Here I defend dispositionalism about meaning and rule-following from Kripkenstein's infamous anti-dispositionalist arguments. The problems of finitude, error, and normativity are all addressed. The general lesson I draw is that Kripkenstein's arguments trade on an overly simplistic version of dispositionalism.

Explaining genuine moral disagreement is a challenge for metaethical theories. For expressivists, this challenge comes from the plausibility of agents making seemingly univocal claims while expressing incongruent conative attitudes. I argue that metaethical inferentialism – a deflationary cousin to expressivism, which locates meaning in the inferential import of our moral assertions rather than the attitudes they express – offers a unique solution to this problem. Because inferentialism doesn’t locate the source of moral disagreements in a clash between attitudes, but instead (...) in conflicts between the inferential import of ethical assertions, the traditional problem for expressivism can be avoided. After considering two forms of inferentialism that lead to revenge versions of the problem, I conclude by recommending that we understand the semantics of moral disagreements pragmatically: the source of univocity does not come from moral or semantic facts waiting to be described, but instead from the needs that ethical and semantic discourses answer – a solution to the problems of what we are to do and how we are to talk about it. (shrink)

A conflict within the community of those investigating business ethics is whether decision makers are motivated by an ethics of justice or an ethics of caring. The proposition put forward in this paper is that ethical orientations are strongly related to cultural backgrounds. Specifically, Hofstede's cultural stereotyping using his masculine-feminine dimension may well match a culture's reliance on justice or caring when decisions are made. A study of college graduates from six countries showed that Hofstede's dimension was remarkably accurate in (...) predicating a justice or caring orientation for decision makers from five of the six countries. (shrink)

Plato claimed that morality exits to control conflict. Business people increasingly are called upon to resolve moral conflicts between various stakeholders who maintain opposing ethical positions or principles. Attempts to resolve these moral conflicts within business discussions may be exacerbated if disputants have different communicative styles. To better understand the communication process involved in attempts to resolve a moral dilemma, we investigate the "discourse ethics" procedure of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas claims that an individual's level of moral reasoning parallels the type (...) of communication which that individual typically uses in attempts to resolve conflict. Our research focuses upon the relationship between the communicative style used by participants attempting to resolve a particular moral dilemma involving workplace safety and the level of moral reasoning possessed by those participants. The results of our study suggest that, contrary to Habermas' views, participants with "higher" levels of moral reasoning do not use "discursive" communicative tactics more frequently than participants that possessed "lower" moral reasoning. (shrink)

This paper offers a theoretical discussion on why the nursing profession has had a delayed response to the issue of climate change. We suggest this delay may have been influenced by the early days of nursing's professionalization. Specifically, we examine nursing's professional mandate, the generally accepted metaparadigm, and the grand theorists’ conceptualizations of both the environment and the nurse–environment relationship. We conclude that these works may have encouraged nurses to conceptualize the environment, as well as their relationship with it, mainly (...) in terms of the individual patient, and as such, nurses have not been encouraged to understand these concepts from a broader perspective. By not having the philosophical and theoretical foundations to understand the environment in relation to society, it is not surprising that nurses have had a delayed response to climate change and may not have viewed it as a professional concern. A planetary health perspective is suggested as a theoretical basis for nursing education, research and practice. Taking on a planetary health perspective could help nurses progress the profession and move healthcare systems towards supporting a climate‐resilient future. (shrink)

The philosopher Rudolf Carnap, although not himself an originator of mathematical advances in logic, was much involved in the development of the subject. He was the most important and deepest philosopher of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, or, to use the label Carnap later preferred, logical empiricists. It was Carnap who gave the most fully developed and sophisticated form to the linguistic doctrine of logical and mathematical truth: the view that the truths of mathematics and logic do not describe (...) some Platonistic realm, but rather are artifacts of the way we establish a language in which to speak of the factual, empirical world, fallouts of the representational capacity of language. Carnap was also the thinker who, after Russell, most emphasized the importance of modern logic, and the distinctive advances it enables in the foundations of mathematics, to contemporary philosophy. It was through Carnap's urgings, abetted by Hans Hahn, once Carnap arrived in Vienna as Privatdozent in philosophy in 1926, that the Vienna Circle began to take logic seriously and that positivist philosophy began to grapple with the question of how an account of mathematics compatible with empiricism can be given.A particular facet of Carnap's influence is not widely appreciated: it was Carnap who introduced Kurt Gödel to logic, in the serious sense. Although Gödel seems to have attended a course of Schlick's on philosophy of mathematics in 1925–26, his second year at the University, he did not at that time pursue logic further, nor did the seminar leave much of a trace on him. In the early summer of 1928, however, Carnap gave two lectures to the Circle which Gödel attended, or so I surmise. At these occasions, Carnap presented material from his manuscript treatise, Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik, that is, “Investigations into general axiomatics”, which dealt with questions of consistency, completeness and categoricity. Carnap later circulated this material to various people including Gödel. (shrink)

Redish et al. provide a significant advance in our understanding of addiction by showing that the various addictive processes are in fact all decision-making processes and each may undergird addiction. We propose means for identifying more central addiction processes. This recognition of the complexity of addiction followed by identification of more central processes would help guide the development of prevention and treatment.

The system whose only predicate is identity, whose only nonlogical vocabulary is the abstraction operator, and whose axioms are all first-order instances of Frege's Axiom V is shown to be undecidable.

ABSTRACT:Organizations adopt formal sanctioning systems to deter ethical violations, but the formal systems’ effectiveness may be undermined by informal sanctioning systems which promote violations. I conducted an ethnographic study of six trading crowds on two financial exchanges to understand how informal and formal sanctioning systems, which are grounded in different interpretations of equity, interact to affect trader deviance from rules established by the financial exchange (exchange deviance). To deter informal trader norms that conflict with exchange rules, the exchanges formally prohibit (...) traders’ informal sanctions. The exchanges, however, underestimate traders’ informal sanctions related to ostracism and social rejection, which are not only difficult for the exchanges to detect, but also interpersonally hurtful and harmful to trader performance. Consequently, the traders’ informal social sanctions lead to secondary sanctions from trading firms. Ultimately, the informal sanctioning system evades the formal sanctioning system by exploiting what the exchanges deem to be minor rule violations. (shrink)

Foss's critique of van Fraassen's constructive empiricism is shown to be completely wide of the mark (Foss 1984, van Fraassen 1980). Foss misunderstands van Fraassen's use of the terms 'observable', 'phenomena', 'empirical adequacy', and 'epistemic community'. He misconstrues constructive empiricism as making knowledge, and perhaps existence, dependent on the observer. On the basis of this error, he attempts to reduce constructive empiricism to skepticism. None of his criticisms are to the point.

A short paper discussing and critiquing common claims that "truth is relative.".

W. H. Auden, the sometimes Greta Garbo of twentieth-century poetry, once told Stephen Spender that he liked America better than England because in America one could be alone. Further, in his introduction to The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse Auden remarked that while in England poets are considered members of a “clerkly caste,” in America they are an “aristocracy of one.” Certainly it does seem to be the individual poet—Whitman, Williams, Olson, Plath, O’Hara, Ginsberg—who has altered the landscape (...) of American poetry and prosody, not the group. And most American literary “movements,” as Robert Creeley has pointed out, are simply comprised of a few people who on occasion drink together, and who are as likely as not to end the evening in violent argument over an aesthetic or political point. Yet the notion of schools or movements remains, in mainstream historical criticism at least, a vital one. How many introductions to anthologies of American poetry, for example, continue to use such rubrics as the Transcendentals, the Populists, the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the New York group? And while established poets often rebel from any sense that they are part of a larger community, which by definition is self-limiting, they are often complicit in their initial categorization. For poets as well as critics the idea of a school is often a useful fiction serving as both a kind of protective hothouse and a platform for getting a hearing.The most recent “group” of American poets—the first since the anthology wars of the early sixties really to be of more than passing interest and perhaps to be actually capable of bringing about a major shift of attention in American poetry and poetics—is the so-called “Language” school. Individual volumes by poets often considered part of this group number well into three figures now and there have been important journals and anthologies produced in a serious and sustained fashion by these writers. Yet in part because of what seems the essentially hermetic character of the project , there has been little notice of this activity by academic critics or reviewers.1 What I’d like to do here is briefly map a few major aspects of the territory, describing some of the practical and theoretical questions which seem to occupy many of these writers in their ongoing critique of the “workshop poem.” 1. Two important exceptions are discussions of some of this work in Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse and Marjorie Perloff’s review “The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties,” American Poetry Review 13 : 15-22. All further references to Perloff’s article, abbreviated “WS,” will be included in the text. For a discussion of the various Language poetry journals and anthologies, see my chapter “American Poetry, 1940s to the Present” in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual/1983, ed. Warren French , pp. 349-74. Lee Bartlett, an associate professor of English, has directed the University of New Mexico’s creative writing program for five years. Coeditor of the critical journal American Poetry, his Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets will be published this fall. Currently he is writing a biography of William Everson. (shrink)

Drawing upon the expertise of film scholars from around the world, Puzzle Films investigates a number of films that sport complex storytelling--from Memento, ...

Three- to six-year-olds were given Heyes's proposed task and theory of mind tasks. Although they correlated, Heyes's was harder; only 50% of participants with a theory of mind reached a criterion of 75% correct. Because of the complex series of inferences involved in Heyes's task, it is possible that one could have a theory of mind and fail Heyes's version.

I argue that the framing of environmental justice issues in terms of distribution is problematic. Using insights about the connections between institutions of human oppression and the domination of the natural environment, as well as insights into nondistributive justice, I argue for a nondistributive model to supplement, complement, and in some cases preempt the distributive model. I conclude with a discussion of eight features of such a nondistributive conception of justice.

A common theme of libertarians is that there is a conflict between the values of liberty and equality. Achieving equality, so libertarians often argue, would require frequent interference in individuals’ lives, creating constraints on freedom and obstacles to the development of individuality. Although not himself endorsing a libertarian conception of liberty, Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen recently has advanced the surprising thesis that there is a tension in Marxist normative thought that in an interesting way parallels the often heard libertarian challenge (...) to egalitarianism. (shrink)

This article reveals a 91-year-old cognitively intact man’s lived experiences of being cared for in a geriatric context in which the majority of the patients were cognitively impaired. A narrative patient story was analysed phenomenologically. The findings indicate that this patient’s basic needs for ethical care were not met. The staff did not see him as a unique individual with his own preferences, resources and abilities to master his life. In order to survive this lack of ethical care, he played (...) the role of an ‘old cognitively impaired man’, which provided him with at least the understanding and attention the cognitively impaired patients received from the staff. The findings also indicate that ethical care is independent of whether or not older cognitively intact and impaired patients stay or live in the same unit, but it is more dependent on a caregiver’s ability to respect and confirm each and every patient for who he or she is and would like to be. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Revisiting the Launching of the Kennedy Institute: Re-visioning the Origins of BioethicsWarren Thomas Reich (bio)Twenty-five years ago, on October 1, 1971, at a press conference held at Georgetown University, the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics, later called the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, was officially inaugurated. To revisit that event—and the Institute’s five founding collaborators who spoke at it—provides an opportunity to (...) re-vision some of the most significant intellectual, moral, cultural, and political factors that shaped both this Institute and the then-nascent field of bioethics.Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who spoke at the press conference, was intensely committed to a new sort of philanthropy that would effect socio-political change in favor the dignity and well-being of the mentally disadvantaged. As executive vice-president of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, she had already applied the Foundation’s vision and resources to the task of harnessing the best of the “biological revolution” of the 1960s to prevent developmental disorders. Prompted by the values at stake in the care of the disadvantaged, she turned the Foundation toward the creation of the Institute in 1971.Just prior to the opening of the Institute, Mrs. Shriver had produced and appeared as introducer in a highly influential film, “Who Shall Survive?”, which dealt with a “mongoloid baby” who was allowed to die in the newborn clinic because of its condition. Showcased at a highly publicized symposium involving 2000 people (Editorial 1971) and widely discussed in the press, the film helped to establish neonatal ethics as paradigmatic for the emerging field of bioethics (Bedeviling Question 1971; Rothman 1991, pp. 190–221). Undoubtedly under the influence of her involvement in the publicizing of those issues, Mrs. Shriver commented at the press conference that she hoped the Institute would re-emphasize the value of children in face of the widespread feeling that children are a burden (Kennedys 1971, p. 19).At the press conference, then president of Georgetown University, Robert J. Henle, S.J., announced the Kennedy Foundation’s grant of $1.35 million to establish the Institute. Henle was undoubtedly alert to the fact that certain issues, such as abortion and terminating the lives of infants, would be perceived [End Page 323] as highly controversial when raised at a Catholic university. Not surprisingly, reporters at the press conference raised provocative questions about how Georgetown University would reconcile Catholic moral doctrine with the Institute’s broadly-based inquiries. Henle replied tersely that the Institute “will be a ‘truly ecumenical and catholic effort,’ defining catholic in its classical meaning of universal” (Helping 1971). The reporters might have found it quite ironic that within a few years Georgetown’s ecumenical vision had provided the intellectual environment that permitted the Institute to become famous for development of the first systematic, secular (principle-based) approach to bioethics (Reich 1995).Father Henle was probably also aware that by launching the Kennedy Institute he was creating the first institute principally devoted to ethics research ever established at a university. It took a special sort of university to take this first step into bioethics research and policymaking. In 1971, ethics was regarded as belonging to religion, and religion was generally regarded as suspect academically. While it was difficult, in that atmosphere, for a nonreligious university to take such a bold step, Henle’s Georgetown University offered a promising setting that could scarcely have been found in any other university. It departed from the common mold of Catholic-college-as-indoctrination-center, yet it had an explicit and unashamed commitment to the investigation of religious and secular values in an environment of academic freedom. It was an increasingly cosmopolitan university, committed to developing the best of secular scholarship. Furthermore, Henle was willing to experiment with as-yet unproven interdisciplinary studies.Sargent Shriver—god-father of the Kennedy Institute, chairman of its first Advisory Board, and a constant dialogue partner of his friend and the Institute’s founding director, Dr. André Hellegers—was intensely interested in linking scientific progress with religious belief, unfettered moral debate, and commitment to disadvantaged humans.At the inaugural event, the new Institute was described as... (shrink)

The following article outlines spiritual formation as it occurs at His Mansion Ministries, a communal ministry centered on Jesus Christ that focuses on helping men and women struggling with life-controlling behaviors and attitudes. Spiritual formation is argued to be a beautiful movement from self to other, a movement that is rooted in a conversion of the self to God. This movement is displayed in the community of His Mansion and the relationships therein. This spiritual movement is also seen in the (...) work and learning that is accomplished at His Mansion. The experience of relationships, work, and learning in the world is typically oriented around the self. At His Mansion Ministries, we believe that spiritual formation happens as a person, in submission to God and his love, moving from being oriented around the self to being aware of and acting for the good of others. (shrink)

Constructive Technology Assessment aims to involve a multitude of stakeholders in discussions involving technology. However, all technological assessment is mediated through concepts. Development of concepts regarding technology rich futures has been lively but confusing for many stakeholders. Utilizing bibliographic data from Web of Science, this article overviews and discusses ten influential concepts that have played an important role during the 2000s. It is argued that the lively and dynamic concept production leads to numerous problems for a CTA approach.

In the probing interviews in this vibrant new book, eminent scholars struggle with some of the most crucial issues facing contemporary intellectuals. Poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler discusses the “pain” of rigorous intellectual work, saying that it is “necessarily extremely hard labor,” as she examines the intersection of discourse and political action. Award-winning filmmaker, philosopher, and social theorist David Theo Goldberg reviews his life’s work, especially on issues of racism. Literary critic and feminist philosopher Avital Ronell sets out to disrupt the (...) standard logic of signification, to force readers into fresh ways of perceiving a subject at hand. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha discusses how critical literacy is intimately connected to the question of democratic representation, and he elaborates on how cultural difference can lead to a politics of discrimination. And neo-Marxist cultural critic Slavoj Žižek takes readers on an exhilarating journey through a wide range of critical subjects. (shrink)

’Ethical codes of conduct are superficial and distracting answers to the question of how to promote ethical behaviour in corporate life.’The author is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Business Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.