We argue that Shogan's critique, as well as that of Fox, fails to engage with the central focus of our article, which was to characterize and evaluate different approaches to lesbian ethics and to propose an alternative to the more familiar approaches.

We explore our role as researchers and witnesses in the context of an emerging partnership with the Penelakut Tribe, the aim of which is to locate the unmarked graves of children who died while attending the notorious Kuper Island Indian Residential School on their territory (southwest British Columbia). This relationship is in the process of taking shape, so we focus on understanding conditions for developing trust, and the interactional expertise necessary to work well together, with a good heart. We suggest (...) that, in some respects, this may be usefully understood as a practice of witnessing on several dimensions. (shrink)

Trust is often an assumed outcome of participation in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) as they directly connect producers with consumers. It is based on this potential for trust “between producers and consumers” that AFNs have emerged as a significant field of food studies analysis as it also suggests a capacity for AFNs to foster associated embedded qualities, like ‘morality’, ‘social justice’, ‘ecology’ and ‘equity’. These positive benefits of AFNs, however, cannot be taken for granted as trust is not necessarily an (...) outcome of AFN participation. Using Chinese case studies of AFNs, which are characterised by a distinct form of trust pressure—consumers who are particularly cynical about small scale farmers, food safety and the organic credentials of producers—this paper highlights how the dynamics of trust are in constant flux between producers and consumers. I suggest that it is the careful construction of the aesthetic and multi-sensory qualities of food, which is often celebrated via social media, that human centred relations in Chinese AFNs are mediated. This leads to two key conclusions: first, that the key variable for establishing trust is satisfying the consumer's desire for safe (i.e. "fresh") food; and second, the materiality of the food and the perception of foods materiality (especially through social media), must both be actively constructed by the farmer to fit the consumer's ideal of freshness. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic, and an account of consequence offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. This text presents what the authors term as 'logical pluralism' arguing that the notion of logical consequence doesn't pin down one deductive consequence relation; it allows for many of them.

In the past decade structures and processes for the ethical review of UK health care research have undergone rapid change. Although this has focused users' attention on the functioning of review committees, it remains rare to read a substantive view from the inside. This article presents details of processes and findings resulting from a novel structured reflective exercise undertaken by a newly formed research ethics review panel in a university school of nursing and midwifery. By adopting and adapting some of (...) the knowledge to be found in the art and science of malt whisky tasting, a framework for critical reflection is presented and applied. This enables analysis of the main contemporary issues for a review panel that is primarily concerned with research into nursing education and practice. In addition to structuring the panel's own literary narrative, the framework also generates useful visual representation for further reflection. Both the analysis of issues and the framework itself are presented as of potential value to all nurses, health care professionals and educationalists with an interest in ethical review. (shrink)

What happens when someone acts? A familiar answer goes like this. There is something that the agent wants, and there is an action that he believes conducive to its attainment. His desire for the end, and his belief in the action as a means, justify taking the action, and they jointly cause an intention to take it, which in turn causes the corresponding movements of the agent's body. I think that the standard story is flawed in several respects. The flaw (...) that will concern me in this paper is that the story fails to include an agent-or, more precisely, fails to cast the agent in his proper role. (shrink)

Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of..

Abstract I argue that meaning in life is importantly influenced by bioloical ties. More specifically, I maintain that knowing one's relatives and especially one's parents provides a kind of self-knowledge that is of irreplaceable value in the life-task of identity formation. These claims lead me to the conclusion that it is immoral to create children with the intention that they be alienated from their bioloical relatives?for example, by donor conception.

Retributive theories of punishment argue that punishing a criminal for a crime she committed is sufficient reason for a justified and morally permissible punishment. But what about when the state gets lucky in its decision to punish? I argue that retributive theories of punishment are subject to “Gettier” style cases from epistemology. Such cases demonstrate that the state needs more than to just get lucky, and as these retributive theories of punishment stand, there is no anti-luck condition. I’ll argue that (...) Gettier-style cases demonstrate an impermissible instance of punishment, even though they meet the conditions of retributive theories of punishment. Retributive theories are, therefore, too weak. The safety condition from epistemology provides the anti-luck condition needed for permissible punishment. I argue that two forms of retributivism, rights-forfeiture and what I call standard retributivism, are both subject to Gettier-style cases. Unlike the literature on standards of proof, this paper argues that safety is a condition on punishment itself, i.e., in all nearby possible worlds, the accuser must correctly accuse the convicted for the crime they actually committed. (shrink)

This essay examines two tendencies in lesbian ethics as differing visions of community, as well as contrasting views of the relationship between the erotic and the ethical. In addition to considering those authors who make explicit claims about lesbian ethics, this paper reflects on the works of some lesbians whose works are less frequently attended to in discussions about lesbian ethics, including lesbians writing from the perspectives of theology and of literature.

Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree logic. (...) This is developed first in a basic, single-premise case; and then extended to the multipremise case, and to allowdegreesof consequence. The metatheoretic properties of degree logic are set out. On the positive side, the logic is supraclassical—all classical valid sequents are degree logic valid. Strikingly, metarules such as cut and conjunction introduction fail. (shrink)

J.L. Schellenberg offers a path to a new kind of religious outlook. Reflection on our early stage in the evolutionary process leads to skepticism about religion, but also offers a new answer to the problem of faith and reason, and the possibility of a new, evolutionary form of religion.

The article "What works when working with athletes" by Fifer, Henschen, Gould, and Ravizza offers an interesting array of information and insights used by three highly experienced applied sport psychology consultants. This response article, however, contends that it may be possible to glean a further, and crucial, level of understanding by exploring the metacognition behind the selection of such courses of action. This may be provided through applied cognitive task analysis techniques to access the cognitive mechanisms underpinning professional practice. A (...) suggested research direction is to use ACTA techniques such as in-depth interviews and cognitive mapping with highly experienced applied sport psychology consultants. Specifically, these techniques would enable readers to access judgments and decisions, attentional demands, critical cues and patterns, and problem solving strategies. This level Of understanding may help to establish how these cognitive processes impact on the support provided to clients, and in turn, assist in developing more conceptually rigorous training methods. (shrink)

v. 1. Nicomachean ethics. Politics. The Athenian Constitution. Rhetoric. On Poetics.--v. 2. Logic.--v. 3. Physics. Metaphysics. On the soul. Short physical treaties.--v. 4. On the heavens. On generation and corruption. Meteorology. Biological treatises.

Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body subverts the authority of the anatomy teaching text, and challenges its claim to objectivity, by writing to the texts of Andreas Vesalius. Vesalius, working in the late 15th century, is recognized as having set the precedent for how the anatomy of the human body is taught even today. By writing a ‘lesbian body’ in disarray, Wittig metaphorically topples the authority and order of the standard Vesalian anatomy. By writing that body as a desiring subject, she (...) also invites us to question the desire for knowledge and ownership of that knowledge, and the illusion of scientific objectivity. Indeed, she offers us a celebration of the subjectivity of the production of texts and identities. But in her rewriting, she must also adopt a particular subject position and guard that position from the ‘wrong’ interpretations. The Lesbian Body is then, despite its literary and political force, a text which fears the interpretive role of its reader. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Empirical Questions Deserve Empirical AnswersColin MartindaleWhat is wrong with the current state of humanistic literary studies? On the theoretical level, we find various types of postmodernism, none of which makes much sense. On the other hand, there are approaches such as Marxism, Feminism, and the New Historicism. One can at least understand the contentions of such theorists, but these contentions are generally quite implausible. If poetry were an effective (...) means of maintaining the status quo or of oppressing anyone, one wonders why this was never noticed by politicians or generals. Now that the fact has been “discovered,” one wonders why it is not put to use by the power elite. What has led literary theory to stray onto such strange grounds? I believe that the faulty methods used by many literary theorists offer us at least part of an answer.Humanistic critics have no reasonable way of deciding among alternative answers if theorists happen to ask a question that is answerable—i.e., if they propose an empirical investigation. Their only method is one of producing examples and trying to persuade the reader. 1 Can a scientific approach provide something better? Certainly it can. First, the scientist does not pose unanswerable questions. Second, science provides methods for resolving disputes, for answering questions that are answerable. These methods are the scientific apparatus of counting, measuring, experimenting, and so on. Humanistic inquiry is simply not as effective as scientific inquiry. If a question is meaningful, it is by definition an empirical question. Science is the only method to us available for answering such questions. Humanism has no decision-making methods, no objective methods of choosing amongst competing hypotheses. [End Page 347]To paraphrase Plato, literary critics hypothesize many fine things but know nothing of how to test them. Science already has the methods. We merely need to apply them. To give an example from my own research, Raymond and a number of other literary scholars tried to say that across the course of the nineteenth century, the content of French poetry became more primary process (Freud), dedifferentiated (Werner), associative (Wundt), or mythic (Cassirer) in its content. 2 Unless one can translate Raymond’s comments into these theoretical terms, it is difficult to understand what in the world he is talking about, let alone to test his contention. Because literary critics usually make up their psychology as they go along, it is difficult to understand what they say. Because they have only a proof-by-example method, it is difficult to believe what they say. If we do make the translation and develop a metric to measure the degree to which poetic content is primary process, we can test Raymond’s hypothesis and find out if it is correct. 3 We can not only find out if it is correct. We can fit curves to the data, compute rates of change, relate rates of change to other variables, and so on. One cannot fit curves to what Lotman aptly called “literary chit-chat.” 4 Without such an objective measure of primary process content, one would no doubt assert that twentieth-century poetry is even more mythic in its content, because the poets themselves have said so. 5 In fact, the metric confirms Plato’s warning that poets lie.Some literary theorists, of course, do things that are at least close to science. Numbers would be of great help to such theorists if only as mnemonic devices. Given that people cannot hold more than about seven things in mind at once, the task of sorting out and comparing hundreds of texts is very difficult unless some counting is done. 6 Humanists can count, but they seem not to realize the value of this ability. Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists were doing what might be called zero-degree science. 7 It is reasonable to segment texts and look for regularities. It is not reasonable to look for regularities before one has determined the reliability of the segmentations: that is, before one has determined whether people agree as to how to segment texts. To compute a reliability coefficient, one has to use numbers, and one has to know the formula. Humanists don’t... (shrink)

Rose seems to be arguing against an extreme ultra-Darwinism that probably has no adherents. He incorrectly argues that a number of psychological traits are very difficult to measure. This is not the case. Rose argues that intelligence has no biological correlates. In fact, it is correlated with brain size, EEG evoked potentials, and cerebral glucose uptake during problem solving. Data that Rose should be aware of are omitted when they do not fit the case he is trying to make.

Page has done connectionist researchers a valuable service in this target article. He points out that connectionist models using localized representations often work as well or better than models using distributed representations. I point out that models using distributed representations are difficult to understand and often lack parsimony and plausibility. In conclusion, I give an example – the case of the missing fundamental in music – that can easily be explained by a model using localist representations but can be explained (...) only with great difficulty and implausibility by a model using distributed representations. (shrink)

Ramachandran and Hirstein offer a number of interesting ideas about aesthetic preference. In this commentary I shall focus mainly on their ideas concerning peak shift and prototypicality. The authors give the example of a rat rewarded for responding to a rectangle and not rewarded for responding to a longer triangle . They argue that the rat will respond even more to a more elongated rectangle. In fact, two phenomena are involved here. Peak shift refers to the fact that the rat (...) responds more to a supernormal stimulus . Behavioural contrast refers to the fact that the rat responds more to the S++ than it did to the S+ before discrimination training took place. It does not detract from the authors’ main point, but we would be unlikely to find peak shift in the hypothetical experiment described. Peak shift only occurs when the S+ and the S- are very similar to each other . Let us say that we train a rat to respond to a 1000 Hz tone and not to respond to a 500 Hz tone. No peak shift will be found. We will find peak shift if the S+ is 1000 Hz and the S- is 950 Hz. The conventional explanation for this is that the animal shows generalization. A rat trained simply to respond to a 1000 Hz tone will also respond a bit less to one of 990 Hz, even less to one of 980 Hz, and so on. In discrimination training, our rat would have a strong tendency to respond to a 1000 Hz tone but, because of generalization from the 950 Hz tone, it would also have some tendency not to respond to it. If we subtract the inhibitory gradient around 950 Hz from the excitatory gradient around 1000 Hz, we will end up with maximal responding around, say, 1010 Hz . Intuitively, we would expect the rat to respond more to the S++ but also less vigorously than it had to the S+ before discrimination training was begun. This is because the inhibitory gradient has been subtracted from the excitatory gradient. Surprisingly, we find behavioural contrast; the rat responds more vigorously to the S++ than it had to the S+. Grossberg argues that this is because there is a tendency to keep amount of activation on a layer of cortex constant. (shrink)