Israeli courts were recently faced with the question whether an employer is allowed to voice objections to unionization during an organizing drive. Since the legislation fails to provide an answer to this question, it was up to the courts to come up with a solution. The National Labor Court in Histadrut v. Pelephone held that employers have no say and must refrain from any communications whatsoever with the workers regarding the decision whether or not to join the union. The Supreme (...) Court later affirmed this decision. This Article explores this legal question and examines whether this decision was justified, and whether it should be adopted in other countries as well. It first discusses the justifications for the conflicting freedoms in this scenario — the workers’ freedom of association and the employer’s freedom of speech — to appreciate their relative strength in the circumstances. It then examines whether it is possible to achieve a certain balance. To this end, the Article critically reviews the legal mechanisms adopted by other legal jurisdictions in this regard, shedding light on their effectiveness and the difficulties of organizing in practice in each jurisdiction. The main argument advanced in this Article is that the solution has to be purposive — to advance the goals of labor law, specifically freedom of association — and that the purposive analysis must be contextual. A rule prohibiting the employer from voicing opinions is surely an infringement of freedom of speech, and strong reasons are needed to justify it. Whether strong enough reasons exist depends on several contextual factors. Essentially, the question is whether it is possible, given the current context, to secure real freedom of association without such a rule. By context we mean two main things: first, the real-life current experience concerning the struggles of organizing; and second, the existence of alternative legal mechanisms that might address this problem. (shrink)

There are good reasons to endorse scientific realism and good reasons to endorse common-sense realism. However, it has sometimes been suggested that there is a tension between the two which makes it difficult to endorse both. Can the common-sense picture of the world be reconciled with the strikingly different picture presented to us by our best confirmed theories of science? This chapter critically examines proposals for doing so, and it offers a new one, which is essentially this. It is a (...) psychological fact that we have certain common-sense beliefs. In the framework of reductive physicalism, all beliefs, including the common-sense ones, are nothing but brain states and processes. Being scientifically realist about these brain states and accepting the reductive-physicalist view of the mind, we can account for the psychological fact that we have certain common-sense beliefs with certain contents, without committing to the idea that the contents of these common-sense beliefs have to be true of the world. In this coherentist approach we are not required to relinquish our common-sense beliefs, since although they are false according to science, this very same science shows that holding those beliefs is fully rational. (shrink)

Persons exhibiting mutations in two tumor suppressor genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, have a greatly increased risk of developing breast and/or ovarian cancer. The incidence of BRCA gene mutation is very high in Ashkenazi Jewish women of European descent, and many issues can arise, particularly for observant Orthodox women, because of their genetic status. Their obligations under the Jewish code of ethics, referred to as Jewish law, with respect to the acceptability of various risk-reducing strategies, may be poorly understood. In this (...) article the moral direction that Jewish law gives to women regarding testing, confidentiality, and other issues is explored. The intent is to broaden nurses' knowledge of how a particular religious tradition could impact on decision making around genetics testing, with the aim of enhancing their understanding of culturally sensitive ethical care. (shrink)

Philosophers of physics have long debated whether the Past State of low entropy of our universe calls for explanation. What is meant by “calls for explanation”? In this article we analyze this notion, distinguishing between several possible meanings that may be attached to it. Taking the debate around the Past State as a case study, we show how our analysis of what “calling for explanation” might mean can contribute to clarifying the debate and perhaps to settling it, thus demonstrating the (...) fruitfulness of this analysis. Applying our analysis, we show that two main opponents in this debate, Huw Price and Craig Callender, are, for the most part, talking past each other rather than disagreeing, as they employ different notions of “calling for explanation”. We then proceed to show how answering the different questions that arise out of the different meanings of “calling for explanation” can result in clarifying the problems at hand and thus, hopefully, to solving them. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize a social phenomenon that exists in Israel: immoral medicine.In recent years, nurses have been exposed to many instances of immoral medicine in hospitals. We want to protest about the demands for money from patients who are waiting for surgical intervention, arouse the medical community’s conscience concerning these immoral activities, and improve professional and moral behaviour.

Following independence in 1948, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem founded a law faculty and modeled it on the European example. Today, the Israeli law faculty is much more similar to the U.S. law school than to institutions of legal education in Europe. This Article traces the history of the changes in Israeli legal education. It argues that the shift began after 1967, faced resistance in the 1980s, and gained momentum in the 1990s. Presently we may be witnessing the beginning of (...) a shift away from U.S. influence and back to Continental Europe or even Asia. The Article discusses three major educational components, which together signaled the shift to U.S. influence: a student-run law review, curricular reform, and open and lively class discussion. The Article then offers several factors to explain the shift: judicial opinions that began to rely on American decisional law, the adoption of the U.S. model of practice by the legal profession, the privatization of law schools, globalization, and Americanization and foreign affairs. Finally, the Article considers the contribution to Americanization made by active U.S. attempts to export American law to other legal systems. (shrink)

Recent marketing theory uses the Jungian concept of the archetype to design strategies for the improvement of product selling. Mark and Pearson propose that archetypes such as the ruler, the hero, the outlaw, and the sage are useful in promoting a product. This article suggests that the concept of archetypes as well as myths such as the Prometheus myth and the myth of the expulsion from Paradise, when combined with the insights offered by Mark and Pearson, may help in understanding (...) the management of trials of dissent as well. The article presents seven motifs that recur in trials of dissent and shows how they form a part of the phenomenon of the political management of dissent: the demonization and otherization of defendants and their supporters; the tendency to employ the charge of conspiracy and thus target a group rather than a single individual; the bending of the laws of procedure; the utilization of previously-untested substantive charges; the appeal made by each side to an external principle or vision--typically, the government resorts to the law of necessity whereas the defense resorts to natural law or a vision of "true justice" ; focus on the judge as manipulator of laws; and the appellate court assuming the role of the ultimate sage, performing its task with balance and detachment. The appellate court may use softer rhetoric in an effort to minimize the damage to the appearance of legality. When it does so, the rule of law is reaffirmed as a concept that benefits all sides; there is thus unity in the commitment to the rule of law, not to patriotism or to identification with the government. In addition, an effort is made to reaffirm the maxim that the government is a government of law, not of men. (shrink)

Statistical mechanics is a strange theory. Its aims are debated, its methods are contested, its main claims have never been fully proven, and their very truth is challenged, yet at the same time, it enjoys huge empirical success and gives us the feeling that we understand important phenomena. What is this weird theory, exactly? Statistical mechanics is the name of the ongoing attempt to apply mechanics, together with some auxiliary hypotheses, to explain and predict certain phenomena, above all those described (...) by thermodynamics. This paper shows what parts of this objective can be achieved with mechanics by itself. It thus clarifies what roles remain for the auxiliary assumptions that are needed to achieve the rest of the desiderata. Those auxiliary hypotheses are described in another paper in this journal, Foundations of statistical mechanics: The auxiliary hypotheses. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 429-430, June 2012.

According to the so-called Hempel’s Dilemma, the thesis of physicalism is either false or empty. Our intention in this paper is not to propose a solution to the Dilemma, but rather to argue as follows: to the extent that Hempel’s Dilemma applies to physicalism it equally applies to any theory that gives a deep-structure and changeable account of our experience or of high-level theories. In particular, we will show that it also applies to mind-body dualistic theories. The scope of Hempel’s (...) Dilemma turns out to be very wide: it is a special case of a general sceptical argument against changeable deep-structure theories in and outside science. (shrink)

Von Neumann argued by means of a thought experiment involving measurements of spin observables that the quantum mechanical quantity is conceptually equivalent to thermodynamic entropy. We analyze Von Neumann's thought experiment and show that his argument fails. Over the past few years there has been a dispute in the literature regarding the Von Neumann entropy. It turns out that each contribution to this dispute addressed a different special case. In this paper we generalize the discussion and examine the full matrix (...) of possibilities that are relevant for the evaluation and understanding of Von Neumann’s argument. (shrink)

Statistical mechanics is the name of the ongoing attempt to explain and predict certain phenomena, above all those described by thermodynamics on the basis of the fundamental theories of physics, in particular mechanics, together with certain auxiliary assumptions. In another paper in this journal, Foundations of statistical mechanics: Mechanics by itself, I have shown that some of the thermodynamic regularities, including the probabilistic ones, can be described in terms of mechanics by itself. But in order to prove those regularities, in (...) particular the time asymmetric ones, it is necessary to add to mechanics assumptions of three kinds, all of which are under debate in contemporary literature. One kind of assumptions concerns measure and probability, and here, a major debate is around the notion of “typicality.” A second assumption concerns initial conditions, and here, the debate is about the nature and status of the so-called past hypothesis. The third kind of assumptions concerns the dynamics, and here, the possibility and significance of “Maxwell's Demon” is the main topic of discussions. This article describes these assumptions and examines the justification for introducing them, emphasizing the contemporary debates around them. (shrink)

Quilty-Dunn et al.'s wide-ranging defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH) argues that vision traffics in abstract, structured representational formats. We agree: Vision, like language, is compositional – just as words compose into phrases, many visual representations contain discrete constituents that combine in systematic ways. Here, we amass evidence extending this proposal, and explore its implications for how vision interfaces with the rest of the mind.

A commonly-discussed feature of perceptual experience is that it has ‘assertoric’ or ‘phenomenal’ force. We will start by discussing various descriptions of the assertoricity of perceptual experience. We will then adopt a minimal characterization of assertoricity: a perceptual experience has assertoric force just in case it inclines the perceiver to believe its content. Adducing cases that show that visual experience is not always assertoric, we will argue that what renders these visual experiences non-assertoric is that they are penetrated by belief-like (...) imaginings. Lastly, we will explain why it is that when belief-like imaginings—as opposed to beliefs (and other cognitive states)—penetrate visual experience, they render visual experiences non-assertoric. (shrink)

The problem of multiple-computations discovered by Hilary Putnam presents a deep difficulty for functionalism (of all sorts, computational and causal). We describe in out- line why Putnam’s result, and likewise the more restricted result we call the Multiple- Computations Theorem, are in fact theorems of statistical mechanics. We show why the mere interaction of a computing system with its environment cannot single out a computation as the preferred one amongst the many computations implemented by the system. We explain why nonreductive (...) approaches to solving the multiple- computations problem, and in particular why computational externalism, are dualistic in the sense that they imply that nonphysical facts in the environment of a computing system single out the computation. We discuss certain attempts to dissolve Putnam’s unrestricted result by appealing to systems with certain kinds of input and output states as a special case of computational externalism, and show why this approach is not workable without collapsing to behaviorism. We conclude with some remarks about the nonphysical nature of mainstream approaches to both statistical mechanics and the quantum theory of measurement with respect to the singling out of partitions and observables. (shrink)

Statistical mechanics is often taken to be the paradigm of a successful inter-theoretic reduction, which explains the high-level phenomena (primarily those described by thermodynamics) by using the fundamental theories of physics together with some auxiliary hypotheses. In my view, the scope of statistical mechanics is wider since it is the type-identity physicalist account of all the special sciences. But in this chapter, I focus on the more traditional and less controversial domain of this theory, namely, that of explaining the thermodynamic (...) phenomena.What are the fundamental theories that are taken to explain the thermodynamic phenomena? The lively research into the foundations of classical statistical mechanics suggests that using classical mechanics to explain the thermodynamic phenomena is fruitful. Strictly speaking, in contemporary physics, classical mechanics is considered to be false. Since classical mechanics preserves certain explanatory and predictive aspects of the true fundamental theories, it can be successfully applied in certain cases. In other circumstances, classical mechanics has to be replaced by quantum mechanics. In this chapter I ask the following two questions: I) How does quantum statistical mechanics differ from classical statistical mechanics? How are the well-known differences between the two fundamental theories reflected in the statistical mechanical account of high-level phenomena? II) How does quantum statistical mechanics differ from quantum mechanics simpliciter? To make our main points I need to only consider non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Most of the ideas described and addressed in this chapter hold irrespective of the choice of a (so-called) interpretation of quantum mechanics, and so I will mention interpretations only when the differences between them are important to the matter discussed. (shrink)

Information, entropy, probability: these three terms are closely interconnected in the prevalent understanding of statistical mechanics, both when this field is taught to students at an introductory level and in advanced research into the field’s foundations. This paper examines the interconnection between these three notions in light of recent research in the foundations of statistical mechanics. It disentangles these concepts and highlights their differences, at the same time explaining why they came to be so closely linked in the literature. In (...) the literature the term ‘information’ is often linked to entropy and probability in discussions of Maxwell’s Demon and its attempted exorcism by the Landauer-Bennett thesis, and in analyses of the spin echo experiments. The direction taken in the present paper is a different one. Here we discuss the statistical mechanical underpinning of the notions of probability and entropy, and this constructive approach shows that information plays no fundamental role in these concepts, although it can be conveniently used in a sense that we shall specify. (shrink)

Flat Physicalism is a theory of through and through type reductive physicalism, understood in light of recent results in the conceptual foundations of physics. In Flat Physicalism, as in physics, so-called "high level" concepts and laws are nothing but partial descriptions of the complete states of affairs of the universe. "Flat physicalism" generalizes this idea, to form a reductive picture in which there is no room for levels, neither explanatory nor ontological. The paper explains how phenomena that seem to be (...) cases of multiple realization of special sciences kinds by physical kinds are fully explains in a reductive physicalist way. Finally, the paper exemplifies the fruitfulness of this reductive approach by showing how it can account even for a case of high-level anomaly in a deterministic universe (for example anomaly of the mental, should this turn our to be a fact about the world) - a result that may be called Anomalous Physicalism. (shrink)

A remarkable thesis prevails in the physics of information, saying that the logical properties of operations that are carried out by computers determine their physical properties. More specifically, it says that logically irreversible operations are dissipative by klog2 per bit of lost information. (A function is logically irreversible if its input cannot be recovered from its output. An operation is dissipative if it turns useful forms of energy into useless ones, such as heat energy.) This is Landauer's dissipation thesis, hereafter (...) LDT. LDT underlies and motivates numerous researches in physics and computer science. Nevertheless, this paper shows that is it plainly wrong. This conclusion is based on a detailed study of LDT in terms of the various notions of entropy used in main stream statistical mechanics. It is supported by a counter example for LDT. Further support is found in an analysis of the phase space representation on which LDT relies. This analysis emphasises the constraints placed on the choice of probability distribution by the fact that it has to be the basis for calculating phase averages corresponding to thermodynamic properties of individual systems. An alternative representation is offered, in which logical irreversibility has nothing to do with dissipation. The strong connection between logic and physics, that LDT implies, is thereby broken off. (shrink)

In response to Bourdieu and Wacquant, I argue that American hegemony in setting the terms of debate on ethnicity and racism is nothing new, led in the first half of the century by US heterotopic intellectuals, immigrants, outsiders and descendants of slaves. Ironically, in the light of claims made by the authors, in the post-war era the debate is increasingly dominated by ex-imperial British and French postcolonial thinkers. The authors' disquiet is more explicable, however, if viewed against the background of (...) French republican discourses that deny the legitimacy of `difference' in the public sphere. But in the final analysis, terms such as multiculturalism or ethnicity are not legislated from above but respond to grassroots social movements, and in France minority groups are presently claiming a voice and presence in the public sphere. (shrink)

In quantum mechanics, the expression for entropy is usually taken to be -kTr(ln), where is the density matrix. The convention first appears in Von Neumann's Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. The argument given there to justify this convention is the only one hitherto offered. All the arguments in the field refer to it at one point or another. Here this argument is shown to be invalid. Moreover, it is shown that, if entropy is -kTr(ln), then perpetual motion machines are possible. (...) This and other considerations support the conclusion that this expression is not the quantum-mechanical correlate of thermodynamic entropy. Its usefulness in quantum-statistical mechanics can be explained by its being a convenient quantification of information, but information and entropy are not synonymous. As the present paper shows, one can change while the other is conserved. (shrink)

The arrow of time is a familiar phenomenon we all know from our experience: we remember the past but not the future and control the future but not the past. However, it takes an effort to keep records of the past, and to affect the future. For example, it would take an immense effort to unmix coffee and milk, although we easily mix them. Such time directed phenomena are subsumed under the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law characterizes our experience (...) of the arrow of time in terms of an increase of a theoretical magnitude called entropy. Statistical mechanics tries to explain the Second Law as an effect of the behavior of the microscopic particles that make up the universe. Since our senses are too coarse to see this microstructure, statistical mechanics describes our experience in terms of probability, or in terms of the partial information we have about the particles. In this paper we explain the workings of statistical mechanics; how it accounts for probability as an objective feature of the world based on the underlying dynamics; how it accounts for our memories of the past; how the statistical mechanical probability underwrites the Second Law; and how, at the same time, it leads to a violation of the Second Law by the so‐called Maxwell’s Demon. (shrink)

When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. Independent representation of roles (e.g., containers vs. supporters) and “fillers” of those roles (e.g., bowls vs. cups, tables vs. chairs) is a core principle of language and higherlevel reasoning. But does such role-filler independence also arise in automatic visual processing? (...) Here, we show that it does, by exploring a surprising error that such independence can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in forcedynamic relations — e.g., a phone contained in a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting in a cup. Participants had to respond to a single target image (e.g., a phone in a basket) within a stream of distractors presented under time constraints. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images matching the target’s relational category than to those that did not — even when those images involved completely different objects. In other words, participants searching for a phone in a basket were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments ruled out strategic responses and also controlled for various confounding image features. We suggest that visual processing represents relations abstractly, in ways that separate roles from fillers. (shrink)

Interventionism is an approach to the foundations of statistical mechanics which says that to explain and predict some of the thermodynamic phenomena we need to take into account the inescapable effect of environmental perturbations on the system of interest, in addition to the system's internal dynamics. The literature on interventionism suffers from a curious dual attitude: the approach is often mentioned as a possible framework for understanding statistical mechanics, only to be quickly and decidedly dismissed. The present paper is an (...) attempt to understand this attraction-repulsion story. It offers a version of interventionism that appears to be defensible, and shows that this version can meet the main objections raised against it. It then investigates some of the philosophical ideas underlying interventionism, and proposes that these may be the source of the resentment interventionism encounters. This paves the way to see some features and consequences of interventionism, often taken to be shortcomings, as philosophically advantageous. (shrink)

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe seems to be tangibly signalled by an increase in women and young girls wearing the Muslim veil, the hijab. In France, this has led to the legal banning of all headscarves and other religious symbols in state schools in the name of French secularism. The article considers the ambiguities and ambivalences associated with the politics of embodiment surrounding veiling and honour killings comparatively, in Britain and France, and the implications for ongoing debates on (...) multiculturalism. The article argues that the publicity surrounding symbolic practices of sexual intimacy in the context of modernity may come to be loaded with secondary symbolic connotations, often highly politicized, for both Muslims and Europeans, leading to irresolvable conundrums. The processes of higher order symbolization outlined here raise critical questions of authority: who has the authority to interpret the scriptures, in this case the Koran and ideas about individual liberty? Who has the right to determine the limits of modesty, or whom a young person should marry? As in the earlier confrontations in South Asia between Sufi saints and learned Muslim clerics, the current contestation involves a range of actors claiming authoritative sacred knowledge. (shrink)

Maxwell’s Demon is a thought experiment devised by J. C. Maxwell in 1867 in order to show that the Second Law of thermodynamics is not universal, since it has a counter-example. Since the Second Law is taken by many to provide an arrow of time, the threat to its universality threatens the account of temporal directionality as well. Various attempts to “exorcise” the Demon, by proving that it is impossible for one reason or another, have been made throughout the years, (...) but none of them were successful. We have shown (in a number of publications) by a general state-space argument that Maxwell’s Demon is compatible with classical mechanics, and that the most recent solutions, based on Landauer’s thesis, are not general. In this paper we demonstrate that Maxwell’s Demon is also compatible with quantum mechanics. We do so by analyzing a particular (but highly idealized) experimental setup and proving that it violates the Second Law. Our discussion is in the framework of standard quantum mechanics; we give two separate arguments in the framework of quantum mechanics with and without the projection postulate. We address in our analysis the connection between measurement and erasure interactions and we show how these notions are applicable in the microscopic quantum mechanical structure. We discuss what might be the quantum mechanical counterpart of the classical notion of “macrostates”, thus explaining why our Quantum Demon setup works not only at the micro level but also at the macro level, properly understood. One implication of our analysis is that the Second Law cannot provide a universal lawlike basis for an account of the arrow of time; this account has to be sought elsewhere. (shrink)

This paper argues that the idea of a Maxwellian Demon presupposes a notion of non-physical free will. The author has changed her mind in this point later on and now thinks that Mawellian Demons are compatible with mechanics; see her paper on this from 2010 and book from 2012.

Home and exile -- Progress: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Georges Sorel and Martin Heidegger -- Franz Baader: Cogitor Ergo Sum -- Edmund Husserl: the crisis of the European man -- Martin Heidegger: Homo Est Brutum Bestiale -- Franz Borkenau: Cartesianism and the exploitation of man and nature -- Franz Böhm: German philosophy at war with Cartesianism.

Alternative cleavage and polyadenylation (APA) can diversify coding and non‐coding regions, but has particular impact on increasing 3′ UTR diversity. Through the gain or loss of regulatory elements such as RNA binding protein and microRNA sites, APA can influence transcript stability, localization, and translational efficiency. Strikingly, the central nervous systems of invertebrate and vertebrate species express a broad range of transcript isoforms bearing extended 3′ UTRs. The molecular mechanism that permits proximal 3′ end bypass in neurons is mysterious, and only (...) beginning to be elucidated. This landscape of neural 3′ UTR extensions, many reaching unprecedented lengths, may help service the unique post‐transcriptional regulatory needs of neurons. A combination of approaches, including transcriptome‐wide profiling, genetic screening to identify APA factors, biochemical dissection of alternative 3′ end formation, and manipulation of individual neural APA targets, will be necessary to gain fuller perspectives on the mechanism and biology of neural‐specific 3′ UTR lengthening. (shrink)

This book offers a unique perspective on one of the deepest questions about the world we live in: is reality multi-leveled, or can everything be reduced to some fundamental ‘flat’ level? This deep philosophical issue has widespread implications in philosophy, since it is fundamental to how we understand the world and the basic entities in it. Both the notion of ‘levels’ within science and their ontological implications are issues that are underexplored in the philosophical literature. The volume reconsiders the view (...) that reality contains many levels and opens new ways to understand the ontological status of the special sciences. The book focuses on major open questions that arise at the foundations of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, brain science and other special sciences, in particular with respect to the physical foundations of these sciences. For example: Is the mental computational? Do brains compute? How can the special sciences be autonomous from physics, grounded in, or based on, physics and at the same time irreducible to physics? The book is an important read for scientists and philosophers alike. It is of interest to philosophers of science, philosophers of mind and biology interested in the notion of levels, but also to psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists investigating such issues as the precise relation of the mental to the underlying neural structures and the appropriate approach to study it. (shrink)

In recent years the magnificent world of fractals has been revealed. Some of the fractal images resemble natural forms so closely that Benoit Mandelbrot's hypothesis, that the fractal geometry is the geometry of natural objects, has been accepted by scientists and non-scientists alike. The present paper critically examines Mandelbrot's hypothesis. It first analyzes the concept of a fractal. The analysis reveals that fractals are endless geometrical processes, and not geometrical forms. A comparison between fractals and irrational numbers shows that the (...) former are ontologically and epistemologically even more problematic than the latter. Therefore, it is argued, a proper understanding of the concept of fractal is inconsistent with ascribing a fractal structure to natural objects. Moreover, it is shown that, empirically, the so-called fractal images disconfirm Mandelbrot's hypothesis. It is conceded that the fractal geometry can be used as a useful rough approximation, but this fact has no bearing on the physical theory of natural forms. (shrink)

This study discusses the mediating role of statistics anxiety and motivation in the relationship comprising academic dishonesty, personality traits, and previous academic achievements in three different learning environments. Self-determination theory provides a broad psychological framework for these phenomena. Data were collected from 649 bachelor-degree students in the Social Sciences in five Israeli academic institutions. Structural equation modelling was employed to investigate the research variables’ relationships. Findings indicate that statistics anxiety mediates the relationship between personality traits and academic dishonesty in the (...) POE and the ERT learning environments. Findings also indicate the relationship between students’ achievements and academic dishonesty, but only in the ERT learning environment. In contrast, motivation mediates the relationship between students’ achievements and statistics anxiety only in the POE learning environment. This study unveils that learning environments determine the mediating role of statistical anxiety. In digital learning environments, mediation has been found between students’ personality traits and academic dishonesty. No similar parallel mediation could be established in the physical learning environment, F2F. Thus, we conclude that online courses should be designed according to student-centred approaches. (shrink)

(1992). The rituals of science: Comments on Abir‐Am (with response) Social Epistemology: Vol. 6, The Historical Ethnography of Scientific Rituals, pp. 373-387.

This article focuses on the construction of two types of non-logical paradoxes in news discourse: 1) inconsistencies of positions and acts; 2) conflicts between reality and expectations or common sense. I will argue that these paradoxes are constructed by various discursive devices and will demonstrate the key role played by conventional and conversational implicatures in this regard. The discussion will focus on 23 items covering disputes between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews, broadcast on mainstream Israeli television news in 2009. I will (...) show that the journalists consistently attribute paradoxicality to Haredim, and that this corresponds with the common public bitterness towards them because they enjoy financial support from the government, while sharing little of the economic and security burden. Moreover, I will argue that the paradoxical representations of Haredim rely on the secular ‘we’ group view and serve to base its common sense and norms. (shrink)

Some philosophers consider that some of their colleagues deny that consciousness exists. We shall call the latter ‘deniers’, adopting a term that was initially meant pejoratively. What do the deniers deny? In order to answer this question, we shall examine arguments, both of some deniers and of their critics, and present denialism as a systematic highly non-trivial position that has had some interesting achievements. We will show that the denialist project concerns the epistemology of the mind and specifically of consciousness: (...) what can be known about it, and how it can be known. The main argument of denialism is that first-person reports about the mental realm are not always the best source of information about that realm, and are certainly not reliable. This leads the deniers to realize that the reference and meaning of mental terms as used in standard philosophical literature are vague and call for clarification, and that what many take to be empirical data in the study of the mind are actually heavily laden with theory. Denialism thus makes scientific and philosophical research clearer and more fruitful. (shrink)

The appearance of multiple realization of the special sciences kinds by physical kinds can be fully explained within a type-identity reductive physicalist framework, based on recent findings in the foundations of statistical mechanics. This has been shown in Hemmo and Shenker. However, while this account is available for special sciences like biology and thermodynamics, it is unavailable for psychology. Therefore the only coherent physicalist account of psychology is a type-type identity account. The so-called “non reductive” physicalism turns out to (...) be an incoherent idea, and functionalism and supervenience cannot salvage it. At the same time, within a type-identity account properly understood one can give a full account of the anomaly of psychology and understand in what sense the special sciences - including psychology - are autonomous. (shrink)

The arrow of time is a familiar phenomenon we all know from our experience: we remember the past but not the future and control the future but not the past. However, it takes an effort to keep records of the past, and to affect the future. For example, it would take an immense effort to unmix coffee and milk, although we easily mix them. Such time directed phenomena are sub- sumed under the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law characterizes our (...) experience of the arrow of time in terms of an increase of a theoretical magnitude called entropy. Statistical mechan- ics tries to explain the Second Law as an effect of the behavior of the microscopic particles that make up the universe. Since our senses are too coarse to see this microstructure, statistical mechanics describes our experience in terms of probability, or in terms of the partial information we have about the particles. In this paper we explain the workings of statistical mechanics; how it accounts for probability as an objective feature of the world based on the underlying dynamics; how it accounts for our memories of the past; how the statistical mechanical probability under- writes the Second Law; and how, at the same time, it leads to a violation of the Second Law by the so-called Maxwell’s Demon. (shrink)

Counselor educators can utilize the ideas of philosopher Michel Foucault in preparing preservice school counselors for their work with K?12 students in public schools. The Foucaultian ideas of governmentality, technologies of domination, received truths, power/knowledge, discontinuity, and archaeology can contribute to students' understanding of the hidden power relations in the assumptions and techniques of counseling. Because most students enter counseling programs without a background in Foucault, it falls to counselor educators to incorporate his ideas into the curriculum. This article describes (...) areas in which Foucaultian ideas can be introduced into the counseling curriculum, in particular, in the practicum courses. (shrink)