Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 54-77, January 2022.

In this volume, Stephen M. Gardiner and David A. Weisbach present arguments for and against the relevance of ethics to global climate policy. Gardiner argues that climate change is fundamentally an ethical issue, since it is an early instance of a distinctive challenge to ethical action, and ethical concerns are at the heart of many of the decisions that need to be made. Consequently, climate policy that ignores ethics is at risk of.

The uniquely human emotion of disgust is intimately connected to morality in many, perhaps all, cultures. We report two studies suggesting that a predisposition to feel disgust is associated with more conservative political attitudes, especially for issues related to the moral dimension of purity. In the first study, we document a positive correlation between disgust sensitivity and self-reported conservatism in a broad sample of US adults. In Study 2 we show that while disgust sensitivity is associated with more conservative attitudes (...) on a range of political issues, this relationship is strongest for purity-related issues—specifically, abortion and gay marriage. (shrink)

This volume examines Rawls's theory of international justice as worked out in his controversial last book, The Law of Peoples.

Legal theorists are familiar with John Finnis's book Natural Law and Natural Rights, but usually overlook his interventions in US constitutional debates and his membership of a group of conservative Catholic thinkers, the 'new natural lawyers', led by theologian Germain Grisez. In fact, Finnis has repeatedly advocated conservative positions concerning lesbian and gay rights, contraception and abortion, and his substantive moral theory derives from Grisez. Bamforth and Richards provide a detailed explanation of the work of the new natural lawyers within (...) and outside the Catholic Church - the first truly comprehensive explanation available to legal theorists - and criticize Grisez's and Finnis's arguments concerning sexuality and gender. New natural law is, they argue, a theology rather than a secular theory, and one which is unappealing in a modern constitutional democracy. This book will be of interest to legal and political theorists, ethicists, theologians and scholars of religious history. (shrink)

After two generations of emphasis on governmental inefficiency and the need for deregulation, we now see growing interest in the possibility of constructive governance, alongside public calls for new, smarter regulation. Yet there is a real danger that regulatory reforms will be rooted in outdated ideas. As the financial crisis has shown, neither traditional market failure models nor public choice theory, by themselves, sufficiently inform or explain our current regulatory challenges. Regulatory studies, long neglected in an atmosphere focused on deregulatory (...) work, is in critical need of new models and theories that can guide effective policy-making. This interdisciplinary volume points the way toward the modernization of regulatory theory. Its essays by leading scholars move past predominant approaches, integrating the latest research about the interplay between human behavior, societal needs and regulatory institutions. The book concludes by setting out a potential research agenda for the social sciences. (shrink)

The ipsilesional arm of stroke patients often has functionally limiting deficits in motor control and dexterity that depend on the side of the brain that is lesioned and that increase with the severity of paretic arm impairment. However, remediation of the ipsilesional arm has yet to be integrated into the usual standard of care for upper limb rehabilitation in stroke, largely due to a lack of translational research examining the effects of ipsilesional-arm intervention. We now ask whether ipsilesional-arm training, tailored (...) to the hemisphere-specific nature of ipsilesional-arm motor deficits in participants with moderate to severe contralesional paresis, improves ipsilesional arm performance and generalizes to improve functional independence. We assessed the effects of this intervention on ipsilesional arm unilateral performance [Jebsen–Taylor Hand Function Test ], ipsilesional grip strength, contralesional arm impairment level [Fugl–Meyer Assessment ], and functional independence [Functional independence measure ]. Intervention occurred over a 3 week period for 1.5 h/session, three times each week. All sessions included virtual reality tasks that targeted the specific motor control deficits associated with either left or right hemisphere damage, followed by graded dexterity training in real-world tasks. We also exposed participants to 3 weeks of sham training to control for the non-specific effects of therapy visits and interactions. We conducted five test-sessions: two pre-tests and three post-tests. Our results indicate substantial improvements in the less-impaired arm performance, without detriment to the paretic arm that transferred to improved functional independence in all three posttests, indicating durability of training effects for at least 3 weeks. We provide evidence for establishing the basis of a rehabilitation approach that includes evaluation and remediation of the ipsilesional arm in moderately to severely impaired stroke survivors. This study was originally a crossover design; however, we were unable to complete the second arm of the study due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We report the results from the first arm of the planned design as a longitudinal study. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Questions about what experts need to know to facilitate their collaboration in interdisciplinary situations are usually answered with proposals concerning the technical methods, epistemic ground rules, and explanatory theories that one applies “across” disciplines, just as such methods, rules, and theories are applied “within” a discipline. However, phenomenology offers something better. Instead of following the traditional route of looking for general conditions that apply to collaborative practice, phenomenology turns to what actually happens in collaborative experience and shows that success is (...) not just a function of applied procedures, even when they are in play. Instead, individual experts seem to rediscover their ability to keep their thoughts and concepts looser, more informal, and open-endedly responsive to the situation—just as they did when they first began to shape unfamiliar circumstances into a regionally shared practice—only now with potentially interdisciplinary circumstances as their experienced phenomenon. By cultivating an awareness of how it is with life prior to its being variously studied, exploited, or harnessed to explanatory theories and essentialist ideas, they remain open to becoming expert collaborators, just as they are already regional experts. An example of this process is given from the authors’ recent field research. (shrink)

Questions about what experts need to know to facilitate their collaboration in interdisciplinary situations are usually answered with proposals concerning the technical methods, epistemic ground rules, and explanatory theories that one applies “across” disciplines, just as such methods, rules, and theories are applied “within” a discipline. However, phenomenology offers something better. Instead of following the traditional route of looking for general conditions that apply to collaborative practice, phenomenology turns to what actually happens in collaborative experience and shows that success is (...) not just a function of applied procedures, even when they are in play. Instead, individual experts seem to rediscover their ability to keep their thoughts and concepts looser, more informal, and open-endedly responsive to the situation—just as they did when they first began to shape unfamiliar circumstances into a regionally shared practice—only now with potentially interdisciplinary circumstances as their experienced phenomenon. By cultivating an awareness of how it is with life prior to its being variously studied, exploited, or harnessed to explanatory theories and essentialist ideas, they remain open to becoming expert collaborators, just as they are already regional experts. An example of this process is given from the authors’ recent field research. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

_Twenty-First Century Inequality & Capitalism: Piketty, Marx and Beyond_ is a collection of critical essays on the economist’s iconic 2014 book, from the perspective of critical theory, global political economy or public sociology, mostly drawn from the Marxist tradition.

Tras haber contendido en el siglo XX con diversas críticas bien fundamentadas, como las de cariz procedimentalista, el conjunto de ideas éticas, antropológicas y políticas conocido por Perfeccionismo se reincorpora en plena forma al actual debate sobre las formas de la vida en común y sus asuntos en juego: ciudadanía, multiculturalismo, fuentes de normatividad, teorías de la justicia, horizontes de lo político, etc. Hoy día, parece claro que una sociedad justa y equitativa requiere la presencia de una riqueza ética propia (...) de una democracia reflexiva; a todo ello, desde luego, puede contribuir una noción renovada de perfeccionismo. De ello y de la contribución que las ideas perfeccionistas hacen a la moral y la política en las complejas sociedades contemporáneas se ocupan los trabajos aquí recogidos. (shrink)

It is tough to relate visual perception or other achievements to physiological processing in the central nervous system. The diagrammatic, algebraic, and verbal pictures of how sights seem to Lehar do not advance understanding of how we manage to see what is in the world. There are well-known conceptual reasons why no such purely introspective approach can be productive.

Within international development [1], public health [2], and clinical medicine [3]–[5], there is increasing interest in determining whether cash payments or other economic incentives can be used to influence the choices and behavior of individuals and groups in order to promote desired health goals. However, a number of complex issues affect the review and approval by research ethics committees of research studying the effectiveness of using financial incentives to promote desired health goals. Current ethical and regulatory frameworks regard the provision (...) of gifts or cash payments to participants in human research as potentially problematic. Specifically, these frameworks imply that such incentives may undermine the autonomy of participant choice, hinder the disclosure of medical information, exacerbate social inequalities, or result in the exploitation or degradation of vulnerable populations [6]–[9]. Typically, these frameworks provide guidance about payment to research participants to reimburse expenses, to compensate for time and effort, to provide insurance coverage, or as an incentive to participate in the research itself. However, the issue of payment as a component of the research intervention is relatively new. RECs thus lack explicit guidance about ethical issues surrounding research that evaluates the use of financial incentives as an intervention to promote health. (shrink)

This book is concerned with how we should think and act in our work, leisure activities, and time utilization in order to achieve flourishing lives. The scope papers range from general theoretical considerations of the value, e.g. 'What is a balanced life?', to specific types of considerations, e.g. 'How should we cope with the effects of work on moral decision-making?'.

Coordinated daily rhythms are evident in most aspects of our physiology, driven by internal timing systems known as circadian clocks. Our understanding of how biological clocks are built and function has grown exponentially over the past 20 years. With this has come an appreciation that disruption of the clock contributes to the pathophysiology of numerous diseases, from metabolic disease to neurological disorders to cancer. However, it remains to be determined whether it is the disruption of our rhythmic physiology per se (...) (loss of timing itself), or altered functioning of individual clock components that drive pathology. Here, we review the importance of circadian rhythms in terms of how we (and other organisms) relate to the external environment, but also in relation to how internal physiological processes are coordinated and synchronized. These issues are of increasing importance as many aspects of modern life put us in conflict with our internal clockwork. (shrink)

Societal evaluation of new technologies, specifically nanotechnology and genetically engineered organisms, challenges current practices of governance and science. When a governing body is confronted by a technology whose use has potential environmental risks, some form of risk analysis is typically conducted to help decision makers consider the range of possible benefits and harms posed by the technology. Environmental risk assessment is a critical component in the governance of nanotechnology and genetically engineered organisms because the uncertainties and complexities surrounding these technologies (...) pose such risk potential. However, GEOs are unique technologies, and there is widespread, international recognition that many traditional forms of ERA are not well-suited for evaluating them. Nanotechnology products are also likely to need different models of risk assessment, as there is very little information on their fate, transport, and impacts in the environment. (shrink)

Considerable work during the past two decades has focused on modeling the structure of semantic memory, although the performance of these models in complex and unconstrained semantic tasks remains relatively understudied. We introduce a two‐player cooperative word game, Connector (based on the boardgame Codenames), and investigate whether similarity metrics derived from two large databases of human free association norms, the University of South Florida norms and the Small World of Words norms, and two distributional semantic models based on large language (...) corpora (word2vec and GloVe) predict performance in this game. Participant dyads were presented with 20‐item word boards with word pairs of varying relatedness. The speaker received a word pair from the board (e.g., exam‐algebra) and generated a one‐word semantic clue (e.g., math), which was used by the guesser to identify the word pair on the board across three attempts. Response times to generate the clue, as well as accuracy and latencies for the guessed word pair, were strongly predicted by the cosine similarity between word pairs and clues in random walk‐based associative models, and to a lesser degree by the distributional models, suggesting that conceptual representations activated during free association were better able to capture search and retrieval processes in the game. Further, the speaker adjusted subsequent clues based on the first attempt by the guesser, who in turn benefited from the adjustment in clues, suggesting a cooperative influence in the game that was effectively captured by both associative and distributional models. These results indicate that both associative and distributional models can capture relatively unconstrained search processes in a cooperative game setting, and Connector is particularly suited to examine communication and semantic search processes. (shrink)

Email archives are important historical resources, but access to such data poses a unique archival challenge and many born-digital collections remain dark, while questions of how they should be effectively made available remain. This paper contributes to the growing interest in preserving access to email by addressing the needs of users, in readiness for when such collections become more widely available. We argue that for the content of email to be meaningfully accessed, the context of email must form part of (...) this access. In exploring this idea, we focus on discovery within large, multi-custodian archives of organisational email, where emails’ network features are particularly apparent. We introduce our prototype search tool, which uses AI-based methods to support user-driven exploration of email. Specifically, we integrate two distinct AI models that generate systematically different types of results, one based upon simple, phrase-matching and the other upon more complex, BERT embeddings. Together, these provide a new pathway to contextual discovery that accounts for the diversity of future archival users, their interests and level of experience. (shrink)

Page's target article makes a good case for the strength of localist models. This can be characterized as an issue of where new information is integrated with respect to existing knowledge structures. We extend the analysis by discussing the dimension of when this integration takes place, the implications, and how they guide us in the creation of cognitive models.