The blogosphere’s heterogeneity has significantly increased in recent years. Thus, the blog-as-diary approach has shown its limitations. Viewing blogs as a genre is also misleading, as it confuses medium and genre. Considering that the studies of blog genres still need further theoretical and empirical investigations, we propose a method to assess blog posts, understood as utterances, the minimal unit of a blog. We then conduct an analysis of two large datasets from 100 Brazilian blogs. Three reviewers read and judged 5218 (...) posts from 50 A-list blogs and 1527 posts from 50 non-A-list blogs, captured in a 30-day period. Posts’ compositional form, theme and style were cross-analyzed in and between datasets. Our findings lead to the conclusion that blogs in the A-list group tend to post more and stick to themes that attract audiences. Non-A-list blogs post less and focus on themes of interest to bloggers themselves, not necessarily hype topics. (shrink)

¿Cómo afrontar la revisión del estatuto aleteico del aforismo? Para responder a la pregunta y con Nicolás Gómez Dávila como referente, analizaremos su relación con lo falso o lo probable, su tendencia a la refutación o la iconoclastia, así como la forma conflictiva en que sus proposiciones se relacionan con lo común o constituyen verdades de vida. El carácter complejo de su condición genérica exige asimismo un estudio de las implicaciones enunciativas de su estatuto de ficción y de la manera (...) en que sus lectores actualizan cierta búsqueda figurada de la verdad mediante una revelación epifánica del sentido. Finalmente, una aproximación genealógica al aforismo, sus juegos de verdad y discursos de veridicción apunta a dos aportaciones del último Foucault, el decir verdad del parresiasta y los hypomnematas, así como a una consideración del aforismo como un ritual vivo de la verdad. (shrink)

The starting point of this essay is the logical and political objection that Plato made against poetry, as well as the lack of distinction that he specified as the origin of its dangerousness, and which modernity converted into the condition of possibility of certain egalitarian forms of sensible experience and material life. I will then look at the function that the historical rearticulation of Platonic idealism has fulfilled from Romanticism to the present day in the age-old dispute between philosophy and (...) poetry, paying particular attention to the different readings of Hölderlin and Mallarmé carried out by Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Agamben as symbols of the disfiguration of poetry. I will analyze the tension between sense and sound as the founder of an irreducible territory that opens a potentiality indicative of its political force. Lastly, I will turn to Michel Foucault’s The Government of Self and Others to analyze the function of messianism and parrhesia in the contemporary characterization of political poetry and its conflicts with the truth-telling of philosophy. (shrink)

The time marked by the clock hands, the so-called “objective time,” is deeply different from the one perceived by the individual. Starting from this hypothesis, directly connected to the subjective modality of “living” the time and defined as time perspective, we will try to understand how much it affects the various domains of people's lives, attitudes, and experiences. Therefore, the research investigates whether all our decisions can be influenced by one or more time perspectives beyond our awareness. Last, but not (...) least, we will try to understand if some time perspectives in specific contexts are more functional and adaptive than others. (shrink)

The human being can be divided into body and mind, two inextricably linked aspects influencing each other. From birth, the body is the site of emotional experiences thanks to cellular memory. The t...

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 164-188, June 2022.

Previous research has established that the success of strikes, and social movements more broadly, depends on their ability to garner support from the public. However, there is scant published research investigating the response of the public to strike action by healthcare workers. In this study, we address this gap through a study of public responses to UK nursing strikes in 2022–2023, using a data set drawn from Twitter of more than 2300 publicly available tweets. We focus on negative tweets, investigating (...) which societal discourses social media users draw on to oppose strike action by nurses. Using a combination of corpus‐based approaches and discourse analysis, we identified five categories of opposition: (i) discourse discrediting nurses; (ii) discourse discrediting strikes by nurses; (iii) discourse on the National Health System; (iv) discourse about the fairness of strikers' demands and (v) discourse about potential harmful impact. Our findings show how social media users operationalise wider societal discourses about the nursing profession (e.g., associations with care, gender, vocation and sacrifice) as well as recent crises such as the Covid‐19 pandemic to justify their opposition. The results also provide valuable insights into misconceptions about nursing, strike action and patient harm, which can inform strategies for public communication. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Although “naturalistic fallacy” is a term coined in the twentieth century, scholars have long voiced myriad anxieties over the mechanisms by which their contemporaries have derived moral, social, and political lessons from natural phenomena—often as gambits for advancing their own alternative explanations. The essays in this Focus section explore five episodes in the history of such concerns with naturalistic reasoning in order to shed new light on the persistence of naturalism itself.

An absolute decline in US life expectancy in low education whites has alarmed policy makers and attracted media attention. Depending on which studies are correct, low education white women have lost between 3 and 5 years of lifespan; men, between 6 months and 3 years. Although absolute declines in life expectancy are relatively rare, some commentators see the public alarm as reflecting a racist concern for white lives over black ones. How ought we ethically to evaluate this lifespan contraction in (...) low education whites? Should we care, or is it racist to care? Does it constitute an injustice or reflect justice being done? I argue that the lifespan contraction in low education whites violates key normative criteria used to make determinations of health justice, and that these judgments do not vitiate concerns about racism. I conclude with reflections on US population health policy and building an inclusive health equity movement. (shrink)

Sex and sensibility: The role of social selection Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9464-6 Authors Erika L. Milam, Department of History, University of Maryland, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA Roberta L. Millstein, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA Angela Potochnik, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Joan E. Roughgarden, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020, USA Journal Metascience (...) Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

Current advances in assisted reproductive technologies aim to promote the health and well-being of future children. They offer the possibility to select embryos with the greatest potential of being born healthy (eg, preimplantation genetic testing) and may someday correct faulty genes responsible for heritable diseases in the embryo (eg, human germline genome modification (HGGM)). Most laws and policy statements surrounding HGGM refer to the notion of ‘serious’ as a core criterion in determining what genetic diseases should be targeted by these (...) technologies. Yet, this notion remains vague and poorly defined, rendering its application challenging and decision making subjective and arbitrary. By way of background, we begin by briefly presenting two conceptual approaches to ‘health’ and ‘disease’: objectivism (ie, based on biological facts) and constructivism (ie, based on human values). The basic challenge under both is sorting out whether and to what extent social and environmental factors have a role in helping to define what qualifies as a ‘serious’ disease beyond the medical criteria. We then focus on how a human rights framework (eg, right to science and right to the highest attainable health) could integrate the concepts of objectivism and constructivism so as to provide guidance for a more actionable consideration of ‘serious’. Ultimately, it could be argued that a human rights framework, by way of its legally binding nature and its globally accepted norms and values, provides a more universal foundation for discussions of the ethical, legal and social implications of emerging or disruptive technologies. (shrink)

“Walter Benjamin, Reader of Kafka: Study, Oblivion and Justice”. In this paper we propose to explore an aspect of Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death, an essay that Walter Benjamin wrote in 1934 for the Jüdische Rundschau, and to investigate an idea that does not develop there in extenso: the “study”. Throughout the text, we find that Benjamin relates this idea with two other concepts: first, he argues that study is opposed to “oblivion”, and, on the other (...) hand, links study with the notion of justice. In this way, both characterizations seem to coexist in the essay about Kafka, without the author developing them in depth. The objective of this work is, then, to delve into each of them in order to clarify how Benjamin conceives the study so that it can be associated with both a struggle against oblivion and with justice. (shrink)

Despite apparent political concern and action—often fuelled by high-profile cases and campaigns—legislative and institutional responses to image-based sexual abuse in the UK have been ad hoc, piecemeal and inconsistent. In practice, victim-survivors are being consistently failed: by the law, by the police and criminal justice system, by traditional and social media, website operators, and by their employers, universities and schools. Drawing on data from the first multi-jurisdictional study of the nature and harms of, and legal/policy responses to, image-based sexual abuse, (...) this article argues for a new joined-up approach that supports victim-survivors of image-based sexual abuse to ‘reclaim control’. It argues for a comprehensive, multi-layered, multi-institutional and multi-agency response, led by a government- and industry-funded online or e-safety organisation, which not only recognises the diversity of victim-survivor experiences and the intersection of image-based sexual abuse with other forms of sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination, but which also enables victim-survivors to reclaim control within and beyond the criminal justice system. (shrink)

Consequentialism is a moral philosophy that maintains that the moral worth of an action is determined by the consequences it has for the welfare of a society. Consequences of model design are a part of the model lifecycle that is often neglected. This paper investigates the issue using system dynamics modeling as an example. Since a system dynamics model is a product of the modeler’s design decisions, the modeler should consider the life cycle consequences of using the model. Seen from (...) a consequentialist perspective, the consequences of policies developed from system dynamics models determine the model’s moral value. This concept is explored by discussing model uncertainty from an engineering perspective. In this perspective, the ethical considerations shift from the behavior of the modeler to the model itself and the model’s inherent uncertainty. When the ethical considerations are taken away from the modeler and directed to what the model does, the ethical boundaries extend beyond the proximity of the model. This discussion renews the ethics conversation in system dynamics by considering this shift in philosophical perspective, and investigates how consequentialist moral philosophy applies to the modeling process and in communicating with decision-makers. A model of social assistance in Norway in the context of immigration pressures illustrates some possibilities for addressing these ethical concerns. This paper argues for an ethical framework, or at the very least, an ethical conversation within the field of system dynamics.Article first published online: 25 FEB 2017. (shrink)

The paper investigates various definitions of the concept of opinion as opposed to factual or evidence-based statements and proposes a taxonomy of opinions expressed in English as identified in selected social media. A discussion situates opinions in the realm of pragmatics and reaches to philosophy of language and cognitive science. The research methodology combines a thorough linguistic analysis of opinions, proposing their multifaceted taxonomy with the automatically generated lexical embeddings of positive and negative lexicon acquired from the analysed opinionated texts. (...) As proposed, the definition of the concept of opinion is best apprehended when looked upon in terms of an opinion event, with a number of necessary conditions on the one hand, and those that are characteristic of an explicit opinion prototype on the other. Lists of opinion discourse markers show their preferential uses either in positive or negative opinionated texts; however, no sets of necessary and/or sufficient opinion markers properties have been acquired from the analysed texts. The conclusions indicate a polysemous understanding of naturally occurring social media opinionated texts and a definitional flexibility of the boundaries around lexical positive and negative types of opinion markers. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Confucian formulations of personhood and the implications they may have for bioethics and medical practice. We discuss how an appreciation of the Confucian concept of personhood can provide insights into the practice of informed consent and, in particular, the role of family members and physicians in medical decision-making in societies influenced by Confucian culture. We suggest that Western notions of informed consent appear ethically misguided when viewed from a Confucian perspective.

This article uses music and the discourse about music to understand the practice of tolerance in Prague during the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Drawing on Las ensaladas, a collection of vernacular polyphony compiled by the Spanish composer Mateo Flecha the Younger, and Harmoniae morales, comprising musical settings of Latin texts by the Slovenian composer Jacobus Handl, the article argues that such music offered Prague's diverse citizens a medium for reflecting on how to live morally (...) and peaceably. Ultimately, this article challenges the commonplace that musical harmony offered an effective model for social harmony, arguing that the practice of singing together exposed the limits of tolerance even as it illuminated how difference might be accommodated. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo nos proponemos analizar un pasaje de El caso Wagner, en el que Nietzsche condensa una serie de problemáticas referidas al vínculo entre Wagner, la decadencia y la psicología. El carácter condensado de las afirmaciones que allí se presentan, suscitan una serie de interrogantes que intentamos responder a lo largo de nuestro escrito. En primer lugar, indagamos las razones por las cuales Nietzsche afirma que los alemanes malentendieron a Wagner y cómo se relaciona esto con el hecho (...) de que nunca hayan sido psicólogos. En segundo lugar, rastreamos por qué Nietzsche sostiene que existe una “afinidad” entre Wagner y la décadence francesa. A los fines de dilucidar estas cuestiones, recurrimos como estrategia interpretativa a una fuente central de la que se nutrió Nietzsche: los Essais de psychologie contemporaine de Paul Bourget. Finalmente, planteamos una tensión que encontramos entre el diagnóstico crítico de la decadencia y la práctica psicológica que Nietzsche reivindica. (shrink)

El presente trabajo busca reconstruir una tensión entre el pensamiento de Marx y Benjamin en relación al valor que cada uno le otorga a la memoria. En principio, podría afirmarse que estos autores asumen puntos de vista contrapuestos: mientras en El Dieciocho Brumario Marx sostiene que toda apelación al pasado es superstición, por lo que la revolución no puede sacar de allí su lírica; para Benjamin, el cambio revolucionario cita al pasado. Lo que llama la atención, sin embargo, es que (...) Benjamin en la Tesis XIV afirma que el salto al pasado que él reivindica es “la revolución tal y como la entendió Marx”. Nuestro objetivo aquí será indagar los motivos por los que Benjamin incluye esta referencia a Marx, considerando que él conocía su negativa a que la revolución se nutriera del pasado. (shrink)

What the Nazis called Aktion T4 was a euthanasia program, officially started on August 18th, 1939. The registration operations for individuals with physical or mental handicaps were followed by forced sterilization and transfer to clinics organized to kill. In this article, I try to explain the mechanisms that allowed the memory of Aktion T4 to be preserved and passed from one generation to the next; memories of the “merciful death” of approximately 70,000 “lives unworthy of life,” that find themselves embedded (...) in family records and family history. In the first section, I summarize the discussion that resulted from the theories of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. Even if those theories do not in any way allude to the consequences that we have witnessed decades after their publication, they started a debate about the value of life and the legitimacy of human intervention in the selection of hereditary character traits, as well as the concept of race and the different methods and forms of theories and eugenics that were later adopted in Europe and in the United States. In the case of Germany, translated into Rassenhygiene, those concepts flowed into the Nazi project of purification of the German people. Through interviews with families who had a relative interned in one of the program's clinics spread across the Reich territory between 1939 and 1945, I investigate the evolution and passage of memories stored within the family sphere, paying attention to the generational steps and processes of trauma. These stories are born from a complicated process of reconstructing these memories via interviews. Their recollections were full of painful silences and negations, similar to the thought process which led the victims to live in a condition that they could not understand, and separated them from the world before they were each made to face a solitary death, far from any contact with their families. The trauma that I analyze concerns actions that had been carried out by previous generations; in the majority of cases, younger generations were not aware of the destiny of their murdered relatives and therefore tried to rebuild the stories of people who they never had the opportunity to meet. I examine the problematic relationship of those being interviewed with the end-of-life issue and also the sense of guilt which is generated by the awareness of crimes that were committed. Aktion T4 was not a crime committed outside the national borders, nor a crime that extended beyond the private sphere to the “others.” Instead, it existed within the most central and intimate place of Nazi culture: the family. (shrink)

The increasing concern about ethics and integrity in research communities has brought attention to how students and junior academics can be trained on this regard. Moreover, it is known that ethical behaviour and integrity not only involve individual but also group norms and considerations. Thus, through action research and participant observation, this research investigates the learning processes through which 64 students collaboratively develop research ethics and integrity competencies. The aim was to understand how bachelor, master and PhD students approach ethical (...) dilemma cases through a collaborative process. The data consisted of recorded group work on ethics cases, student group reports, and post-training questionnaires. Later, the analyses considered groups as the unit of analysis. These data were analysed through content analysis utilizing the SOLO taxonomy to identify levels of understanding and assess evolvement of ethical sensitivity during a case-based training session. The results show that all groups reached the level of understanding where the groups demonstrated that concepts had been understood appropriately, but occasionally struggled to make connections between them. Students perceived working collaboratively as beneficial. The results help teachers of research ethics and integrity to make pedagogically justified choices in their teaching. Drawing on the results of this study, we propose a tool for the formative assessment of student learning of research ethics and integrity. (shrink)

Existing whistle-blowing models rely on “cold” economic calculations and cost-benefit analyses to explain the judgments and actions of potential whistle-blowers. I argue that “hot” cognitions – value conflict and emotions – should be added to these models. I propose a model of the whistle-blowing decision process that highlights the reciprocal influence of “hot” and “cold” cognitions and advocate research that explores how value conflict and emotions inform reporting decisions. I draw on the cognitive appraisal approach to emotions and on the (...) social-functional value pluralism model to generate propositions. (shrink)

By conceptualizing place-making as a dynamic process, this essay explores the history of two field sites that house long-term research projects in animal behavior: the Amboseli Baboon Project, cofounded by Jeanne Altmann in 1971, and Kay Holekamp’s Mara Hyena Project, which began in 1988. It highlights scientific place-making as crucial to the production of knowledge within behavioral ecology and invests our historical understanding of field sites with an appreciation for the intellectual processes that have transformed land into places for the (...) generation of scientific data. (shrink)

The study focused on university students' understanding and conceptions of ethical issues in research. Domain-specific and domain-transcending measures were developed to gauge the students' awareness of ethical issues. Responses were obtained from 269 undergraduate and graduate students at a U.S. regional university. Participant withdrawal, the debriefing of research participants, the dissemination of findings, and giving credit to co-contributors were the most challenging ethical issues for the students. Ethical awareness was predicted by professional and organizational socialization, and perspective taking. Contextualization greatly (...) improved the students' ability to recognize ethical issues. Simulations and role-taking are suggested as the means with which to teach students about the ethical issues perceived as challenging. (shrink)

The focus of this article is university teachers’ and students’ views of plagiarism, plagiarism detection, and the use of plagiarism detection software as learning support. The data were collected from teachers and students who participated in a pilot project to test plagiarism detection software at a major university in Finland. The data were analysed through factor analysis, T-tests and inductive content analysis. Three distinct reasons for plagiarism were identified: intentional, unintentional and contextual. The teachers did not utilise plagiarism detection to (...) support student learning to any great extent. We discuss the pedagogical implications and suggest that the contextual reasons for plagiarism require focus primarily on study strategies, whereas the intentional reasons require profound discussion about attitudes and conceptions of good learning and university-level study habits. (shrink)

El presente artículo introduce la traducción del francés al español del estudio sobre la espacialidad en Gilles Deleuze realizado en 2010 por el profesor Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc: «Cartografía y territorios». Se presenta, para ello, una lectura culturalista de la filosofía occidental del espacio, destacando dos de sus rasgos, la hiperfecundidad y el temporalismo, que retoma el que es considerado aquí como el primer esbozo de tematización de las cartografías tacto-libidinales de lo vivo, a saber: la filosofía aristotélica del alma. Así, se (...) espera contextualizar y apreciar de mejor manera toda concepción de la espacialidad que rehabilite la hiperfecundidad del espacio y evacúe el temporalismo, permitiendo desactivar las concepciones tradicionales de subjetividad e identidad, tal como logra hacerlo la geofilosofía de Deleuze. (shrink)

Une analyse historique du cours d’analyse supérieure donné par Guido Fubini à l’université de Turin en 1916 et entièrement consacré à la théorie des nombres ouvre d’intéressantes perspectives d’étude. L’article retrace une pratique de patrimonialisation collective, au sens où il analyse comment une communauté mathématique liée à un lieu spécifique organisait l’enseignement supérieur au cours d’une année donnée, l’objectif étant d’identifier ce qu’elle jugeait important de préserver et de transmettre par rapport à un certain domaine du savoir, aux ressources disponibles (...) et à une identité construite sur le temps long. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious work on the contribution of family environments to adolescent emotion dysregulation has tended to focus on broad parenting characteristics ; however, it is possible that day-to-day variability in parenting may also relate to emotion dysregulation. The current study sought to test whether inconsistency in the quality of daily parent-youth interactions related to multiple indices of emotion dysregulation in adolescents. Two-hundred-twenty-two adolescents participated with one parent. Adolescents completed 14-days of diary reporting on the quality of interactions with their parent and (...) their emotion dysregulation experiences for each day. Analyses reveal that, beyond the effects of average interaction quality, adolescents with greater variability in the quality of their interactions with their parent reported greater average emotion dysregulation across the days of diary recording and demonstrated greater variability in thei... (shrink)

El presente escrito hace una aproximación al trabajo literario de Oswald de Andrade desde la perspectiva benjaminiana de la historia que permite pensar un nuevo lugar para América Latina. Para alcanzar tal objetivo nos centraremos en el concepto de antropofagia a partir de dos importantes obras del autor: el “Manifiesto da poesía Pau-Brasil” (1924) y el “Manifiesto Antropófago” (1928), en las cuales de Andrade expone lo que entiende por antropofagia y cómo esta sería la característica del salvaje americano. Las afirmaciones (...) realizadas por el escritor brasilero serán analizadas teniendo en cuenta dos aspectos del materialismo histórico propuesto por Walter Benjamin, el rechazo a la idea de progreso y la trituración del valor tradicional de la obra de arte. (shrink)

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently upheld United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York Judge's denial of petitioner's application for a writ of habeas corpus. The Court held that it was not objectively unreasonable for the Appellate Division to conclude, in light of clearly established federal law as expressed by the Supreme Court of the United States, that a New York statute providing for the recommitment of specific defendants who plead not (...) responsible by reason of mental disease or defect under a mere “preponderance of the evidence” standard does not violate either due process or the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (shrink)

I should like to offer my greatest thanks to Paul Griffiths for providing the opportunity for this exchange, and to commentators Gillian Brown, Steven Fuller, Stefan Linquist, and Erika Milam for their generous and thought-provoking comments. I shall do my best in this space to respond to some of their concerns.

In this reply, we wish to defend our original position and address several of the points raised by two excellent responses. The first response questions the relevance of the notion of ‘serious’ within the context of human germline genome modification. We argue that the ‘serious’ factor is relevant and that there is a need for medical and social lenses to delineate the limits of acceptability and initial permissible applications of HGGM. In this way, ‘serious’ acts as a starting point for (...) further discussions and debates on the acceptability of the potential clinical translation of HGGM. Therefore, there is a pressing need to clarify its scope, from a regulatory perspective, so as to prevent individuals from using HGGM for non-therapeutic or enhancement purposes. The second response criticizes the narrow interpretation of the objectivist approach and the apparent bias towards material innovations when discussing the right to benefit from scientific advancements. As an in-depth discussion of the objectivist and constructivist approaches was beyond the scope of our original paper, we chose to focus on one specific objectivist account, one which focuses on biological and scientific facts. We agree, however, with the critique that material innovations should not be the sole focus of the right to benefit from scientific advancements, which also incorporates freedom of scientific research and access to scientific knowledge scientific freedom and knowledge, including the influence of these on ethical thinking and cultures. (shrink)

Editorial introduction to the Special Issue by Erika Goble, editor.

Background This paper describes the design, implementation, and process outcomes from three public deliberations held in three tribal communities. Although increasingly used around the globe to address collective challenges, our study is among the first to adapt public deliberation for use with exclusively Indigenous populations. In question was how to design deliberations for tribal communities and whether this adapted model would achieve key deliberative goals and be well received.Methods We adapted democratic deliberation, an approach to stakeholder engagement, for use with (...) three tribal communities to respect tribal values and customs. Public deliberation convenes people from diverse backgrounds in reasoned reflection and dialogue in search of collective solutions. The deliberation planning process and design were informed by frameworks of enclave deliberation and community-based participatory research, which share key egalitarian values. The deliberations were collaboratively designed with tribal leadership and extensive partner input and involvement in the deliberations. Each deliberation posed different, locally relevant questions about genomic research, but used the same deliberation structure and measures to gauge the quality and experience of deliberation.Results A total of 52 individuals participated in the deliberations across all three sites. Deliberants were balanced in gender, spanned decades in age, and were diverse in educational attainment and exposure to health research. Overall, the deliberations were positively evaluated. Participant perceptions and external observer datasets depict three deliberations that offered intensive conversation experiences in which participants learned from one another, reported feeling respected and connected to one another, and endorsed this intensive form of engagement.Conclusion The adapted deliberations achieved key deliberative goals and were generally well received. Limitations of the study are described. (shrink)

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is an inherently feminine color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing (...) the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this paper, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose that essentialism—which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful “essences”—emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the paper, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens' K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this paper illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology. (shrink)

Abstract:Many scientists argue that the world is becoming increasingly dominated by human activity, much to the detriment of the natural world. In what scholars have dubbed the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch during which time human activity has been the dominating force over climate and the environment, many questions of environmental ethics have arisen. Who does the earth belong to? What is the relationship between humans and the environment? What is the moral standing of non-human life? Locke and Rousseau provide (...) varying answers to these questions, which are central to discussions of environmental ethics. In many ways, Locke and Rousseau's answers are opposed to each other, suggesting a differing world view when it comes to environmental ethics. Locke's understanding of environmental ethics seems to dominate, and perhaps even cause, the onset of the Anthropocene, but Rousseau's response, and a potential turn toward his understanding of environmental ethics marks an ideological shift in the way that humans understand their relationship with the world around them. This paper argues that the writings of Locke and Rousseau correspond to different stages of the Anthropocene with significant effects on both environmental ethics and environmental governance and policy. (shrink)