Hurley’s is a difficult book to work through—partly because of its length and the complexity of its arguments, but also because each of the ten essays of which it is composed has a rather different starting point and focus, and because few of her arguments achieve real closure. Essay 2 discusses competing interpretations of Kant, essay 4 articulates nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness, essay 5 offers fresh interpretations of commissurotomy patients’ behavior, essay 6 develops an objection to Wittgenstein on rule following, (...) essay 8 attacks an alleged assumption of externalism, and chapter 10 explores the possibility of combining a “motor theory” and a “control theory” of perception. This is a very rich brew, and at least half the challenge this book presents consists in discerning its central argument and conclusion with enough precision to bring criticism to bear. (shrink)

True to his longstanding bias against grand unifying theories, Hacking chooses to pursue these questions by focusing on a specific case of memory-thinking: the history of multiple personality. His excavation of the contemporary terrain leads him, however, to the surprisingly grand conclusion that the various sciences of memory—including neurological studies of localization, experimental studies of recall, and studies in the psychodynamics of memory—all emerged in connection with attempts to “scientize the soul,” as a result of which spiritual battles have been (...) recast as scientific controversies “where we suppose there is such a thing as knowledge to be had”. (shrink)

The subjective deontic "ought" generates counterexamples to classical inference rules like modus ponens. It also conflicts with the orthodox view about modals and conditionals in natural language semantics. Most accounts of the subjective ought build substantive and unattractive normative assumptions into the semantics of the modal. I sketch a general semantic account, along with a metasemantic story about the context sensitivity of information-sensitive operators.

In this paper, I will argue that there is a deep connection between home-based care, technology, and the self. Providing the means for persons to receive care at home is not merely a kindness that respects their preference to be at home: it is an important means of extending their selfhood and respecting the unique selves that they are. Home-based technologies like telemedicine and robotic care may certainly be useful tools in providing care for persons at home, but they also (...) have important implications for sustaining selfhood in ways that are of value to individuals and those who care for them. I will argue, by appealing to Hilde Lindemann’s notion of “holding” persons’ identities in place, that technological interventions are not only useful tools for improving and sustaining health and good care at home, but that they may also help to extend our personal identities and relational capacities in ways that are practically and ethically good. Because of these important goods, I will claim that there is a prima facie moral duty to do this “holding” work and that it is best done by family members and loved ones who are well suited to the job because of their history and relationship with the individual that needs to be “held” in place. (shrink)

This paper treats the political and ethical issues associated with the new caretaking technologies. Given the number of feminists who have raised serious concerns about the future of care work in the United States, and who have been critical of the degree to which society “free rides” on women's caretaking labor, I consider whether technology may provide a solution to this problem. Certainly, if we can create machines and robots to take on particular tasks, we may lighten the care burden (...) that women currently face, much of which is heavy and repetitious, and which results in injury and care “burnout” for many female caretakers. Yet, in some contexts, I argue that high-tech robotic care may undermine social relationships, cutting individuals off from the possibility of social connectedness with others. (shrink)

This special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values assembles papers that consider relations among science, ethics, and justice. The papers are drawn from a 2011 National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop that brought together interdisciplinary scholars to consider, incorporate, and attend to the meanings, uses, and social consequences of ethical questions and justice ideals in technoscientific projects. The papers included in this special issue examine key areas that emerged from this workshop, including public participation, the production of knowledge, what counts as (...) consent, ownership of biomaterials, and others. Together, the papers raise questions about new directions and articulations of power, justice, and inequalities in science and technology studies. (shrink)

Questions regarding the nature of moral judgment loom large in moral philosophy. Perhaps the most basic of these questions asks how, exactly, moral judgments and moral rules are to be defined; what features distinguish them from other sorts of rules and judgments? A related question concerns the extent to which emotion and reason guide moral judgment. Are moral judgments made mainly on the basis of reason, or are they primarily the products of emotion? As an example of the former view, (...) Kant held all moral requirements to be derived from a principle of rationality (the categorical imperative). As an example of the latter, Hume famously claimed that reason is “the slave of the passions” and that moral judgments stem from the moral emotions. When addressing these issues, philosophers have largely relied on the traditional tools of philosophical analysis, along with introspection, anecdotal evidence and armchair speculation. In recent years, however, a rich body experimental psychology has emerged which, in the view of a growing number of philosophers, casts important new light on these venerable questions. Our aim, in this chapter, is to illustrate how empirical methods can help move traditional philosophical debates forward in interesting and important ways. Since space does not permit an exhaustive survey of the relevant experimental work, we will focus on a few of the most compelling examples. (shrink)

This study examines the relation between firms’ corporate philanthropic giving and their performance in three other social domains – employee relations, environmental issues, and product safety. Based on a sample of 384 U.S. companies and using data pooled from 1998 through 2000, we find that worse performers in the other social areas are both more likely to make charitable contributions and that the extent of their giving is larger than for better performers. Analyses of each separate area of social performance, (...) however, indicate that the relation between giving and negative social performance (cited concerns) only holds for the environmental issues and product safety areas. We find no significant association between corporate philanthropy and employee relations concerns. In general, these findings suggest that corporate philanthropy may be more a tool of legitimization than a measure of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Globally, there is a lack of adherence to the WHO definition of live birth. This is leading to untenable ethical inconsistencies due to significant variation in which infants are being acknowledged and registered as alive. If an infant is not registered as alive, there can be no acknowledgement of their rights as a child, and there are subsequent implications for worldwide child health resources and funding. Being alive should not be a quality that is geographically determined. This paper explores the (...) differing definitions that are used regarding live birth and the ethical and practical implications for infants, their families and child health worldwide. (shrink)

U.S. approaches to oversight of research and technological products have developed over time in an effort to ensure safety to humans, animals, and the environment and to control use in a social context. In modern times, regulatory and oversight tools have evolved to include diverse approaches such as performance standards, tradable allowances, consultations between government and industry, and pre-market safety and efficacy reviews. The decision whether to impose an oversight system, the oversight elements, the level of oversight, the choice of (...) approach, and its execution can profoundly affect technological development, individual and collective interests, and public confidence in technological products. Oversight is conducted by a range of institutions with various capabilities, cultures, and motives. Avenues for disputing oversight decisions are also important, and some argue that the U.S. operates in an adversarial regulatory culture in which Congress, the media, and stakeholders regularly contest the decisions of federal agencies. (shrink)

This article aims to rethink the trauma of the 1947 Partition of British India through the figure of the border. It is at the border that we can see how the present is as much constituted by the concentration of new realities that call for shifting frameworks of understanding as it is by past events that continue to haunt memory. It undertakes this task through a close reading of the trope of borders in Saadat Hasan Manto’s 1953 short story, ‘Toba (...) Tek Singh’. Partition fiction serves as a fruitful ground for developing new approaches to that history because, in part, literature is uniquely situated between representation and theory, between what a text represents and how it represents. In Manto’s story, the border is embodied in its central protagonist, Bishan Singh, who experiences an ontological struggle between being and belonging that exceeds the particular historical, geographical, and national context of the Partition. I suggest that the division of British India signaled a unique rupture within the subcontinent in which the creation of borders became the defining traumatic event of that history. This article thus moves away from the familiar nationalist rhetoric that has otherwise dominated conversations about the 1947 Partition of British India. It focuses instead on the geographical border as a conceptual figure that is at once spatially and corporeally oriented to a collective identity that exceeds nationalist frameworks of reference. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the different ways in which dream research can contribute to interdisciplinary consciousness research. As a second global state of consciousness aside from wakefulness, dreaming is an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness. However, programmatic suggestions for integrating dreaming into broader theories of consciousness, for instance by regarding dreams as a model system of standard or pathological wake states, have not yielded straightforward results. We review existing proposals for using dreaming as a model system, (...) taking into account concerns about the concept of modeling and the adequacy and practical feasibility of dreaming as a model system. We conclude that existing modeling approaches are premature and rely on controversial background assumptions. Instead, we suggest that contrastive analysis of dreaming and wakefulness presents a more promising strategy for integrating dreaming into a broader research context and solving many of the problems involved in the modeling approach. (shrink)

'This book not only revises the interpretation of Dewey's ethics but also has relevance to recent discussions about the possibility of naturalistic, ...

The executive hypothesis of self-regulation places cognitive information processing at the center of self-regulatory success/failure. While the hypothesis is well supported by cross-sectional studies, no study has tested its primary prediction, that temporary lapses in executive control underlie moments of self-regulatory failure. Here, we conducted a naturalistic experiment investigating whether short-term variation in executive control is associated with momentary self-regulatory outcomes, indicated by negative affect reactivity to everyday stressors. We assessed working memory capacity (WMC) through ultra-brief, ambulatory assessments on smart (...) phones five times per day in a 7-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study involving college-aged adults. We found that participants exhibited more negative affect reactivity to stressor exposures during moments when they exhibited lower than usual WMC. Contrary to previous findings, we found no between-person association between WMC and average stress reactivity. We interpret these findings as reflecting the role of executive control in determining one’s effective capacity to self-regulate. (shrink)

En el presente ensayo se analiza la crítica que hace Aristóteles a la teoría de las ideas de Platón; comenzaremos por saber cómo y por qué Aristóteles critica la teoría de las ideas, después nos enfocaremos en el libro de la Metafísica de Aristóteles, de donde obtendremos las críticas que hace a esta teoría y, para finalizar, veremos qué respuestas da Aristóteles a varios de los problemas que existen en la teoría de las ideas de Platón. Al final llegaremos a (...) unas conclusiones muy interesantes, porque notaremos que Aristóteles no estaba en contra de su maestro, sólo quería perfeccionar varias de sus ideas en su búsqueda de la verdad.¿Cómo y por qué Aristóteles. (shrink)

Physics, once known as “natural philosophy,” is the most basic science, explaining the world we live in, from the largest scale down to the very, very, very smallest, and our understanding of it has changed over many centuries. In Black Bodies and Quantum Cats , science writer Jennifer Ouellette traces key developments in the field, setting descriptions of the fundamentals of physics in their historical context as well as against a broad cultural backdrop. Newton’s laws are illustrated via the (...) film Addams Family Values , while Back to the Future demonstrates the finer points of special relativity. Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” serves to illuminate the mysterious nature of neutrinos, and Jeanette Winterson’s novel Gut Symmetries provides an elegant metaphorical framework for string theory. An enchanting and edifying read, Black Bodies and Quantum Cats shows that physics is not an arcane field of study but a profoundly human endeavor—and a fundamental part of our everyday world. (shrink)

Actualist counterpart theory replaces David Lewis’s concrete possible worlds and individuals with ersatz worlds and individuals, but retains counterpart theory about de re modality. While intuitively attractive, this view has been rejected for two main reasons: the problem of indiscernibles and the Humphrey objection. I argue that in insisting that ersatz individuals play the same role as Lewisian individuals, actualists commit the particularist fallacy. The actualist should not require stand-ins for every Lewisian individual. Ersatz individuals should instead be construed as (...) representations of actually existing qualitative ways for individuals to be, or qualitative properties individuals can instantiate. This necessitates changes elsewhere. Non-instrumental uses of Kripke semantics and standard counterpart semantics also require stand-ins for particular non-actual individuals. I argue that the actualist should instead adopt a non-standard counterpart semantics that more clearly illuminates the role that actual properties and relations play in explaining de re possibilities and necessities. The result is an intuitive and forceful reply to both the problem of indiscernibles and the Humphrey objection. (shrink)

En este explicamos, a grandes rasgos, lo que es el Paradigma Constructivista, comenzamos por revisar los antecedentes y bases del mismo que están fundamentados en los estudios e investigaciones de Piaget, continuamos con las problemáticas y posturas del constructivismo, lo que da pie para el siguiente subtema que se refiere a los distintos tipos de constructivismo de los que contamos cuatro; Piagetiano, Humano, Social y Radical, cerramos con la forma en que el constructivismo aborda los componentes de la educación que (...) son el alumno, maestro y la evaluación. (shrink)

Psychiatric ethics spans several overlapping domains, including the guidelines for ethical research in psychiatry, the professional ethics required in the practice of psychiatry, and a broader set of moral and ethical problems and dilemmas distinctive to, or at least magnified by, the mental health care setting. Reviewed here are selected issues arising in the last two domains, some seemingly inevitable components of mental disorder and its cultural history and others resultant from recent changes and discoveries. Even as science explains and (...) demystifies mental disorder, it is concluded, new ethical problems will continue to arise in psychiatry and certain recalcitrant problems will likely persist. (shrink)

According to classical arguments, language learning is both facilitated and constrained by cognitive biases. These biases are reflected in linguistic typology—the distribution of linguistic patterns across the world's languages—and can be probed with artificial grammar experiments on child and adult learners. Beginning with a widely successful approach to typology (Optimality Theory), and adapting techniques from computational approaches to statistical learning, we develop a Bayesian model of cognitive biases and show that it accounts for the detailed pattern of results of artificial (...) grammar experiments on noun-phrase word order (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012). Our proposal has several novel properties that distinguish it from prior work in the domains of linguistic theory, computational cognitive science, and machine learning. This study illustrates how ideas from these domains can be synthesized into a model of language learning in which biases range in strength from hard (absolute) to soft (statistical), and in which language-specific and domain-general biases combine to account for data from the macro-level scale of typological distribution to the micro-level scale of learning by individuals. (shrink)

Siempre ha existido un contante problema entre la libertad y el determinismo, como si se negaran una idea a la otra, pero ¿por qué el determinismo es tan cerrado con la idea de la libertad?, ¿qué pasaría si el determinismo no fuera tan duro y admitiera a la libertad como parte del ser humano?, ¿cuál postura es más convincente en su forma de ver la libertad?

The primary purpose behind effectiveness research is to determine whether a treatment with demonstrated efficacy has utility when administered to the general population. The main questions these studies are meant to answer are these: Can the typical patient respond to treatment? Is the treatment acceptable to the typical patient? Can the treatment be administered safely and in its entirety in the typical treatment setting? Is the treatment under study significantly better than the community standard of care both from a cost (...) and outcome perspective? Answering these questions is meant to provide sufficient information to providers and policymakers so that effective interventions can be adopted and become the new community standard. For this research to make a meaningful impact on a provider and policymaker's decision to change the status quo, study interventions should be compared to the existing community standard of treatment, often referred to as treatment as usual. From an ethical perspective, this decision may not always be the safest choice. In some populations, TAU may mean no treatment at all, and in others TAU may be worse than withholding treatment. The effectiveness researcher is then caught between the pull to do no harm and the need for research to have an impact on change. The purpose of this article is to highlight certain conditions when TAU is ethically acceptable and to discuss alternatives when TAU may be an unethical treatment condition. For purposes of precision, we focus exclusively on psychotherapy effectiveness research rather than system-intervention research or medication-intervention research. (shrink)

This article examines the case of institutional inertia in Japanese financial regulation, focusing on the reasons why institutions centered on informal modes of organization and interaction proved particularly The Japanese case serves as a particularly tough test for theories of institutional adaptation and change because even crisis failed to produce timely institutional change. The paper argues that informal, exclusionary and opaque relational ties served as a functional substitute for formal regulation and promoted cooperative government-bank relationships in an earlier period. Yet, (...) when the informal attributes of the system began to impede the sound functioning of the financial system, the very opacity of these ties and the informational dynamics underlying them meant that the Diet and the general public were less than fully aware of the extent of dysfunction present as time went on. (shrink)

As countries around the world work to restrict unhealthy food and beverage marketing to children, the U.S. remains reliant on industry-self regulation. The First Amendment’s protection for commercial speech and previous gutting of the Federal Trade Commission’s authority pose barriers to restricting food marketing to children. However, false, unfair, and deceptive acts and practices remain subject to regulation and provide an avenue to address marketing to young children, modern practices that have evaded regulation, and gaps in the food and beverage (...) industry’s self-regulatory approach. (shrink)

In Western Europe, debates surrounding the integration of ‘Muslim’ women over the last decade signify the ways in which racialized notions of gender and sexuality have come to define acceptable and unacceptable ways of being European. Discourses concerning the wearing of the headscarf and ‘honour crimes’ are particular ways in which ‘Muslim’ genders are produced, condemned and held responsible for posing a threat to supposedly stable European values of gender equality and sexual emancipation. This article examines some of the interventions (...) by feminist and gay activists Germany regarding the veil and so-called honour crimes, which reflect an increasing acceptance of the state’s escalating racialization processes on the part of activists. The article concludes that the very racialization of the category ‘Muslim’ needs to be examined not only in a postcolonial context but also how this process has emerged after 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’. (shrink)

In this article, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian model of learning in a general type of artificial language‐learning experiment in which learners are exposed to a mixture of grammars representing the variation present in real learners’ input, particularly at times of language change. The modeling goal is to formalize and quantify hypothesized learning biases. The test case is an experiment (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012) targeting the learning of word‐order patterns in the nominal domain. The model identifies internal biases of (...) the experimental participants, providing evidence that learners impose (possibly arbitrary) properties on the grammars they learn, potentially resulting in the cross‐linguistic regularities known as typological universals. Learners exposed to mixtures of artificial grammars tended to shift those mixtures in certain ways rather than others; the model reveals how learners’ inferences are systematically affected by specific prior biases. These biases are in line with a typological generalization—Greenberg's Universal 18—which bans a particular word‐order pattern relating nouns, adjectives, and numerals. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to understand how academic integrity educational tutorials are administered across Canadian higher education. Results are shared from a survey of publicly funded Canadian higher education institutions, including universities and colleges, across ten provinces where English is the primary language of instruction. The survey contained 29 items addressing institutional demographic details, as well as academic integrity education questions. Results showed that academic integrity tutorials are inconsistent across Canadian higher education, with further differences evident within the (...) university and college sectors. (shrink)

Philosophical theorizing is often, either tacitly or explicitly, guided by intuitions about cases. Theories that accord with our intuitions are generally considered to be prima facie better than those that do not. However, recent empirical work has suggested that philosophically significant intuitions are variable and unstable in a number of ways. This variability of intuitions has led naturalistically inclined philosophers to disparage the practice of relying on intuitions for doing philosophy in general (e.g. Stich & Weinberg 2001) and for doing (...) moral philosophy in particular (Appiah 2008; Doris & Stich 2005; Horowitz 1998; Nadelhoffer & Feltz 2008; Sinnott Armstrong 2008). In this paper, we will draw on naturalistic considerations to offer some solace to philosophers who rely on intuitions. We wouldn’t call this a defense of intuitions, exactly, since we are sympathetic with much of the naturalists’ critique. But we want to introduce into the debate some neglected naturalistic reasons to be optimistic about intuitions, focusing especially on ethical intuitions. (shrink)

Environmental releases of gene edited (GEdOs) and gene drive organisms (GDOs) will likely occur under conditions of high uncertainty and in complex socioecological systems. Therefore, public deliberation is especially important to account for diverse interpretations of safety, risks, and benefits; to draw on experiential and public wisdom in areas of proposed release; to ameliorate dangers of technological optimism; and to increase the public legitimacy of decisions. Yet there is a “democratic deficit” in the United States' oversight system for GEdOs and (...) GDOs, as unconflicted experts, publics, and skeptical stakeholders are most often excluded from decision‐making and unavailable to critically examine potential risks and benefits or raise broader concerns about socioeconomic or cultural impacts. This article argues for the need to open up decision‐making for GEdOs and GDOs, discusses the challenges for doing so within the current oversight framework, and finally, proposes institutional, policy, and attitudinal changes that are likely important for overcoming barriers to public deliberation. (shrink)

Are women's requests for aid in dying honored more often than men's, or less? Feminist arguments can support conclusions either that gendered perceptions of women as self‐sacrificing predispose physicians to accede to women's requests to die — or that cultural understandings of women as not fully rational agents lead physicians to reject their requests as irrational.