In Jacques Lacan's view, a woman is a reduced object of Phallic Power through the sacred path. Women are therefore "not all" in their desire. Lacan undertakes a localisation in the "Name of Father", where wo/man is given the vacuous place in the play of substitutions. Following Lacan, we attempt at an interpretation of the feminine condition.

Given the current context of the experience of migration on schools in England and Europe, and the competing policies and approaches to social integration in schools, there is a need to understand the connection between language development and social integration as a basis for promoting appropriate policies and practices. This volume explores the complex relationship between language, education and the social integration of newcomer migrant children in England, through an in-depth analysis of case studies from schools in the East of (...) England. The authors set this evidence against the background of policy debates in the wider international setting, including a critical discussion of assumptions underlying national narratives of mainstreaming and assimilation. In the light of an absence of national guidelines for appropriate practice in schools, the authors outline a model of inclusive pedagogy for English as an additional language and a framework of home-school communication to promote effective EAL parental engagement in schools. (shrink)

En utilisant des exemples tirés d’une famille esclave de la Réunion et de l’île Maurice, cet article analyse comment le choix des prénoms ainsi que des noms de famille a marqué le statut de ses membres et a signalé ou bien dissimulé leurs relations de parenté. Selon le droit colonial français, les pères esclaves ne disposaient pas du statut de pères, mais les noms des esclaves et de leurs descendants conservaient les traces de leur ascendance maternelle en portant le nom (...) de famille de leur mère. Comme le statut des enfants esclaves était déterminé par la condition de leur mère, les archives coloniales préservaient souvent la trace de l’ascendance maternelle en effaçant la mémoire de leurs pères – esclaves ou libres. Quand le nombre des affranchis et de leurs descendants a augmenté pendant la première moitié du xixe siècle, la pratique d’adopter le prénom de la mère comme nom de famille est devenue commune. C’est ainsi que la féminisation des noms de famille des descendants d’esclaves les a marqués insidieusement et a favorisé leur discrimination officieuse jusqu’à présent. (shrink)

En utilisant des exemples tirés d’une famille esclave de la Réunion et de l’île Maurice, cet article analyse comment le choix des prénoms ainsi que des noms de famille a marqué le statut de ses membres et a signalé ou bien dissimulé leurs relations de parenté. Selon le droit colonial français, les pères esclaves ne disposaient pas du statut de pères, mais les noms des esclaves et de leurs descendants conservaient les traces de leur ascendance maternelle en portant le nom (...) de famille de leur mère. Comme le statut des enfants esclaves était déterminé par la condition de leur mère, les archives coloniales préservaient souvent la trace de l’ascendance maternelle en effaçant la mémoire de leurs pères – esclaves ou libres. Quand le nombre des affranchis et de leurs descendants a augmenté pendant la première moitié du xixe siècle, la pratique d’adopter le prénom de la mère comme nom de famille est devenue commune. C’est ainsi que la féminisation des noms de famille des descendants d’esclaves les a marqués insidieusement et a favorisé leur discrimination officieuse jusqu’à présent. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with (...) tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark’s (2018) embodied inference; Seth’s (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli’s (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain ‘s cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. (shrink)

Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...) perceiving an artwork as belonging to a (correct) category of art requires no art-historical knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, contextualist attempts to incorporate art-historical knowledge via the mechanism of cognitive penetration are incompatible with Walton’s claim that categories of art must be perceptually distinguishable. Here I propose a way of elaborating Walton’s view that avoids this difficulty and reconciles contextualism with aesthetic perception, the view that we perceive aesthetic properties. (shrink)

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

Does the scope of beliefs that people can form on the basis of perception remain fixed, or can it be amplified with learning? The answer to this question is important for our understanding of why and when we ought to trust experts, and also for assessing the plausibility of epistemic foundationalism. The empirical study of perceptual expertise suggests that experts can indeed enrich their perceptual experiences through learning. Yet this does not settle the epistemic status of their beliefs. One might (...) hold that the background knowledge of experts is the cause of their enriched perceptual experience – what is known as cognitive permeation – and so their subsequent beliefs are only mediately justified because they are epistemically dependent on this background knowledge. I argue against this view. Perceptual expertise is not the result of cognitive permeation but is rather the result of perceptual learning, and perceptual learning does not involve cognition in a way that entails cognitive permeation. Perceptual expertise thus provides a means of widening the scope of the immediately justified beliefs that experts can form. (shrink)

The acquaintance debate in aesthetics has been traditionally divided between pessimists, who argue that testimony does not provide others with aesthetic knowledge of artworks, and optimists, who hold that acquaintance with an artwork is not a necessary precondition for acquiring aesthetic knowledge. In this paper I propose a reconciliationist solution to the acquaintance debate: while aesthetic knowledge can be had via testimony, aesthetic judgment requires acquaintance with the artwork. I develop this solution by situating it within a virtue aesthetics framework (...) based on Ernest Sosa's virtue epistemology. I go on to apply the solution to the debates on moral testimony and expert testimony. An interesting variant on Gettier cases emerges: cases in which subjects have knowledge, but it has been formed by the wrong competence. (shrink)

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...) second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear to require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to (...) favour the hypothesis that what experts learn is simply to better direct their attention to elements of the stimulus relevant to making post-perceptual categorizations. Here I argue against this hypothesis. Attentional weighting is an integral component of the process that allows experts to come to represent high-level properties in perceptual experience. (shrink)

It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several attention-related phenomena. We claim that it cannot account for all of them, since there are certain forms of voluntary attention that it cannot accommodate. (...) We therefore suggest that, although the theory of Bayesian prediction error minimization introduces some powerful tools for the explanation of mental phenomena, its advocates have been wrong to claim that Bayesian prediction error minimization is ‘all the brain ever does’. (shrink)

How do institutions respond to expert contests over epistemologies of sex and gender? In this article, I consider how epistemological ascendancy in debates over the regulation of women athletes with high testosterone is established within a legal setting. Approaching regulation as an institutional act that defines forms of embodied difference, the legitimacy of which may be called into question, I show how sexed bodies are enacted through and as part of determinations of expertise. I focus on proceedings from 2015 when (...) the Court of Arbitration for Sport was asked to decide whether an Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, could compete as a female athlete. Despite acknowledging that sexed bodies are unruly, the court ultimately endorsed the use of testosterone as seemingly essential to women’s athletic performance, thereby reasserting a two-category model of biological difference. The legitimacy of these regulatory efforts was established through the concurrent narrowing of expertise and the body, a process that is also revealed to be gendered. (shrink)

Can compensation repair the moral harm of a previous wrongful act? On the one hand, some define the very function of compensation as one of restoring the moral balance. On the other hand, the dominant view on compensation is that it is insufficient to fully repair moral harm unless accompanied by an act of punishment or apology. In this paper, I seek to investigate the maximal potential of compensation. Central to my argument is a distinction between apologetic compensation and non-apologetic (...) compensation. Apologetic compensation, I argue, is an act that expresses regret and apology by means of some offer of money, goods, or services. Non-apologetic compensation is an act that seeks to restore loss or harm without expressing regret or apology. In the paper, I defend the view that acts of compensation can be apologetic and argue that such apologetic compensation is sufficient for moral repair. (shrink)

For many philosophers, there is a tension inherent to shame as an inward-looking, yet intersubjective, emotion: that between the role of the ashamed self and the part of the shaming Other in pronouncing the judgement of shame. Simply put, the issue is this: either the perspective of the ashamed self takes precedence in autonomously choosing to feel shame, and the necessary role of the audience is overlooked, or else the view of the shaming Other prevails in heteronomously casting the shame, (...) and the ashamed individual’s agency becomes problematically understated. I argue that this debate is fundamentally misguided insofar as it assumes that shame must be exclusively contingent upon either the perspective of the self or that of the Other, when it is in fact dependent upon both at once. This is the “double movement” of shame: an appraisal of the self that is at once social and private. (shrink)

This article offers an account of organizational change to explain why women leaders are underrepresented compared to women athletes in many sports organizations. I distinguish between accommodation and transformation as forms of change: the former includes women without challenging binary constructions of gender, the latter transforms an organization’s gendered logic. Through a case study of the International Olympic Committee from 1967-1995, I trace how the organization came to define gender equity primarily in terms of accommodating women’s segregated athletic participation. Key (...) to this was the construction of women’s bodies as athletically able but inferior to men, an arrangement formalized in codified rules and procedures and legitimized by external stakeholders. Defined in these terms, gender equity did little to transform the organization’s binary and hierarchically gendered logic, which continued to shape the informal norms and procedures associated with the organization’s allegedly gender-neutral and meritocratic yet male-dominated leadership. I argue that the exclusion of women from ostensibly gender-integrated leadership positions allows organizations to avoid revealing gender similarity between men and women. This maintains a logic underpinned by notions of binary gender difference and masculine superiority. (shrink)

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

Attempts to engineer a generally intelligent artificial agent have yet to meet with success, largely due to the (intercontext) frame problem. Given that humans are able to solve this problem on a daily basis, one strategy for making progress in AI is to look for disanalogies between humans and computers that might account for the difference. It has become popular to appeal to the emotions as the means by which the frame problem is solved in human agents. The purpose of (...) this paper is to evaluate the tenability of this proposal, with a primary focus on Dylan Evans’ search hypothesis and Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. I will argue that while the emotions plausibly help solve the intracontext frame problem, they do not function to solve or help solve the intercontext frame problem, as they are themselves subject to contextual variability. (shrink)

This chapter addresses a general question: What is responsible risking? It explores the notion of "responsible risking" as a thick moral concept, and it argues that the notion can be given moral content that could be action-guiding and add an important tool to our moral toolbox. To impose risks responsibly, on this view, is to take on responsibility in a good way. A core part of responsible risking, this chapter argues, is some version of a Forethought Condition. Such a condition (...) requires us to not make decisions or plans such that we could not deliver on our responsibility obligations. This chapter argues that three moral obligations can be derived from descriptive notions of responsibility. They are (1) the control condition, (2) the responsibility to fix condition, and (3) the responsibility to explain condition. The idea is that in order to impose risks responsibly we ought not act in ways that undermine our ability to remain in control over the risks, undermine our ability to sort out negative outcomes by reparations or compensation, or undermine our prospects of providing an explanation for our actions that also makes sense in hindsight and to those affected. This idea is then tried out on the case of germline gene editing. It is argued that such a moral notion of responsibility is also action-guiding when we do not know for certain what is the morally right or obligatory action all-things-considered due to epistemic gaps. (shrink)

This paper extends previous attempts at understanding the nature of organizational integrity and its increasingly important role for companies which, after all, bear a moral and societal responsibility. Interpretations of organizational integrity in business ethics literature incorporate aspects ranging from the behavior of managers and employees to corporate structures and incentive systems. We argue that virtue ethics builds an indispensable framework for understanding the origin of the concept of integrity and transfer these findings to an organizational level. Hence, we first (...) define organizational integrity, and second operationalize it in a closed three-step process, consisting of morally sound corporate commitments, their transparent institutionalization within the company, and their implementation into actions. We consider the main goal of organizational integrity to be of a preventative investment nature. Organizational integrity is a company investment that translates into avoiding fines for potential violations of the law or ethical missteps, as well as an investment in the company’s reputation. In turn, organizational integrity can protect a company from disruptions that can threaten its existence. Defining and operationalizing the concept of organizational integrity provides the foundation for future scientific research and the basis for developing practical guidance for organizations and managers. (shrink)

What kind of moral principle could be sufficiently restrictive to avoid the kind of large-scale risks that have resulted in catastrophe in the past, while at the same time not be so restrictive as to halt desirable progress? Is there such a principle that is not merely a precautionary principle, but one that could be based on firm moral grounds? In this article, I set out to explore a simple idea: might it be the case that reparability could serve as (...) a moral constraint against risky policy decisions? The idea is simple, but comes in two forms. First, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for harm that is, in principle, irreparable, such that it would bring about a permanent loss of a kind qua kind. Second, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for a reparable (but not compensable) harm that exceeds what realistically could be repaired. I set out here to do two things. First, I describe the moral problem to be addressed for any principle-guiding decisions about risk. A central claim in this article is that risk decisions are epistemically impaired decisions, and that we must, alongside outcome uncertainty, also take both epistemic uncertainty and moral uncertainty into account. Second, I introduce the idea of reparability as a moral constraint in the form of two versions of the Reparability Principle. Such a principle, I argue, could have some interesting advantages that seem both morally intuitive and that come with some advantages against some of the epistemic challenges posed by risk impositions. (shrink)

In this article, our concern is to describe how body(ies) and self are performed in women’s birth narratives through the mediation of a number of significant elements, including technical devices. We will show how, in these narratives, (1) action is distributed among a series of actants, including professionals and technology; (2) that dichotomies appear which cannot be reduced to one of body/mind, but are more adequately described in terms of ‘body-in-labour’/’embodied self’, each of them being locally performed through the mediation (...) of medical practices, knowledge and technologies, the definition of these elements and of their relations being specific to each obstetrical configuration; (3) that part of professionals’ activities is devoted to the detailed management of the articulation between the body-in-labour and the embodied self, and to monitoring their joint transformations. (shrink)

This article addresses dilemmas of agency for feminism through reflections on social psychological research on the role of representations in the construction of identity by Muslim women. Engaging first with Saba Mahmood’s account of religious subjectivities in Politics of Piety, the author argues that feminist research requires a social conception of agency that addresses dialogical dynamics of representation and identity. Drawing on research concerning veiling and identity among Muslim women in the UK and Denmark, the author shows how a social (...) conception of agency may be elaborated through the analysis of how competing representations of gender are negotiated in the self–other encounter. The author argues that a dialogical approach to researching identity in context defies blunt political judgement while shedding light on the intersecting socio-cultural forces and relations of power that engage processes of resistance and re-presentation. (shrink)

How one should respond to shame is a moral consideration that has figured relatively little in philosophical discourse. Recent psychological insights tell us that, at its core, shame reflects an unfulfilled need for emotional connection. As such, it often results in psychological and moral damage—harm which, I argue, renders shaming practices very difficult to justify. Following this, I posit that a morally preferable response to shame is one that successfully addresses and dispels the emotion. To this end, I critique two (...) common responses to shame, compliance and anger, and then propose an alternative: the practice of emotional vulnerability. (shrink)

BackgroundEngagement is important within cohort studies for a number of reasons. It is argued that engaging participants within the studies they are involved in may promote their recruitment and retention within the studies. Participant input can also improve study designs, make them more acceptable for uptake by participants and aid in contextualising research communication to participants. Ultimately it is also argued that engagement needs to provide an avenue for participants to feedback to the cohort study and that this is an (...) ethical imperative. This study sought to explore the participants’ experiences and thoughts of their engagement with their birth cohort study.MethodsParticipants were recruited from the Children of the 90s (CO90s) study. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 42 participants. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, and uploaded onto Nvivo software. They were then analysed via thematic analysis with a constant comparison technique.ResultsParticipants’ experiences of their engagement with CO90s were broadly based on three aspects: communication they received from CO90s, experiences of ethical conduct from CO90s and receiving rewards from CO90s. The communication received from CO90s, ranged from newsletters explaining study findings and future studies, to more personal forms like annual greeting cards posted to each participant. Ethical conduct from CO90s mainly involved participants understanding that CO90s would keep their information confidential, that it was only involved in ‘good’ ethical research and their expectation that CO90s would always prioritise participant welfare. Some of the gifts participants said they received at CO90s included toys, shopping vouchers, results from clinical tests, and time off from school to attend data collection (Focus) days. Participants also described a temporality in their engagement with CO90s and the subsequent trust they had developed for the cohort study.ConclusionThe experiences of engagement described by participants were theorized as being based on reciprocity which was sometimes overt and other times more nuanced. We further provide empirical evidence of participants’ expectation for a reciprocal interaction with their cohort study while highlighting the trust that such an interaction fosters. Our study therefore provides key insights for other cohort studies on what participants value in their interactions with their cohort studies. (shrink)

Prior research indicated that resistance to consumption contributes to the achievement of sustainable development goals and is associated with higher well-being. We investigate conditions under which materialists intend to resist consumption. We find that by enhancing self-control and long-term orientation, the intention to resist consumption and the frugality scores of high- and low-materialism individuals increase. These increases are stronger for those who believe that possessions are a source of happiness, but not for those who believe that possessions signal success or (...) for those who believe that acquiring possessions is a central goal in their daily lives. The findings suggest that individuals who believe that possessions are a source of happiness and who are led to feel more self-controlled and long-term oriented become inclined to resist consumption in the short-term to achieve materialistic aspirations in the long-term. Similar findings were not obtained for the other dimensions of materialism because these dimensions do not motivate one to save in the short-term. Overall, these studies demonstrate that the happiness dimension of materialism may also motivate resistance to consumption. Such findings have implications for sustainability, for public policy makers, and for business ethics. (shrink)

Trust is a key ingredient of business activities. Scams are spectacular betrayals of trust. When the victim is a powerful organization that does not look vulnerable at first sight, we can suspect that this organization has developed an excessive trust, or over-trust. In this article, we take over-trust as the result of the intentional production of gullibility by the scammer. The analysis of a historically famous scam case, the Elf “Great Sniffer Hoax,” suggests that the victim is made gullible by (...) the scammer through a range of seduction and protection maneuvers that prevent the victim from developing doubts and suspicions. An integrated framework of the production of gullibility in organizations is proposed in order to further our understanding of over-trust. We discuss how these insights might be extended, beyond the case of scams, to more ordinary contexts of business activities. (shrink)

[Book symposium] Are Moral Emotions Key to Informed Risk Decisions? : A Commentary on Sabine Roeser, Risk, Technology, and Moral Emotions.

ABSTRACT The literature regarding the Dark Triad of personality (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) has expanded rapidly during recent years with researchers evaluating the connections that these personality traits have with a variety of phenomena including philosophical beliefs and moral decision-making. The goal of the present study was to replicate and extend recent research concerning the associations that the Dark Triad had with anti-natalist beliefs (i.e., that it is morally wrong to procreate) by using multidimensional conceptualizations of these dark personality (...) traits and examining whether primal world beliefs mediate the associations that these dark personality traits have with anti-natalist beliefs. The results indicate that, as expected, specific dark personality traits (i.e., antagonistic narcissism, psychopathic meanness, psychopathic disinhibition, and antagonistic Machiavellianism) were positively associated with certain anti-natalist beliefs. In addition, the associations that these dark personality traits had with anti-natalist beliefs were sometimes mediated by the safe primal world belief (i.e., perceiving the world to be non-threatening and cooperative) and the enticing primal world belief (i.e., perceiving the world to be irresistibly fascinating). Discussion focuses on the implications of these results for the role that primal world beliefs play in the connections between dark personality traits and anti-natalist beliefs. (shrink)

Despite signifying a negative self-appraisal, shame has traditionally been thought by philosophers to entail the presence of self-respect in the individual. On this account, shame is occasioned by one’s failure to live up to certain self-standards—in displaying less worth than one thought one had—and this moves one to hide or otherwise inhibit oneself in an effort to protect one’s self-worth. In this paper, I argue against the notion that only self-respecting individuals can experience shame. Contrary to the idea that shame (...) presupposes the presence of self-worth, I contend that shame merely requires that one have the desire, rather than the expectation, that one is worthy. Furthermore, I suggest that the desire for concealment fueled by shame is not an inherently self-protective mechanism but can alternatively be understood as an effort to safeguard one’s connection with others. (shrink)

The fallacies, as traditionally conceived, are wrong ways of reasoning that nevertheless appear attractive to us. Recently, however, Woods (2013) has argued that they don’t merit such a title, and that what we take to be fallacies are instead largely virtuous forms of reasoning. This reformation of the fallacies forms part of Woods’ larger project to naturalize logic. In this paper I will look to his analysis of the argumentum ad hominem as a case study for the prospects of this (...) project. I will argue that the empirical literature on implicit bias presents a difficulty for the reformation of the ad hominem as cognitively virtuous. Cases where implicit bias influences our assessment of the truth or claim or argument are instances of ad hominem reasoning, and these qualify as fallacious on Woods’ own definition. (shrink)

Wayfinding is generally understood as the process of purposefully navigating to distant and non-visible destinations. Within this broad framework, uninformed searching entails finding one’s way to a target destination, in an unfamiliar environment, with no knowledge of its location. Although a variety of search strategies have been previously reported, this research was largely conducted in the laboratory or virtual environments using simplistic and often non-realistic situations, raising questions about its ecological validity. In this study, we explored how extant findings on (...) searching translate to a real-world environment, using a phenomenologically informed experiment. Our findings demonstrate a previously undescribed complex and dynamic interplay of different search strategies. Importantly, our results reveal that: (i) the presence of other people is importantly entangled with the process of searching; and (ii) people frequently probe and switch between search strategies based on local environmental characteristics. Together, our results reveal that search behaviour is critically dependent on environmental features and that searching in complex real-world settings should not be conceptualised as depending on a simple singular strategy. This raises questions about the dominance of laboratory-based experiments and their narrow cognitivist framework, highlighting the value of studying wayfinding in the real world. (shrink)

_The Tender Bud_ is the moving story of one woman's journey through breast cancer. The woman in question happens to be a senior psychiatrist of broad learning and deep clinical insight. Madeleine Meldin weathered the crisis of breast cancer without the support of an immediate family and in the context of ongoing professional burdens. This book is the journal that she wrote for herself as an aid to coping with the personal upheaval of diagnosis, mastectomy, and the aftermath of (...) treatment. It was written while these events unfolded. With arresting candor, Meldin chronicles her emotions at each stage of her odyssey - the recurrent cycles of denial, anxiety, and despair; the conflicting feelings engendered by her physicians, surgeons, and the treatment "establishment" in general; her struggle between resignation and emergent hopefulness. Unique to Meldin's account is her ongoing juxtaposition of the different dimensions of "having cancer." Simply and gracefully, she chronicles the everyday dimension of cancer, with its obligation to proceed maturely and dispassionately with medical and surgical care, to meet one's professional responsibilities, to maintain the appearances that allow one to carry on with one's life. Meldin excels at showing how even the most mundane experiences of everyday life - conversations with friends and colleagues, the selection of clothes, a trip to the hairdresser - became saturated with her illness, with her sense of herself as a cancer patient. (shrink)