Promoting the use of contact tracing technology will be an important step in global recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Across two studies, we assessed two messaging strategies as motivators of intended contact tracing uptake. In one sample of 1117 Australian adults and one sample of 888 American adults, we examined autonomy-supportive and controlling message framing and the presence or absence of information safety as predictors of intended contact tracing application uptake, using an online randomized 2 × 2 experimental design. (...) The results suggested that the provision of data safety assurances may be key in affecting people’s intentions to use contact tracing technology, an effect we found in both samples regardless of whether messages were framed as autonomy-supportive or controlling. Those in high information safety conditions consistently reported higher intended uptake and more positive perceptions of the application than those in low information safety conditions. In Study 2, we also found that perceptions of government legitimacy related positively to intended application uptake, as did political affiliation. In sum, individuals appeared more willing to assent to authority regarding contact tracing insofar as their data safety can be assured. Yet, public messaging strategies alone may be insufficient to initiate intentions to change behavior, even in these unprecedented circumstances. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCurrent theoretical approaches suggest that mathematical anxiety manifests itself as a weakness in quantity manipulations. This study is the first to examine automatic versus intentional processing of numerical information using the numerical Stroop paradigm in participants with high MA. To manipulate anxiety levels, we combined the numerical Stroop task with an affective priming paradigm. We took a group of college students with high MA and compared their performance to a group of participants with low MA. Under low anxiety (...) conditions, participants with high MA showed relatively intact number processing abilities. However, under high anxiety conditions, participants with high MA showed higher processing of the non-numerical irrelevant information, which aligns with the theoretical view regarding deficits in selective attention in anxiety and an abnormal numerical distance effect. These results demonstrate that abnormal, basic numerical process... (shrink)

Plastic consumption is an important aspect of contemporary living, and studies that systematically examine consumers’ plastic waste recycling intentions from an ethical perspective are scarce. Considering the severity of plastic waste recycling problems globally based on the stimulus-organism-response paradigm, this study analyses how the information publicity influences consumers’ plastic waste recycling intentions from an ethical perspective in an emerging market economy. We investigate this link by focusing on the indirect effect of perceived social pressure and the moderating role of (...) media disposition (i.e., media richness and content trustworthiness). Data from a three-wave field survey of 469 household consumers from China showed that social pressure mediated the positive relationship between information publicity and ethical recycling intentions. Additionally, media richness and content trustworthiness moderate the link between information publicity and consumers’ perceptions of social pressure. These findings provide encouraging evidence for applying the SOR paradigm to explain the ethical recycling intention of consumers. The findings may assist policymakers in motivating consumers to think ethically about plastic waste recycling. (shrink)

‘According to informational semantics, if it's necessary that a creature can't distinguish Xs from Ys, it follows that the creature can't have a concept that applies to Xs but not Ys.’ There is, indeed, a form of informational semantics that has this verificationist implication. The original definition of information given in Dretske'sKnowledge and the Flow of Information, when employed as a base for a theory of intentional representation or ‘content,’ has this implication. I will argue that, in (...) fact, most of what an animal needs to know about its environment is not available as natural information of this kind. It is true, I believe, that there is one fundamental kind of perception that depends on this kind of natural information, but more sophisticated forms of inner representation do not. It is unclear, however, exactly what ‘natural information’ is supposed to mean, certainly in Fodor's, and even in Dretske's writing. In many places, Dretske seems to employ a softer notion than the one he originally defines. I will propose a softer view of natural information that is, I believe, at least hinted at by Dretske, and show that it does not have verificationist consequences. According to this soft informational semantics, a creature can perfectly well have a representation of Xs without being able to discriminate Xs from Ys. (shrink)

"According to informational semantics, if it's necessary that a creature can't distinguish Xs from Ys, it follows that the creature can't have a concept that applies to Xs but not Ys." (Jerry Fodor, The Elm and the Expert, p.32).

Small companies face an increasingly turbulent business environment. They are traditionally ‘power’ cultures, with informal, chaotic, communication flows. This has enabled them to maintain flexibility. However, informal information is no longer enough in the face of complexity. These companies need to concentrate onformal information for traceability. Effective management of both formal and informal information enables these small companies to adapt to change. This paper explores information in a small company, using an in-depth case study. The work (...) is of particular interest and value to the knowledge-intensive small company, one of the emerging types of company in Europe. (shrink)

Providing individuals with the information necessary to make informed decisions is now considered an ethical standard for health systems and general practitioners.

Under the background of global cross-border mobile commerce integration, the importance of cross-border payment research is becoming increasingly prominent and urgent. The important value of this study is to empirically research the influence power of key elements in using two different mobile payment platforms in Korea. The extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology has been widely applied in various studies because of its strong interpretive power. In Korea, there are a few empirical studies on Chinese users. Based (...) on a survey of 908 Chinese participants in Korea, this study is one application extending UTAUT2 by incorporating multi-group and multi-model constructs: UTAUT2, information system success model, and an initial trust model, considering a multi-group analysis with some mediating variables. By comparing the two different payment platforms’ characters, this manuscript provides a set of targeted measures to ensure Chinese WeChat Payment platform decision-makers create effective long-term strategic policies for cross-border m-payments in Korea, and eventually, benefit cross-border m-commerce and economic cooperation in Southeast Asia. (shrink)

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism economy has been seriously affected. China has implemented a direct traveling management mechanism and recovered from the pandemic faster than the rest of the world. However, the COVID-19 situation is complicated and uncontrollable because of the available unclear information including difficult medical terminologies. This study attempts to find the determinants of the travel intention of China’s tourists in the post-COVID-19 epidemic. Along with information overload and perception risk, an expanded research model of (...) the Theory of Planned Behavior was employed to propose the theoretical framework of this study. A survey was conducted among 518 tourists who spend their holiday in Hainan, which is a popular tourist destination in China. The empirical results show that information overload positively and significantly impacted perceived risk. Furthermore, perceived risk negatively affects the intention to travel. Perceived risk also negatively affected the attitude toward traveling. However, response self-efficacy did not have a significant effect on the intention to travel. Finally, based on the analysis results, this study proposes relevant research contributions and practical recommendations with management implications for the travel industries. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall defend Russell's view that Mont Blanc, with all of its snow elds, is a component part" or constituent of what is actually asserted when one utters Mont Blanc is more than 4000 meters high," and of what one believes, when one believes that Mont Blanc is 4000 meters high. I also claim, however, that a proposition that does not have Mont Blanc as a constituent plays an important role in the assertion and the belief that (...) Mont Blanc is more than 4000 meters high. Taken somewhat out of context, the quotes from Frege and Russell express insights that pull in di erent directions in the contemporary philosophy of language. Behind Frege's remark is the insight that reference is not direct but mediated. When we think and talk about things, our thoughts and words are not in direct contact with the things thought about and talked about. The meanings of our words, and the cognitive roles of our ideas, do not in and of themselves determine their reference. They get at objects via some aspects of.. (shrink)

Electronic information is a vital but complex component in the modern health care system, fueling ongoing efforts to develop a universal electronic health record infrastructure. This innovation creates a substantial tension between two desirable values: the increased quality and utility of patient medical records and the protection of the privacy of the information they contain. This article discusses related U.S. legislation, policy, and law—including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. This article offers an inclusive, equilibrium (...) model to conceptualize the spectrum of challenge that this interplay of desirable but oppositional values creates. The model illustrates the relationship between information privacy and information flow, and that between individual and society-level needs, within the resulting impact sectors of individual security, health care priorities, public health effectiveness, and e-health development, while specifying beneficial outcomes for each. (shrink)

Although organizations can derive competitive advantage from developing and implementing information systems, they are confronted with a rising number of unethical information practices. Because end-users and computer experts are the conduit to an ethical organizational environment, their intention to report unethical IT-related practices plays a critical role in protecting intellectual property and privacy rights. Using the survey methodology, this article investigates the relationship between willingness to report intellectual property and privacy violations and Machiavellianism, gender and computer literacy in (...) the form of programming experience. We found that gender and computer expertise interact with Machiavellianism to influence individuals’ intention of reporting unethical IT practices. This study helps us to improve our understanding of the emergent ethical issues existing in the IT-enabled decision environment. (shrink)

In this paper I present a dynamic-epistemic hybrid logic for reasoning about information and intention changes in situations of strategic interaction. I provide a complete axiomatization for this logic, and then use it to study intentions-based transformations of decision problems.

The problem of intentional identity, as originally offered by Peter Geach, says that there can be an anaphoric link between an indefinite term and a pronoun across a sentential boundary and across propositional attitude contexts, where the actual existence of an individual for the indefinite term is not presupposed. In this paper, a semantic resolution to this elusive puzzle is suggested, based on a new quantified intensional logic and game-theoretic semantics (GTS) of imperfect information. This constellation leads to (...) an expressive intensional language with a property of informational independence, argued to produce a purely semantic explication to intentional identity statements. One consequence is that various extra-logical and pragmatic factors become of secondary concern; it is possible to solve the puzzle by logico-semantic methods, albeit somewhat radically renewed ones. (shrink)

Virtual community websites are one of the applications that provide a platform for people with common interests to extend their social relations in social media. With the proliferation of food safety incidents in recent years, social media has often been a major channel for public engagement in risk communication because of its social networking and immediate interaction. To understand the users’ needs and satisfaction, this study proposed a model to develop and evaluate the antecedents of continuance intention toward food safety (...) information from social media. Based on the questionnaire collected from 289 Facebook users, this study assessed the integrated model of the expectation-confirmation theory and technology acceptance model with technology readiness as moderator. The results showed that the perceived ease-of-use, usefulness, and confirmation indirectly affected social media continuance usage intention through satisfaction; perceived ease-of-use, usefulness, and satisfaction were the direct determinants that affected the users’ social media continuance intention. Furthermore, positive technology readiness had significant effects on the relationship between the perceived ease-of-use, usefulness, confirmation, satisfaction, and continuance intention toward food safety information. This study contributes some important suggestions and managerial implications for food safety promotion providers, practitioners, and academics in the food industry, and social media environment. (shrink)

Organisms engage in various activities that are directed at objects, whether real or imagined. Such activities may be termed “intentional relations.” We present a four-level framework of social understanding that organizes the ways in which social organisms represent the intentional relations of themselves and other agents. We presuppose that the information available to an organism about its own intentional relations (or first person information) is qualitatively different from the information available to that organism about (...) other agents’ intentional relations (or third person information). However, through the integration of these two sources of information, it is possible to generate representations of intentional relations that are uniformly applicable to the activities of both self and other. The four levels of the framework differ in the extent to which such integration occurs and in the degree to which imagination is involved in generating these representations. Most animals exist at the lowest level, at which integration of first and third person sources of information does not occur. Of nonhuman species, only great apes exhibit social understanding at intermediate levels, at which integration of these sources of information provides uniform representations of intentional relations. Only humans attain the highest level, at which it is possible to represent intentional relations with mental objects. We propose that with the development of the imagination, children progress through three stages, equivalent to the later three levels of the framework. The abnormalities in social understanding of autistic individuals are hypothesized to result from a failure to develop integrated representations of intentional relations. (shrink)

The nursing profession has a responsibility to ensure that nursing goals and perspectives as these have developed over time remain the focus of its work. Explored in this paper is the potential problem for the nursing profession of recognizing both the promises and pitfalls of informational technologies so as to use them wisely in behalf of ethical patient care. We make a normative claim that maintaining a critical stance toward the use of informational technologies in practice and in influencing the (...) thought patterns of the younger generations of nurses is a moral imperative of the discipline, because without this practice can become subverted from professional goals in various ways. We use a synthesized concept we call “intentional authenticity” derived from the writing of Heidegger and Feminist care ethics to provide a foundation for the development of nurses who understand the importance of the nurse‐patient relationship and how the unthoughtful use of informational and other technologies can militate against effective or good nursing care. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer an analysis of ‘group intentions.’ On our proposal, group intentions should be understood as a state of equilibrium among the beliefs of the members of a group. Although the discussion in this paper is non-technical, the equilibrium concept is drawn from the formal theory of interactive epistemology due to Robert Aumann. The goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of group intentions that is informed by important work in economics and formal epistemology.

People intend to do things, try to do things, and do things. Do they also will to do things? More precisely, if people will to do things and their willing bears upon what they do, is willing, or volition, something distinct from intending and trying? This question is central to the intention/volition debate, a debate about the ingredients of the best theory of the nature and explanation of human action. A variety of competing conceptions of volition, intention, and trying have (...) been advanced in the literature; it would be impossible to examine each thoroughly in a single paper. We can show, however, that the major functional roles ascribed to volition are nicely filled by a triad composed of intention, trying, and information feedback. Sections I and II below develop an account of the connection between intention and trying. Section III examines leading arguments for the existence of volitions and decomposes volitions into members of the triad just identified. (shrink)

Due to extensive product differentiation and the personalized aesthetic needs of consumers, modern enterprises need different expressions of information to attract consumers’ interest and improve their purchase intention. This study draws from the elaboration likelihood model, anchoring theory, and media richness theory to explore how the expression of advertised information can be effectively matched to the product type to enhance consumers’ purchase intention. The mediating effect of information-processing fluency and moderating effect of consumers’ personal involvement on this (...) relationship is also explored. Data from experiments and questionnaires involving 1,292 participants were analyzed. The results show that direct expression of advertised information is more suitable for advertising search products, while metaphorical expressions of advertised information are more suitable for advertising experience products. These combinations of product type and expression of advertised information can effectively improve consumers’ purchase intention. Meanwhile, the main combined effect of the product type and expression of advertised information is mediated by consumers’ information-processing fluency, and moderated by consumers’ personal involvement positively. (shrink)

Daka destinations refer to tagging one’s visit to a popular destination by posting on social media. As a novel tourism concept derived from digital media in the post-pandemic era, Daka destinations have become a major option for potential tourists; thus, investigating tourist intentions toward them is of utmost significance to tourism recovery. Based on the viewpoints of information sources of Daka destinations, tourism motivations, and self-construction, this study investigates the research framework of potential tourism intentions through three scenarios. The (...) findings revealed the following: Different information sources have different stimuli for potential tourists, and WeChat Moments exerted a positive impact on tourism intention because of credibility; tourism bloggers from Weibo exert a more significant positive impact on tourism intentions of potential tourists because of professionalism. Considering the credibility of WeChat Moments, the extrinsic motivation of potential tourists exerted a more significant impact on tourism intentions; regarding professional tourism bloggers, the intrinsic motivation of potential tourists exerted a more significant impact on tourism intention. Regarding the credibility of WeChat Moments, dependent self-construction potential tourists with extrinsic motivation exerted a more significant impact on tourism intention. Regarding tourism bloggers with high professionalism, independent self-construal potential tourists with intrinsic motivation exerted a more significant impact on tourism intention. This study enriches the research mechanism of the formation path of potential tourists’ tourism intention, extends the self-construction theory to the research field of using social media to collect Daka destinations tourism information, and provides a reference to subsequent research on potential tourists’ tourism intention. (shrink)

This study uses online survey data from the United States and China to examine how contradictory information and social norms regarding HPV vaccines obtained through social media are related to young women’s attitudes and intentions surrounding HPV vaccination. The results show that exposure to contradictory information on social media had a greater negative association with intentions to receive HPV vaccination among the United States participants than among the Chinese participants, while social norms supporting HPV vaccines had a stronger (...) positive association with intentions to receive HPV vaccination among the Chinese participants than among the United States participants. These findings extend the literature on social media communication regarding HPV vaccination and contribute to our knowledge of cultural contexts that influence intentions to receive HPV vaccination. (shrink)

As the negative environmental impacts of transportation systems become more severe, governments and environmental groups are seeking more sustainable transportation options, such as replacing fuel-powered vehicles with electric vehicles and expanding public transportation systems to reduce the number of people driving on their own, in order to reduce the environmental impacts of transportation systems. At present, the rapid expansion of public transportation systems is not an easy task and requires a long period of time to plan for expansion and construction, (...) so people are increasingly looking to find means of transportation that meet sustainable conditions as solutions. In this context, electric bicycles are one of the solutions that people can choose, with benefits such as energy saving, carbon reduction, effective air pollution reduction, and simple and labor-saving riding. However, in Taiwan, despite the many benefits of electric bicycles, their popularity is not high. Therefore, this study focuses on the factors that affect the purchase of electric bicycles in Taiwan. The Influential Network Relation Map generated by the Z-based Decision-making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory technique is used to describe the influence relationships among the factors and to establish the key evaluation criteria of electric bicycle purchase intention. The results indicate that vehicle price, safety, motor performance, battery life, and battery durability are the most important factors in purchasing electric bicycles. Furthermore, the power of motor is considered as the factor that most significantly affects other criteria, while safety and price are most likely to be affected by other criteria. This study has contributed to academia and industry, for the dependency weights of these factors are set to provide a scientific and systematic way to show how consumers think in the decision-making process and to provide more reliable information and management implications for the electric bicycle industry. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the tourism industry in various ways, including tourists’ travel motivations and intentions. Unlike previous studies that have focused on the dark side of the pandemic, this study adds the dimension of perceptions of positive information on COVID-19 to the Theory of Planned Behavior to explore their influence on travel motivation and intention. A total of 470 valid questionnaires were collected from a sample of Chinese university students. The results showed that the students’ perceptions of (...) positive COVID-19 information positively impacted their travel intentions through the variables of perceived behavioral control, travel attitudes, and travel motivations. Perceived behavioral control was the mediating variable that most explained the impact of perceptions of positive COVID-19 information on travel motivation and intention. This study contributes to the understanding of the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism and of university students’ travel motivations and intentions. It also offers implications for the tourism industry to formulate relevant recovery strategies during and after the pandemic. (shrink)

This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it (...) does not require that fake news must be circulated with the intention to deceive one’s audience. In this way, our account overcomes a potential limitation of the current philosophical discussion about fake news, which appears to individuate the main problem with this phenomenon in the fact that fake news consumers are misled and misinformed. In contrast, the proposed analysis shows that an additional (and perhaps equally fundamental) problem uncovered by the spread of fake news is a widespread pathological relationship with information, one on which we consume information not to satisfy our interest in the truth but to strengthen our social identities and quench our hunger for social recognition. (shrink)

The moot point of the Western philosophical rhetoric about free will consists in examining whether the claim of authorship to intentional, deliberative actions fits into or is undermined by a one-way causal framework of determinism. Philosophers who think that reconciliation between the two is possible are known as metaphysical compatibilists. However, there are philosophers populating the other end of the spectrum, known as the metaphysical libertarians, who maintain that claim to intentional agency cannot be sustained unless it is (...) assumed that indeterministic causal processes pervade the action-implementation apparatus employed by the agent. The metaphysical libertarians differ among themselves on the question of whether the indeterministic causal relation exists between the series of intentional states and processes, both conscious and unconscious, and the action, making claim for what has come to be known as the event-causal view, or between the agent and the action, arguing that a sort of agent causation is at work. In this paper, I have tried to propose that certain features of both event-causal and agent-causal libertarian views need to be combined in order to provide a more defendable compatibilist account accommodating deliberative actions with deterministic causation. The ‘‘agent-executed-eventcausal libertarianism’’, the account of agency I have tried to develop here, integrates certain plausible features of the two competing accounts of libertarianism turning them into a consistent whole. I hope to show in the process that the integration of these two variants of libertarianism does not challenge what some accounts of metaphysical compatibilism propose—that there exists a broader deterministic relation between the web of mental and extra-mental components constituting the agent’s dispositional system—the agent’s beliefs, desires, short-term and long-term goals based on them, the acquired social, cultural and religious beliefs, the general and immediate and situational environment in which the agent is placed, etc. on the one hand and the decisions she makes over her lifetime on the basis of these factors. While in the ‘‘Introduction’’ the philosophically assumed anomaly between deterministic causation and the intentional act of deciding has been briefly surveyed, the second section is devoted to the task of bridging the gap between compatibilism and libertarianism. The next section of the paper turns to an analysis of folk-psychological concepts and intuitions about the effects of neurochemical processes and prior mental events on the freedom of making choices. How philosophical insights can be beneficially informed by taking into consideration folk-psychological intuitions has also been discussed, thus setting up the background for such analysis. It has been suggested in the end that support for the proposed theory of intentional agency can be found in the folk-psychological intuitions, when they are taken in the right perspective. (shrink)

Recently philosophers have proposed a wide variety of interventions referred to as ‘moral enhancements’. Some of these interventions are concerned with helping individuals make more informed decisions; others, however, are designed to compel people to act as the intervener sees fit. Somewhere between these two extremes lie interventions designed to direct an agent's attention either towards morally relevant issues – hat-hanging – or away from temptations to do wrong – hat-hiding. I argue that these interventions fail to constitute genuine moral (...) enhancement because, although they may result in more desirable outcomes – more altruism, more law-following, and/or less self-destructive behavior, they ignore a person's intentions, and often what makes an action right or wrong is the intent behind it. (shrink)

The influence of historical-causal theories of reference developed in the late sixties and early seventies by Donnellan, Kripke, Putnam and Devitt has been so strong that any semantic theory that has the consequence of assigning disjunctive representational content to the mental states of twins (e.g. [H2O or XYZ]) has been thereby taken to refute itself. Similarly, despite the strength of pre-theoretical intuitions that exact physical replicas like Davidson's Swampman have representational mental states, people have routinely denied that they have any (...) intentional/representational states. I want to focus on a particular brand of causal theory that is not historical, the so-called pure informational or nomic covariance theories, and examine how they propose to handle twin cases and replicas like Swampman. In particular, I will take up Fodor. (shrink)

Philosophical orthodoxy has it that intentional action consists in one’s intention appropriately causing a motion of one’s body, placing the latter as (conceptually and/or metaphysically) prior to the former. Here I argue that this standard schema should be reversed: acting intentionally is at least conceptually prior to intending. The argument is modelled on a Williamsonian argument for the priority of knowledge developed by Jenifer Nagel. She argues that children acquire the concept KNOWS before they acquire BELIEVES, building on this (...) alleged developmental priority of knowledge to establish its conceptual priority. I start by taking a closer look at Nagel’s argument, canvassing extant objections to do both with the empirical adequacy of her claims and their philosophical implications. Doing so allows me in the second part of the paper to draw lessons that inform the construction of a revamped parallel argument for the priority of ACTS INTENTIONALLY. (shrink)

I will concentrate on the 'executive' conception of intentions and intentional actions. I will argue that intentional bodily movements have distinctive observable characteristics that set them apart from non-intentional bodily motions. I will also argue that that when we observe an action performed by someone else, the perceptual representations we form contain information about the dynamics of movements and their relations to objects in the scene that can be exploited in order to identify at least the (...) more basic intentions of the agent. In the final part of the paper, I will offer some suggestions as to how this capacity to perceive the actions of other agents as intentional relates to our capacity to recognize our own actions as intentional. (shrink)

Background:Healthcare organizations are now challenged to retain nurses’ generation and understand why they are leaving their nursing career prematurely. Acquiring knowledge about the effect of ethical work climate and level of perceived organizational support can help organizational leaders to deal effectively with dysfunctional behaviors and make a difference in enhancing nurses’ dedication, commitment, satisfaction, and loyalty to their organization.Purpose:This study aims to determine the relationship between ethical work climate, and perceived organizational support and nurses’ organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and turnover (...) intention.Methods:A descriptive correlational research design was conducted in all inpatient care units at three major hospitals affiliated to different health sectors at Alexandria governorate. All nurses working in these previous hospitals were included in the study (N = 500). Ethical Climate Questionnaire, Survey of Perceived Organizational Support, Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, Index of Job Satisfaction, and Intention to Turnover scale were used to measure study variables.Ethical considerations:Approval was obtained from Ethics Committee at Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University. Privacy and confidentiality of data were maintained and assured by obtaining subjects’ informed consent to participate in the research before data collection.Findings:The result revealed positive significant correlations between nurses’ perception of overall ethical work climate and each of perceived organizational support, commitment, as well as their job satisfaction. However, negative significant correlations were found between nurses’ turnover intention and each of these variables. Also, approximately 33% of the explained variance of turnover intention is accounted by ethical work climate, organizational support, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction, and these variables independently contributed significantly in the prediction of turnover intention.Recommendation:Strategies to foster and enhance ethical and supportive work climates as well as job-related benefits are considered significant factors in increasing nurses’ commitment and satisfaction and decreasing their turnover intention. (shrink)

The concept of intention can do useful work in psychological theory. Many authors have insisted on a qualitative difference between prospective and intentions regarding their type of content, with prospective intentions generally being more abstract than immediate intentions. However, we suggest that the main basis of this distinction is temporal: prospective intentions necessarily occur before immediate intention and before action itself, and often long before them. In contrast, immediate intentions occur in the specific context of the action itself. Yet both (...) types of intention share a common purpose,namely that of generating the specific information required to transform an abstract representation of a goal-state into a concrete episode of instrumental action directed towards that goal. To this extent, the content of a prospective and of an immediate intention can actually be quite similar. The main distinction between prospective and immediate intentions becomes one of when, i.e., how early on, the episodic details of an action are planned. We propose that the conscious experience associated with intentional action comes from this process of fleshing out intentions with episodic details. (shrink)

The distinction between intentional and unintentional discrimination is a prominent one in the literature and public discourse; intentional discriminatory actions are commonly considered particularly morally objectionable relative to unintentional discriminatory actions. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what the two types amount to, and what generates the moral difference between them. The paper develops philosophically-informed conceptualizations of the two types based on which the moral difference between them may be accounted for. On the suggested account, intentional discrimination is characterized (...) by the agent viewing the content of an underlying discriminatory belief as a consideration that counts in favor of her action. This, it is argued, amounts to endorsing the discriminatory belief, which generates the particular moral severity of intentional discrimination. (shrink)

Mental states differ from most other entities in the world in having semantic or intentional properties: they have meanings, they are about other things, they have satisfaction- or truth-conditions, they have representational content. Mental states are not the only entities that have intentional properties - so do linguistic expressions, some paintings, and so on; but many follow Grice, 1957 ] in supposing that we could understand the intentional properties of these other entities as derived from the (...) class='Hi'>intentional properties of mental states. Of course, accepting this supposition leaves us with a puzzle about how the non-derivative bearers of intentional properties could have these properties. In particular, intentional properties seem to some to be especially difficult to reconcile with a robust commitment to ontological naturalism - the view that the natural properties, events, and individuals are the only properties, events, and individuals that exist. Fodor puts this intuition nicely in this oft-quoted passage: " I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they've been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of _spin_, _charm_, and _charge_ will perhaps appear upon their list. But _aboutness_ surely won't; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep.... If aboutness is real, it must be really something else. " Some philosophers have reacted to this clash by giving up one of the two views generating the tension. For example, Churchland, 1981 ] opts for intentional irrealism in order to save ontological naturalism, while. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the use of scientific models that attribute intentional content to complex systems bears a striking similarity to the way in which statistical descriptions are used. To demonstrate this, I compare and contrast an intentional model with a statistical model, and argue that key similarities between the two give us compelling reasons to consider both as a type of phenomenological model. I then demonstrate how intentional descriptions play an important role in scientific (...) methodology as a type of phenomenal model, and argue that this makes them as essential as any other model of this type. (shrink)

Edible insects are a potentially less burdensome source of proteins on the environment than livestock for a majority of rural consumers. Hence, edible insects are a timely idea to address the challenges of the supply side to sustainably meet an increasing demand for food. The objective of this paper is twofold. The first is to identify and compare rural-households’ intentions to consume insect-based foods among households drawn from two regions in Kenya—one where consumption of insects is common and the other (...) where the practice is uncommon. The second is to explore consumers’ trust in sources of information regarding quality and appropriateness of food items. The study employed an extended theory of planned behaviour and involved 432 participants. Results indicate that rural households have positive intentions to consume insect-based foods and those intentions are higher for individuals who are more familiar with the practice. Results also show that information sources from industry are more trusted than those from the media. Further, the study revealed that control variables such as perceived availability of insect-based foods and their level of fit with the culinary practices have a higher influence on consumption intentions than general attitudes. In addition, age of the respondent, gender, household size and level of formal education, significantly influence the consumption intentions. The study discusses the implications of these findings in the development of sustainable agri-food systems. (shrink)

Information and communication technology has become the great technological fix of our time and not the least in the education system. There seems to be no end to the hype of ICT and the accompanying promises that education will be revolutionized—“smart” pupils will be made and the so-called knowledge society propelled. This master narrative has many co-authors, some of whom have the best intentions and realize the big challenge of educating the world population. In response to the two insightful (...) reviews of my article, I want to question this master narrative further and in doing so make clear where I agree and disagree with the reviewers. (shrink)

The words ―Rights,‖ ―Trust,‖ ―Human Dignity,‖ and even ―Government‖ have widely varying meanings and connotations, differing across time, languages and cultures. Concepts of rights, trust, and human dignity have been examined for centuries in great depth by ethicists and other philosophers and by religious think-ers, and more recently by social scientists and, especially as related to information, by information scientists. Similarly, discussions of government are well documented in writings back to Plato and Aristotle, with investi-gations of electronic government (...) dating back only to the early 1990s with the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web. At first e-government was described in glowing, positive terms. Little, if any, attention was paid to two critical questions: 1) Will people trust e-government? and 2) How will cultural differences affect individuals‘ trust in government and their perceptions of govern-ment‘s effect of their human dignity? Examinations of trust and distrust by individuals within organizations have addressed questions of motives and intentions, expectations of behavior, protection of interests, confi-dence in accuracy and reliability of information, vulnerability, and reciprocity, among other complex topics. Establishing e-government services often requires going through several phases: 1) publish , 2) interact transact transform . Building and maintaining trust in e-government require developing an understanding both of the many levels of interactions where trust must be earned and of cultural differences. Another challenge in developing such a framework is that e-government, itself, is very dynamic, changing rapidly over time. Trust in content or a system available one day may not carry over when the content and/or system changes dramatically. Components of a framework must include the follow-ing dimensions: conceptual domains, cultural dimensions, information content dimensions, and system di-mensions. Of course, these dimensions must be considered within the context of rapidly changing govern-ments, ICT services, the digital divide, and other factors. This paper provides a very brief overview of some of the notions of trust and distrust, concentrating on those concerning trust as it relates to notions of power, trust in organizations, and trust in information and information systems as one part of a framework to ad-dress the question of trust in e-government. It also makes a few recommendations for how to build citizen-centric e-government to ensure information rights through a focus on human dignity, fundamental human rights, and earning trust. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that informational semantics, the most well-known and worked-out naturalistic account of intentional content, conflicts with a fundamental psychological principle about the conditions of belief-formation. Since this principle is an important premise in the argument for informational semantics, the upshot is that the view is self-contradictory??indeed, it turns out to be guilty of a sophisticated version of the fallacy famously committed by Euthyphro in the eponymous Platonic dialogue. Criticisms of naturalistic accounts of content typically proceed (...) piecemeal by narrowly constructed counterexamples, but I argue that the current result is more robust. It affects a broad family of accounts, and provokes a wider doubt about the possibility of successful execution of the naturalistic project. (shrink)

I investigate the structure of pro-tempore disjunctive intentions: intentions directed at two or more eventually incompatible goals that are nonetheless kept open for the time being, while the agent is waiting to acquire more information to determine which option is better. These intentions are the basic tool for balancing, in our planning agency, rigidity and flexibility, stability and responsiveness to changing circumstances. They are a pervasive feature of intentional diachronic agency and contribute to secure dynamic consistency in our (...) plans. I show how they differ from simple disjunctive intentions, where the agent is indifferent between the options. I argue that pro-tempore disjunctive intentions meet the distinctive pressures of intentions and that, contrary to the initial impressions, they are both stable and successful at settling practical matters. In closing, I argue that pro-tempore disjunctive intentions are all-out intentions that are more explanatorily powerful than Holton's "partial" intentions. (shrink)