic cells to xenobots, challenge the ontological divide between the organic and inorganic, as well as between the natural and the artificial. Entities such as synthetic cells can be seen as hybrid or transitory objects, or neo–things. However, what has remained philosophically underexplored so far is the impact these hybrid neo–things will have on (our phenomenological experience of) the living world. By (...) extrapolating from Walter Benjamin’s account of how technological reproducibility affects the aura of art, we embark upon an exploratory inquiry that seeks to fathom how the technological reproducibility of life itself may influence our experience and understanding of the living. We conclude that, much as technologies that enabled reproduction corroded the aura of original artworks (as Benjamin argued), so too will the aura of life be under siege in the era of synthetic lifeforms. This article zooms in on a specific case study, namely the research project Building a Synthetic Cell (BaSyC) and its mission to create a synthetic cell–like entity, as autonomous as possible, focusing on the properties that differentiate organic from synthetic cells. (shrink)

Abstract: In this article, we explore what are ethical forms of holding service users responsible in mental health care contexts. Hanna Pickard has provided an account of how service users should be held responsible for morally wrong or seriously harmful conduct within contexts of mental health care, called the clinical stance. From a clinical stance one holds a person responsible for harm, but refrains from emotionally blaming the person and only considers the person responsible for this conduct in a detached (...) sense. Her account is based on what are considered best practices in the treatment of people with borderline personality disorder and addiction. We ask if this account generalizes across different diagnostic criteria and different clinical contexts. To begin to answer this question, we compare the clinical stance to an account of what are considered best practices in the treatment of service users at a specialized clinic for people with autism spectrum disorder in the Netherlands. We refer to this alternative account as the nurturing stance and highlight relevant similarities and differences between the clinical stance and the nurturing stance. We conclude with suggestions for further research and theorizing. (shrink)

Genes have long been used to validate social inequality. The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, by Kathryn Paige Harden, attempts not only to reclaim genetic research on human behavior from its eugenic past but also to argue that genetic research can be used to understand and enhance social equality. This review essay illustrates why embracing a political agenda in which genetics matter for social equality will not in practice advance efforts to reduce social inequality. It argues that (...) the points raised in The Genetic Lottery would be important in an alternate world in which structural inequalities have ceased to exist, but not in the world we live in today. (shrink)

This article evaluates communicative approaches to responsibility within the Strawsonian tradition. These approaches consider reactive attitudes to be forms of moral address and consider responsiveness to moral address a condition on responsible agency. The article consists of a critical and a positive part. In the first part, I identify a risk for these theories. They often provide an overly narrow account of how we can communicate with others about perceived moral disregard. I argue that, when read this way, a conversational (...) approach has implausible implications and falls prey to a familiar objection to Strawsonian theory: it would incorporate social injustices inherent to our responsibility practices. In particular, it would affirm ableist attitudes towards autistic individuals, by exempting them as moral agents on the basis of irrelevant criteria. In the second part, I propose an inclusive reading of the communicative approach. This inclusive account steers clear of ableism towards autistic individuals and accommodates diversity. Although it is also derived from our practices and psychologies, it does not incorporate the biases and injustices that are part of those practices, and instead it provides us with a means to criticize them. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a forward-looking account of the difference between the responsibility of children and the responsibility of adults. I do so by means of criticizing agency-cultivation accounts of responsibility. According to these accounts, the justification for holding a person to a norm is the cultivation of their moral agency, and children are, just like adults, considered responsible to the extent that they can have their moral agency cultivated in this manner. Like many forward-looking accounts, these accounts claim (...) that the purpose of holding adults to norms is similar to the purpose of holding children to norms. I argue that the justifications for holding adults to norms are different because of the particular ways in which adults can be in moral disagreement with one another, and the consequences that this has. Moral disagreement is relevant to consequentialist accounts because it impacts on whether and how we can secure beneficial outcomes via holding someone to a norm. One of the upshots of this analysis is that the forward-looking justification for holding adults to norms is qualitatively different from how and why we should hold children to norms. (shrink)

Consumers’ engagement in morally-questionable behaviors poses a serious threat to firms. To further the understanding of consumers’ behavior, this study explores the association and conflicts between their ethical and legal judgments. In addition, it examines the way consumers’ judgments depend on their mind-sets and the legal liability criterion of action. In two experiments, participants were asked to judge the ethicality and legality of consumers’ morally-questionable behaviors. Behavior activity and participants’ mind-sets were manipulated. The results show that consumers are more likely (...) to judge a behavior to be legal when they consider it ethical than when they consider it unethical. Nevertheless, conflicts between ethical and legal judgments are prevalent. Furthermore, ethical judgments, legal judgments, and the occurrence of conflicts between them depend on activity and on consumers’ mind-sets. Finally, consumers report uncertainty about the ethicality and legality of a wide range of morally-questionable behaviors. Thus, the results paint a picture of individuals who perceive the law to be often beyond their reach or in conflict with their ethical principles. They portray both ethical and legal judgments as dynamically-changing, subjective, and context-dependent. Theoretical contribution and business applications are discussed. (shrink)

Personal space is the distance that people tend to maintain from others during daily life in a largely unconscious manner. For humans, personal space-related behaviors represent one form of non-verbal social communication, similar to facial expressions and eye contact. Given that the changes in social behavior and experiences that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, including “social distancing” and widespread social isolation, may have altered personal space preferences, we investigated this possibility in two independent samples. First, we compared the size of (...) personal space measured before the onset of the pandemic to its size during the pandemic in separate groups of subjects. Personal space size was significantly larger in those assessed during the onset of the pandemic. Lastly, we found that the practice of social distancing and perceived risk of being infected with COVID-19 were linked to this personal space enlargement during the pandemic. Taken together, these findings suggest that personal space boundaries expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic independent of actual infection risk level. As the day-to-day effects of the pandemic subside, personal space preferences may provide one index of recovery from the psychological effects of this crisis. (shrink)

Infants possess only rudimentary face-processing skills, evidence from patients treated for congenital cataract and from monkeys deprived of face input for several months postnatally indicates that this early experience plays a key role in the ultimate development of expert face processing. This article provides evidence that early visual deprivation disrupts some but not all aspects of face processing and that the deficits caused by early visual deprivation are face-specific, but that it is visual deprivation rather than the lack of input (...) from faces per se that causes the deficits to occur. The evidence is placed from visually deprived monkeys and humans into a broader context showing the role of biased experience on the development of expert face processing. (shrink)

This paper analyses policies pertaining to school dress codes which have been formulated recently by all state education bureaucracies in Australia. It examines these policies and their implementation in the context of devolution, the marketisation of schools, and cognate social legislation. In doing so it seeks to understand the textual hiatus between government policy and schooling practices.

In this paper I ask what implicit attitudes tell us about our freedom. I analyze the relation between the literature on implicit attitudes and an important subcategory of theories of free will—self-disclosure accounts. If one is committed to such a theory, I suggest one may have to move to a more social conceptualization of the capacity for freedom. I will work out this argument in five sections. In the first section, I discuss the specific theories of free will that are (...) central to this paper. In the second section, I will show that implicit-bias research raises questions about people’s capacities to exercise free will. In the third section, I will consider how an individual may overcome these failures and argue that the individual ability for self-regulation is significantly limited. One could stop here and conclude that free will is a limited capacity. But I argue that this conclusion would be too hastily drawn. I will instead continue to ask what would be required for free will. By discussing how failures of free will are due to social structures and may be therefore repaired by changing social structures in section 4, I will arrive at an alternative conclusion about the capacity for free will in section 5. (shrink)

Providing effective feedback to patients in a rehabilitation training program is essential. As technologies are being developed to support patient training, they need to be able to provide the users with feedback on their performance. As there are various aspects on which feedback can be given, it is important to ensure that users are not overwhelmed by too much information given too frequently by the assistive technology. We created a rule-based set of guidelines for the desired hierarchy, timing, and content (...) of feedback to be used when stroke patients train with an upper-limb exercise platform which we developed. The feedback applies to both success on task completion and to the execution of compensatory movements, and is based on input collected from clinicians in a previous study. We recruited 11 stroke patients 1–72 months from injury onset. Ten participants completed the training; each trained with the rehabilitation platform in two configurations: with motor feedback and with no motor feedback. The two conditions were identical, except for the feedback content provided: in both conditions they received feedback on task success; in the MF condition they also received feedback on making undesired compensatory movements during the task. Participants preferred the configuration that provided feedback on both task success and quality of movement. This pilot experiment demonstrates the feasibility of a system providing both task-success and movement-quality feedback to patients based on a decision tree which we developed. (shrink)

That conditional, if-then reasoning does not emerge until 4–5 years has long been accepted. Here we show that children barely 3 years old can do conditional reasoning. All that was needed was a superficial change to the stimuli: When color was a property of the shapes rather than of the background, 3-year-olds could succeed. Three-year-olds do not seem to use color to inform them which shape is correct unless color is a property of the shapes themselves. While CD requires integrating (...) color and shape information, the dimensional change card sort task requires keeping those dimension cognitively separate – inhibiting attention to one when sorting by the other. For DCCS, a superficial change to the stimuli that is the inverse of what helps on CD enables 3-year-olds to succeed when normally they do not until ∼4⁤12 years. As we and others have previously shown, 3-year-olds can succeed at DCCS when color is a property of the background, instead of a property of the stimulus. Our findings on CD and DCCS suggest that scaffolding preschoolers’ emerging conceptual skills by changing the way stimuli look enables 3-year-olds to demonstrate reasoning abilities long thought beyond their grasp. Evidently, children of 3 years have difficulty mentally separating dimensions of the same object and difficulty mentally integrating dimensions not part of the same object. Our present CD findings plus our earlier DCCS findings provide strong evidence against prominent cognitive complexity, conditional reasoning, and graded memory theories for why 3-year-olds fail these two tasks. The ways we have traditionally queried children may have obscured the budding reasoning competencies present at 3 years of age. (shrink)

In homes, schools, and workplaces, women and men are often separated in ways that sustain gender stratification by reducing women's access to socially valued knowledge. The fact that these spatial arrangements may be imperceptible increases their power to reproduce prevailing status differences. I use cross-cultural and historical examples to illustrate that the more pronounced the degree of spatial gender segregation, the lower is women's status relative to men's. The advantages of such a spatial perspective are its interdisciplinary foundations and its (...) creation of avenues for change. (shrink)

This book is a lively and provoking introduction to film theory.

This book engages in an analysis of the ideals of freedom and social justice. Rolle examines and questions Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World by David Walker, which encourages slaves to embrace a theologically-based understanding of freedom and participate in insurrectionist activities to overthrow slavery.

In 1902, the Calabrian brigand Giuseppe Musolino was tried on several counts of murder and many crimes of lesser magnitude. While the tale of the brigand’s 1898 false conviction, imprisonment, escape and then revenge sparked a national debate about the political and cultural meaning of brigandage, the trial came to focus on Musolino’s emotional state at the time of his crimes. Was he a cold-blooded and calculating killer who manipulated southerners into believing he was a folk hero? Or was he (...) an angry, passionate and insane murderer victimized by his own feelings? Both jurists and scientists weighed in to determine his culpability. By turning a political question of banditry or brigandage into a psychological question of morbid or criminal emotions, the trial politicized the criminal character. This article examines the perspectives on emotions that shaped Musolino’s trial, and how psychiatric knowledge came to challenge legal notions of insanity and culpability. It argues that the determination of emotions as motives served to de-legitimize the rationale and political motives of the defendant, in turn politicizing his emotions and character. At the same time, the cause of Musolino’s crime and his culpability represented the failures of national unification and the ongoing tensions between the North and South of Italy. The introduction of psychiatric expertise into the criminal court pushed judgement and punishment to examine increasingly who a person was as opposed to what that person had done. The court’s definition of who a person ‘was’, was a matter of how that person felt. (shrink)

In this new and expanded edition of their controversial 1994 book, the authors update their analysis of what's gone wrong with Women's Studies programs. Their three new chapters provide a devastating and detailed examination of the routine practices found in feminst teaching and research.

This book demonstrates the vital connection between language and gesture, and why it is critical for research on second language acquisition to take into account the full spectrum of communicative phenomena. The study of gesture in applied linguistics is just beginning to come of age. This edited volume, the first of its kind, covers a broad range of concerns that are central to the field of SLA. The chapters focus on a variety of second-language contexts, including adult classroom and naturalistic (...) learners, and represent learners from a variety of language and cultural backgrounds. Gesture: Second Language Acquisition and Classroom Research is organized in five sections: Part I, Gesture and its L2 Applications, provides both an overview of gesture studies and a review of the L2 gesture research. Part II, Gesture and Making Meaning in the L2, offers three studies that all take an explicitly sociocultural view of the role of gesture in SLA. Part III, Gesture and Communication in the L2, focuses on the use and comprehension of gesture as an aspect of communication. Part IV, Gesture and Linguistic Structure in the L2, addresses the relationship between gesture and the acquisition of linguistic features, and how gesture relates to proficiency. Part V, Gesture and the L2 Classroom, considers teachers’ gestures, students’ gestures, and how students’ interpret teachers’ gestures. Although there is a large body of research on gesture across a number of disciplines including anthropology, communications, psychology, sociology, and child development, to date there has been comparatively little investigation of gesture within applied linguistics. This volume provides readers unfamiliar with L2 gesture studies with a powerful new lens with which to view many aspects of language in use, language learning, and language teaching. (shrink)

This book distinguishes 'citizen art' from within the field of social and activist art practices and examines how it performs new modes of citizenship.

A clear introduction to the major works of Kierkegaard that highlights the Lutheran framework of his thought, the book combines exposition of the texts within their philosophical, theological, and historical context with an engaging critical dialogue that brings Kierkegaard into debate with twenty-first century thought.