Development of interpersonal trust among children and adolescents The main purpose of the present article is to introduce a topic related to the development of interpersonal trust among children and adolescents. Although this subject, since the beginnings of psychology considered as an academic discipline, has been regarded as an essential component of human functioning, there are still very few theoretical and empirical studies that approach the issue from a developmental point of view. In this paper the three-dimensional conceptualization of interpersonal (...) trust is provided. Furthermore, the article highlights the past and current theoretical and empirical research on the development of interpersonal trust in infants, preschool and school-age children. Finally, some challenges are presented in the field of interpersonal trust studies. (shrink)

Consumers have shown increasing interest in products that reflect social and environmental concerns—so-called “sustainable products.” Although consumers typically view sustainability positively, the ethical attributes of products do not always drive their preferences, which implies a trade-off between ethical attributes and other valued attributes. In the current research, we examine how consumers implicitly judge products and services that are more or less congruent with social and environmental concerns and how incongruity between ethical claims and a product’s nature may influence consumers to (...) behave responsibly. The results from two experimental studies show that increasing the strength of ethical claims impairs sophisticated products’ evaluation but enhances simple products’ evaluation. Additionally, the findings reveal that the strength of ethicality on sophisticated products may impair perceptions of product enjoyment to a point at which products are evaluated more favorably when less-ethical claims are used to promote them. For managers, the results highlight an important business consideration, as they reveal the circumstances under which it is worth emphasizing the strength of the sustainability appeal of products or services. Results show that not all consumers are willing to sacrifice taste or quality in their leisure time preferring to seize the day rather than saving the world. (shrink)

Scientists aim to remediate artifacts in their experimental datasets. However, the remediation of one artifact can result in another. Why might this happen, and what does this consequence tell us about how we should account for artifacts and their control? In this paper, I explore a case in functional neuroimaging where remediation appears to have caused this problem. I argue that remediation amounts to a change to an experimental arrangement. These changes need not be surgical, and the arrangement need not (...) satisfy the criterion of causal modularity. Thus, remediation can affect more than just the factor responsible for the artifact. However, if researchers can determine the consequences of their remediation, they can make adjustments that control for the present artifact as well as for previously controlled ones. Current philosophical accounts of artifacts and the factors responsible for them cannot adequately address this issue, as they do not account for what is needed for artifact remediation (and specifically correction). I support my argument by paralleling it with ongoing concerns regarding the transparency of complex computational systems, as near future remediation across the experimental life sciences will likely make greater use of AI tools to correct for artifacts. (shrink)

This chapter sheds light on a response to experimental philosophy that has not yet received enough attention: the reflection defense. According to proponents of this defense, judgments about philosophical cases are relevant only when they are the product of careful, nuanced, and conceptually rigorous reflection. The chapter argues that the reflection defense is misguided: Five studies (N>1800) are presented, showing that people make the same judgments when they are primed to engage in careful reflection as they do in the conditions (...) standardly used by experimental philosophers. (shrink)

In this article, we analyse the evidential value of the corpus of experimental philosophy. While experimental philosophers claim that their studies provide insight into philosophical problems, some philosophers and psychologists have expressed concerns that the findings from these studies lack evidential value. Barriers to evidential value include selection bias and p-hacking. To find out whether the significant findings in x-phi papers result from selection bias or p-hacking, we applied a p-curve analysis to a corpus of 365 x-phi chapters and articles. (...) Our results suggest that this corpus has evidential value, although there are hints of p-hacking in a few parts of the x-phi corpus. (shrink)

In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether non-philosophers share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-barn cases do count as knowledge is negatively correlated with (...) age; older participants are less likely than younger participants to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases. We also found that increasing the number of defeaters (fakes) does not decrease the inclination to attribute knowledge. (shrink)

Scientists often respond to failures to replicate by citing differences between the experimental components of an original study and those of its attempted replication. In this paper, we investigate these purported mismatch explanations. We assess a body of failures to replicate in neuroscience studies on spinal cord injury. We argue that a defensible mismatch explanation is one where a mismatch of components is a difference maker for a mismatch of outcomes, and the components are relevantly different in the follow-up study, (...) given the scope of the original study. With this account, we argue that not all differences between studies are meaningful, even if they are difference makers. As our examples show, focusing only on these differences results in disregarding the representativeness of the original experiment’s components and the scope of its outcomes, undercutting other epistemic aims, such as translation, in the process. (shrink)

This paper accounts for broad definitions of memory, which extend to paradigmatic memory phenomena, like episodic memory in humans, and phenomena in worms and sea snails. These definitions may seem too broad, suggesting that they extend to phenomena that don’t count as memory or illustrate that memory is not a natural kind. However, these responses fail to consider a definition as a hypothesis. As opposed to construing definitions as expressing memory’s properties, a definition as a hypothesis is the basis to (...) test inferences about phenomena. A definition as a hypothesis is valuable when the “kinding” of phenomena is ongoing. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss critically some of the key themes in Max Deutsch’s excellent book, The Myth of the Intuitive. We focus in particular on the shortcomings of his historical analysis – a missed opportunity by our lights, on the claim that philosophers present arguments in support of the judgments elicited by thought experiments, and on the claim that experimental philosophy is only relevant for the methodology of philosophy if thought experiments elicit intuitions.

In this paper, I investigate how researchers evaluate their characterizations of scientific phenomena. Characterizing phenomena is an important – albeit often overlooked – aspect of scientific research, as phenomena are targets of explanation and theorization. As a result, there is a lacuna in the literature regarding how researchers determine whether their characterization of a target phenomenon is appropriate for their aims. This issue has become apparent for accounts of scientific explanation that take phenomena to be explananda. In particular, philosophers who (...) endorse mechanistic explanation suggest that the discovery of the mechanisms that explain a phenomenon can lead to its recharacterization. However, they fail to make clear how these explanations provide warrant for recharacterizing their explananda phenomena. Drawing from cases of neurobiological research on potentiation phenomena, I argue that attempting to explain a phenomenon may provide reason to suspend judgment about its characterization, but this cannot provide warrant to recharacterize it if researchers cannot infer a phenomenon’s characteristics from this explanation. To explicate this, I go beyond explanation – mechanistic or otherwise – to analyze why and how researchers change their epistemic commitments in light of new evidence. (shrink)

To explain their role in discovery and contrast them with theory-driven research, philosophers of science have characterized exploratory experiments in terms of what they lack: namely, that they lack direction from what have been called “local theories” of the target system or object under investigation. I argue that this is incorrect: it’s not whether or not there is direction from a local theory that matters, but instead how such a theory is used to direct an experiment that matters. Appealing to (...) contemporary exploratory experiments that involve the use of experimental techniques—specifically, examples where scientists explore the interaction of neural activity and human behavior by magnetically stimulating brains—I argue that local theories of a target system can inform auxiliary hypotheses in exploratory experiments, which direct these experiments. These examples illustrate how local theories can direct the exploration of target systems where researchers do not aim to evaluate these theories. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the nature of empirical findings that provide evidence for the characterization of a scientific phenomenon, and the defeasible nature of this evidence. To do so, I explore an exemplary instance of the rejection of a characterization of a scientific phenomenon: memory transfer. I examine the reason why the characterization of memory transfer was rejected, and analyze how this rejection tied to researchers’ failures to resolve experimental issues relating to replication and confounds. I criticize the presentation (...) of the case by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, who claim that no sufficient reason was provided to abandon research on memory transfer. I argue that skeptics about memory transfer adopted what I call a defeater strategy, in which researchers exploit the defeasibility of the evidence for a characterization of a phenomenon. (shrink)

The study of the neural basis of memory has advanced over the past decade. A key contributor to this memory “renaissance” has been new tools. On its face, this matches what might be described as a neuroscientific revolution stemming from the development of tools, where this revolution is largely independent of theory. In this paper, we challenge this tool revolution account by focusing on a problem that arises in applying it to this “renaissance”: it is centered around memory, but the (...) tools were not developed for solving problems in memory science. To resolve this problem, we introduce an account that distinguishes tool development and tool uptake, and we argue that while theoretical considerations may not inform development, they do inform uptake. Acknowledging the distance between these stages of tool use draws our attention to the questions of why and how tool uptake occurs in the domains that it does. (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists propose the idea that plants are cognitive, which has been met with criticisms. These criticisms focus on the fact that plants do not possess the properties traditionally associated with cognition. By contrast, several proponents introduce novel ways to conceptualize cognition. How should we make sense of this debate? In this paper, I argue that the plant cognition debate is not about whether plants meet a set of well-delineated and agreed-upon criteria according to which they count as cognitive. (...) Rather, many proponents are hypothesizing about cognition. They construe COGNITION not as an expression of what cognition is, but rather as a conjecture about what cognition might be. These conjectures orient research that can uncover novel similarities amongst the phenomena to which these concepts extend. In defending this view, I argue that investigating plant cognition is valuable, even if the results of these investigations lead us to reject the claim that plants are cognitive. (shrink)

Objective We sought to understand ethics and education needs of emergency nurses and physicians in paediatric and adult emergency departments in order to build ethics capacity and provide a foundation for the development of an ethics education programme. Methods This was a prospective cross-sectional survey of all staff nurses and physicians in three tertiary care EDs. The survey tool, called Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment Survey, was pilot tested on a similar target audience for question content and clarity. Results Of the (...) 123 participants surveyed, 72% and 84% of nurses and physicians fully/somewhat agreed with an overall positive ethical climate, respectively. 69% of participants reported encountering daily or weekly ethical challenges. Participants expressed the greatest need for additional support to address moral distress, conflict management with patients or families and resource issues. Of the 23 reported occurrences of moral distress, 61% were associated with paediatric mental health cases. When asked how the ethics consultation service could be used in the ED, providing education to teams was the most desired method. Conclusions Nurses report a greater need for ethics education and resources compared with their physician colleagues. Ethical challenges in paediatric EDs are more prevalent than adult EDs and nurses voice specific moral distress that are different than adult EDs. These results highlight the need for a suitable educational strategy, which can be developed in collaboration with the leadership of each ED and team of hospital ethicists. (shrink)

Objective We sought to understand ethics and education needs of emergency nurses and physicians in paediatric and adult emergency departments in order to build ethics capacity and provide a foundation for the development of an ethics education programme. Methods This was a prospective cross-sectional survey of all staff nurses and physicians in three tertiary care EDs. The survey tool, called Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment Survey, was pilot tested on a similar target audience for question content and clarity. Results Of the (...) 123 participants surveyed, 72% and 84% of nurses and physicians fully/somewhat agreed with an overall positive ethical climate, respectively. 69% of participants reported encountering daily or weekly ethical challenges. Participants expressed the greatest need for additional support to address moral distress, conflict management with patients or families and resource issues. Of the 23 reported occurrences of moral distress, 61% were associated with paediatric mental health cases. When asked how the ethics consultation service could be used in the ED, providing education to teams was the most desired method. Conclusions Nurses report a greater need for ethics education and resources compared with their physician colleagues. Ethical challenges in paediatric EDs are more prevalent than adult EDs and nurses voice specific moral distress that are different than adult EDs. These results highlight the need for a suitable educational strategy, which can be developed in collaboration with the leadership of each ED and team of hospital ethicists. (shrink)

Atherosclerosis is the major cause of death in the industrialised world. Though much work on the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis points to 'oxidised' low density lipoprotein (LDL) as a key aetiological feature in the generation of the atherosclerotic plaque, the nature of this 'oxidised' LDL in vivo remains an enigma. We argue here that glycated LDL shows many of the characteristics attributed to 'oxidised LDL' and may be the source of the latter in vivo. These include the increased uptake and impaired (...) degradation of glycated LDL by macrophages and the stimulation of transendothelial chemotaxis of monocytes, cytokine secretion and platelet aggregation. We hypothesise that the covalent binding of glycated LDL to the endothelial cell wall may result in the formation of the early atherosclerotic lesion of the fatty streak and that apolipoprotein E may mediate the physiological clearance of glycated moieties. The proposed role of glycation in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis would explain its high incidence among diabetics and the contentious epidemiological and experimental correlations between dietary sugar and atherosclerosis. (shrink)

My dissertation is on scientific phenomena, their characterization, and their role in scientific inquiry. I focus on three questions. First, what do characterizations of scientific phenomena represent? To answer this, I investigate what it means to characterize a phenomenon, as opposed to describing the results of individual studies. Second, how do researchers develop these characterizations? This question relates to the logic of discovery: I examine how researchers use existing theories and methods to explore systems, search for phenomena, and develop representations (...) of them. Third, how do researchers evaluate these characterizations? This question relates to the logic of justification: I investigate how empirical findings serve as defeasible evidence for the characterizations of phenomena, and in light of what evidence we should accept, suspend judgment about, or reject them. (shrink)

While many neuroscientists and philosophers share an interest in integrating neuroscience, both camps suggest that this integration is challenging. Why is this the case? In this paper, I account for why tools, or the materials and technologies that researchers use to study brain structure and activity, are obstructions to integrating neuroscience. The constraints of tools and their productivity create neuroscience practices that can be in tension with methodological, data, and explanatory integration. My account explains why integration in neuroscience likely will (...) not occur unless new tools are developed. At the same time, my account explains why new tools can facilitate local integration between neuroscience subfields for the same reasons why they can obstruct it. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is a popular approach to addressing philosophical questions. Though not without controversy, this approach has impacted epistemology (Weinberg, Nichols, and...

This article is a within- and cross-country examination of the impact of fair trade certification on consumers’ evaluations and attitudes toward ethically certified products. Across three experimental studies, the authors analyze how different levels of brand familiarity and fair trade expertise impact consumer decisions. The authors study this phenomenon across markets with different social orientation cultures to analyze potential dissimilarities in the way consumers evaluate and behave toward ethically certified products. Findings suggest that fair trade certifications enhance product valuations. However, (...) this effect is especially observed for low familiar brands, once the level of fair trade expertise increases. Findings also suggest that there are individual cultural differences with respect to social and environmental labeling expertise that may account for some of the unexplained variation in choice behaviors observed across countries. Results indicate that especially in more (mature) individualistic markets (vs. collectivistic) consumer ethical behavior seems to be greatly influenced by consumers’ perceptions about the eligibility of brands using (or not) fair trade. This effect is strengthened by the significant mediating role of consumers’ ethicality perceptions on the relationship between fair trade and the willingness to pay for brands. (shrink)

Studies in experimental philosophy claim to document intuition variation. Some studies focus on demographic group-variation; Colaço et al., for example, claim that age generates intuition variation regarding knowledge attribution in a fake-barn scenario. Other studies claim to show intuition variation when comparing the intuition of philosophers to that of non-philosophers. The main focus has been on documenting intuition variation rather than uncovering what underlying factor(s) may prompt such a phenomenon. We explore a number of suggested explanatory hypotheses put forth (...) by Colaço et al., as well as an attempt to test Sosa's claim that intuition variance is a result of people ‘filling in the details’ of a thought experiment differently from one another. We show (i) that people respond consistently across conditions aimed at ‘filling in the details’ of thought experiments, (ii) that risk attitude does not seem relevant to knowledge ascription, (iii) that people's knowledge ascriptions do not vary due to views about defeasibility of knowledge. Yet, (iv) we find no grounds to reject that a large proportion of people appear to adhere to so-called subjectivism about knowledge, which may explain why they generally have intuitions about the fake-barn scenario that vary from those of philosophers. (shrink)

Dean MacCannell (Washington, 1940), catedrático emérito de paisajismo de la Universidad de California en Davis, es un autor de referencia internacional en antropología, sociología y ética del turismo, con obras fundamentales como _The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class _(1976), _Empty Meeting Grounds_ (1992) – ambas publicadas en España por la editorial Melusina- o _The Ethics of Sightseeing_ (2011). Considerando que uno de los principales atractivos de su obra es su capacidad para captar la relación entre el (...) turismo y las transformaciones culturales y socio-económicas de los últimos cincuenta años, quisimos dirigirle una serie de preguntas para profundizar sobre su obra y reflexionar sobre el turismo en el mundo post-pandemia de la Covid-19. (Traducción al español a cargo de Carmen González). (shrink)

On 26 April 1883, two days after the divorce from his first wife, Harriet Melusina Fay, was finalized, Charles Peirce married Juliette Pourtalai, a woman of unknown, or at least of unspoken, origin.1 This marked the most consequential juncture of Peirce's life for it triggered a turn of events which led to his dismissal from Johns Hopkins University and his separation from the U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey2 and it precipitated his exclusion from influential social circles he had belonged (...) to and even to some extent from his own family. Four years after their marriage, Charles and Juliette abandoned urban living and retreated to Milford, Pennsylvania, a village in the Upper Delaware River Valley between... (shrink)

En reseña de:García López, Daniel J. Rara avis. Una teoría queer impolítica. Ed. Melusina,Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2016.

El presente escrito analiza con detalle los argumentos presentados por el filósofo francés Frédéric Schiffter contra el difunto pensador Guy Debord, y que han sido magníficamente editados en castellano bajo el título Contra Debord (Editorial Melusina, Barcelona, 2005). Schiffter arremete contra el ídolo mediático en que Debord se había convertido, sobre todo tras su suicidio, en 1994, y también contra quienes se dejaron llevar por su discurso sin reparar en el significado de sus ideas y sus críticas. Schiffter contrapone (...) al platonismo resentido de Debord un escepticismo que apela a la vida, al espectáculo y a la mercancía, como instancias donde el ser humano puede refugiarse para evitar, aunque sea sólo ilusoriamente, el aspecto trágico y absurdo de su existencia. Pero no tiene en cuenta el apreciable aporte descriptivo que la idea de sociedad del espectáculo ha supuesto para comprender mejor la actual sociedad tardocapitalista. Además, Schiffter incurre en el mismo fallo que reprocha a Debord: hacer de su propia propuesta una ontología indiscutible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beastly Vagueness in Charles Sanders Peirce and Henry JamesMegan M. QuigleyIn 1878, Charles Sanders Peirce closed the first section of "How to Make our Ideas Clear"—an article that William James later declared a "birth certificate of Pragmatism"—on a strangely anecdotal note.1 Using what would become known as the pragmatic method to demolish the notion of Grand Ideas ("Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects"), Peirce (...) also included a lesson from an "old German story":Many a man has cherished for years some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some morning to find it gone, cleaned vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself known such a man.(WCSP, p. 261)The story of the fled Melusina (a half-woman, half-serpent who gives birth to monsters) acts ostensibly as a warning against the danger inherent in "vague" ideas. "A vague shadow of an idea" can sap the life-blood out of a young man and, therefore, Peirce asserted, we must strive to be clear. But Peirce's anecdote did more than further his argument; it was an autobiographical aside—so personal, in fact, that he ordered the passage to be deleted in all future printings of his essay.Melusina was not just an allusion to a mythological figure; it was also a reference to the middle name of his wife, Harriet Melusina Fay. Since his schooldays, Peirce's friend and, later, wife, whom he called [End Page 362] "Zina," had been his constant companion and even the scribe for his fervent aspirations. Under the title "Theories of C. S. Peirce, 1854" she had transcribed his ambitious declaration: "My life is built upon a theory: and if this theory turns out false, my life will turn out a failure" (Brent, p. 51). By the mid 1870s, Peirce's theory, "passionately loved... his companion by day and by night," was finally being elucidated in his articles; however, Melusina herself had "cleaned vanished away," after two decades of intimacy, leaving Peirce in Paris to what his friend Henry James described as "a very lonely and dreary existence." Peirce's inclusion of an anecdote about his own loneliness—"I have myself known such a man"—is poignant even as it reveals his anger. Melusina is both a monster and "beautiful," and with her disappearance, Peirce has lost, "the essence of his life." The personal allusion also highlights the anxiety in the young Peirce's writing. What if his theories came to nothing, remained merely vague, and he lost his whole life and his wife to a misguided dedication? And how ironic would that be given that the idea itself aimed to explode the fallacy of grand ideas? Such an irony was not lost on his main companion during the winter of 1875, Henry James.In the following pages I aim to demonstrate that Charles S. Peirce's anxiety acted as a germ for the beast of John Marcher in James's late story, "The Beast in the Jungle." "More than any of Henry James's tales," Paul Lindholdt writes, "'The Beast in the Jungle,' has prompted source studies and psychoanalytic discussions by critics striving to identify" John Marcher.2 Eager to diagnose the relationship between Marcher and May Bartram, critics have sought both autobiographical and literary sources for Marcher's character.3 Strangely, however, no one has noted the connection between Peirce and Marcher, an omission that is especially odd given the critical attention directed at the relationship between the story and pragmatism. Since Richard Hocks's Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought highlighted the pragmatic tendencies of James's story and called Marcher the "anti-pragmatist" hero, "an epitome of William's... (shrink)