Online deliberation is one important instance of civic tech that is both for and by the citizens, through engaging citizens in Internet-supported deliberative discussions on public issues. This article explains the origins of a set of symposium articles in this journal issue based on the 2017 'International Conference on Deliberation and Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Civic Tech' held in Singapore. Symposium articles are presented in a sequence that flows from designing decision making systems to platforms to specific technological nudges.

Researchers from diverse disciplines, including organismal and cellular physiology, sports science, human nutrition, evolution and ecology, have sought to understand the causes and consequences of the surprising variation in metabolic rate found among and within individual animals of the same species. Research in this area has been hampered by differences in approach, terminology and methodology, and the context in which measurements are made. Recent advances provide important opportunities to identify and address the key questions in the field. By bringing together (...) researchers from different areas of biology and biomedicine, we describe and evaluate these developments and the insights they could yield, highlighting the need for more standardisation across disciplines. We conclude with a list of important questions that can now be addressed by developing a common conceptual and methodological toolkit for studies on metabolic variation in animals. (shrink)

The paper is intended as a contribution to historical materialism. The authors are not interested in any historical-philosophical, still less in exegetical, problems. They believe that this intellectual tradition is relevant for understanding the social transformations ongoing contemporarily and for coping with practical problems to which these transformations give rise. Among the most important changes there are those labeled as “globalization” and the rise and development of “knowledge society” and “information civilization.” If one adopts this stance, one should admit that (...) the problems of space and culture deserve special attention. Discussing the ways these problems could be tackled in historical materialism, the authors use the ideas of Leszek Nowak and Immanuel Wallerstein. (shrink)

Przyglądam się tej kognitywistycznej książce z kognitywistycznej perspektywy. Zastanawiam się nad recepcją wydanej przed pięciu laty pracy, jej aktualnością i wpływem na rozwój relacji między fenomenologią a kognitywistyką.

Do the new sciences of well-being provide knowledge that respects the nature of well-being? This book written from the perspective of philosophy of science articulates how this field can speak to well-being proper and can do so in a way that respects the demands of objectivity and measurement.

Enjoying great popularity in decision theory, epistemology, and philosophy of science, Bayesianism as understood here is fundamentally concerned with epistemically ideal rationality. It assumes a tight connection between evidential probability and ideally rational credence, and usually interprets evidential probability in terms of such credence. Timothy Williamson challenges Bayesianism by arguing that evidential probabilities cannot be adequately interpreted as the credences of an ideal agent. From this and his assumption that evidential probabilities cannot be interpreted as the actual credences of human (...) agents either, he concludes that no interpretation of evidential probabilities in terms of credence is adequate. I argue to the contrary. My overarching aim is to show on behalf of Bayesians how one can still interpret evidential probabilities in terms of ideally rational credence and how one can maintain a tight connection between evidential probabilities and ideally rational credence even if the former cannot be interpreted in terms of the latter. By achieving this aim I illuminate the limits and prospects of Bayesianism. (shrink)

Well–being, health and freedom are some of the many phenomena of interest to science whose definitions rely on a normative standard. Empirical generalizations about them thus present a special case of value-ladenness. I propose the notion of a ‘mixed claim’ to denote such generalizations. Against the prevailing wisdom, I argue that we should not seek to eliminate them from science. Rather, we need to develop principles for their legitimate use. Philosophers of science have already reconciled values with objectivity in several (...) ways, but none of the existing proposals are suitable for mixed claims. Using the example of the science of well-being, I articulate a conception of objectivity for this science and for mixed claims in general. _1_ Introduction _2_ What Are Mixed Claims? _3_ Mixed Claims Are Different _3.1_ Values as reasons to pursue science _3.2_ Values as agenda-setters _3.3_ Values as ethical constraints on research protocols _3.4_ Values as arbiters between underdetermined theories _3.5_ Values as determinants of standards of confirmation _3.6_ Values as sources of wishful thinking and fraud _4_ Mixed Claims Should Stay _4.1_ Against Nagel _5_ The Dangers of Mixed Claims _6_ The Existing Accounts of Objectivity _6.1_ The perils of impartiality _7_ Objectivity for Mixed Claims _8_ Three Rules _8.1_ Unearth the value presuppositions in methods and measures _8.2_ Check if value presuppositions are invariant to disagreements _8.3_ Consult the relevant parties _9_ Conclusion. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of papers that advance our understanding of the metaphysics of powers — properties such as fragility and electric charge. The metaphysics of powers is a fast developing research field with fundamental questions at the forefront of current research, such as Can there be a world of only powers? What is the manifestation of a power? Are powers and their manifestations related by necessity? What are the prospects for dispositional accounts of causation? The papers focus on (...) questions concerning the metaphysics of powers that cut across any particular subject-specific ontological domain -- whether philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, epistemology – investigating the metaphysical structure of powers, the nature of the manifestation of powers, the necessity or contingency of a power’s relation to its manifestations, and powers and causation. A number of authors also engage in discussion with Humean and neo-Humean treatments of causation, thereby making contributions to a larger metaphysical debate beyond powers. Additionally, the authors engage critically with the latest contributions to the debate on powers in the literature, thereby bringing together in a wholesome and analytical way the most recent and noteworthy theoretical developments in this research field. (shrink)

Thick concepts, namely those concepts that describe and evaluate simultaneously, present a challenge to science. Since science does not have a monopoly on value judgments, what is responsible research involving such concepts? Using measurement of wellbeing as an example, we first present the options open to researchers wishing to study phenomena denoted by such concepts. We argue that while it is possible to treat these concepts as technical terms, or to make the relevant value judgment in-house, the responsible thing to (...) do, especially in the context of public policy, is to make this value judgment through a legitimate political process that includes all the stakeholders of this research. We then develop a participatory model of measurement based on the ideal of co-production. To show that this model is feasible and realistic, we illustrate it with a case study of co-production of a concept of thriving conducted by the authors in collaboration with a UK anti-poverty charity Turn2us. (shrink)

This review provides an overview of the ethics of extinctions with a focus on the Western analytical environmental ethics literature. It thereby gives special attention to the possible philosophical grounds for Michael Soulé’s assertion that the untimely ‘extinction of populations and species is bad’. Illustrating such debates in environmental ethics, the guiding question for this review concerns why – or when – anthropogenic extinctions are bad or wrong, which also includes the question of when that might not be the case (...) (i.e. which extinctions are even desirable). After providing an explanation of the disciplinary perspective taken (section “Introduction”), the concept of extinction and its history within that literature are introduced (section “Understanding extinction”). Then, in section “Why (or when) might anthropogenic extinctions be morally problematic?”, different reasons for why anthropogenic extinctions might be morally problematic are presented based on the loss of species’ value, harm to nonhuman individuals, the loss of valuable biological variety and duties to future generations. This section concludes by also considering cases where anthropogenic extinctions might be justified. Section “How to respond to extinctions?” then addresses a selection of topics concerning risks and de-extinction technologies. Finally, the section on “Extinction studies” introduces other viewpoints on the ethics of extinction from the extinction studies literature, followed by the “Conclusion”. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is a kind of injustice that arises when one’s capacity as an epistemic subject is wrongfully denied. In recent years it has been argued that psychiatric patients are often harmed in their capacity as knowers and suffer from various forms of epistemic injustice that they encounter in psychiatric services. Acknowledging that epistemic injustice is a multifaceted problem in psychiatry calls for an adequate response. In this paper I argue that, given that psychiatric patients deserve epistemic respect and have (...) a certain epistemic privilege, healthcare professionals have a pro tanto epistemic duty to attend to and/or solicit reports of patients’ first-person experiences in order to prevent epistemic losses. I discuss the nature and scope of this epistemic duty and point to one interesting consequence. In order to prevent epistemic losses, healthcare professionals may need to provide some patients with resources and tools for expressing their experiences and first-person knowledge, such as those that have been developed within the phenomenological approach. I discuss the risk of secondary testimonial and hermeneutical injustice that the practice of relying on such external tools might pose and survey some ways to mitigate it. (shrink)

What makes a measure of well-being valid? The dominant approach today, construct validation, uses psychometrics to ensure that questionnaires behave in accordance with background knowledge. Our first claim is interpretive—construct validation obeys a coherentist logic that seeks to balance diverse sources of evidence about the construct in question. Our second claim is critical—while in theory this logic is defensible, in practice it does not secure valid measures. We argue that the practice of construct validation in well-being research is theory avoidant, (...) favoring a narrow focus on statistical tests while largely ignoring relevant philosophical considerations. (shrink)

This book defends an account of justice to nonhuman beings – i.e., to animals, plants etc. – also known as ecological or interspecies justice, and which lies in the intersection of environmental political theory and environmental ethics. More specifically, against the background of the current extinction crisis this book defends a global non-ranking biocentric theory of distributive ecological/interspecies justice to wild nonhuman beings, because the extinction crisis does not only need practical solutions, but also an account of how it is (...) the outcome of large-scale injustice. This book not only provides a novel theoretical framework that supports such a claim, but it also develops the theoretical tools to find just compromises between the entitlements of intraspecies and intra-human global distributive justice to ecological space for the purpose of working towards a vision of just conservation. -/- Content: 1. Introducing Ecological Justice 2. Political Non-Ranking Biocentrism 3. The Community of Justice 4. The Currency of Distributive Justice 5. The Principles of Distributive Justice 6. Ecological Justice and the Capabilities Approach 7. Biodiversity Loss: An Injustice? 8. Who Owns the Earth? 9. Visions of Just Conservation 10. Outlook for Implementation . (shrink)

Fifteen philosophers offer new essays exploring the metaphysics of relations from antiquity to the present day. They address topics as diverse as ancient and medieval reasons for scepticism about polyadic properties; recent attempts to reduce causal and spatiotemporal relations; recent work on the directionality of relational properties; powers ontologies and their associated problems; whether the most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a fundamentally relational world; and whether the very idea of such a world is coherent. From those who question (...) whether there are relational properties at all, to those who hold they are a fundamental part of reality, The Metaphysics of Relations covers a broad spectrum of positions on the nature and ontological status of relations, from antiquity to the present day. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is often observed that experiences of utterance understanding are what surfaces in hearer’s consciousness in the course of language comprehension. The nature of such experiences has been a hotly debated topic. One influential position in this debate is the semantic perceptual view, according to which meaning properties can be perceived. In this paper I present two new challenges for the view that we can become perceptually aware of meaning properties in auditory experience or, in brief, that we can (...) hear meanings. The first challenge concerns the issue of providing a plausible model of meaning perception. The second challenge consists in accommodating the crucial role of cognition in the etiology of such experiences. Drawing on these observations, I will suggest a new account, according to which experiences of understanding have a complex, mixed nature involving both perceptual and cognitive elements. (shrink)

This paper proposes a qualitative study exploring anomalous self and world-experiences in individuals with high levels of depersonalization experiences. Depersonalization (DP) is a condition characterized by distressing feelings of being a detached, neutral and disembodied onlooker of one’s mental and bodily processes. Our findings indicate the presence of a wide range of anomalous experiences traditionally understood to be core features of DP, such as disembodiment and disrupted self-awareness. However, our results also indicate experiential features that are less highlighted in previous (...) work, such as faster time perception and blurriness of the self/other boundaries which may play a key role in altering one’s sense of self and sense of presence in the world. Our qualitative study provides an in-depth examination of self-reported disturbances of one’s relatedness to one’s self and the world, thereby shedding further light on the nature of altered subjective experiences in DP. In doing so, this paper draws attention to key aspects yet overlooked that may prove valuable for shedding further light into the phenomenon of depersonalization. We conclude by highlighting limitations of this study and a number of open questions that further work needs to address in the future. (shrink)

As Justin Biddle and I have argued, climate skepticism can be epistemically problematic when it displays a systematic intolerance of producer risks at the expense of public risks : 261–278, 2015). In this paper, I will provide currently available empirical evidence that supports our account, and I discuss the normative consequences of climate skepticism by drawing upon Philip Kitcher’s “Millian argument against the freedom of inquiry.” Finally, I argue that even though concerns regarding inappropriate disqualification of dissent are reasonable, a (...) form of “targeting” dissent—namely revealing manufactured dissent—is required in order to identify epistemically detrimental dissent and, thus, to protect scientific and public discourse. (shrink)

The viability of a naïve realist theory of memory was a lively debate for philosophers of mind in the first half of the twentieth century. More recently, though, naïve realism has been largely abandoned as a non-starter in the memory literature, with representationalism being the standard view held by philosophers of memory. But rather than being carefully argued, the dismissal of naïve realism is an assumption that sits at the back of much recent theorizing in the philosophy of memory. In (...) this paper, we identify three reasons why philosophers of memory have felt compelled to outright reject naïve realism. We argue that none of those reasons are successful. Thus, far from being a non-starter, we argue that naïve realism is a theoretical perspective that needs to be given serious consideration in current philosophy of memory debates. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that emotion concepts—including the so‐called basic ones, such as anger or sadness—can be defined in terms of universal semantic primitives such as “good”, “bad”, “do”, “happen”, “know”, and “want”, in terms of which all areas of meaning, in all languages, can be rigorously and revealingly portrayed.The definitions proposed here take the form of certain prototypical scripts or scenarios, formulated in terms of thoughts, wants, and feelings. These scripts, however, can be seen as formulas providing rigorous specifications of (...) necessary and sufficient conditions (not for emotions as such, but for emotion concepts), and they do not support the idea that boundaries between emotion concepts are “fuzzy.” On the contrary, the small set of universal semantic primitives employed here (which has emerged from two decades of empirical investigations by the author and colleagues) demonstrates that even apparent synonyms such as sad and unhappy embody different—and fully specifiable—conceptual structures. (shrink)

Recently, there has been much talk of impact investing. Around the world, specialized intermediaries have appeared, mainstream financial players and governments have become involved, renowned universities have included impact investing courses in their curriculum, and a myriad of practitioner contributions have been published. Despite all this activity, conceptual clarity remains an issue: The absence of a uniform definition, the interchangeable use of alternative terms and unclear boundaries to related concepts such as socially responsible investment are being criticized. This article aims (...) to contribute to a better understanding of impact investing, which could help foster this specific investment style and guide further academic research. To do so, it investigates a large number of academic and practitioner works, highlighting areas of similarity and inconsistency on three levels: definitional, terminological, and strategic. Our research shows that, on a general level, heterogeneity—especially definitional and strategic—is less pronounced than expected. Yet, our research also reveals critical issues that need to be clarified to advance the field and increase its credibility. First and foremost, this includes the characteristics required of impact investees, notably whether they need to be organizations that prioritize their non-financial mission over the business side. Our results indicate that there may be different schools of thoughts concerning this matter. (shrink)

Executive Summary There is a general perception that biomedical research has not given the same attention to the health problems of women that it has given ...

Can social phenomena be understood by analyzing their parts? Contemporary economic theory often assumes that they can. The methodology of constructing models which trace the behavior of perfectly rational agents in idealized environments rests on the premise that such models, while restricted, help us isolate tendencies, that is, the stable separate effects of economic causes that can be used to explain and predict economic phenomena. In this paper, I question both the claim that models in economics supply claims about tendencies (...) and also the view that economics, when successful, necessarily follows this method. When economics licenses successful policy interventions, as it did in the case of the Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions, its method is not to study tendencies but rather to study the phenomenon as a whole. Key Words: economic models • tendencies • economic experiments • policy making • John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

Louise Brown's birth in 1978 heralded a new era not just in reproductive technology, but in the relationship between science, cells, and society. For the first time, human embryos could be created, selected, studied, manipulated, frozen, altered, or destroyed, outside the human body. But with this possibility came a plethora of ethical questions. Is it acceptable to destroy a human embryo for the purpose of research? Or to create an embryo with the specific purpose of destroying it for research? In (...) an attempt to construct ethical and legal frameworks for the new era of cellular reprogramming, legislators and ethicists have tried to distinguish between different kinds of biological entity. We treat cells differently depending on whether they are human or animal, somatic cells or gametes, and on whether they are embryos or not. But this approach to the ethics of cellular reprogramming is doomed to failure for the simple reason that cellular reprogramming in itself destroys the distinctions that the law requires to function. In this article, we explore the historical trajectory of cellular reprogramming and its relationship with ethics and society. We suggest that the early hype of embryo research has not obviously fulfilled expectations, but since new avenues of research are continuously opening, it is hard to say definitely that these promises have been broken. We explore the forthcoming challenges posed by the creation of DNA from scratch in the laboratory, and the implications of this for understandings of identity, privacy, and reproduction. We conclude that while ethics used to seek answers in biological facts, this is no longer possible, and a new approach is required. (shrink)

We distinguish between two different strategies in methodology of economics. The big picture strategy, dominant in the twentieth century, ascribed to economics a unified method and evaluated this m...

Introduction 1. Language and meaning Nothing is as easily overlooked, or as easily forgotten, as the most obvious truths. The tenet that language is a tool ...

In what sense, if any, are philosophers experts in their domain of research and what could philosophical expertise be? The above questions are particularly pressing given recent methodological disputes in philosophy. The so-called expertise defense recently proposed as a reply to experimental philosophers postulates that philosophers are experts qua having improved intuitions. However, this model of philosophical expertise has been challenged by studies suggesting that philosophers’ intuitions are no less prone to biases and distortions than intuitions of non-philosophers. Should we (...) then give up on the idea that philosophers possess some sort of expertise? In this paper, I argue that instead of focusing on intuitions, we may understand the relevant results of philosophical practice more broadly and investigate the other kind of expertise they would require. My proposal is inspired by a prominent approach to investigating expert performance from psychology and suggests where and how to look for expertise in the results characteristic of philosophical practice. In developing this model, I discuss the following three candidates for such results: arguments, theories, and distinctions. Whether philosophers could be shown to be expert intuiters or not, there are interesting domains where we could look for philosophical expertise, beyond intuitions. (shrink)

In everyday life and in science we acquire evidence of evidence and based on this new evidence we often change our epistemic states. An assumption underlying such practice is that the following EEE Slogan is correct: 'evidence of evidence is evidence' (Feldman 2007, p. 208). We suggest that evidence of evidence is best understood as higher-order evidence about the epistemic state of agents. In order to model evidence of evidence we introduce a new powerful framework for modelling epistemic states, Dyadic (...) Bayesianism. Based on this framework, we then discuss characterizations of evidence of evidence and argue for one of them. Finally, we show that whether the EEE Slogan holds, depends on the specific kind of evidence of evidence. (shrink)

How good are we at understanding what others communicate? It often seems to us, at least, that we understand quite well what others convey when speaking in a familiar language. However, a growing body of evidence from the psychology of language suggests that in various communicative settings comprehenders routinely form linguistic representations that are underdetermined, “sketchy”, “shallow” or imprecise, often without noticing it. The paper discusses some important consequences of this evidence. Following recent discussions in this strand of research, I (...) outline how the evidence is currently best interpreted as supporting a view on which operating at a certain level of imprecision and underdetermination is a functional feature of the system responsible for comprehension of linguistic utterances in humans. That this kind of imprecision and underdetermination is part and parcel of linguistic interactions, makes the exact success rate of comprehension particularly hard to estimate. This poses a unique and interesting challenge for assessing the quality of linguistic comprehension. Understanding what a speaker intended to convey with a linguistic utterance may be less transparent than it appears to us. I will discuss the extent to which this evidence may lead to pessimism about how good we are at comprehending what others communicate. However, as I will argue in the last part of the paper, in various cases language users can be sensitive to some types of imprecision and underdetermination in comprehension and make up for it by means of various forms of post hoc deliberation. I will describe some such clarificatory contexts and end by charting a map of important issues that require further investigation. (shrink)

In Valuing Health, Dan Hausman argues that well-being is not measurable, at least not in the way that science and policy would require. His argument depends on a demanding conception of well-being and on a pessimistic verdict upon the existing measures of subjective well-being. Neither of these reasons, I argue, warrant as much skepticism as Hausman professes.

This entry provides an opinionated overview of key epistemological debates regarding experts. To comprehend, justify, and enhance our practices of trusting, utilising, and depending on experts' judgments, it is crucial to clarify the characteristics of experts and the means of identifying those who exemplify them. Consequently, this entry examines and evaluates accounts of the main characteristics of experts. Furthermore, it discusses indicators of experts that help recognise experts and considers to what extent they are accessible to other experts and laypersons.

The concept of natural otherness can be found throughout the environmental ethics literature. Drawing on this concept, this article pursues two aims. For one, it argues for an account of individual natural otherness as stable difference as opposed to accounts of natural otherness that put more emphasis on independence for the purpose of differentiating individual natural otherness from the concept of wildness. Secondly, this account of natural otherness is engaged to argue for a particular way of theorising the moral standing (...) of individual nonhuman entities. While individual natural otherness in itself does not provide an account of whether an entity matters morally in itself (that is, whether it is morally considerable); it points to an account of incommensurable moral significance for all entities which are attributed moral considerability. That is an often-overlooked alternative to egalitarian or hierarchical accounts or moral significance. Individual natural otherness understood in this way in turn provides another explanatory story for why relational accounts of environmental ethics that strongly emphasise the importance of concepts such as wildness are particularly salient. (shrink)

Research in phenomenology and philosophy of psychiatry has suggested that psychopathological disturbances of experience often involve an alteration of one's ‘sense of possibility’, dependent upon the presence of specific ‘existential feelings’ (Ratcliffe 2012). In this paper I provide an extended account of how the engagement with certain narratives can lead to a transformation of one's sense of possibility by eliciting affective experiences that are not consonant with the person's existential feelings. More precisely, I claim that, even when the experience of (...) some types of emotion is generally precluded by a restricted sense of possibility, such emotions may be aroused by particular self-narratives, and I explore how this dynamic can give rise to enduring and wide-ranging affective changes. (shrink)

This study examines the presence of ethical climates in skilled nursing facilities and identifies their antecedents (work group, job position, tenure). A cross-sectional survey design was implemented. A total of 359 facilities were selected in the Midwestern United States. Responses were received from nurses representing 100 of those facilities (28%). A total of 656 usable questionnaires were returned of the 3060 distributed (21.4% response rate). Descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, and multivariate and univariate analyses of variance were used. The results (...) confirmed the presence of five ethical climates. Significant differences between registered and licensed practical nurses with regard to egoistic and independence ethical climates were found. Furthermore, nurses in management and non-management positions differed significantly in their perceptions of caring and egoistic climates. The results suggest incongruence in value perceptions and imply that researchers and practitioners have to direct efforts towards preventing and identifying reasons behind this. (shrink)

Biological conservation practices and approaches take many forms. Conservation projects do not only differ in their aims and methods, but also concerning their conceptual and normative background assumptions and their underlying motivations and objectives. We draw on philosophical distinctions from the ethics of conservation to explain variances of different positions on conservation projects along six dimensions: (1) conservation ideals, (2) intervention intuitions, (3) the moral considerability of nonhuman beings, (4) environmental values, (5) views on nature and (6) human roles in (...) nature. The result is a map of the moral landscape of biological conservation, on which these six dimensions are layered. This map functions as a heuristic tool to understand conceptual and normative foundations of specific conservation projects, which we will illustrate with four paradigmatic examples: the Pisavaara Strict Nature Reserve, Predator Free New Zealand, the Oostvaardersplassen Nature Reserve and the Great Green Wall Project. With this map as a heuristic tool, we aim to conceptually illuminate disagreement and clarify misunderstandings between representatives of different environmental protection strategies and to show that the same project can be supported (or criticised) on different grounds. (shrink)

Affordances, i.e. the opportunity of actions offered by the environment, are one of the central research topics for the theoretical perspectives that view cognition as emerging from the interaction between the environment and the body. Being at the bridge between perception and action, affordances help to question a dichotomous view of perception and action. While Gibson’s view of affordances is mainly externalist, many contemporary approaches define affordances as the product of long-term visuomotor associations in the brain. These studies have emphasized (...) the fact that affordances are activated automatically, independently from the context and the previous intention to act: for example, affordances related to objects’ size would emerge even if the task does not require focusing on size. This emphasis on the automaticity of affordances has led to overlook their flexibility and contextual-dependency. In this contribution I will outline and discuss recent perspectives and evidence that reveal the flexibility and context-dependency of affordances, clarifying how they are modulated by the physical, cultural and social context. I will focus specifically on social affordances, i.e. on how perception of affordances might be influenced by the presence of multiple actors having different goals. (shrink)

The questions of whether episodic memory is a propositional attitude, and of whether it has propositional content, are central to discussions about how memory represents the world, what mental states should count as memories, and what kind of beings are capable of remembering. Despite its importance to such topics, these questions have not been addressed explicitly in the recent literature in philosophy of memory. In one of the very few pieces dealing with the topic, Fernández (2006) provides a positive answer (...) to the initial questions by arguing that the propositional attitude view of memory, as I will call it, provides a simple account of how memory possesses truth-conditions. A similar suggestion is made by Byrne (2010) when he proposes that perception and episodic memory have the same kind of content, differing only in degree. Against the propositional attitude view, I will argue that episodic memory does not have propositional content, and therefore, that it is not a propositional attitude. My project here is, therefore, mainly critical. I will show that, if empirical work is to inform our philosophical theories of memory in any way, we have good reasons to deny, or at least to be skeptical, of the prospects of the propositional attitude view of episodic memory. (shrink)

Following SOX, financial restatements increased dramatically. Prior research suggests that how investors respond to restatements, particularly those involving fraud, may mitigate or exacerbate damage suffered. We extend both accounting and management research by examining the joint effects of pre-restatement managerial reputation and the announcement of managerial corrective actions in response to a restatement on nonprofessional investors’ judgments. We find that pre-restatement managerial reputation and the announcement of managerial corrective actions jointly influence investors’ managerial fraud prevention assessments, which mediate their trust (...) in management. These trust perceptions in turn affect investors’ investment and CEO retention judgments. Our results have implications for firms that are concerned with lessening the negative consequences associated with issuing a restatement. (shrink)

Recent editions of diagnostic manuals in psychiatry have focused on providing quick and efficient operationalized criteria. Notwithstanding the genuine value of these classifications, many psychiatrists have argued that the operationalization approach does not sufficiently accommodate the rich and complex domain of patients’ experiences that is crucial for clinical reasoning in psychiatry. How can we increase the role of phenomenology in the process of diagnostic reasoning in psychiatry? I argue that this could be done by adopting a clinical staging approach in (...) diagnostic reasoning in psychiatry. The approach has the resources to include the progressive nature of patients’ experiences to a much greater degree than is currently practiced. It can address the recent plea for increasing the role of phenomenology in psychiatric diagnosis by offering a model for clinical reasoning that goes beyond the operationalized, static criteria of diagnostic manuals, without depriving us of their benefits. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Saying and the Said Subjectivity as Sensibility Ethics of Difference or an Ethics of Truths? Reading Levinas with Badiou: Impossibly Demanding? An Impossibly Demanding Education Notes.

It has been suggested that both performance and academic well-being play a role in adolescent students’ educational attainment and school dropout. In this study, we therefore examined, first, what kinds of academic well-being (i.e., school burnout, schoolwork engagement, and mathematics self-concept) and mathematics performance profiles can be identified among lower secondary school students ( N grade 7 = 583, N grade 9 = 497); second, how stable these profiles are across one school year during the seventh and ninth grades; and, (...) third, how students with different academic well-being and mathematics performance profiles differ with respect to their educational aspirations. By means of latent profile analyses, three groups of students in seventh grade: thriving (34%), average (51%), and negative academic well-being (15%) and four groups of students in ninth grade: thriving (25%), average (50%), negative academic well-being (18%), and low-performing (7%) with distinct well-being and mathematics performance profiles were identified. Configural frequency analyses revealed that the profiles were relatively stable across one school year; 60% of the students displayed identical profiles over time. The thriving students reported the highest educational aspirations compared to the other groups. In addition, the low-performing students in the ninth grade had the lowest educational aspirations just before the transition to upper secondary school. Practical implications as well as directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Different arguments in favor of the moral relevance of the concept of biodiversity (e.g., in terms of its intrinsic or instrumental value) face a range of serious difficulties, despite that biodiversity constitutes a central tenet of many environmentalist practices and beliefs. That discrepancy is considerable for the debate on potential moral reasons for protecting biodiversity. This paper adds a new angle by focusing on the potential of the concept of natural otherness—specifically individual and process otherness in nature—for providing additional moral (...) reasons in favor of the protection of biodiversity as variety. Four arguments are presented. Two arguments draw on the individual natural otherness of nonhuman living beings and two additional arguments draw on the process otherness of active nature. The upshot is that each of these arguments—if successful—provides a moral reason in favor of the protection of biodiversity. (shrink)

When you hear a person speaking in a familiar language you perceive the speech sounds uttered and the voice that produces them. How are speech sounds and voice related in a typical auditory experience of hearing speech in a particular voice? And how to conceive of the objects of such experiences? I propose a conception of auditory objects of speech perception as temporally structured mereologically complex individuals. A common experience is that speech sounds and the voice that produces them appear (...) united. I argue that the metaphysical underpinnings of the experienced unity of speech sounds and voices can be explained in terms of the mereological view on sounds and their sources. I also propose a psychological explanation of how we form and individuate the auditory objects of experiences of listening to speech in a particular voice. Voice characteristics enable determining the identity of auditory objects of speech sound perception by making some features of the speech signal stable and predictable. (shrink)

Those giving birth within modern maternity systems are recognised as facing a number of barriers to person-centred care. In this paper, I argue that in order to best facilitate the conditions for positive change, work needs to be done to provide a more granular articulation of the specific barriers. I then offer a nuanced and contextually aware articulation of one key component of the overall failure to ensure person-centred care: medical authority and the expectation of conformity. Articulating these barriers with (...) increased specificity is valuable, as it creates a stronger foundation from which to challenge existing problems which serve to constrain the autonomy of birthing individuals. The analysis offered in this paper also underscores the need for change at an institutional, rather than individual, level. (shrink)