A major part of police work consists in providing services and information to the general public. A stated goal of such police work is to be service-minded and contribute to a positive encounter. This article analyses service requests in calls to the duty desk of a large police station and focuses on how officers deal with requests that have to be rejected. It reveals a general pattern in which officers produce the rejection in a dispreferred format and include displays of (...) empathy, accounts for the rejection and suggestions for alternative solutions. However, in certain types of requests the rejections are not infrequently produced in a direct and unmitigated fashion, without accounts or explanations.This is especially notable in requests that touch upon institutional constraints, such as professional secrecy. And in certain cases the rejections are even delivered in an aggravated form, involving an explicit or implicit challenge to the legitimacy of the request. These rejections cast the caller in an oppositional role, infringing the professional constraints of the police. However, the constraints in question may not be accessible to the callers. The officers will consequently be experienced as hostile and will subvert their own objectives of showing service-mindedness. (shrink)

This paper analyses the logical structure of the balancing of conflicting normative arguments, and asks whether non-monotonic logic is adequate to represent this type of legal or practical reasoning. Norm conflicts are often regarded as a field of application for non-monotonic logics. This paper argues, however, that the balancing of normative arguments consists of an act of judgement, not a logical inference, and that models of deductive as well as of defeasible reasoning do not give an adequate account of its (...) structure. Moreover, it argues that as far as the argumentation consists in logical inferences, deductive logic suffices for reconstructing the argumentation from the internal point of view of someone making normative judgements. (shrink)

This paper aims at reconstructing Radbruch’s relativistic conception of law within the framework of a model of principles. The idea of relativism remains a disputed issue in current legal and moral philosophy. In spite of the fact that Radbruch’s legal philosophy lacks coherence, it includes elements that resemble modern conceptions of law as a system including principles to be balanced against each other. Therefore, a reconstruction within a model of principles might as well prove the fruitfulness of the model of (...) principles as render a more appropriate theoretical framework for Radbruch’s legal philosophy. After an outline of Radbruch’s relativism, I will discuss some critical points of his approach and, subsequently, present a reconstruction according to the model of principles, which makes plausible at least some of Radbruch’s contentions. (shrink)

An explanation of the Dunning–Kruger effect is provided which does not require any psychological explanation, because it is derived as a statistical artifact. This is achieved by specifying a simple statistical model which explicitly takes the boundary constraints into account. The model fits the data almost perfectly.JEL ClassificationA22; C24; C91; D84; D91; I21.

Gauss’ 1809 discussion of least squares, which can be viewed as the beginning of mathematical statistics, is reviewed. The general consensus seems to be that Gauss’ arguments are at fault, but we show that his reasoning is in fact correct, given his self-imposed restrictions, and persuasive without these restrictions.

In this paper I want to point out the multifaceted impact of utilitarianism as well as pragmatism, applied as the unified philosophy of environmental protection. Special attention is paid to the utilitarian aspect of Marxism, and a continuous, comprehensive case study from Poland – in the context of European economic realities – serves as an example of social receptionof the utilitarian paradigm in contemporary environmental protection policy.

_Airy Nothings_ contains eleven contributions on the scholarly and literary representations of the Otherworld of Faerie from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

In two experiments and two different research paradigms, we tested the hypothesis that Zen meditation increases access to accessible but unconscious information. Zen practitioners who meditated in the lab performed better on the Remote Associate Test than Zen practitioners who did not meditate. In a new, second task, it was observed that Zen practitioners who meditated used subliminally primed words more than Zen practitioners who did not meditate. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

In searching for an appropriate utility function in the expected utility framework, we formulate four properties that we want the utility function to satisfy. We conduct a search for such a function, and we identify Pareto utility as a function satisfying all four desired properties. Pareto utility is a flexible yet simple and parsimonious two-parameter family. It exhibits decreasing absolute risk aversion and increasing but bounded relative risk aversion. It is applicable irrespective of the probability distribution relevant to the prospect (...) to be evaluated. Pareto utility is therefore particularly suited for catastrophic risk analysis. A new and related class of generalized exponential (gexpo) utility functions is also studied. This class is particularly relevant in situations where absolute risk tolerance is thought to be concave rather than linear. (shrink)

The contributions in this volume treat aspects and manifestations of this cultural symbiosis, and they throw new light on authors and texts both more and less ...

Likert-scale surveys are frequently used in cross-cultural studies on leadership. Recent publications using digital text algorithms raise doubt about the source of variation in statistics from such studies to the extent that they are semantically driven. The Semantic Theory of Survey Response (STSR) predicts that in the case of semantically determined answers, the response patterns may also be predictable across languages. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) was applied to 11 different ethnic samples in English, Norwegian, German, Urdu and Chinese. Semantic (...) algorithms predicted responses significantly across all conditions, although to varying degree. Comparisons of Norwegian, German, Urdu and Chinese samples in native versus English language versions suggest that observed differences are not culturally dependent but caused by different translations and understanding. The maximum variance attributable to culture was a 5% unique overlap of variation in the two Chinese samples. These findings question the capability of traditional surveys to detect cultural differences. It also indicates that cross-cultural leadership research may risk lack of practical relevance. (shrink)

In 2014, the editorial board of BMC Medical Ethics came together to devise sections for the journal that would give structure to the journal help ensure that authors’ research is matched to the most appropriate editors and help readers to find the research most relevant to them. The editorial board decided to take a practical approach to devising sections that dealt with the challenges of content management. After that, we started thinking more theoretically about how one could go about classifying (...) the field of medical ethics. This editorial elaborates and reflects on the practical approach that we took at the journal, then considers an alternative theoretically derived approach, and reflects on the possibilities, challenges and value of classifying the field more broadly. (shrink)

To investigate whether making performance predictions affects prospective memory processing, we asked one group of participants to predict their performance in a PM task embedded in an ongoing task and compared their performance with a control group that made no predictions. A third group gave not only PM predictions but also ongoing-task predictions. Exclusive PM predictions resulted in slower ongoing-task responding both in a nonfocal and in a focal PM task. Only in the nonfocal task was the additional slowing accompanied (...) by improved PM performance. Even in the nonfocal task, however, was the correlation between ongoing-task speed and PM performance reduced after predictions, suggesting that the slowing was not completely functional for PM. Prediction-induced changes could be avoided by asking participants to additionally predict their performance in the ongoing task. In sum, the present findings substantiate a role of metamemory for attention-allocation strategies of PM. (shrink)

Arousal is one of the dimensions of core affect and frequently used to describe experienced or observed emotional states. While arousal ratings of facial expressions are collected in many studies it is not well understood how arousal is displayed in or interpreted from facial expressions. In the context of socioemotional disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, this poses the question of a differential use of facial information for arousal perception. In this study, we demonstrate how automated face-tracking tools can be (...) used to extract predictors of arousal judgments. We find moderate to strong correlations among all measures of static information on one hand and all measures of dynamic information on the other. Based on these results, we tested two measures, average distance to the neutral face and average facial movement speed, within and between neurotypical individuals and individuals with autism. Distance to the neutral face was predictive of arousal in both groups. Lower mean arousal ratings were found for the autistic group, but no difference in correlation of the measures and arousal ratings could be found between groups. Results were replicated in an high autistic traits group. The findings suggest a qualitatively similar perception of arousal for individuals with and without autism. No correlations between valence ratings and any of the measures could be found, emphasizing the specificity of our tested measures. Distance and speed predictors share variability and thus speed should not be discarded as a predictor of arousal ratings. (shrink)

Over the past three centuries in the West, there has been a sort of oscillation between two antagonistic visions of the world. One sees the world as being fundamentally inert, in such a manner that all hopes, dreams and technological delights are permitted. The other thinks of the world as inhabited by a spirit who consecrates all its parts by recording them in a great whole. We can think of the pantheism that sets itself in opposition to Newton's materialism or, (...) more exactly, to the materialist interpretation given to Newton in the 18th century. In the 17th century the opposite had occurred. The magic universe of the Renaissance had given place to the triumphs of the Cartesian mechanism. As for protestantism, which is said to have been one of the most powerful factors of disenchantment after the 17th century, how was one not to see it prolonged, by reaction, into a philosophy for which nature is the tangible presence of God? When Calvin wrote that nothing happens in nature that is not a direct effect of the divine will, we already see appear in the background the mystic ecstasies that Rousseau experienced in nature. For if no single leaf flutters and no breeze blows without divine intervention, then receiving the slightest sensation would mean, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, entering into direct contact with God. (shrink)

One of the dominant characteristics of Western philosophical and literary history of the last two centuries is that the object of desire (in the novel) and the object of perception (in epistemology) have been made to reveal aspects which are more complex than the classical age had suspected. With Descartes, everything was clear: the object is but a portion of extension. But with Kant things already become more complicated: the object has a mysterious. en-soi (an sich-in itself) which escapes us. (...) And the object of desire, in literature, acquires such a mystic character that it loses its status of creature. “For what the romantic lover seeks is not really the beloved”, writes Eric Heller. “Intermingled with his erotic craving, inarticulate, diffuse, and yet dominating it, is the desire for spiritual salvation.” It is no longer the object (the creature) which one wishes to embrace, but the invisible reality mirrored in it. Desire does not tend so much toward objects as toward what lies beyond these objects where, it believes, it will find its salvation. (shrink)

At first glance, the formulation of the principle of inertia—not. yet complete with Galileo, more precise with Gassendi, finally systematic with Newton—seems to constitute but one of the aspects of a process of deep transformations at the end of which traditional cosmology was replaced by various world systems. These transformations—or, to use a more classic term, this “ scientific revolution” —have been the object of numerous works, a list, of which would alone fill the pages of a thick volume. But (...) the principle of inertia itself, a principle about which can be said without exaggeration that it expressed the essence of this revolution at the same time as it stimulated it, has perhaps not received all the attention it deserves. And especially the impact of this principle on Western culture has not been fully measured. True, Alexandre Koyré has always insisted on the fact that, by reducing movement to a state like that of the state of rest, the principle of inertia expressed a new vision of the world more than a scientific result. But his admirable analyses deal more with the slow advent of the priciple of inertia among the natural philosophers who preceded, accompanied and then followed Galileo than with the theological, philosophical and literary impact of this principle. Moreover, by examining this impact, we discover that it is necessary to make a distinction between Euclidian space and absolute space, a distinction which is frequently implicit with certain scientific historians, but, and this must be emphasized, is more often ignored. (shrink)