Critically significant parental effects in behavioral genetics may be partly understood as a consequence of maternal brain structure and function of caregiving systems recently studied in humans as well as rodents. Key parental brain areas regulate emotions, motivation/reward, and decision making, as well as more complex social-cognitive circuits. Additional key environmental factors must include socioeconomic status and paternal brain physiology. These have implications for developmental and evolutionary biology as well as public policy.

“The sleeper awakes” is a convention of many literary utopias from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The plots of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and H. G. Wells’sWhen the Sleeper Wakes all famously involve a sleeping modern everyman who awakens to a future where the conflicts and contradictions of the burgeoning capitalist society have been resolved. The Bleilers identify dozens of other speculative novels from the same period employing this very device, such as William (...) Hudson’s A Crystal Age and Alvarado Fuller’s A.D. 2000.1 Chris Ferns has argued that this trope constitutes something of a “consoling... (shrink)

The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However Experiment 6, which provided a brief context for the modified concepts to lend them greater credibility, did reveal the predicted interaction. It is argued that the modifier effect arises primarily (...) from a general lack of confidence in generic statements about the typical properties of unfamiliar concepts. Neither prototype nor classical models of concept combination receive support from the phenomenon. 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of moral compunction among a sample of senior managers set against the background of their routine organizational participation. In considering what factors influence their moral sensibilities these managers were interviewed using an approach designed to elicit their perceptions concerning both the ethical and commercially imperative dimensions of their working lives. The qualitative data resulting from this inquiry, while tentative, indicates the primacy of the normative appeal of shareholder value, conditioned by the exigencies of engagement in (...) corporate bureaucracies, including the maintenance of career and livelihood responsibilities. These conclusions indicate the magnitude of the obstacle that the normative business ethics project requires to overcome in order to fulfil its promise. (shrink)

Our understanding of the philosophers of the past is not always assisted by the attempt to fit them under one or other of the categories that we currently use to map the philosophical landscape. We have grown used to the idea that there are three principal kinds of moral theory—deontological and broadly Kantian, consequentialist and broadly Millian, virtue-theoretic and broadly Aristotelian—and so historical approaches to moral philosophy tend to orientate themselves by assuming that each and every object of study must (...) count as one or other of these kinds of moralist. This is unfortunate. It is particularly unfortunate in respect of the moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Philosophers. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of moral compunction among a sample of senior managers set against the background of their routine organizational participation. In considering what factors influence their moral sensibilities these managers were interviewed using an approach designed to elicit their perceptions concerning both the ethical and commercially imperative dimensions of their working lives. The qualitative data resulting from this inquiry, while tentative, indicates the primacy of the normative appeal of shareholder value, conditioned by the exigencies of engagement in (...) corporate bureaucracies, including the maintenance of career and livelihood responsibilities. These conclusions indicate the magnitude of the obstacle that the normative business ethics project requires to overcome in order to fulfil its promise. (shrink)

Distinct systems for representing concepts as prototypes, exemplars, and theories are closely integrated in the mind, and the notion of concept is required as a framework for exploring this integration. Eliminating the term from our theories will hinder rather than promote scientific progress.

Aerts et al. provide a valuable model to capture the interactive nature of conceptual combination in conjunctions and disjunctions. The commentary provides a brief review of the interpretation of these interactions that has been offered in the literature, and argues for a closer link between the more traditional account in terms of concept intensions, and the parameters that emerge from the fitting of the Quantum Probability model.

A wide-ranging exploration and critical assessment of the work of a major figure in Chinese and comparative philosophy. In this volume, prominent philosophers working in Chinese thought and related areas critically reflect upon the work of Roger T. Ames, one of the most significant contemporary figures working in the field of Chinese philosophy. Through his decades of collaborative work in comparative methodology and cross-cultural interpretation, along with a number of pathbreaking translations of Chinese philosophical texts, Ames has managed to challenge (...) standing paradigms and open fresh avenues of research into the Chinese tradition. His work will be read and studied for years to come. The original essays presented here, which are substantive philosophical contributions in their own right, cover the full range of Ames’s scholarly output. They address methodological questions as well as specific issues in textual interpretation, including ample discussion of Ames’s most recent and provocative contribution: Confucian “role ethics.” In the final section of the book, Ames responds to each essay. The result is a conversation and engagement that both underscores the vitality of his thinking and indicates the directions it may take in the future. Altogether, this work provides a snapshot of a remarkable career—and an invitation to continue reflecting upon its meaning and importance. “This is an outstanding collection, critically and constructively engaging a scholar whose work has shaped the entire field of Chinese philosophy.” — Franklin Perkins, author of Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy. (shrink)

The chapter begins with early eighteenth-century descriptions of the use of reason, properly supplemented by faith and grace, in the government of the passions. Next the familiar figures of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson are presented, with emphasis laid upon their insistence that government of the passions is work that the individual has to do for himself. The question is then raised whether all people can be conceived as able to do the work necessary to self-government, and Mandeville is introduced as an (...) advocate of the view that the answer to this question is plainly No. The next section of the chapter provides examples of texts which give the faculty of conscience a governing role, as well texts which see in the formations of associations of ideas the possibility of gradual reform and correction of the passions. In conclusion the chapter makes brief mention of two trends that would prove important in the first decades of the next century: religious revivalism, and the advocacy of physiological cures to mental disorders. (shrink)

The sounds that make up spoken words are heard in a series and must be mapped rapidly onto words in memory because their elements, unlike those of visual words, cannot simultaneously exist or persist in time. Although theories agree that the dynamics of spoken word recognition are important, they differ in how they treat the nature of the competitor set—precisely which words are activated as an auditory word form unfolds in real time. This study used eye tracking to measure the (...) impact over time of word frequency and 2 partially overlapping competitor set definitions: onset density and neighborhood density. Time course measures revealed early and continuous effects of frequency (facilitatory) and on set based similarity (inhibitory). Neighborhood density appears to have early facilitatory effects and late inhibitory effects. The late inhibitory effects are due to differences in the temporal distribution of similarity within neighborhoods. The early facilitatory effects are due to subphonemic cues that inform the listener about word length before the entire word is heard. The results support a new conception of lexical competition neighborhoods in which recognition occurs against a background of activated competitors that changes over time based on fine-grained goodness-of-fit and competition dynamics. (shrink)

Char and colleagues provide a useful conceptual framework for the proactive identification of ethical issues arising throughout the lifecycle of machine learning applications in healthcare. Th...

ABSTRACT The subject of this paper is the place of Hume in Nicholas Phillipson's account of the Scottish Enlightenment. I begin with Phillipson's reading of Hume as ‘civic moralist’. I then turn to his account of Hume the author of The History of England. And from there I proceed to the place of Hume in his intellectual biography of Adam Smith. I conclude with a brief description of Phillipson's understanding of Hume's place in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment as (...) it mutated in the late eighteenth century and came to an end in the early nineteenth. I show how just as Phillipson's Hume cannot be understood apart from the Scottish Enlightenment, so also Phillipson's Scottish Enlightenment cannot be understood without Hume. (shrink)

My purpose in Hume: An Intellectual Biography was to write the first comprehensive account of Hume's career as an author, beginning with what we know about his education at Edinburgh, and ending with "My Own Life," the brief autobiography that Hume wrote shortly before he died. Where Ernest Mossner, in his classic The Life of David Hume, was explicitly concerned with the man rather than with the ideas, I was concerned with the ideas, and the arguments, rather than with the (...) man. Hume's biography was of interest to me insofar as, but no further than, it shed light on Hume's intellectual development. In many respects, Mossner's achievement as a biographer remains deeply impressive, and anyone wanting to gain a full... (shrink)

Three issues are raised in this commentary. First, the mapping of semantic information into the different layers could be done in a more realistic way by using the Context layer to represent situational contexts. Second, a way to differentiate category membership information from other property information needs to be considered. Finally, the issue of modal knowledge is raised.

Atran's thesis has strong implications for the doctrine of externalism in concepts (Fodor 1994). Beliefs about biological kinds may involve a degree of deference to scientific categories, but these categories are not truly scientific. They involve instead a folk view of science itself.

Consideration of color alone can give a misleading impression of the three approaches to category coordination: the nativist, empiricist and culturalist models. Empiricist models can benefit from a wider range of correlational information in the environment. Also, all three approaches may explain a set of perceptual categories within the human repertoire. Finally, a suggestion is offered for supplementing the naming game by varying the social status of agents.

This summary account of Hume’s life and works challenges the usual way of telling the story of Hume’s career. It is generally believed that what Hume most wanted to be was a philosopher and that Hume turned to politics and history because that desire was frustrated, principally by the reputation for atheism he had acquired as a result of his writings on religion. The author argues that, from the beginning, Hume was as interested in politics as he was in philosophy; (...) that a career as an independent man of letters, and not as a professional philosopher, was what he most wanted; and that that career was a success, with the History of England its triumphant culmination. Hume’s religious skepticism was no obstacle to his living the life that he most wanted to live, the life of a sophisticated and widely respected citizen of the European republic of letters. (shrink)

Three questions are raised: First, when did the eighteenth century in British philosophy begin and end? Secondly, is there a reason to talk in terms of British philosophy in this period, as different and distinct from English, Scottish, Welsh, and possibly also Irish and American philosophy? Thirdly, how should philosophy be defined in an eighteenth-century British context? The structure of the volume is then explained, and a brief indication given of the content of each chapter.

This brief essay reflects on my encounters with Polany, June and Rhine and tries to link some elements of their thought.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Cicero to British—and not only British—philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the most part, interest appears to have been much greater in De Officiis, De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum, De Natura Deorum, Academica, De Legibus, and so on, than in the works of Plato or of Aristotle. Yet Cicero was different things to different people. To many, he was the paradigmatic moderate Stoic, critical of the paradoxical excesses of Zeno (...) and Chrysippus, but unwilling to follow the Epicureans in their reduction of the goods of life to the merely useful and agreeable. In this rich and rewarding study of British moral philosophy from Locke to Hume, Tim... (shrink)

The commentaries by Rimé and Scherer underscore and extend many of the central themes discussed in our target article. This response filters the commentaries through the lens of our review article and highlights the core idea that relationships provide a vital context for the types of emotional responding outlined in the commentaries, including the social sharing of emotion as well as the link between emotional competence and physical health.

Competing perspectives on the nature of emotion are illustrated with latent and emergent variable models. Latent variable models draw from classical test theory, assuming that the measured indicators of emotion covary by virtue of some common executive, organizing neural circuit or network in the brain. By contrast, emergent variable models draw from a theory-driven, operational definition tradition, positing that emotions do not cause, but rather are caused by, the measured indicators of emotion, assuming no executive neural circuit or network, and (...) requiring no covariation among indicators. I suggest that the emergent variable model may be more compatible with the extant literature on the nature of emotion, especially in the age of affective neuroscience. (shrink)

This chapter considers the extent to which David Hume is properly regarded as a Scottish philosopher at all. It begins by looking at A Treatise of Human Nature and argues that there is little, if any, discernible connection between it and either the education Hume received at Edinburgh or what was going on in Scottish letters in the 1720s and 1730s. It also explores ways in which Hume, like William Robertson, engaged with and subverted the usual tropes of Scottish history (...) writing. His writings on religious topics Scotland were never far from Hume’s mind. Hume repeatedly found himself involved in the struggle between ‘Moderate’ and ‘Orthodox’ wings of the Church of Scotland, and this had a significant impact on how he presented his philosophy of religion. (shrink)

As scientists target communities for research into the etiology, especially the genetic determinants of common diseases, there have been calls for the protection of communities. This paper identifies the distinct characteristics of aboriginal communities and their implications for research in these communities. It also contends that the framework in the Belmont Report is inadequate in this context and suggests a fourth principle of respect for communities. To explore how such a principle might be specified and operationalized, it reviews existing guidelines (...) for protecting aboriginal communities and points out problems with these guidelines and areas for further work. (shrink)

Notwithstanding requirements for scientific/social value and risk/benefit proportionality in major research ethics policies, there are no widely accepted standards for these judgments in Phase 1 trials. This paper examines whether the principle of clinical equipoise can be used as a standard for assessing the ratio of risk to direct-benefit presented by drugs administered in one category of Phase 1 study—first-in-human trials involving patients. On the basis of the supporting evidence for, and architecture of, Phase 1 studies, the articles offers two (...) provisional conclusions: (1) the risks of drug administration in such trials cannot generally be justified on therapeutic grounds but by appeal to the social value of the research; and (2) a framework for adjudicating the ratio of risk/social-value must be developed. (shrink)

Evidence that confirms a scientific hypothesis is said to be ‘novel’ if it is not discovered until after the hypothesis isconstructed. The philosophical issues surrounding novel confirmation have been well summarized by Campbell and Vinci [1983]. They write that philosophers of science generally agree that when observational evidence supports a theory, the confirmation is much stronger when the evidence is ‘novel’... There are, nevertheless, reasons to be skeptical of this tradition... The notion of novel confirmation is beset with a theoretical (...) puzzle about how the degree of confirmation can change without any change in the evidence, hypothesis, or auxiliary assumptions... There have not yet appeared any obviously satisfactory solutions to these problems Much of the literature on novel confirmation relies on the Bayesian analysis of conditional probabilities. Let H represent a hypothesis, E an event that confirms the hypothesis, and B some relevant background information. Denote by Pr the conditional probability of x given y. There are various plausible measures of the degree of support that E lends to H. Among these are: Degree of support = Pr Degree of support = Pr – Pr Degree of support = Pr – Pr Degree of support = Pr – Pt In the work cited, Campbell and Vinci offer a somewhat more involved Bayesian interpretation. Formula is discussed by Gardner [1981] who points out that under this formulation there can be no role for novelty. 'The function Pr contains no third slot in which to insert a temporal relation between the invention of H and the inventor's learning E. Obviously, then, this relation could not possibly affect E's support of H.' Formula, on the other hand, suggests a role for novelty. Bayes's Theorem allows us to rewrite the formula as Degree of support = Pr x [Pr – 1] We can use 1/Pr as a measure of the novelty of E. Then shows that the degree of support increases with novelty of E. In the paper already cited, Campbell and Vinci discuss shortcomings of this analysis. Formula expresses an alternative offered by Howson [1984]. In that formula, Pr represents the probability of H assuming that only B – {E} is known. This allows for the possibility of non-novel facts generating support for hypotheses. Niiniluoto [1984] argues for a variant along the lines of, in which we account for the possibility that the theorist was unaware that his hypothesis entails E. One problem in deciding among these approaches is that the choice of a definition for the degree of support appears arbitrary. What kind of argument could justify the choice of one definition over another? It is our position that there can be no basis for addressing this question in the absence of an explicit model of the process by which hypotheses are generated. Only in the presence of such a model can the various conditional probabilities be given meaningful interpretations. We provide such models in Sections 1, 2 and 4. The simple model of Section 1, incorporating strong assumptions, yields the conclusion that novelty is irrelevant. When these assumptions are relaxed in the later sections, novelty becomes relevant for a variety of reasons. It is at least potentially the case that scientists have more information about their own abilities than is publicly available, and this information might influence their decisions about whether even to attempt novel prediction. If this is so, then it should be incorporated into the model of hypothesis generation. This requires an explicit discussion of how scientists respond to incentives and how the incentives themselves evolve, which in turn takes us into the realm of economic theory. We have addressed these issues in another paper, written for an audience of economists. The results of this research are summarized in Section 3. (shrink)

Participants were asked to carry out a series of simple tasks while following mental control instructions. In advance of each task, they either suppressed thoughts of their intention to perform the task, concentrated on such thoughts, or monitored their thoughts without trying to change them. Suppression resulted in reduced reports of intentionality as compared to monitoring, and as compared to concentration. There was a weak trend for suppression to enhance reported intentionality for a repetition of the action carried out after (...) suppression instructions had been discontinued. (shrink)

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes covered in the present volume. It highlights the interdisciplinary approach taken in the choice of contributors to the volume which it is hoped will result in new perspectives on the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. The chapter notes that the contributors approach Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and Reid from new points of view, and other important figures and philosophical themes are discussed in terms of their contributions to a distinctively Scottish philosophical (...) scene in the eighteenth century. The chapter presents an outline of these themes including Scottish institutions and education, moral philosophy, aesthetic theory, religious thought, and historical and political theory. (shrink)