Objectives: To investigate life scientists’ views of accountability and the ethical and societal implications of research. Design: Qualitative focus group and one-on-one interviews. Participants: 45 Stanford University life scientists, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty. Results: Two main themes were identified in participants’ discussions of accountability: the “how” of science and the “why” of science. The “how” encompassed the internal conduct of research including attributes such as honesty and independence. The “why,” or the motivation for conducting research, was two-tiered: (...) first was the desire to positively impact the research community and science itself, and second was an interest in positively impacting the external community, broadly referred to as society. Participants noted that these motivations were influenced by the current systems of publications, grants and funding, thereby supporting a complex notion of boundary-setting between science and non-science. In addition, while all participants recognised the “how” of science and the two tiers of “why,” scientists expressed the need to prioritise these domains of accountability. This prioritisation was related to a researcher’s position in the academic career trajectory and to the researcher’s subsequent “perceived proximity” to scientific or societal concerns. Our findings therefore suggest the need for institutional change to inculcate early-stage researchers with a broader awareness of the implications of their research. The peer review processes for funding and publication could be effective avenues for encouraging scientists to broaden their views of accountability to society. (shrink)

Steven Vogel’s Thinking like a Mall, which continues themes developed in his previous work Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory, is clearly intended to provok...

When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a mental model or a user model of the conversational partner. Such adaptation has been shown to improve listeners' comprehension, their satisfaction with an interactive system, the efficiency with which they execute conversational tasks, and the likelihood of achieving (...) higher level goals such as changing the listener's beliefs and attitudes. We focus on one aspect of adaptation, namely the tailoring of the content of dialogue system utterances for the higher level processes of persuasion, argumentation and advice-giving. Our hypothesis is that algorithms that adapt content for these processes, according to a user model, will improve the usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of dialogue systems. We describe a multimodal dialogue system and algorithms for adaptive content selection based on multi-attribute decision theory. We demonstrate experimentally the improved efficacy of system responses through the use of user models to both tailor the content of system utterances and to manipulate their conciseness. (shrink)

This volume contains nine chapters of translation, by a range of leading scholars, focusing on core themes in the philosophy of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), one of the most influential Chinese thinkers of the later Confucian tradition. -/- Table of Contents: Chapter One: Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics by Philip J. Ivanhoe Chapter Two: Moral Psychology and Cultivating the Self by Curie Virág Chapter Three: Politics and Government by Justin Tiwald Chapter Four: Poetry, Literature, Textual Study, and Hermeneutics by On-cho Ng Chapter (...) Five: Social Conditions of His Time by Beverly Bossler Chapter Six: Heaven, Ghosts and Spirits, and Ritual by Hoyt Tillman Chapter Seven: Criticisms of Buddhism, Daoism, and the Learning of the Heart-mind by Ellen Neskar and Ari Borrell Chapter Eight: Science and Natural Philosophy by Yung Sik Kim Chapter Nine: Zhu Xi's Commentarial Work: Abiding in the Mean and the Constant by Daniel Gardner. (shrink)

To this end, I propose to follow a somewhat unusual pattern, in that there will be no point-by-point consideration of issues raised by Taylor and Kullman. Instead, I intend to outline Merleau-Ponty's position on language, speech, and meaning as presented in the Phénoménologie de la Perception, and proceed from there to a discussion of the pre-objective.

As the gap between the need for and supply of human organs continues to widen, the aim of securing additional sources of these “gifts of the body” has become a seemingly overriding moral imperative, one that could—and some argue, should—override the widespread ban on organ markets. As a medical practice, organ transplantation entails the inherent risk that one human being, a donor, will become little more than a means to the end of healing for another human being and that he (...) or she will come to have a purely instrumental value. With the establishment of organ markets, not only will the harms of instrumentalization be a reality—the ends of medicine will be further compromised and confused. (shrink)

Increasingly, national governments across the globe are prioritizing investments in neuroscience. Currently, seven active or in-development national-level brain research initiatives exist, spanning four continents. Engaging with the underlying values and ethical concerns that drive brain research across cultural and continental divides is critical to future research. Culture influences what kinds of science are supported and where science can be conducted through ethical frameworks and evaluations of risk. Neuroscientists and philosophers alike have found themselves together encountering perennial questions; these questions are (...) engaged by the field of neuroethics, related to the nature of understanding the self and identity, the existence and meaning of free will, defining the role of reason in human behavior, and more. With this Perspective article, we aim to prioritize and advance to the foreground a list of neuroethics questions for neuroscientists operating in the context of these international brain initiatives. (shrink)

The toy model used by Spekkens (Phys. Rev. A 75, 032110, 2007) to argue in favor of an epistemic view of quantum mechanics is extended by generalizing his definition of pure states (i.e. states of maximal knowledge) and by associating measurements with all pure states. The new toy model does not allow signaling but, in contrast to the Spekkens model, does violate Bell-CHSH inequalities. Negative probabilities are found to arise naturally within the model, and can be used to explain the (...) Bell-CHSH inequality violations. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce has a great deal to contribute both to understanding and to solving many of the philosophical problems which puzzle contemporary thinkers. In fact it is probably true that in some ways philosophers of our time are in a better position to understand Peirce's thought than those of his own day. In this paper I would like to consider two puzzling notions: 1) the substantiality of things, and 2) the foundations of human knowledge.

Metaphysicians go on busily doing metaphysical thinking all over the world, and apparently with a modicum of self-assurance that they are not talking nonsense or pursuing an illusory will-of-the-wisp. Yet other philosophers of empirical, analytical, phenomenological, or other turns of mind seem to have more and more difficulty in understanding just how metaphysicians give meaning and positive content to the vast abstract concepts by which they seek to describe and explain the entire spectrum of reality extending far beyond present or (...) perhaps even possible human experience. Since there is no way of gaining direct insight into dimensions of reality beyond human experience, and since in order to be applied to the whole range of reality these concepts must abstract from purely human experience, it is hard for them to see—and it is a serious problem in itself—how these all-embracing terms can be anything more than empty, formal, verbal symbols or conceptual constructions, with no positive existential content describing reality itself across its whole spectrum. Even the metaphysician himself, though when left alone he may have a sure sense of how to do metaphysical thinking fruitfully, when questioned to explain and justify what he is doing, and is convinced is worth doing, can feel embarrassed and struck dumb as to how to articulate and justify the principles behind the procedures he is following. (shrink)