The amount of social support literature in the field of interpersonal communication has increased steadily. In the last decade, however, no one has pushed for a conclusion as to what kind of phenomenon social support is. This article aims to describe the essence of social support. The essence is what must be present in all the phenomena that claim to be social support. The study uses phenomenological reduction and imag¬inative variation (1) on social support definitions and (2) on the empirical (...) material of support in men’s friendships. The synthesis of the two sets of material deduces the essence of social support both theoretically and empirically. According to the phenomenological reduction the essence of social support is the awareness of a real or potential void in a person’s life experience, and of otherness that intends to alter that experience to achieve wholeness. Supportive communication is the manifestation of the essence of social support in interpersonal relationships. (shrink)

Recently the role of customary local institutions in the conservation of biological diversity has become a topic of widespread interest. In this paper the conservation value of one such institution, traditionally protected forest, is studied with regard to its ecological representativity and institutional persistence. On the basis of a case study from Mozambique the paper concludes that traditionally protected forests do have a practical conservation value, especially as fire refuges and in the preservation of metapopulations of endangered species. However, it (...) is also important to recall their spiritual aspect, which is crucial for their continuing appreciation and upholding. Even though customary institutions are still strong in the study area, they are subject to power struggles at both local and national levels. In the present context of political transition, any outside interventions regarding such local institutions as sacred forests, which have high symbolic value, should be considered carefully. (shrink)

[First published 09/2016; substantive revision 02/2021.] Evaluative terms and concepts are often divided into “thin” and “thick”. We don’t evaluate actions and persons merely as good or bad, or right or wrong, but also as kind, courageous, tactful, selfish, boorish, and cruel. The latter evaluative concepts are "descriptively thick": their application somehow involves both evaluation and a substantial amount of non-evaluative description. This article surveys various attempts to answer four fundamental questions about thick terms and concepts. (1) A “combination question”: (...) how exactly do thick terms and concepts relate evaluation and non-evaluative description? (2) A “location question”: is evaluation somehow inherent to thick terms and concepts, such as perhaps an aspect of their meaning, or merely a feature of their use? (3) A “delineation question”: how do thick terms differ from the thin and from other kinds of evaluative terms? (4) Given answers to these questions, what broader philosophical significance and applications might thick concepts have? (shrink)

This paper offers a general model of substantive moral principles as a kind of hedged moral principles that can (but don't have to) tolerate exceptions. I argue that the kind of principles I defend provide an account of what would make an exception to them permissible. I also argue that these principles are nonetheless robustly explanatory with respect to a variety of moral facts; that they make sense of error, uncertainty, and disagreement concerning moral principles and their implications; and that (...) one can grasp these principles without having to grasp any particular list of their permissibly exceptional instances. I conclude by pointing out various advantages that this model of principles has over several of its rivals. The bottom line is that we should find nothing peculiarly odd or problematic about the idea of exception-tolerating and yet robustly explanatory moral principles. (shrink)

The accommodation of evidence has been argued to be associated with several methodological problems that should prompt evaluators to lower their confidence in the accommodative theory. Accommodators may overfit their model to data (Hitchcock and Sober, Br J Philos Sci 55(1):1–34, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/55.1.1), hunt for (spurious) associations between variables (Mayo, Error and the growth of experimental knowledge. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, pp 294–318), or ‘fudge’ their theory in the effort to accommodate a particular datum (Lipton, Inference to the (...) best explanation. Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 164–183). The converse of accommodation, novel prediction, has been offered as a solution. If theorists novelly predict empirical results rather than accommodate those results, the potential risks of accommodation are avoided, and the theory warrants greater confidence. This paper evaluates if the problems of accommodation justify a preference for novel prediction over accommodation for evaluators of a scientific theory. I argue that there is currently insufficient evidence to conclude that the problems of accommodation result in a predictivist advantage in theory confirmation. Taking into consideration the disadvantages of novel prediction and the advantages of accommodation, the impact of further evidential factors, and recent scientific evidence about the consequences of novel prediction and accommodation, novel prediction and accommodation appear roughly on a par, or accommodation is even superior in the current context. (shrink)

The dimensional structure of phenomenal space and its relation to the brain have not been widely focused on in brain and consciousness studies. This paper postulates that focusing on the dimensional structures displayed in the relation between phenomenal space and the brain is necessary for understanding the integration of distributed brain events in binding. A related issue is why items and events of phenomenal space and consciousness as they appear in experience seem to be beyond the reach of natural scientific (...) empirical observation. The proposed solution to these issues is postulated to require a fourth spatial dimension. A transcendence principle of detection (TPD) is introduced, which states that transcendent degrees of freedom of an n+1 dimension are a necessary condition for experiencing or detecting an n-dimensionally extended physical structure as an n-dimensionally extended phenomenal structure. It is postulated that the phenomenal outcome of binding, i.e. the threedimensionally distributed and extended phenomenal structure of human experience, is the expected first-person outcome of threedimensionally distributed neurophysical structures being monitored at the domain of a fourth spatial dimension. (shrink)

This article looks at negotiations with state authorities and the evidentiary criteria they create in culturally contrasting contexts when phenomena deal with elements that for the dominant society are conceptualized as “supernatural.” We draw from the level of experiences of other-than-human beings, especially spirits and “ungraspable” presences, as social practices in and of themselves as well as acts of mobilizing those which are meaningful for knowledge production in Indigenous Amazonia and North European contexts. Our two cases show how in state (...) territorial protection debates and health services, visibility, quantification, measurability, Euro-American dominant, mainly binary, and bounded concepts are employed to create the grounds of validity. Yet, for actual individual or collective experiences, new types of evidence work can emerge in collaborations. Thus, this article sheds light on the needs for contextual and communicative actions to overcome contrasting onto-epistemologies in the context of the state. (shrink)

Although the history of centrally planned economies has been widely studied, the development of socialist thinking on the subject has remained largely uncharted. In this 1991 work, Pekka Sutela presents a detailed analysis of Soviet economic thought and theory. Dr Sutela traces the competing currents in the Marxist tradition of socialist economies from the Revolution to the present day. In particular he shows how the Gorbachev economic reform programme of 1987 rose from the work of Nobel Prize economist L. (...) V. Kantorovich and his followers. However, this programme failed and the author explains in some detail why this happened. Since then, Soviet economists have tried to abandon their traditional theory of central planning and move along the path and long established contacts with leading Soviet economists, Pekka Sutela is able to show how Soviet economic thinking has moved from dogmatism through reformism to pragmatism. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been recently conceptualized and studied as a political phenomenon. Most debates in this scholarship have thus far focused on normative issues. Less attention has been paid to the explanatory potential of CSR research grounded in political theory and philosophy. In this article, we conduct a pragmatist reading of political scholarship on CSR and seek to deploy existing knowledge for research pursuing political explanation. We argue that the political ontologies that underlie scholarship on CSR can be (...) used to transform normative and descriptive research also for explanatory uses. We show how ontologies vary in terms of potential research objects and scopes of political explanation, and argue that the main types of political-ontological stances adopted in scholarship on CSR, foundational and post-foundational stances, offer explanatory analysis of different schematic guidelines. Our pragmatist reading of previous research and an empirical case illustration of political explanation of change in corporate responsibility in the biofuel industry demonstrate the opportunities, limitations, and challenges different political-ontological commitments provide for political explanation. (shrink)

X‐linked agammaglobulinemia is a heritable immunodeficiency disease caused by a differentiation abnormality, resulting in the virtual absence of B Iymphocytes and plasma cells. The affected gene encodes a cytoplasmic protein tyrosine kinase, Bruton's agammaglobulinemia tyrosine kinase, designated Btk. Btk and the other family members, Tec, Itk and Bmx, contain five regions, four of which are common structural and functional modules that are found in other signaling proteins. Mutations affect all domains of the gene, but amino acid substitutions seem to be (...) confined to certain regions. More than 150 unique mutations have been identified and are collected in a mutation database, BTKbase. Here we discuss the three‐dimensional structural implications of such mutations and their putative functional role. Of special interest are mutations affecting the pleckstrin homology domain, as Btk is the only disease‐associated protein so far reported to carry mutations in this particular module. (shrink)

The article examines the role of discourse in organisational sensemaking. By building links between the theorising undertaken within organisational studies and the empirical analysis of multimodal social interaction, it argues for a relational view of sensemaking and investigates how sense is made in and through social interaction in real organisational situations where language use intertwines with embodied actions and the manipulation of artefacts. In particular, the article studies the use of discourse technologies of textual artefacts in sensemaking processes. The data (...) come from training workshops of a Finnish workplace organisation, conducted in order for the employees to delineate the history and future of their organisation with the help of writable papers. The results show how the papers exert agency in the situation by facilitating three specific discursive practices and by enabling and restricting the actions employed in constructing a shared understanding of the organisational reality. (shrink)

Francesco Guala has written an important book proposing a new account of social institutions and criticizing existing ones. We focus on Guala’s critique of collective acceptance theories of institutions, widely discussed in the literature of collective intentionality. Guala argues that at least some of the collective acceptance theories commit their proponents to antinaturalist methodology of social science. What is at stake here is what kind of philosophizing is relevant for the social sciences. We argue that a Searlean version of collective (...) acceptance theory can be defended against Guala’s critique and question the sufficiency of Guala’s account of the ontology of the social world. (shrink)

Our review essay contributes to the long-standing and vibrant discussion in science and technology studies (STS) on methods, methodologies, and theory–method relationships. We aim to improve the reflexivity of research by unpacking the often implicit assumptions that imbue research conduct and by offering practical tools through which STS researchers can recognize their research designs and think through them in a new way. To achieve these aims, we analyze different compositions of theories, methods, and empirics in three different STS approaches—actor–network theory, (...) the biography of artifacts and practices, and ethnomethodology—by employing the concept of a theory–methods package (TMP). A selection of theoretical cornerstone texts and case studies in infrastructure research from each tradition serves as our material. Our findings point, first, to differences between the TMPs of the reviewed approaches and to the internal diversity of theory–method relationships in each approach. Second, we found some intriguing similarities between the approaches and discuss potential complementarities of their theory–method fits. (shrink)

In this paper a social group’s (retrospective) responsibility for its actions and their consequences are investigated from a philosophical point of view. Building on Tuomela’s theory of group action, the paper argues that group responsibility can be analyzed in terms of what its members (jointly) think and do qua group members. When a group is held responsible for some action, its members, acting qua members of the group, can collectively be regarded as praiseworthy or blameworthy, in the light of some (...) normative standard, for what the group has done. The paper gives a necessary and sufficient conditions analysis of a group’s responsibility for its actions and their outcomes, and the conditions can be cashed out in terms of the group members’ joint (and other) actions. (shrink)

Moral particularism denies that moral reasons present in particular cases depend on any suitable provision of moral principles. If they did, there should be invariable reasons. But reasons are holistic: whether a consideration is a reason may vary with the context. This work responds to particularism with a moderate form of generalism, according to which it is compatible with reasons holism that moral reasons are fundamentally determined by moral principles. The holism of reasons is explained by construing moral principles as (...) hedged: they determine reasons that are invariable, but only given the presence of certain suitable conditions. Both what may function as a reason and what may function as a suitable condition is determined by the given principle's normative basis---the basis on which we attribute to reasons normative force capable of justifying action. Such determinations don't happen fundamentally on a case-by-case basis, but instead set on the holism of reasons the sorts of antecedent constraints that particularism cannot accept. So, although the view rules out standard forms of generalism, it doesn't collapse into particularism. The moderate generalist view of moral metaphysics is argued also to ground better explanations of the relevant sorts of moral facts than its particularist rivals. It is also argued that generalism can regard moral principles as necessary for good moral deliberation without requiring that the deliberator represent them to herself in explicit propositional form. Psychologically, the grasp of moral principles that is required for proper responsiveness to reasons determined by principles may simply structure one's capacity to be responsive to reasons. Finally, on moderate generalism, overall moral verdicts about particular cases are a function of the relative strengths of the reasons present in them. It is argued, from the structure of value and evaluative comparisons, that the relative strengths of reasons are determined not by priority principles that order competing principles but by evaluative comparisons of the alternatives for which the competing principles specify reasons. A plausible moral epistemology is sketched on which the context-sensitivity of such comparisons doesn't make them too weak to justify moral verdicts. (shrink)

Reino Virtanen. CHAPITRE VII LA FIN D'UNE TRAJECTOIRE « Valéry est notre Lucrèce », écrivait Alain '. Mais où est La Nature des Choses de Valéry ? Il a nié en effet la possibilité d'une telle œuvre dans la France de son époque. Il disait ...

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro-colonial power regimes; balancing of culture-specific frameworks with broad-gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; (...) the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources. (shrink)

To meet all physicians' needs for ethics consultation in Finland, a novel form of service, the Physicians' Ethics Forum, was founded in 2003. The Forum is a cost-efficient service based on electronic communication. In this paper, experiences throughout its first 6 years are described.

“Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives” writes Sissela Bok. Although trust is ubiquitous, understanding trust is a non-trivial challenge. Trust: Analytic and Applied Perspectives addresses critical and analytical issues of trust. It examines trust from a conceptual perspective as well as considers it in practical contexts ranging from the public sphere broadly understood to particular social institutions, such as universities and medical care. Trust: Analytic and Applied Perspectives explores what kind of good trust (...) is, what kind of goods it can protect and how it can bring about goods, and develops subtle distinctions between trust and other virtues, and between trust and other forms of dependence.The pluralism of the volume reflects the diversity of the real world contexts and theoretical perspectives indispensable in the search of a deeper understanding of trust. Without such an understanding of the nature of trust and the good reasons why people might trust one another or the institutions, we are in danger of designing institutions that will reduce trust or even drive it out. Trust: Analytic and Applied Perspectives sheds new light on the intersecting dimensions of our social cooperation, in which trust can be responsibly undertaken. (shrink)

Interface agents are increasingly being used to enhance the user-friendliness of computers. In the new mobile technology of handheld computers, interface agents are also being used to present on-line news. The purpose of the study was to explore how the gender of the interface agent and the user affect evaluations of the agent and the news service. The results revealed that attitudes toward the interface agent significantly correlated with evaluations of the entire news service. Moreover, the gender of the participant (...) and of the agent was significant for an evaluation of the credibility and entertainment value of the news service. (shrink)