Agency work is one of the most rapidly growing forms of employment in leading economies over the past two decades, signifying a global shift towards non-standard flexible employment modes. The rapid growth of agency work has become one of the most notable global employment trends and is set to become a permanent feature of the modern workplace. The growth of agency employment raises a number of ethical challenges for governments and businesses. A key emerging challenge is to identify firm-level HRM (...) strategies to effectively manage and protect agency employees. Based on an extensive review of the existing research on agency work, this article develops an organizational-level flexicurity model of HRM as a promising answer to effectively manage agency employees in responsible ways within the context of increasing employment flexibilization. This article also develops a research agenda, providing a platform to inform future research. (shrink)

High-performance work systems -performance research has dominated innovative human resource management studies for two decades. However, mainstream HPWS research has paid little attention to employees’ perceptions of HPWS, or to the relationship between HPWS and corporate social performance. The influence of CSP on employee outcomes such as organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behaviour has thus been similarly neglected. This paper seeks to investigate these missing links in literature using data collected from a sample of 700 employees in China. The findings (...) demonstrate that HPWS is positively related to HPWS satisfaction and employees’ perceptions of CSP. HPWS satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between HPWS and employees’ affective commitment. There are multiple mediators between HPWS and OCB, indicating more complicated mechanisms through which HPWS leads to desired HR outcomes. Employees’ perceived CSP has a significant influence on HPWS satisfaction, AC and OCB, suggesting firms should place a premium on achieving a reputation as being socially responsible. (shrink)

The Biliu River is the largest river in Dalian. The occurrence of floods and droughts in this basin has extremely important impacts on local industry, agriculture, and urban development. For a long time, the annual distribution of precipitation in the Biliu River Basin is extremely uneven, the river runoff varies greatly from year to year and season to year, floods and droughts occur frequently, and serious soil erosion results in fragile ecological environment and severe shortage of water resources. In this (...) paper, the spatial and temporal changes of rainfall and runoff in the Biliu River Basin are studied through the coupling of the MIKE 11 model and the MIKE SHE model. The hydrological changes in the Biliu River Basin are simulated. The coupled model is verified by monthly runoff data from 1996 to 2015, and the simulation values are found to be true. The values match well. Based on the cyclical pattern of precipitation and runoff in the Biliu River Basin, the rainfall and runoff data in the Biliu River Basin from 2016 to 2030 are derived. The MIKE SHE/MIKE 11 coupling model is used to predict the Biliu River from 2016 to 2030. The results show that flood disasters are expected to occur in August 2020, July 2025, and July 2030, which can provide a basis for hydrological management in the Biliu River Basin. (shrink)

Part of understanding the meaning and power of algorithms means asking what new demands they might make of ethical frameworks, and how they might be held accountable to ethical standards. I develop a definition of networked information algorithms as assemblages of institutionally situated code, practices, and norms with the power to create, sustain, and signify relationships among people and data through minimally observable, semiautonomous action. Starting from Merrill’s prompt to see ethics as the study of “what we ought to do,” (...) I examine ethical dimensions of contemporary NIAs. Specifically, in an effort to sketch an empirically grounded, pragmatic ethics of algorithms, I trace an algorithmic assemblage’s power to convene constituents, suggest actions based on perceived similarity and probability, and govern the timing and timeframes of ethical action. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of Molyneux's problem within contemporary philosophy of mind tend to characterize the problem as primarily concerned with the role innately known principles, amodal spatial concepts, and rational cognitive faculties play in our perceptual lives. Indeed, for broadly similar reasons, rationalists have generally advocated an affirmative answer, while empiricists have generally advocated a negative one, to the question Molyneux posed after presenting his famous thought experiment. This historical characterization of the dialectic, however, somewhat obscures the role Molyneux's problem has (...) played in spawning debates within the empiricist tradition. Fortunately, the differences between various empiricist accounts have been widely recognized and discussed among historians of philosophy working on the topic. The focus of the present essay is to develop an interpretation of John Locke's views on Molyneux's problem that best coheres with his other views on human understanding as well as with the predominant scientific opinion about the nature of perception during the period in which he lived. (shrink)

The paper aims to show that, if S5 is the logic of metaphysical necessity, then no state of affairs in any possible world constitutes any non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God. There might well be states of affairs in some worlds describing extraordinary goods and extraordinary evils, but it is false that these states of affairs constitute any (non-trivial) evidence for or against the existence of God. The epistemological and metaphysical consequences for philosophical theology of (...) assuming that S4 or Kσρ is the logic of metaphysical necessity are equally untenable. S4 guarantees that God does not exist if there is the slightest evidence against the existence of God. And Kσρ guarantees that God might survive the loss or acquisition of any essential property at all. (shrink)

Perhaps the greatest impediment to a viable libertarianism is the provision of a satisfactory explanation of how actions that are undetermined by an agent's character can still be under the control of, or ‘up to’, the agent. The ‘luck problem’ has been most assiduously examined by Robert Kane who supplies a detailed account of how this problem can be resolved. Although Kane's theory is innovative, insightful, and more resourceful than most of his critics believe, it ultimately cannot account for the (...) type of control that moral responsibility and (ultimate) agency legitimately require. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists have long worried that the human tendency to anthropomorphize leads us to err in our understanding of nonhuman minds. This tendency, which I call intuitive anthropomorphism, is a heuristic used by our unconscious folk psychology to understand nonhuman animals. The dominant understanding of intuitive anthropomorphism underestimates its complexity. If we want to understand and control intuitive anthropomorphism, we must treat it as a cognitive bias and look to the empirical evidence. This evidence suggests that the most common (...) control for intuitive anthropomorphism, Morgan’s Canon, should be rejected, while others are incomplete. It also suggests new approaches. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists make many different, seemingly incompatible parsimony claims in support of competing models of cognition in nonhuman animals. This variety of parsimony claims is problematic. Firstly, it is difficult to justify each specific variety. This problem is especially salient for Morgan's Canon, perhaps the most important variety of parsimony claimed. Secondly, there is no systematic way of adjudicating between particular claims when they conflict. I argue for a view of parsimony in comparative psychology that solves these problems, based (...) on Sober's view that parsimony claims are claims that one model is more plausible given background theory. (shrink)

I challenge the dominant understanding of what it means to say two thoughts are associated. The two views that dominate the current literature treat association as a kind of mechanism that drives sequences of thought. The first, which I call reductive associationism, treats association as a kind of neural mechanism. The second treats association as a feature of the kind of psychological mechanism associative processing. Both of these views are inadequate. I argue that association should instead be seen as a (...) highly abstract filler term, standing in for causal relations between representational states in a system. Associations, so viewed, could be implemented by many different mechanisms. I outline the role that this view gives associative models as part of a top-down characterization of psychological processes of any kind and of any complexity. (shrink)

The middle-market tabloid newspapers in Britain help to shape a perception of teachers and state schools that is mostly negative and derisory. This article provides examples of this bias in newspaper reportage based on a case study of an annual teacher union conference and journalists' different interpretations of events generally.

Are people rational? This question was central to Greek thought and has been at the heart of psychology and philosophy for millennia. This book provides a radical and controversial reappraisal of conventional wisdom in the psychology of reasoning, proposing that the Western conception of the mind as a logical system is flawed at the very outset. It argues that cognition should be understood in terms of probability theory, the calculus of uncertain reasoning, rather than in terms of logic, the calculus (...) of certain reasoning. (shrink)

In response to calls for greater interdisciplinary involvement from the social sciences and humanities in the development, governance, and study of artificial intelligence systems, this paper presents one sociologist’s view on the problem of algorithmic bias and the reproduction of societal bias. Discussions of bias in AI cover much of the same conceptual terrain that sociologists studying inequality have long understood using more specific terms and theories. Concerns over reproducing societal bias should be informed by an understanding of the ways (...) that inequality is continually reproduced in society—processes that AI systems are either complicit in, or can be designed to disrupt and counter. The contrast presented here is between conservative and radical approaches to AI, with conservatism referring to dominant tendencies that reproduce and strengthen the status quo, while radical approaches work to disrupt systemic forms of inequality. The limitations of a conservative approach to racial bias are discussed through the specific example of biased criminal risk assessments and Indigenous overrepresentation in Canada’s criminal justice system. This illustrates the dangers of treating racial bias as a generalizable problem and equality as a generalizable solution, emphasizing the importance of considering inequality in context. Societal issues can no longer be out of scope for AI and machine learning, given the impact of these systems on human lives. This requires engagement with a growing body of critical AI scholarship that goes beyond biased data to analyze structured ways of perpetuating inequality, opening up the possibility for interdisciplinary engagement and radical alternatives. (shrink)

A number of Christian theologians and philosophers have been critical of overly moralizing approaches to the doctrine of sin, but nearly all Christian thinkers maintain that moral fault is necessary or sufficient for sin to obtain. Call this the “Moral Consensus.” I begin by clarifying the relevance of impurities to the biblical cataloguing of sins. I then present four extensional problems for the Moral Consensus on sin, based on the biblical catalogue of sins: (1) moral over-demandingness, (2) agential unfairness, (3) (...) moral repugnance, and (4) moral atrocity. Next, I survey several partial solutions to these problems, suggested by the recent philosophical literature. Then I evaluate two largely unexplored solutions: (a) genuine sin dilemmas and (b) defeasible sinfulness. I argue that (a) creates more problems than it solves and that, while (b) is well-motivated and solves or eases each of the above problems, (b) leaves many biblical ordinances about sin morally misleading, creating (5) a pedagogical problem of evil. I conclude by arguing that (5) places hefty explanatory burdens on those who would appeal to (b) to resolve the four extensional problems discussed in this paper. So Christian thinkers may need to consider a more radical separation of sin and moral fault. (shrink)

This paper employs ethnographic research methods to study a Buddhist meditation practice that takes the walking body as its object. The mundane act of walking is transformed into a meditative object for the purpose of refining states of embodied consciousness. This meditation practice offers a glimpse of the relationship of body to mind, a fundamental concern within the philosophy of mind. The analytic focus of this paper is the practical nature of meditation work. Aspects of Buddhist Philosophy are explored and (...) compared to analytic themes within Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology. (shrink)

There are two roles that association played in 18th–19th century associationism. The first dominates modern understanding of the history of the concept: association is a causal link posited to explain why ideas come in the sequence they do. The second has been ignored: association is merely regularity in the trains of thought, and the target of explanation. The view of association as regularity arose in several forms throughout the tradition, but Thomas Brown (1778–1820) makes the distinction explicit. He argues that (...) there is no associative link, and association is mere sequence. I trace this view of association through the tradition, and consider its implications: Brown's views, in particular, motivate a rethinking of the associationist tradition in psychology. Associationism was a project united by a shared explanandum phenomenon, rather than a theory united by a shared theoretical posit. (shrink)

Over the last decade, fully distributed models have become dominant in connectionist psychological modelling, whereas the virtues of localist models have been underestimated. This target article illustrates some of the benefits of localist modelling. Localist models are characterized by the presence of localist representations rather than the absence of distributed representations. A generalized localist model is proposed that exhibits many of the properties of fully distributed models. It can be applied to a number of problems that are difficult for fully (...) distributed models, and its applicability can be extended through comparisons with a number of classic mathematical models of behaviour. There are reasons why localist models have been underused, though these often misconstrue the localist position. In particular, many conclusions about connectionist representation, based on neuroscientific observation, can be called into question. There are still some problems inherent in the application of fully distributed systems and some inadequacies in proposed solutions to these problems. In the domain of psychological modelling, localist modelling is to be preferred. Key Words: choice; competition; connectionist modelling; consolidation; distributed; localist; neural networks; reaction-time. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science believe that empirical psychology can contribute little to the philosophical investigation of explanations. They take this to be shown by the fact that certain explanations fail to elicit any relevant psychological events (e.g., familiarity, insight, intelligibility, etc.). We report results from a study suggesting that, at least among those with extensive science training, a capacity to render an event intelligible is considered a requirement for explanation. We also investigate for whom explanations must be capable of rendering (...) events intelligible and whether or not accuracy is also viewed as a requirement. (shrink)

Despite its long period of dominance, the details of associationism as developed by the British Empiricists in the 18th and 19th centuries are often ignored or forgotten today. Perhaps as a result, modern understandings of Empiricist associationism are often oversimplified. In fact, there is no single core view that can be viewed as definitional, or even weaker, as characteristic, of the tradition. The actual views of associationists in this tradition are much more diverse than any such view would allow, even (...) on fundamental aspects of the concept of association. This paper presents some of the most striking theoretical diversity and most significant discussions within the Empiricist associationist tradition. Recognizing this diversity, Empiricist associationism is best viewed as a project with shared questions and methods rather than a shared substantive theory of mind. This discussion can inform our understanding of the historical tradition, and also inform our current use of association and associationism. The concept of association is more flexible than it is often treated, and even its basic nature and function remain up for debate. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Disagreement holds the key: the possibility of agreeing or disagreeing with a state of mind makes that state of mind act logically like accepting a claim. Charles Stevenson was quite right to begin his presentation of emotivism with disagreement.—Allan Gibbard.

The minimal God exemplifies essential omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection, but none of the other properties of the traditional God. I examine the consequences of the minimal God in augmented S5, S4, and Kρσ. The metaphysical consequences for the minimal God in S5 include the impossibility that God—or any other object—might acquire, lose, or exchange an essential property. It is impossible that an essentially divine being might become essentially human, for instance. The epistemological consequences include the impossibility of agnosticism—it is (...) impossible that P(◻︎FG |E) = P(~◻︎FG| E). Indeed, every weaker forms of agnosticism are also impossible—it is impossible that P(◻︎FG |E) = n, n(0 < n < 1). The metaphysical and epistemological consequences for the minimal God in S4 are equally untenable. I show that we can avoid all of these unwelcome epistemological consequences for the minimal God in Kρσ. But Kρσ has some extraordinary metaphysical consequences for the minimal God. All of the problems for the minimal God generalize to the maximal God. (shrink)

The dead donor rule justifies current practice in organ procurement for transplantation and states that organ donors must be dead prior to donation. The majority of organ donors are diagnosed as having suffered brain death and hence are declared dead by neurological criteria. However, a significant amount of unrest in both the philosophical and the medical literature has surfaced since this practice began forty years ago. I argue that, first, declaring death by neurological criteria is both unreliable and unjustified but (...) further, the ethical principles which themselves justify the dead donor rule are better served by abandoning that rule and instead allowing individuals who have suffered severe and irreversible brain damage to become organ donors, even though they are not yet dead and even though the removal of their organs would be the proximal cause of death. (shrink)

Thinking Space is ideal reading for those looking to learn about the Ospatial turn1 in social and cultural theory. As theorists have begun using using geographical concepts and metaphors to think about the complex and differentiated world this book examines the way they use spatial ideas, what role these ideas play in their thinking and what this means for how we think about theory and space. Among the writers discussed are: Simmel, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Cixous, Lefebvre, Lacan, Bourdieu, Foucault and Fanon.

How can a critical analysis of entrepreneurial intention inform an appreciation of ethics in social enterprise business models? In answering this question, we consider the ethical commitments that inform entrepreneurial action and the hybrid organisations that emerge out of these commitments and actions. Ethical theory can be a useful way to reorient the field of social enterprise so that it is more critical of bureaucratic and market-driven enterprises connected to neoliberal doctrine. Social enterprise hybrid business models are therefore reframed as (...) outcomes of both ethical and entrepreneurial intentions. We challenge the dominant conceptualisation of social enterprise as a hybrid blend of mission and market by reframing hybridity in terms of the moral choice of economic system and social value orientation. We deconstruct the political foundations of charitable trading activities, co-operative and mutual enterprises and socially responsible businesses by examining the rationalities and ethical commitments that underpin them. Whilst conceptual modelling of social enterprise is not new, this paper contributes to knowledge by developing a theory of social enterprise ethics based on the moral/political choices that are made by entrepreneurs when choosing between systems of economic exchange and social value orientation, then expressing it through a legal form. (shrink)

An extension of Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of 'virtues of acknowledged dependence', to include relationships with the non-human world, offers an organising principle for environmental virtue ethics. It situates ecological virtue among more traditional virtues of inter-human relationships, and may thereby contribute to an ethical reconciliation of policies aimed at encouraging ecological virtue with those aimed at protecting the freedoms required for personal autonomy. Within this eudaimonist framework, ecological virtue may be understood and promoted as directly contributing to a good life.

I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...) of teleofunction, explicated in terms of natural selection. -/- To explain (ii), we begin by recognizing that representational states do not have content, that is, they are neither true nor false except insofar as they both “point to” or “refer” to something, as well as “say” something regarding whatever it is they are about. To distinguish veridical from false representations, there must be a way for these separate aspects to come apart; hence, we explain (ii) by providing independent theories of what I call f-reference and f-predication (the ‘f’ simply connotes ‘fundamental’, to distinguish these things from their natural language counterparts). -/- Causal theories of representation typically founder on error, or on what Fodor has called the disjunction problem. Resemblance or isomorphism theories typically founder on what I’ve called the non-uniqueness problem, which is that isomorphisms and resemblance are practically unconstrained and so representational content cannot be uniquely determined. These traditional problems provide the motivation for my theory, the structural preservation theory, as follows. F-reference, like reference, is a specific, asymmetric relation, as is causation. F-predication, like predication, is a non-specific relation, as predicates typically apply to many things, just as many relational systems can be isomorphic to any given relational system. Putting these observations together, a promising strategy is to explain f-reference via causal history and f-predication via something like isomorphism between relational systems. -/- This dissertation should be conceptualized as having three parts. After motivating and characterizing the problem in chapter 1, the first part is the negative project, where I review and critique Dretske’s, Fodor’s, and Millikan’s theories in chapters 2-4. Second, I construct my theory about the nature of representation in chapter 5 and defend it from objections in chapter 6. In chapters 7-8, which constitute the third and final part, I address the question of how representation is implemented in biological systems. In chapter 7 I argue that single-cell intracortical recordings taken from awake Macaque monkeys performing a cognitive task provide empirical evidence for structural preservation theory, and in chapter 8 I use the empirical results to illustrate, clarify, and refine the theory. (shrink)

This article assumes that a profession is a number of individuals in the same occupation voluntarily organized to earn a living by openly serving a moral ideal in a morally-permissible way beyond what law, market, morality, and public opinion would otherwise require. Our question is whether the concept of profession may have a far wider range than the term, so that, for example, pointing out that a certain language lacks a word for “profession” in our sense, is not enough to (...) show that those who speak the language also lack the concept. We believe the survey of 71 Chinese reported here begins to answer that question. This article has four parts. The first describes who was interviewed, how, when, and so on. The second describes some important features of the survey’s questions, explaining how the questions track the concept of profession. The third part reports and interprets the results relevant to our question. The forth defends a tentative answer to the question with which we began—arguing the survey supports the claim that China has a profession of engineering. This article should serve as a “proof of concept”, that is, a model for similar studies around the world both of engineering and of other occupations thought to be professions. (shrink)

国家社会科学基金项目中国社会科学院哲学研究所重点项目中国社会科学院哲学研究所出版基金资助项目.

A recent article in Anthropology of Consciousness entitled ‘Imaginal research for unlearning mastery: Divination with Tarot as a decolonizing methodology’ argues that the Western Tarot may be a useful tool to facilitate decolonization despite (or perhaps in spite) of the colonial and imperial imprints of the accumulating class. This response points out the Tarot is in fact a tool developed by the accumulating class, designed specifically to facilitate the imposition of elite master narratives. This letter calls into question the appropriateness (...) and effectiveness of using the Tarot as a tool for decolonization. (shrink)

The “Cosmological Constant Problem” is widely considered a crisis in contemporary theoretical physics. Unfortunately, the search for its resolution is hampered by open disagreement about what is, strictly, the problem. This disagreement stems from the observation that the CCP is not a problem within any of our current theories, and nearly all of the details of those future theories for which the CCP could be made a problem are up for grabs. Given this state of affairs, I discuss how one (...) ought to make sense of the role of the CCP in physics and generalize some lessons from it. (shrink)