The accounting profession has emphasized the need for ethics education in the accounting curriculum. The current study examines professional commitment and anticipatory socialization, operationalized by perception of financial reporting, as possible determinants of Accounting students' ethical perceptions and intentions. Accounting students with higher levels of professional commitment and higher perception of the importance of financial reporting were more likely to perceive questionable actions as unethical and less likely to engage in such actions compared to those students with lower (...) commitment and lower perception of financial reporting. The results have implications for accounting instructors and accounting employers as they socialize students in the accounting profession at this early stage. (shrink)

The accounting profession has emphasized the need for ethics education in the accounting curriculum. The current study examines professional commitment and anticipatory socialization, operationalized by perception of financial reporting, as possible determinants of Accounting students' ethical perceptions and intentions. Accounting students with higher levels of professional commitment and higher perception of the importance of financial reporting were more likely to perceive questionable actions as unethical and less likely to engage in such actions compared to those students with lower (...) commitment and lower perception of financial reporting. The results have implications for accounting instructors and accounting employers as they socialize students in the accounting profession at this early stage. (shrink)

Nanotechnology presents significant challenges in terms of developing a regulatory framework. This is due to a lack of scientific knowledge about the behaviour of the technology in its interactions with biological and ecological processes, the environment and other technologies. Crucially, there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the potential environmental and human health and safety impacts of NT. Consequently, the development of NT is a potential test case for framing new models of ‘soft law’ voluntary governance as a substitute (...) for traditional command and control type regulation. Driven by ‘new science governance,’ an approach based on a combination of ideas in anticipatory ethics, future-oriented responsibility, upstream public engagement and deliberation and theories of justice may offer a solution. The uniqueness of the approach can be found in the incorporation of anticipatory approaches via public participation and deliberation as the input into procedural justice approaches with distributional justice as the output. The overarching objective of this work is to contribute to the discussion in relation to the internalisation of responsibility and the building of intellectual and societal capacity to anticipate negative consequences before they arise in the hope that such an approach could be the antithesis of the retrospective imposition of responsibility and liability after the harm is done, which is the outcome of traditional regulatory and ethical approaches. Ultimately, the purpose is to contribute to the long-term sustainability of NT. (shrink)

Abstract In this essay, a new approach for the ethical study of emerging technology ethics will be presented, called anticipatory technology ethics (ATE). The ethics of emerging technology is the study of ethical issues at the R&D and introduction stage of technology development through anticipation of possible future devices, applications, and social consequences. I will argue that a major problem for its development is the problem of uncertainty, which can only be overcome through methodologically sound forecasting and futures studies. (...) I will then consider three contemporary approaches to the ethics of emerging technologies that use forecasting: ethical technology assessment, the techno-ethical scenarios approach and the ETICA approach, and I considered their strengths and weaknesses. Based on this critical study, I then present my own approach: ATE. ATE is a conceptually and methodologically rich approach for the ethical analysis of emerging technologies that incorporates a large variety of ethical principles, issues, objects and levels of analysis, and research aims. It is ready to be applied to contemporary and future emerging technologies. Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 1-13 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0141-7 Authors Philip A. E. Brey, Department of Philosophy, School of Behavioral Sciences, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757. (shrink)

Epistemic injustices are wrongs that agents can suffer in their capacity as knowers. In this article, I offer a conceptualisation of a phenomenon I call anticipatory epistemic injustice, which I claim is a distinct and particularly pernicious type of epistemic injustice worthy of independent analysis. I take anticipatory epistemic injustice to consist in the wrongs that agents can suffer as a result of anticipated challenges in their process of taking up testimony-sharing opportunities. I distinguish my account from paradigmatic (...) cases of epistemic injustice, such as Miranda Fricker’s concepts of testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice; additionally, I differentiate my view from Kristie Dotson’s account of testimonial smothering. I argue, ultimately, that anticipatory epistemic injustice is a useful addition to our current taxonomy of epistemic injustices, as it has promising explanatory potential for a range of non-standard cases of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Previous work suggests that relative increases in socially evaluative threat modulate the psychobiological stress response. However, few studies have compared stressors which manipulate the level of socially evaluative threat to which the participant is exposed. Here we present two studies. In the first, we assessed the integrity of an ecologically valid, laboratory stressor and its effects on acute psychobiological reactivity and ability to evoke an anticipatory response prior to participation. Specifically, we assessed whether the expectation and experience of direct (...) social evaluation evokes greater reactivity than indirect evaluation. In the second study, we sought to replicate the findings regarding acute stress reactivity whilst extending the assessment window to assess the extent to which the stressor evokes anticipatory responses. As hypothesized, greater reactivity was observed following direct social evaluation compared with indirect observation. Increases in anxiety, heart rate and blood pressure were demonstrated across both studies and the paradigm therefore provides an ecologically valid technique for the activation of psychological and cardiovascular stress responding. Additionally, anticipation of experiencing socially evaluated multitasking led to increases in anxiety, tension, and worry prior to the event itself, supporting previous suggestions that threat anticipation may prolong the activation of stress mechanisms. In the present studies we assessed whether the expectation and experience of direct social evaluation evokes greater reactivity than indirect evaluation. The findings have demonstrated that direct social evaluation of multitasking is a more potent stressor than multitasking with indirect evaluation. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the period of anticipation of stressful events may be critical to understanding the process of stress regulation, and as such we recommend extending the sampling window to allow for the investigation of these processes. (shrink)

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the "right to die"--or to live. __The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying__, informed by Foucault's genealogy of medicine and power as well as by (...) a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion--people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts--has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual "medicine." The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to "spiritual surveys," to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo's, __The Anticipatory Corpse__ explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. A ground-breaking work in bioethics, this book will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy. "With extraordinary philosophical sophistication as well as knowledge of modern medicine, Bishop argues that the body that shapes the work of modern medicine is a dead body. He defends this claim decisively with with urgency. I know of no book that is at once more challenging and informative as __The Anticipatory Corpse. __To say this book is the most important one written in the philosophy of medicine in the last twenty-five years would not do it justice. This book is destined to change the way we think and, hopefully, practice medicine." --_Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School _ "Jeffrey Bishop carefully builds a detailed, scholarly case that medicine is shaped by its attitudes toward death. Clinicians, ethicists, medical educators, policy makers, and administrators need to understand the fraught relationship between clinical practices and death, and __The Anticipatory Corpse __is an essential text. Bishop's use of the writings of Michel Foucault is especially provocative and significant. This book is the closest we have to a genealogy of death." --_Arthur W. Frank, University of Calgary _ "Jeffrey Bishop has produced a masterful study of how the living body has been placed within medicine's metaphysics of efficient causality and within its commitment to a totalizing control of life and death, which control has only been strengthened by medicine's taking on the mantle of a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model. This volume's treatment of medicine's care of the dying will surely be recognized as a cardinal text in the philosophy of medicine." --_H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine_. (shrink)

The technical details of Internet architecture affect social debates about privacy and autonomy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and the basic performance and reliability of Internet services. This paper explores one method for practicing anticipatory ethics in order to understand how a new infrastructure for the Internet might impact these social debates. This paper systematically examines values expressed by an Internet architecture engineering team—the Named Data Networking project—based on data gathered from publications and internal documents. Networking engineers making technical choices also (...) weigh non-technical values when working on Internet infrastructure. Analysis of the team’s documents reveals both values invoked in response to technical constraints and possibilities, such as efficiency and dynamism, as well as values, including privacy, security and anonymity, which stem from a concern for personal liberties. More peripheral communitarian values espoused by the engineers include democratization and trust. The paper considers the contextual and social origins of these values, and then uses them as a method of practicing anticipatory ethics: considering the impact such priorities may have on a future Internet. (shrink)

The essays in this issue of JMP are devoted to critical engagement of my book, The Anticipatory Corpse. The essays, for the most part, accept the main thrust of my critique of medicine. The main thrust of the criticism is whether the scope of the critique is too totalizing, and whether the proposed remedy is sufficient. I greatly appreciate these interventions because they allow me this occasion to respond and clarify, and to even further extend the argument of my (...) book. In this response essay, I maintain that the regnant social imaginary of medicine is the regnant social imaginary of our time. It is grounded in a specific ontotheology: where ontology is a power ontology; where material is malleable to the open-ended organization of power and dependent only on working out the efficient mechanisms of its enactment; where ethically it is oriented only to the immanent telos of utility maximization in the short run, and ultimately to some posthuman future in the long run. This ontotheology originates in the anticipatory corpse and is ordered toward some god-like posthuman being. The entire ontotheology finds enactment through the political economy of neoliberalism. This social imaginary constantly works to insulate itself from other social imaginaries through the use of its institutional power, through marginalization, circumscription, or absorption. The modern social imaginary of neoliberal societies marginalizes and politically isolates other social imaginaries, or transforms them into something acceptable to the neoliberal imaginary. Yet, these other social imaginaries could influence the larger social imaginary in novel ways, sometimes through withdrawal and sometimes through challenges. These other practices—again, usually practices ordered according to different ontological and teleological purposes—might serve as a source of renewal and transformation, but only if the practitioners of these other social imaginaries understand the ontotheological powers that they are up against. (shrink)

Although big-data research has met with multiple controversies in diverse fields, political and security implications of big data in life sciences have received less attention. This paper explores how threats and risks are anticipated and acted on in biobanking, which builds research repositories for biomedical samples and data. Focusing on the biggest harmonisation cluster of biomedical research in Europe, BBMRI-ERIC, the paper analyses different logics of risk in the anticipatory discourse on biobanking. Based on document analysis, interviews with ELSI (...) experts, and field research, three types of framing of risk are reconstructed: data security, privacy, and data misuse. The paper finds that these logics downplay the broader social and political context and reflects on the limits of the practices of anticipatory governance in biobanking. It argues that this regime of governance can make it difficult for biobanks to address possible future challenges, such as access to biomedical data by authorities, pressures for integrating biobank data with other type of personal data, or their use for profiling beyond medical purposes. To address potential controversies and societal implications related to the use of big data in health research and medicine, the paper suggests to expand the vocabulary and practices of anticipatory governance, in the biobanking community and beyond. (shrink)

This paper presents an experimental approach for engaging undergraduate STEM students in anticipatory ethical reasoning, or ethical reasoning applied to the analysis of potential mid- to long-term implications and outcomes of technological innovation. The authors implemented two variations of an approach that integrates three key components—scenario analysis, design fiction, and ethical frameworks—into five sections of an introductory course on the social contexts of science and technology that is required of STEM majors. The authors dub this approach Creative Anticipatory (...) Ethical Reasoning, or CAER. Scenario analysis is a strategy emerging from business consulting for grounded analysis of plausible future trajectories to inform planning. Design fiction is a creative hands-on activity that blends science fiction and design prototyping to facilitate critical thinking with respect to the societal dimensions of a plausible future technology. The authors present the following findings: in each of the variations, students demonstrated significant engagement with CAER and a substantive shift in their conception of what constitutes responsible innovation and ethical conduct in science and technology. Specifically, their integration of ethical reasoning with stakeholder perspectives and scenario analysis reframed technologies, from unproblematic solutions for societal problems to socially-embedded forms of life that might diverge from designers’ intentions. This suggests that CAER could be a useful pedagogical intervention for expanding students’ ethical engagement to consider the potential unintended consequences of technological innovation. (shrink)

Jeffrey Bishop’s The Anticipatory Corpse demonstrates how death is present in and cloaked by contemporary practices of end-of-life care. A key to Bishop’s argument is that for modern medicine the cadaver has become epistemologically normative and that a metaphysics shorn of formal and final causes now shapes contemporary healthcare practices. The essays of this symposium laud and interrogate Bishop’s argument in three ways. First, they raise critical methodological challenges from the perspectives of human rights, Charles Taylor’s concept of social (...) imaginaries, and economics. Second, they demonstrate the analytical power of his argument by detailing how it might be extended to additional issues beyond simply end-of-life care and how it might be brought into conversation with sociology. Third, they engage the constructive turn Bishop takes at the end of the book. Bishop himself also updates readers on the reception of The Anticipatory Corpse, as well as the way his thinking has evolved over the past 5 years since its publication. He also engages the questions, challenges, and openings provided by our authors. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Various approaches have emerged over the last several decades to meet the challenges and complexities of anticipating and responding to the potential impacts of emerging technologies. Although many of the existing approaches share similarities, they each have shortfalls. This paper takes as the object of its study Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies (ATE) to technology assessment, given that it was formatted to address many of the privations characterising parallel approaches. The ATE approach, also in practice, presents certain areas for (...) retooling, such as how it characterises levels and objects of analysis. This paper results from the work done with the TechEthos Horizon 2020 project in evaluating the ethical, legal, and social impacts of climate engineering, digital extended reality, and neurotechnologies. To meet the challenges these technology families present, this paper aims to enhance the ATE framework to encompass the variety of human processes and material forms, functions, and applications that comprise the socio-technical systems in which these technologies are embedded. (shrink)

Drawing on and extending the Foucaultian philosophical framework that Jeffrey Bishop develops in his masterful book, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, we undertake a sociological analysis of the neurological procedure—deep brain stimulation —which implants electrodes in the brain, powered by a pacemaker-like device, for the treatment of movement disorders. Following Bishop’s work, we carry out this analysis through a two-fold strategy. First, we examine how a multidisciplinary team evaluates candidates for this implant at (...) a major medical center. We present excerpts from an ethnographic study of the “case conference” where disease entities are presented, contested, ratified, and made objects for intervention with this technology. The case conference becomes the key site in the transition from “person-with-illness” to “person-with-brain-implant” as a team of health professionals determines a plan of action by interpreting both statistical and “quality of life” data regarding their patients. Second, this article explores these decision-making processes through Bishop’s conceptualization of evidence-based medicine, which relies on statistical approaches as the ultimate authority in knowledge production and medical decisions. We then reflect on Bishop’s critique of the social sciences and the methodological, analytical, and substantive ramifications that The Anticipatory Corpse can offer future sociological work. (shrink)

When you expect something bad to happen, you take action to avoid it. That is the principle of action that underlies J. Y. Lee’s recent paper (2021), which presents a new form of epistemic injustice that arises from anticipating negative consequences for testifying. In this brief reply article occasioned by Lee’s essay, I make two main contributions to the discussion of this idea. The first (§§2–3) is an intervention in the discussion between Lee and Eric Bayruns García regarding the relationship (...) between anticipatory epistemic injustice and Kristie Dotson’s concept of testimonial smothering. The second (§§4–5) is to expand the concept of anticipatory epistemic injustice into the educational context, and to illuminate yet another form of anticipatory epistemic injustice, which I call anticipatory zetetic injustice (§6). (shrink)

In The Anticipatory Corpse, Jeffrey Bishop claims that modern medicine has lost formal and final causality as the dead body has become epistemologically normative, and that a singular focus on efficient and material causality has thoroughly distorted modern medical practice. Bishop implies that the renewal of medicine will require its housing in alternate social spaces. This essay critiques both Bishop’s diagnosis and therapy by arguing, first, that alternate social imaginaries, though perhaps marginalized, are already present within the practice of (...) medicine. And second, the essay argues that alternate social imaginaries in medicine can be reclaimed not through separatist communities but in the re-narration of conceptually underdetermined practices. Given Bishop’s invitation for theology to engage medicine, this essay then draws from theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the kind of diagnosis and therapy currently needed, concluding with a contemporary example of how an alternate social imaginary is being instantiated in modern medicine. (shrink)

Anticipatory looking on mindreading tasks can indicate our expectation of an agent's action. The challenge is that social situations are often more complex, involving instances where we need to track an agent's false belief to successfully identify the outcome to which an action is directed. If motor processes can guide how action goals are understood, it is conceivable— where that kind of goal ascription occurs in false-belief tasks— for motor representations to account for someone's belief-like state. Testing adults (N (...) = 42) in a real-time interactive helping scenario, we discovered that participants' early mediolateral motor activity (leftwards– rightwards leaning on balance board) foreshadowed the agent's belief-based action preparation. These results suggest fast belief-tracking can modulate motor representations generated in the course of one's interaction with an agent. While adults' leaning, and anticipatory looking, revealed the contribution of fast false-belief tracking, participants did not correct the agent's mistake in their final helping action. These discoveries suggest that adults may not necessarily use another's belief during overt social interaction or find reflecting on another's belief as being normatively relevant to one's own choice of action. Our interactive task design offers a promising way to investigate how motor and mindreading processes may be variously integrated. (shrink)

Until the late 19th century scientists almost always assumed that the world could be described as a rule-based and hence deterministic system or as a set of such systems. The assumption is maintained in many 20th century theories although it has also been doubted because of the breakthrough of statistical theories in thermodynamics (Boltzmann and Gibbs) and other fields, unsolved questions in quantum mechanics as well as several theories forwarded within the social sciences. Until recently it has furthermore been assumed (...) that a rule-based and deterministic system was also predictable if only the rules were known, but this assumption has now been undermined by modern chaos-theory describing rule-based and deterministic, but unpredictable systems, while catastrophe-theory delivers a set of types describing various kinds of instability and conditions for the stability of a given system. Hence the main trait in the theoretical development in the 20th-century science can be described as a basic modification and limitation of some of the fundamental and strong assumptions forwarded in the previous epochs of modern science. Ironically, the very same process has been a process in which the human capacity to intervene in nature has expanded dramatically and mainly with the help of the very same theories, and not least because they allow nature to be described and made manipulable on a lower level and a more fine-grained scale. While the overall theoretical consistency between the various theories has gone, the reach of human intervention in nature has increased based on quite new dimensions whether in the area of physics (e.g.: energy technologies, chemical technologies, nanotechnologies etc.) or biology (ge¬netic manipulation) or in the area of psychology, sociology and culture (artificial simulations of mental processes, new means of communication, implying changes in the social infrastructure and cultural behaviour etc.). While some of these changes and new conditions can be reflected from within the conceptual framework of rule-based systems, albeit more complex than formerly recognized, others seem to give rise to the question of whether there are »systems« and relations between different systems in the world which are not rule-based? For instance, it seems to be obvious that the notion of instability represents a major conceptual break with former theories of rule-based systems, as the stability of the latter is an axiomatically given property implied in the very notion of rule-based systems, while instability can only be the result of external influence which should be explained as the result of another rule-based sy¬stem. While there are no difficulties implied concerning the stability of rule-based systems, the notion of unstable states of a system raises the question of how there can be a system at all if there are no invariant stabilising principles? This is the first question which I will address. And I shall do so by taking two examples of such systems as my point of departure. The first example will be the computer and the second will be ordinary language. In both cases I will argue that the stability of these systems (which are both defined by the existence/presence of human intentions) are provided by the help of - differently organised - redundancy functions which both allow the maintenance of systems in unstable macro-states, suspension of previous rules, underdetermination and overdetermination and generation/emergence/creation of new rules more or less independent of previous rules by the help of optional recursions to the permanently accessible underlying levels as for instance the level of binary representation in computers. Since the notion of redundancy is both controversial as such and often avoided, the concept is discussed (as defined in Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of information and in the semiotic framework of J. J. Greimas) and leading to a more general definition in which the redundancy functions serve to overcome noisy conditions, but at the cost of rule-based stability, determination, and predictability. A second question will be how the notion of rule-generating systems relates to the notion of anticipatory systems and it will be argued that rule-generating systems share some features with an¬ticipatory systems and that the former from a certain viewpoint can be seen as a subclass of the latter, although anticipative features are not necessarily a part of the definition of rule-generating systems. On the other hand, it will be discussed whether anticipatory systems which are not rule-generating systems can exist and it will be argued that the capacity to anticipate is strongly limited if it is not part of a rule-generating system. Therefore, it is concluded that the most powerful anticipatory systems need to be rule-generating systems. (shrink)

The Anticipatory and Consummatory Interpersonal Pleasure Scale is a psychometric instrument that has been used to indirectly measure social anhedonia in many cross-cultural contexts, such as in Western, European, Eastern, and Israeli samples. However, little is known about the psychometric properties of the ACIPS in Korean samples. The primary goal of this study was to validate the Korean version of the ACIPS among non-help-seeking individuals. The sample consisted of 307 adult individuals who had no current or prior psychiatric history. (...) Participants were administered the ACIPS, along with the Behavioral Inhibition and Behavioral Activation Scales and Beck Depression Inventory. We examined the association of the total ACIPS scores with the other measures. The ACIPS showed good internal consistency. We also explored the factor structure of the Korean translation of the ACIPS using principal component analysis with Promax rotation and Kaiser normalization. Factor analysis yielded a three-factor structure that accounted for 58.8% of the variance. The three-factor model included the following subdomains: interactions involving close relationships, casual interactions, and interactions involving family members. Total BAS and BIS scores were significantly associated with total ACIPS scores, while BDI scores were inversely associated with total ACIPS scores. The current research indicates that the Korean version of the ACIPS is a useful and valid scale. Future directions include using the Korean translation of the ACIPS to elucidate the varying degrees of hedonic capacity in psychiatric patients. (shrink)

The critical theory of the Frankfurt School starts with an explanatory-diagnostic analysis of the social pathologies of the present followed by anticipatory-utopian reflection on possible treatments for these disorders. This approach draws extensively on parallels to medicine. I argue that the ideas of social pathology and crisis that pervade the methodological writings of the Frankfurt School help to explain critical theory’s contention that the object of critique identifies itself when social institutions cease to function smoothly. However, in reflecting on (...) the role that reason and self-awareness play in the second stage of social criticism, I contend that this model is actually better conceptualized through the lens of the psychoanalyst rather than the physician. Although the first generation’s explicit commitment to psychoanalysis has dissipated in recent critical theory, faith in a rationalized ‘talking cure’ leading to greater self-awareness of existing pathologies remains at the core of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

This paper targets the constitutive basis of social cognition. It begins by describing the traditional and still dominant cognitivist view. Cognitivism assumes internalism about the realisers of social cognition; thus, the embodied and embedded elements of intersubjective engagement are ruled out from playing anything but a basic causal role in an account of social cognition. It then goes on to advance and clarify an alternative to the cognitivist view; namely, an enactive account of social cognition. It does so first by (...) articulating a diachronic constitutive account for how embodied engagement can play a constitutive role in social cognition. It then proceeds to consider an objection; the causal-constitutive fallacy (Adams & Aizawa 2001, 2008; Block 2005) against enactive social cognition. The paper proceeds to deflate this objection by establishing that the distinction between constitution and causation is not co-extensive with the distinction between internal constitutive elements and external causal elements. It is then shown that there is a different reason for thinking that an enactive account of social cognition is problematic. We call this objection the ‘poverty of the interactional stimulus argument’. This objection turns on the role and characteristics of anticipation in enactive social cognition. It argues that anticipatory processes are mediated by an internally realised model or tacit theory (Carruthers 2015; Seth 2015). The final part of this paper dissolves this objection by arguing that it is possible to cast anticipatory processes as orchestrated as well as maintained by sensorimotor couplings between individuals in face-to-face interaction. (shrink)

Since the inception of large‐scale human genome research, there has been much caution about the risks of exacerbating a number of socially dangerous attitudes linked to human genetics. These attitudes are usually labeled with one of a family of genetic or genomic “isms” or “ations” such as “genetic essentialism,” “genetic determinism,” “genetic reductionism,” “geneticization,” “genetic stigmatization,” and “genetic discrimination.” The psychosocial processes these terms refer to are taken to exacerbate several ills that are similarly labeled, from medical racism and psychological (...) fatalism to economic exploitation and social exclusion. But as genomic information becomes more familiar in clinical and research settings as well as other life activities, do we need to continue to worry so much about this family of attitudes and their impact on existing problems?In genomics, the underlying anxiety has been that disclosure of genomic information will trigger a series of (seemingly unavoidable) negative responses that will affect individuals, their families, and their communities at large. The fundamental social challenges that hyperbolic genomic messaging, low genomic literacy, and “folk biology” help sustain remain to be addressed. If we hope to break the cycle of genomic isms and ations, we will have to get better at resisting overinterpretations of the relevance that genomics has for people’s future potentials, ancestral vulnerabilities, community memberships, and ethnic affiliations. (shrink)

Online platforms like Instagram cover potentially distressing imagery with a sensitive-content screen (blurred imagery plus a content warning). Previous research suggests people typically choose to “uncover” and view screened content. In three studies, we investigated whether the presence of screens mitigates the negative emotional impact of viewing content. In Study 1, participants viewed positive and neutral images, and screens (with an option to view the negative images beneath) for a 5-minute period. In Study 2, half the participants saw a grey (...) mask in place of the typical sensitive-content screen. In addition, each image appeared for a fixed period (5 s) and participants had no option to uncover it. Study 3 was like Study 2 except half the participants saw negative images preceded by a sensitive-content screen and half saw negative images without screens. Overall, participants reported a significant increase in state anxiety and negative affect from pre-to post task when they were exposed to sensitive-content screens, whether or not they were also exposed to the negative imagery beneath. Our data suggest sensitive-content screens cause negative responses – state anxiety and negative affect – that do not translate to an emotional benefit when people view negative content. (shrink)

To investigate whether people with social anxiety have less actual and “anticipatory” anxiety when interacting with a robot compared to interacting with a person, we conducted a 2 × 2 psychological experiment with two factors: social anxiety and interaction partner. The experiment was conducted in a counseling setting where a participant played the role of a client and the robot or the confederate played the role of a counselor. First, we measured the participants’ social anxiety using the Social Avoidance (...) and Distress Scale, after which, we measured their anxiety at two specific moments: “anticipatory anxiety” was measured after they knew that they would be interacting with a robot or a human confederate, and actual anxiety was measured after they actually interacted with the robot or confederate. Measurements were performed using the Profile of Mood States and the State–Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results indicated that participants with higher social anxiety tended to feel less “anticipatory anxiety” and tension when they knew that they would be interacting with robots compared with humans. Moreover, we found that interaction with a robot elicited less tension compared with interaction with a person regardless of the level of social anxiety. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary field of neurorobotics looks to neuroscience to overcome the limitations of modern robotics technology, to robotics to advance our understanding of the neural system’s inner workings, and to information technology to develop tools that support those complementary endeavours. The development of these technologies is still at an early stage, which makes them an ideal candidate for proactive and anticipatory ethical reflection. This article explains the current state of neurorobotics development within the Human Brain Project, originating from a (...) close collaboration between the scientific and technical experts who drive neurorobotics innovation, and the humanities and social sciences scholars who provide contextualising and reflective capabilities. This article discusses some of the ethical issues which can reasonably be expected. On this basis, the article explores possible gaps identified within this collaborative, ethical reflection that calls for attention to ensure that the development of neurorobotics is ethically sound and socially acceptable and desirable. (shrink)

Few phenomena have found such divergent descriptions in sociological lit­ erature as have social inconsistencies. They were studied by George Herbert Mead as eruptive "natural" events constituting a social temporality. Alfred SchUtz described them as "explosions" of the individual actor's anticipatory action patterns. Talcott Parsons attempted to grasp social inconsistencies into his frame of "pattern variables," while Erving Goffman dealt with them as disruptions of "fostered impressions of reality" maintained by one or the other dominant team. The present study (...) traces these divergent approaches back to various un­ checked assumptions concerning the structure and the constitution of social types. Thus, to further clarify the relationship between social types and the relevance structure of interactional situations has been my first objective. This initially rather limited intention widened when the role of social incon­ sistencies for analysing the differences between play, game, and social action proper in the immediate context of social interaction became apparent. The structure of social inconsistencies seems to hold a key to unifying the theo­ ries of play and social,action. (shrink)

The generation of redundancy is specific for meaning processing in anticipatory systems. Variation generates entropy; redundancy is generated by selection mechanisms in inter-human communications. ….

In this essay, a new approach to the ethics of emerging information technology will be presented, called anticipatory technology ethics (ATE). The ethics of emerging technology is the study of ethical issues at the R&D and introduction stage of technology development through anticipation of possible future devices, applications, and social consequences. In the essay, I will first locate emerging technology in the technology development cycle, after which I will consider ethical approaches to emerging technologies, as well as obstacles in (...) developing such approaches. I will argue that any sound approach must centrally include futures studies of technology. I then present ATE and some applications of it to emerging information technologies. In ATE, ethical analysis is performed at three levels, the technology, artifact and application levels, and at each levels distinct types of ethical questions are asked. ATE analyses result in the identification and evaluation of a broad range of ethical issues that can be anticipated in relation to an emerging information technology. This ethical analysis can then be used for ethical recommendations for design or governance. (shrink)

Purpose: Constructivism postulates that the perceived reality is a complex construct formed during development. Depending on the particular school, these inner constructs take on different forms and structures and affect cognition in different ways. The purpose of this article is to address the questions of how and, even more importantly, why we form such inner constructs. Approach: This article proposes that brain development is controlled by an inherent anticipatory drive, which biases learning towards the formation of forward predictive structures (...) and inverse goal-oriented control structures. This drive, in combination with increasingly complex environmental interactions during cognitive development, enforces the structuring of our conscious self, which is embedded in a constructed inner reality. Essentially, the following questions are addressed: Which basic mechanisms lead us to the construction of inner realities? How are these emergent inner realities structured? How is the self represented within the inner realities? And consequently, which cognitive structures constitute the media for conscious thought and selfconsciousness? Findings: Due to the anticipatory drive, representations in the brain shape themselves predominantly purposefully or intentionally. Taking a developmental, evolutionary perspective, we show how the brain is forced to develop progressively complex and abstract representations of the self embedded in the constructed inner realities. These self representations can evoke different stages of self-consciousness. Implications: The anticipatory drive shapes brain structures and cognition during the development of progressively more complex, competent, and flexible goal-oriented bodyenvironment interactions. Self-consciousness develops because increasingly abstract, individualizing self representations are necessary to realize these progressively more challenging environmental interactions. (shrink)

An anticipatory system is a system with the capacity to anticipate its own evolution. This paper generalizes the idea of anticipatory systems from its original biological setting to the fields of cognitive and social sciences, and it shows that anticipatory systems are a generalization of autopoietic systems. Anticipatory systems, almost by definition, escape the possibilities of rote iteration. This argument shows that the complexity of an anticipatory system extends well beyond mainstream complexity theory. For this (...) reason, the idea of systems of higher-order complexity has been introduced. These types of systems come in at least two forms: impredicative or self-referential systems, and living systems. It follows that anticipation does not necessarily require life. (shrink)

The national-level scenarios project NanoFutures focuses on the social, political, economic, and ethical implications of nanotechnology, and is initiated by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU). The project involves novel methods for the development of plausible visions of nanotechnology-enabled futures, elucidates public preferences for various alternatives, and, using such preferences, helps refine future visions for research and outreach. In doing so, the NanoFutures project aims to address a central question: how to deliberate the social implications (...) of an emergent technology whose outcomes are not known. The solution pursued by the NanoFutures project is twofold. First, NanoFutures limits speculation about the technology to plausible visions. This ambition introduces a host of concerns about the limits of prediction, the nature of plausibility, and how to establish plausibility. Second, it subjects these visions to democratic assessment by a range of stakeholders, thus raising methodological questions as to who are relevant stakeholders and how to activate different communities so as to engage the far future. This article makes the dilemmas posed by decisions about such methodological issues transparent and therefore articulates the role of plausibility in anticipatory governance. (shrink)

Research addressing the challenges emerging from the development and diffusion of digital technologies has grown rapidly in recent years. However, much of this literature tends to overlook the immersion of these technologies into our everyday lives. This everyday digitalization cannot be reduced to specific technological innovations and is obviously a crucial aspect of the social changes introduced by digital technologies. This themed issue sets out to explore the everyday dimension of digitalization, in the specific context of agri-food systems. We propose (...) a collection of papers that contribute to opening new approaches to digitalization in food and agriculture, by concentrating the attention on the mundane and ordinary aspects of digitalization and exploring their potential contributions to profound transformations in agri-food systems. The various forms of everyday digitalization that are presented in this symposium offer two particular ways of critically engaging with the digitalization of agriculture and food. Firstly, our everyday digitalization looks beyond examining the impacts of digitalization and positioning digital technologies in opposition to farmers, consumers, government, or other actors. Secondly, we shed light on the politics of uncertainty, which enables us to make anticipatory actions and see things beyond success and failure. What we observe is how these imaginaries participate in the co-production of digital realities through their encounter with the complexity of everyday life. Therefore, it remains essential to engage critically with both the imaginary and the everyday dimensions of digitalization in their multiplicity. (shrink)

How are beliefs efficacious? One answer is: via rational intentional action. But there are other ways that beliefs are efficacious. This dissertation examines these other ways, and sketches an answer to the question of how beliefs are efficacious that takes into account how beliefs are involved in the full range of behavioral disciplines, from psychophysiology and cognition to social and economic phenomena. The account of how beliefs are efficacious I propose draws on work on active accounts of perception. I develop (...) an account based on a proposal sketched by the cognitive scientist Ulrich Neisser. Neisser sketched an active account of perception, on which dynamic anticipatory schemata direct an organism's exploration and action, and are in turn revised as a result of exploration and action. This notion of schema has roots in nineteenth century neurophysiology and in Frederick Bartlett's subsequent work on memory. Neisser appealed to it to unite what he thought was right about information-processing accounts of perception with what he thought was right about ecological accounts of perception. The point that we must anticipate in order to perceive has been recognized by philosophers in the form of the "theory-ladenness of observation." I extend the concept of anticipatory schema to include its role in social perception and social interaction; the concept of anticipatory schema provides a more interactive account of the role of expectations in the maintenance and existence of social institutions, and can be used to enrich the account of convention David Lewis provided. I also show that the concept of rational expectations, which explains the neutrality of money in terms of the efficacy of anticipatory expectations, is compatible with the proposed account of how beliefs are efficacious. I discuss how the proposal accounts for the three main modes by which beliefs can be efficacious: via their role in causing intentional action, via their role in causing economic phenomena and the existence and maintenance of social institutions, and via their role in causing unintentional physiological responses, including anticipatory physiological responses that can enable perception, cause involuntary actions and give rise to the placebo effect. (shrink)

People are using the future to search for better ways to achieve sustainability, inclusiveness, prosperity, well-being and peace. In addition, the way the future is understood and used is changing in almost all domains, from social science to daily life. This book presents the results of significant research undertaken by UNESCO with a number of partners to detect and define the theory and practice of anticipation around the world today. It uses the concept of ‘Futures Literacy’ as a tool to (...) define the understanding of anticipatory systems and processes – also known as the Discipline of Anticipation. This innovative title explores: • new topics such as Futures Literacy and the Discipline of Anticipation; • the evidence collected from over 30 Futures Literacy Laboratories and presented in 14 full case studies; • the need and opportunity for significant innovation in human decision-making systems. This book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers, policy-makers and students, as well as activists working on sustainability issues and innovation, future studies and anticipation studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351047999, has been made available under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license. (shrink)

To unzip language from social behaviour one can hypothesise that language-systems are constituted by words and rules or, alternatively, constructions. The systems thus become autonomous and, if linked to individualist psychology, one can posit that each person’s brain operates a language faculty However, such views find little support in neuroscience. Brains self-organize by linking phonetic (and manual) gestures with action-perception. Far from being housed in the skull,language activity links people across time-scales. Not only does articulation give rise to speech but,together (...) with gesture, this is partly anticipatory, uses long term and working memory, and links with both previous interactions and linguistic history. Further, without conscious acting and perceiving, what we call language would be no more than sound or visible pattern. Accordingly,language can be viewed as what Fowler (2010) calls ‘between person public activity.’ As such, it arises as people co-ordinate while using cultural history and circumstances. On this distributed view(see, Cowley, 2007a; 2009), this results in skills with affective, verbal and social resources for doings things together Genotypes build phenotypes as persons or selves (Ross, 2007) arise under biological, linguistic and cultural constraints. As we concert activity, we re-enact the phonetic gestures and visible expression of our fellows. We come to hear phenomenological patterns that can be described as languages and their parts. (shrink)

Studies of social media and its uses have focused on how it shapes behavior but less so with emotion. Overcoming this limitation, this article investigates the role of emotion in understanding and shaping actions online, and how, conversely, different uses of social media are leveraged to manage and express emotions, focusing on Facebook and Instagram. To this end, this article draws on 24 in-depth interviews with youth users in Hong Kong to excavate practices of emotional labor and management online, which (...) reveal (1) strategies to manage emotional reactions, centering on critical distance; (2) strategies to manage emotional conveyance by manipulating the temporality of the content they produce; and (3) the creation of a digital blasé that consisted of the atmosphere of Facebook and Instagram, sustained by general emotional detachment, the perceived need to detach, and a sense of “watchedness”. Throughout, emotional detachment was the default state that users entered into when using Facebook and Instagram, as an anticipatory reaction to the emotional exhaustion imposed by imagined content and into which they inevitably returned. (shrink)

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is an important ethical, legal, and political theme for the European Commission. Although variously defined, it is generally understood as an interactive process that engages social actors, researchers, and innovators who must be mutually responsive and work towards the ethical permissibility of the relevant research and its products. The framework of RRI calls for contextually addressing not just research and innovation impact but also the background research process, specially the societal visions underlying it and the (...) norms and priorities that shape scientific agendas. This requires the integration of anticipatory, inclusive, and responsive dimensions, and the nurturing of a certain type of reflexivity among a variety of stakeholders, from scientists to funders. In this paper, we do not address potential limitations but focus on the potential contribution of philosophical reflection to RRI in the context of the Ethics and Society subproject of the Human Brain Project (HBP). We show how the type of conceptual analysis provided by philosophically oriented approaches theoretically and ethically broadens research and innovation within the HBP. We further suggest that overt inclusion of philosophical reflection can promote the aims and objectives of RRI. (shrink)

The evidence most of us have for our beliefs on global climate change, the extent of human contribution to it, and appropriate anticipatory and mitigating actions turns crucially on epistemic trust. We extend trust or distrust to many varied others: scientists performing original research, intergovernmental agencies and those reviewing research, think tanks offering critique and advocating skepticism, journalists transmitting and interpreting claims, even social systems of modern science such as peer-reviewed publication and grant allocation. Our personal experiences and assessments (...) of evidential indicators themselves may be buttressed significantly by trust, not just in. (shrink)

Two decades ago, in 1994, in the context of the 4th EU Framework Programme, ELSA was introduced as a label for developing and funding research into the ethical, legal and social aspects of emerging sciences and technologies. Currently, particularly in the context of EU funding initiatives such as Horizon2020, a new label has been forged, namely Responsible Research and Innovation. What is implied in this metonymy, this semantic shift? What is so new about RRI in comparison to ELSA? First of (...) all, for both labels, the signifier was introduced in a top-down manner, well before the concept that was signified by it had acquired a clear and stable profile. In other words, the signifier preceded the research strategies actually covered by these labels. Moreover, the newness of RRI does not reside in its interactive and anticipatory orientation, as is suggested by authors who introduced the term, but rather in its emphases on social-economic impacts. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in public engagement with, and the democratization of, science and technology. Despite notable successes, such developments have often struggled to enhance public trust, avert crises of expertise and democracy, and build more socially responsive and responsible science and innovation. A central reason for this is that mainstream approaches to public engagement harbor what we call “residual realist” assumptions about participation and publics. Recent coproductionist accounts in science and technology studies offer (...) an alternative way of seeing participation as coproduced, relational, diverse, and emergent but have been somewhat reluctant to articulate what this means in practice. In this paper, we make this move by setting out a new framework of interrelating paths and associated criteria for remaking public participation with science and democracy in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory, and responsible ways. This framework comprises four paths to: forge reflexive participatory practices that attend to their framings, emergence, uncertainties, and effects; ecologize participation through attending to the interrelations between diverse public engagements in wider systems; catalyze practices of anticipatory reflection to bring about responsible democratic innovations; and reconstitute participation as constitutive of systems of technoscience and democracy. (shrink)

Consumers are increasingly facing product evaluation and choice situations that include information about product sustainability, i.e., information about a product’s relative environmental and social impact. In many cases, consumers have to make decisions that involve a trade-off between product sustainability and other valued product attributes. Similarly, product and marketing managers need to make decisions that reflect how consumers will respond to different trade-off scenarios. In the current research, we study consumer responses across two different possible trade-off scenarios: one in which (...) consumers face a trade-off between product sustainability and hedonic value, and another in which they must trade-off between product sustainability and utilitarian value. Our results suggest that, overall, consumers are more likely to trade-off hedonic value for sustainability than to trade-off utilitarian value for sustainability. In Studies 1A and 1B, we presented participants with a product choice task and also measured their anticipatory emotions as they contemplated their options. The results suggest that given a trade-off, consumers are more likely to choose a sustainable product when they have to trade-off hedonic value than when they have to trade-off utilitarian value. Further, these studies provide some insight into the emotions underlying this effect. In Study 2, we use a different consumer response measure, relative purchase likelihood, and investigate the effect of trade-off type across categories that vary in the degree to which hedonic and utilitarian attributes are perceived to be important. Our results suggest that the effect of trade-off type still holds, yet is moderated by product type such that consumers’ greater willingness to trade-off hedonic value for sustainability is attenuated as the relative importance of hedonic attributes increases. In addition to building on our theoretical understanding of decision making given trade-offs with moral attributes, this research is also intended to support managers as they define and choose among various strategic, product development, and marketing promotion options. (shrink)

BackgroundOur human societies and certainly also (bio) medicine are more and more permeated with technology. There seems to be an increasing awareness among bioethicists that an effective and comprehensive approach to ethically guide these emerging biomedical innovations into society is needed. Such an approach has not been spelled out yet for bioethics, while there are frequent calls for ethical guidance of biomedical innovation, also by biomedical researchers themselves. New and emerging biotechnologies require anticipation of possible effects and implications, meaning the (...) scope is not evaluative after a technology has been fully developed or about hypothetical technologies, but real-time for a real biotechnology.Main textIn this paper we aim to substantiate and discuss six ingredients that we increasingly see adopted by ethicists and that together constitute “ethics parallel research”. This approach allows to fulfil two aims: guiding the development process of technologies in biomedicine and providing input for the normative evaluation of such technologies. The six ingredients of ethics parallel research are: (1) disentangling wicked problems, (2) upstream or midstream ethical analysis, (3) ethics from within, (4) inclusion of empirical research, (5) public participation and (6) mapping societal impacts, including hard and soft impacts. We will draw on gene editing, organoid technology and artificial intelligence as examples to illustrate these six ingredients.ConclusionEthics parallel research brings together these ingredients to ethically analyse and proactively or parallel guide technological development. It widens the roles and judgements from the ethicist to a more anticipatory and constructively guiding role. Ethics parallel research is characterised by a constructive, rather than a purely critical perspective, it focusses on developing best-practices rather than outlining worst practice, and draws on insights from social sciences and philosophy of technology. (shrink)

The paper introduces measurement of fixation-speech intervals as an important tool for the study of the reading process. Using the theory of the organism-environment system, we developed experiments to investigate the time course of reading. By combining eye tracking with synchronous recording of speech during reading in a single measure, we issue a fundamental challenge to information processing models. Not only is FSI an authentic measure of the reading process, but it shows that we exploit verbal patterns, textual features and, (...) less directly, reading experience. Reading, we conclude, is not a matter of decoding linguistic information. Far from being a text-driven process, it depends on integrating both sensory and motor processes in an anticipatory meaning generation based on the history of experience and cultural context of the reader. Finally, we conclude with remarks on the social character and cognitive history of reading. (shrink)

Butz, Achimova, Bilkey, and Knott provide a topic overview and discuss whether the special issue contributions may imply that event‐predictive abilities constitute a root for conceptual human thought, because they enable complex, mutually beneficial, but also intricately competitive, social interactions and language communication.

This Handbook presents the state of the art overview of current research on anticipation studies. It develops anticipation from both the theoretical and applied points of view. Via this comprehensive overview of the research on anticipation, this Handbook makes clear that anticipation is a serious topic of research that can and should be connected to Futures Studies research, perspectives and orientation. The Handbook uses the anticipatory viewpoint as a unifying framework able both to stop the progressive fragmentation of the (...) human and social sciences and begin a process aimed at progressively closer integration, mutual knowledge and dialogue among the human and social sciences. It sets the agenda for the field, helps futures studies to come of age, and contributes to changing the orientation of the human and social sciences from their dominant past-orientation to a new future-orientation. The Handbook presents research from a variety of fields such as: Biology, ecology, psychology, social sciences, humanities, engineering, and computer science. The editorial board consists of scholars from various sciences, such as futurists, sociologists, economists, statisticians, computer scientists, designers and game builders. (shrink)