In this study, a 20-item questionnaire was used to elicit undergraduates’ (N = 93) ethical judgment and behavioral intention regarding a number of behaviors involving computers and internet usage. Machiavellianism was found to be uncorrelated with both ethical judgment and behavioral intention. Gender was found to be negatively correlated with both ethical judgment and behavioral intention, such that females judged the behaviors as being less ethical than males, and were less likely to engage in the behaviors than males. A disconnect (...) was found between ethical judgment and behavioral intention, for both males and females, such that the ethical judgment mean for a number of issues was significantly lower (towards the “unethical” end of the continuum) than the behavioral intention mean (towards the “more likely to engage in” end of the continuum). The study raises questions regarding ethical awareness of technology-related issues, and the authors make suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In the face of ubiquitous information communication technology, the presence of blogs, personal websites, and public message boards give the illusion of uncensored criticism and discussion of the ethical implications of business activities. However, little attention has been paid to the limitations on free speech posed by the control of access to the Internet by private entities, enabling them to censor content that is deemed critical of corporate or public policy. The premise of this research is that transparency alone will (...) not achieve the desired results if ICT is used in a one way system, controlled by the provider of information. Stakeholders must have an avenue using the same technology to respond to and interact with the information. We propose a model that imposes on corporations a public trust, requiring these gatekeepers of communication technology to preserve individual rights to criticism and review. (shrink)

A central issue in epistemology concerns the connection between truth and justification. The burden of our paper is to explain this connection. Reliabilism, defended by Goldman, assumes that the connection is one of reliability. We argue that this assumption is too strong. We argue that foundational theories, such as those articulated by Pollock and Chisholm fail to elucidate the connection. We consider the potentiality of coherence theories to explain the truth connection by means of higher level convictions about probabilities, which (...) we call doxastic ascent, and defend such a theory. Our defense appeals to the work of Reid and contemporary cognitive psychology in order to account for the psychological reality of higher level evaluations. (shrink)

One hypothesis concerning the human dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is that it functions, in part, to signal the occurrence of conflicts in information processing, thereby triggering compensatory adjustments in cognitive control. Since this idea was first proposed, a great deal of relevant empirical evidence has accrued. This evidence has largely corroborated the conflict-monitoring hypothesis, and some very recent work has provided striking new support for the theory. At the same time, other findings have posed specific challenges, especially concerning the (...) way the theory addresses the processing of errors. Recent research has also begun to shed light on the larger function of the ACC, suggesting some new possibilities concerning how conflict monitoring might fit into the cingulate's overall role in cognition and action. (shrink)

Deepfakes are algorithmically modified video and audio recordings that project one person’s appearance on to that of another, creating an apparent recording of an event that never took place. Many scholars and journalists have begun attending to the political risks of deepfake deception. Here we investigate other ways in which deepfakes have the potential to cause deeper harms than have been appreciated. First, we consider a form of objectification that occurs in deepfaked ‘frankenporn’ that digitally fuses the parts of different (...) women to create pliable characters incapable of giving consent to their depiction. Next, we develop the idea of ‘illocutionary wronging’, in which an individual is forced to engage in speech acts they would prefer to avoid in order to deny or correct the misleading evidence of a publicized deepfake. Finally, we consider the risk that deepfakes may facilitate campaigns of ‘panoptic gaslighting’, where many systematically altered recordings of a single person's life undermine their memory, eroding their sense of self and ability to engage with others. Taken together, these harms illustrate the roles that social epistemology and technological vulnerabilities play in human ethical life. (shrink)

There is considerable evidence that the hippocampal system contributes both to (1) the temporary maintenance of memories and to (2) the processing of a particular type of memory representation. The findings on amnesia suggest that these two distinguishing features of hippocampal memory processing are orthogonal. Together with anatomical and physiological data, the neuropsychological findings support a model of cortico-hippocampal interactions in which the temporal and representational properties of hippocampal memory processing are mediated separately. We propose that neocortical association areas maintain (...) shortterm memories for specific items and events prior to hippocampal processing as well as providing the final repositories of long-term memory. The parahippocampal region supports intermediate-term storage of individual items, and the hippocampal formation itself mediates an organization of memories according to relevant relationships among items. Hippocampal-cortical interactions produce (i) strong and persistent memories for events, including their constituent elements and the relationships among them, and (ii) a capacity to express memories flexibly across a wide range of circumstances. (shrink)

Orthodox decision theory gives no advice to agents who hold two goods to be incommensurate in value because such agents will have incomplete preferences. According to standard treatments, rationality requires complete preferences, so such agents are irrational. Experience shows, however, that incomplete preferences are ubiquitous in ordinary life. In this paper, we aim to do two things: (1) show that there is a good case for revising decision theory so as to allow it to apply non-vacuously to agents with incomplete (...) preferences, and (2) to identify one substantive criterion that any such non-standard decision theory must obey. Our criterion, Competitiveness, is a weaker version of a dominance principle. Despite its modesty, Competitiveness is incompatible with prospectism, a recently developed decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences. We spend the final part of the paper showing why Competitiveness should be retained, and prospectism rejected. (shrink)

The classical social theorist Emile Durkheim proposed the counterintuitive thesis that crime is beneficial for society because it provokes punishment, which enhances social solidarity. His logic, however, is blemished by a reified view of society that leads to group-selectionist thinking and a teleological account of the causes of crime. Reconceptualization of the relationship between crime and punishment in terms of evolutionary game theory, however, suggests that crime (cheating) may confer benefits on cooperating individuals by promoting stability in their patterns of (...) cooperation. (shrink)

The disagreement between philosophers about the scientific worth of the evolutionary behavioral sciences (evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, etc.) is in part due to the fact that critics and advocates of these sciences characterize them very differently. In this article, by analyzing quantitatively the citations made in the articles published in Evolution & Human Behavior between January 2000 and December 2002, we provide some evidence that undermines the characterization of the evolutionary behavioral sciences put forward by their critics.

School violence is a burning issue these days. This book provides an in-depth analysis of violence prevention programs and an assessment of their effectiveness, using data from observations, individual interviews, and focus groups, as well as published data from the schools. It is distinguished by its focus on the cultural and structural context of school violence and violence prevention efforts. Where most other researchers use quantitative measures, such as surveys, to assess the effectiveness of violence prevention programs, the authors of (...) this book use qualitative research and ethnography to study the environment where such programs take place. Thus, this work--one of only a few ethnographic studies of violence prevention programs in schools--links previous quantitative research on the topic and critical ethnography. _Preventing Violence in Schools: A Challenge to American Democracy_: *includes voices of school students, accused of practicing violence, who have been participants in violence prevention programs; *analyzes a citywide peer mediation program ; *examines the kinds of violence recognized in schools and the ways schools themselves may perpetuate violence; and *describes a violence prevention program for students at an alternative school. _Preventing Violence in Schools: A Challenge to American Democracy_ is highly relevant for students in courses on urban education, foundations of education, education and social policy, youth and the law, and qualitative research, and for teachers, administrators, and other professionals, such as school psychologists and guidance counselors, at the middle and high school levels. (shrink)

In the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, participants have commonly been instructed to report their conscious content. This, it was claimed, risks confounding the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) with their preconditions, i.e., allocation of attention, and consequences, i.e., metacognitive reflection. Recently, the field has therefore been shifting towards no-report paradigms. No-report paradigms draw their validity from a direct comparison with no-report conditions. We analyze several examples of such comparisons and identify alternative interpretations of their results and/or methodological issues in all (...) cases. These go beyond the previous criticism that just removing the report is insufficient, because it does not prevent metacognitive reflection. The conscious mind is fickle. Without having much to do, it will turn inward and switch, or timeshare, between the stimuli on display and daydreaming or mind-wandering. Thus, rather than the NCC, no-report paradigms might be addressing the neural correlates of conscious disengagement. This observation reaffirms the conclusion that no-report paradigms are no less problematic than report paradigms. (shrink)

According to many philosophers, psychological explanation canlegitimately be given in terms of belief and desire, but not in termsof knowledge. To explain why someone does what they do (so the common wisdom holds) you can appeal to what they think or what they want, but not what they know. Timothy Williamson has recently argued against this view. Knowledge, Williamson insists, plays an essential role in ordinary psychological explanation.Williamson's argument works on two fronts.First, he argues against the claim that, unlike knowledge, (...) belief is``composite'' (representable as a conjunction of a narrow and a broadcondition). Belief's failure to be composite, Williamson thinks, undermines the usual motivations for psychological explanation in terms of belief rather than knowledge.Unfortunately, we claim, the motivations Williamson argues against donot depend on the claim that belief is composite, so what he saysleaves the case for a psychology of belief unscathed.Second, Williamson argues that knowledge can sometimes provide abetter explanation of action than belief can.We argue that, in the cases considered, explanations that cite beliefs(but not knowledge) are no less successful than explanations that citeknowledge. Thus, we conclude that Williamson's arguments fail both coming andgoing: they fail to undermine a psychology of belief, and they fail tomotivate a psychology of knowledge. (shrink)

Recent findings have provided evidence for the existence of non‐vertebrate acquired immunity. We survey these findings and propose that all living organisms must express both innate and acquired immunity. This is opposed to the paradigm that only vertebrates manifest the two forms of immune mechanism; other species are thought to use innate immunity alone. We suggest new definitions of innate and acquired immunity, based on whether immune recognition molecules are encoded in the inherited genome or are generated through somatic processes. (...) We reason that both forms of immunity are similarly ancient, and have co‐evolved in response to lifestyle, cost‐benefit tradeoffs and symbiosis versus parasitism. However, different species have evolved different immune solutions that are not necessarily genetically related, but serve a similar general function – allowing individuals to learn from their own immune experience; survival of species is contingent on the acquired immune experience of its individuals. (shrink)

Since its inception the ‘mindblindness’ theory of autism has greatly furthered our understanding of the core social-communication impairments in autism spectrum conditions . However, one of the more subtle issues within the theory that needs to be elaborated is the role of the ‘self’. In this article, we expand on mindblindness in ASC by addressing topics related to the self and its central role in the social world and then review recent research in ASC that has yielded important insights by (...) contrasting processes relating to both self and other. We suggest that new discoveries lie ahead in understanding how self and other are interrelated and/or distinct, and how understanding atypical self-referential and social-cognitive mechanisms may lead to novel ideas as to how to facilitate social-communicative abilities in ASC. (shrink)

We revisit the analogy suggested by Madelung between a non-relativistic time-dependent quantum particle, to a fluid system which is pseudo-barotropic, irrotational and inviscid. We first discuss the hydrodynamical properties of the Madelung description in general, and extract a pressure like term from the Bohm potential. We show that the existence of a pressure gradient force in the fluid description, does not violate Ehrenfest’s theorem since its expectation value is zero. We also point out that incompressibility of the fluid implies conservation (...) of density along a fluid parcel trajectory and in 1D this immediately results in the non-spreading property of wave packets, as the sum of Bohm potential and an exterior potential must be either constant or linear in space. Next we relate to the hydrodynamic description a thermodynamic counterpart, taking the classical behavior of an adiabatic barotopric flow as a reference. We show that while the Bohm potential is not a positive definite quantity, as is expected from internal energy, its expectation value is proportional to the Fisher information whose integrand is positive definite. Moreover, this integrand is exactly equal to half of the square of the imaginary part of the momentum, as the integrand of the kinetic energy is equal to half of the square of the real part of the momentum. This suggests a relation between the Fisher information and the thermodynamic like internal energy of the Madelung fluid. Furthermore, it provides a physical linkage between the inverse of the Fisher information and the measure of disorder in quantum systems—in spontaneous adiabatic gas expansion the amount of disorder increases while the internal energy decreases. (shrink)

Numbers are vital to so many areas of life: in science, economics, sports, education, and many aspects of everyday life from infancy onwards. This handbook brings together the different research areas that make up the vibrant field of numerical cognition in one comprehensive and authoritative volume.

: We offer a response to three themes arising from the commentators’ inquiries and critiques: The epistemological compatibility of enactivism and conceptual metaphor theory; the ….

Context: How can an enactive approach to the teaching and learning of mathematics be implemented, which fosters mathematical thinking, making intensive use of metaphorizing and taking into account ….

At healthcare facilities worldwide, women during childbirth undergo medical procedures they haven’t consented to and experience mistreatment and disrespect. This phenomenon is recognized as obstetric violence (OV), a distinct form of gender violence. The resulting trauma carries both immediate and long-term implications, making it vital to address for promoting women’s health. OV is partly shaped by a narrow, paternalistic conception of vulnerability. A flawed conception of the vulnerability of pregnant women and fetuses has opened the door to medical control and (...) coercion during childbirth. In this paper we examine what role notions of vulnerability play in perpetuating OV and consider recent attitudinal shifts in research ethics as a model for addressing it. (shrink)

This article consists of two important parts. The first is a specific defense of some of the central claims made by stanley cavell in "must we mean what we say" against the criticisms of fodor and katz in "the availability of what we say." the major issue concerns the question of whether evidence of some sort is needed to support a claim by a native speaker about what we mean when we say something. Further speculations on this topic occupy the (...) other part of the paper. (shrink)

Intervening on causal systems can illuminate their underlying structures. Past work has shown that, relative to adults, young children often make intervention decisions that appear to confirm a single hypothesis rather than those that optimally discriminate alternative hypotheses. Here, we investigated how the ability to make informative causal interventions changes across development. Ninety participants between the ages of 7 and 25 completed 40 different puzzles in which they had to intervene on various causal systems to determine their underlying structures. Each (...) puzzle comprised a three‐ or four‐node computer chip with hidden wires. On each trial, participants viewed two possible arrangements of the chip's hidden wires and had to select a single node to activate. After observing the outcome of their intervention, participants selected a wire configuration and rated their confidence in their selection. We characterized participant choices with a Bayesian measurement model that indexed the extent to which participants selected nodes that would best disambiguate the two possible causal structures versus those that had high causal centrality in one of the two causal hypotheses but did not necessarily discriminate between them. Our model estimates revealed that the use of a discriminatory strategy increased through early adolescence. Further, developmental improvements in intervention strategy were related to changes in the ability to accurately judge the strength of evidence that interventions revealed, as indexed by participants' confidence in their selections. Our results suggest that improvements in causal information‐seeking extend into adolescence and may be driven by metacognitive sensitivity to the efficacy of previous interventions in discriminating competing ideas. (shrink)

There has been an increase of discussion and focus on matters of theological significance in the area of youth ministry. An area that remains neglected concerns the professional youth worker in Southern Africa. This focus on professional youth work has gained a great amount of urgency from the office of the presidency of Southern Africa, who in collaboration with the Commonwealth desk have prioritised the focus on youth work in South Africa. Unfortunately, the focus on the professional youth worker, the (...) career youth pastor, within the church in Southern Africa fails to receive a similar amount of attention. The article will highlight the need to pursue a theological articulation around the office of the career youth pastor by building a practical theological argument for the office of career youth pastor. The article will address a case study of a mainline evangelical denomination regarding its theological articulation of the career youth pastor. (shrink)

Philosophically, there is a book which was a tremendous experience for me: Eino Kaila's hychology of the Person ality _ His thesis that man lives strictly according to his needs - negative and positive - was shattering to me, but terribly true. And I built on this ground. Ingmar Bergman J 1. This introductory essay is neither intended to be a full presentation nor to be a critical evaluation of the contributions to philosophy made by Eino Kaila. Kaila's work will (...) speak to the reader through the four papers here published in English translation from the German. They belong in the tra dition of the Vienna Circle and of logical empiricism. They cover, however, only one period or sector of Kaila's rich and varied life-work. This is the sector best integrated into the mainstream of contemporary philosophic thinking. The primary aim of this essay is to portray an impressive intellectual personality and to make a modest contribution to Finnish and Scandinavian intellectual history. Much of its content may be thought to be of 'local' relevance only. But considering the position which Kaila held in his country and considering his decisive influence on the development of philosophy in Finland, I hope that this local background will also interest an international circle of readers. (shrink)

Art therapy encourages the use of art materials to express feelings and thoughts in a supportive environment. Art materials differ in fluidity and are postulated to thus differentially enhance emotional response (the more fluid the material the more emotion). Yet, to the best of our knowledge, this assumption has not been empirically tested. The current study aimed to examine the emotional and physiological responses to art making with different art materials. We were particularly interested in vagal activity, indexed by heart (...) rate variability (HRV), because of its association with numerous health related outcomes. In this study, fifty adults (mean age 33 ± 10.27 years, 52% males) participated in a repeated measures experiment, in which they were requested to draw with three art materials (order randomized) differing in their level of fluidity (pencil, oil-pastels and gouache paint) intermittent with periods of music. We measured the emotional response to art making with each material using a self-report measure and matrices of HRV using a wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) device. We calculated two indices of HRV, one indicative of parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity, and one indicative of sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity. Art making with gouache paint and oil pastels resulted in improved positive mood, while pencil did not. Art making explained approximately 35% of the variability in parasympathetic reactivity, which may indicate changes in emotional regulation processes during the art-making task. Yet, fluidity was not sufficient to explain the reaction to art-making. Surprisingly, the largest suppression of PNS and augmentation of the SNS occurred during art-making with oil-pastels and not with Gouache. Moreover, PNS and SNS reactivity to oil-pastels were related to emotional valance, which may point to emotional engagement. We can conclude that art-making with oil-pastels, first created in Japan in 1924 to increase self-expression of students, results in a unique emotional and physiological responses. These findings might be explained by the enhanced tactile experience of art-making with oil-pastels along with their relative fluidity, triggering an arousal pattern. Further studies that take the format and presentation of the materials as well as the content of the artwork, into account, are needed. (shrink)

In their target article, Rips et al. have presented the view that there is no necessary dependency between natural numbers and internal magnitude. However, they do not give enough weight to neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies. We provide evidence demonstrating that the acquisition of natural numbers depends on magnitude representation and that natural numbers develop from a general magnitude mechanism in the parietal lobes.

There is a long and distinguished tradition in philosophy and psychology according to which the mind’s fundamental, foundational connection to the world is made by connecting perceptually to features of objects. On this picture, which we’ll call feature prioritarianism, minds like ours first make contact with the colors, shapes, and sizes of distal items, and then, only on the basis of the representations so obtained, build up representations of the objects that bear these features. The feature priority view maintains, then, (...) that our perception/knowledge of objects asymmetrically depends on our perception/knowledge of simple features. This paper has two aims. First, we will present evidence, drawn from a variety of perceptual effects, that feature prioritarianism cannot be true, since there are cases that speak against the priority of feature representations in perceptual processing. Instead, we claim that the evidence supports an alternative —-and more complex—- no-priority view. Second, we will offer a framework for a no-priority view that both captures the cases we cite and provides a more sensible architecture in which to understand a variety of productive projects in perceptual science, and show how the framework cross-cuts some recent discussions in philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Morphogen gradient theories have enjoyed considerable popularity since the beginning of this century, but conclusive evidence for a role of morphogens in controlling multicellular development has been elusive. Recently, work on three secreted signalling proteins, Activin in Xenopus, and Wingless and Dpp in Drosophila, has stongly suggested that these proteins function as morphogens. In order to define a factor as a morphogen, it is necessary to show firstly, that it has a direct effect on target cells and secondly, that it (...) affects the development of target cells in a concentration‐dependent manner. With these criteria in mind, the evidence available for a variety of proposed morphogens is discussed. While the evidence is not conclusive in most of the cases considered, there is a strong case in favour of the three proteins mentioned above, which suggests that morphogens are potentially of general importance in controlling the development of multicellular organisms. (shrink)

This article seeks to shed light on civil commitment in the context of the opioid crisis, to sketch the existing legal landscape surrounding civil commitment, and to illustrate the relevant medical, ethical, and legal concerns that policymakers must take into account as they struggle to find appropriate responses to the crisis.

The Madelung equations map the non-relativistic time-dependent Schrödinger equation into hydrodynamic equations of a virtual fluid. While the von Neumann entropy remains constant, we demonstrate that an increase of the Shannon entropy, associated with this Madelung fluid, is proportional to the expectation value of its velocity divergence. Hence, the Shannon entropy may grow due to an expansion of the Madelung fluid. These effects result from the interference between solutions of the Schrödinger equation. Growth of the Shannon entropy due to expansion (...) is common in diffusive processes. However, in the latter the process is irreversible while the processes in the Madelung fluid are always reversible. The relations between interference, compressibility and variation of the Shannon entropy are then examined in several simple examples. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for classical diffusive processes, the “force” accelerating diffusion has the form of the positive gradient of the quantum Bohm potential. Expressing then the diffusion coefficient in terms of the Planck constant reveals the lower bound given by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in terms of the product between the gas mean free path and the Brownian momentum. (shrink)

According to Peter Galison , science has a highly fractionated structure with multiple sub-sub-disciplines, each with its own agenda. Cooperative trading between groups is necessary for most scientific work to move forward, and it is this trading that preserves the stability of science. We argue that it is not trading per se, but trading in a gift economy that guarantees stability. We support our claims with an examination of contemporary work on magnetic resonance imaging instrumentation. Specifically, we consider: How a (...) feature improvement, intended to reduce scan time, led to substantial medical mis-diagnosis; How a technical error, when corrected, created a consumer crisis in which radiologists preferred technically flawed instruments; How new magnetic resonance theory radically altered the physical interpretation of MRI images; How the MRI instrument at first was financially supported by, and--ironically--ultimately invalidated, the accepted understanding of the nature, source and management of chronic back pain. Ultimately there are three reasons stability requires gifting. First, without a general sense of shared purpose traders will not be committed to mutual engagement; profit does not provide an adequate shared purpose for the MRI community. Second, stability requires trust, and profits are not an adequate foundation for trust. Finally, knowledge is a gift that will not keep on giving if treated simply as a source of profit. (shrink)

The problem of justifying legal punishment has been at the heart of legal and social philosophy from the very earliest recorded philosophical texts. However, despite several hundred years of debate, philosophers have not reached agreement about how legal punishment can be morally justified. That is the central issue addressed by the contributors to this volume. All of the essays collected here have been published in the highly respected journal Philosophy & Public Affairs. Taken together, they offer not only significant proposals (...) for improving established theories of punishment and compelling arguments against long-held positions, but also ori-ginal and important answers to the question, "How is punishment to be justified?"Part I of this collection, "Justifications of Punishment," examines how any practice of punishment can be morally justified. Contributors include Jeffrie G. Murphy, Alan H. Goldman, Warren Quinn, C. S. Nino, and Jean Hampton. The papers in Part II, "Problems of Punishment," address more specific issues arising in established theories. The authors are Martha C. Nussbaum, Michael Davis, and A. John Simmons. In the final section, "Capital Punishment," contributors discuss the justifiability of capital punishment, one of the most debated philosophical topics of this century. Essayists include David A. Conway, Jeffrey H. Reiman, Stephen Nathanson, and Ernest van den Haag. (shrink)