Based on social-cognitive theory, this article proposes a model that seeks to explain why high status organizational members engage in unethical behavior. We argue that status differentiation in organizations creates social isolation which initiates activation of high status group identity and a deactivation of moral identity. We further argue that high status group identity results in insensitivity to the needs of out-group members which, in turn, results in lessened motivation to selfregulate ethical decision making. As a result of this identity (...) activation, we demonstrate how high status individuals will be more vulnerable to engaging in unethical activities. Individual-level moderators of the relationships are also discussed. (shrink)

We asked whether and how generations vary in their perceptions on moral matters ranging from their justifications of crime and questions concerning bodily autonomy. In our exploratory study using data from the World Values Survey, we found that Generations Y and Z are more likely than their older counterparts to justify crimes, such as cheating on taxes or stealing property, and to favor greater bodily autonomy in issues such as suicide and abortion. They also rank lower the importance of God (...) and national pride. Implications are offered for employers who wish to motivate and incentivize a multi-generational workforce. (shrink)

Visual working memory is a construct hypothesized to store a small amount of accurate perceptual information that can be brought to bear on a task. Much research concerns the construct's capacity and the precision of the information stored. Two prominent theories of VWM representation have emerged: slot-based and continuous-resource mechanisms. Prior modeling work suggests that a continuous resource that varies over trials with variable capacity and a potential to make localization errors best accounts for the empirical data. Questions remain regarding (...) the variability in VWM capacity and precision. Using a novel eye-tracking paradigm, we demonstrate that VWM facilitates search and exhibits effects of fixation frequency and recency, particularly for prior targets. Whereas slot-based memory models cannot account for the human data, a novel continuous-resource model does capture the behavioral and eye tracking data, and identifies the relevant resource as item activation. (shrink)

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What was the state of Pragmatism studies when you first encountered pragmatism? Larry A. Hickman – After completing my undergraduate degree in psychology I decided that I wanted to study philosophy. In order to prepare for graduate school, I spent a year taking philosophy courses at the University of Texas in Austin. The faculty included Charles Hartshorne, who was co-editor of the Peirce Collected Papers. There was also David L. Miller and George Gentry, (...) b... (shrink)

Research on sleep loss and vigilance both focus on declines in cognitive performance, but theoretical accounts have developed largely in parallel in these two areas. In addition, computational instantiations of theoretical accounts are rare. The current work uses computational modeling to explore whether the same mechanisms can account for the effects of both sleep loss and time on task on performance. A classic task used in the sleep deprivation literature, the Psychomotor Vigilance Test, was extended from the typical 10-min duration (...) to 35 min, to make the task similar in duration to traditional vigilance tasks. A computational cognitive model demonstrated that the effects of time on task in the PVT were equivalent to those observed with sleep loss. Subsequently, the same mechanisms were applied to a more traditional vigilance task—the Mackworth Clock Task—providing a good fit to existing data. This supports the hypothesis that these different types of fatigue may produce functionally equivalent declines in performance. (shrink)

We are in the midst of a reevaluation of Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The last few years have seen a spate of new books on Rorty. This year alone two critical anthologies already are out and two more are in preparation. A new volume of previously unpublished philosophical papers by Rorty will be released in a few months (see Rorty 2020). The intensification of interest since his passing in 2007 spans the globe and shows no signs of abating. Spurred in part (...) by a new generation of readers of Ame... (shrink)

Michelle Bella & Giovanni Maddalena – Many Peirce scholars wonder about what is going on with the publication of the Writings? André De Tienne – The answer is at once, almost nothing, but a lot! We are in a state of quasi-limbo, and so people do notice that we have not been publishing any volume for the last 10 years and the universal question is, what is happening to the Peirce Edition Project? It is a question that I keep (...) asking myself! But I am glad to share this more publicly, so that peo... (shrink)

This article proposes an integrative reading of Peirce's and James's philosophies, which aims to figure out the main features of a shared pragmatist metaphysics. Two methodologies are adopted to reach this goal: a historical scrutiny of sources, prevalent in the first part, and a theoretical investigation of Peirce's and James's philosophies, in the second and third parts. The first part analyzes Peirce's and James's proximity, which lies in their common understanding of pragmatism as an anti-dogmatic method in philosophy, and their (...) alleged main difference, which is represented by the issue of nominalism/anti-nominalism, and pivots around the concepts of individuals and generals. The article challenges the mainstream interpretation that sees Peirce as a champion of generality and continuity, whereas James is known for being an ardent defender of individuality. The arguments supporting such an unconventional interpretation are offered in the second part, which explores Peirce's view of individuality in logic, and the third one, dedicated to James's view of continuity in psychology. As a conclusion, Peirce and James's shared pragmatic metaphysics turns out to be centered on the dynamical bonding between individuals and generals. (shrink)

The second half of the nineteenth century was a crucial moment for the institutionalization of psychology from European experimental studies that became increasingly popular in the United States. The relationship between pragmatist philosophy and biology is deeply linked to psychology, and in particular to the physiological and Darwinian psychology elaborated by William James. This article focuses on a portion of the much broader debate involving some of the leading American exponents of the new psychology with the intention of highlighting important (...) methodological and theoretical issues that arose concerning the relationship between biology and philosophy within an evolutionary framework, issues in some ways still relevant today. (shrink)

Although most of us know that human beings cannot and should not be replaced by computers, we have great difficulties saying why this is so. This paradox is largely the result of institutionalizing several fundamental misconceptions as to the nature of both trustworthy objective and moral knowledge. Unless we transcend this paradox, we run the increasing risks of becoming very good at counting without being able to say what is worth counting and why. The degree to which this is occurring (...) is the degree to which the computer revolution is already over — and the degree to which we human beings have lost. (shrink)

Philosophie des expériences radicales est un ouvrage riche et ambitieux à de nombreux points de vue. Stéphane Madelrieux montre dans quelle mesure l’expérience constitue l’une des catégories majeures de la philosophie française contemporaine, bien qu’elle ait du mal à être reconnue comme telle, soit du fait de la variété des penseurs l’ayant discutée, soit en raison de sa moindre visibilité par rapport aux catégories qui sont “calquées sur le nom des courants manifestes (vie, existence, struc...

Première traduction européenne des Principles of Psychology, celle du psychologue et psychiatre Giulio Cesare Ferrari est aussi la première traduction presque intégrale des deux volumes de l’ouvrage. Elle marque le début d’un travail intense de traduction des œuvres de James en italien, qui ne sera égalé que plusieurs années après en France et en Allemagne. Elle se situait dans un moment culturel très dynamique où le rôle scientifique et culturel de la psychologie et de la philosophie faisait l’objet de grands (...) débats en Italie. Le cadre théorique et la mentalité « antiscolastique » de la psychologie de James reflétaient une nouvelle perspective naturaliste et une attitude de rupture profonde avec la tradition philosophique et psychologique précédente. (shrink)

Moving from pragmatism and drawing on a fascinating and accurate interpretation of Richard Rorty’s work, Rosa Calcaterra’s Contingency and Normativity. The Challenges of Richard Rorty (Brill-Rodopi, 2019) proposes a philosophical investigation of the relationship between normativity and contingency. Calcaterra’s longstanding familiarity with pragmatist philosophy strongly marks her attitude towards these topics and their related issues. The author takes up some of the pragmatists’ constructiv...

We have investigated the nonlinear low-frequency microwave absorption of an ensemble of small metallic grains. Earlier Zhou et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 1958 (1996)] have proved that linear absorption by such a system is due to a mesoscopic relaxation mechanism for which important contribution is from the grains with small level spacings between the ground state and the first excited state. Here we have shown further that such grains are anomalously sensitive to the field amplitude and the distribution of (...) level spacings. Since such a behavior depends on external magnetic field, we expect the appearance of a giant nonlinear magnetoresistance, as well as a very strong temperature dependence of the nonlinear microwave conductivity. (shrink)

Cissexist perception involves a prejudicial judgment and an unmediated affective response, such as that of disgust, directed at the gendered aspects of another person. In this paper, I advance a view of how cissexist perception harms disabled people. On this view, there at least two morally problematic aspects of cissexist perception: that it has painful effects, and that it restricts bodily agency. I defend this claim through an analysis of a double bind faced by people subjected to cissexist perception: on (...) the one hand, such individuals are pressured into avoiding certain environments to dodge dangerous predicaments that can arise on behalf of looking different from others; this constitutes unfair exclusion from an environment and under some conditions causes pain. On the other hand, to avoid dangerous predicaments, targets of cissexist perception are pressured into concealing their gender non-conformity to fit into certain environments; concealing frustrates their bodily agency. I conclude with remarks about how trans-affirming artwork may have the capacity to interrupt cissexist perception. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.4 (2003) 609-612 [Access article in PDF] SARAH B. POMEROY. Spartan Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xviii + 198 pp. 11 black-and-white illustrations. Paper, $19.95. This "first full-length historical study of Spartan women to be published" (vii) is a very welcome book on an inadequately understood subject. Pomeroy's scholarly expertise for this study is firmly established; her research has been fundamental to examinations of (...) women's roles in classical antiquity—and has included contributions on ancient Spartan women. As Pomeroy notes in the preface, her recent books on Xenophon and on Plutarch, whose writings provide much of our evidence for ancient Spartan women, combined with her knowledge of women's roles and issues in ancient women's history, provide her the detailed expertise required for such a book-length work on Spartan women. In this review, I will note what I consider particular strengths of the book, as well as some weaknesses.The strengths of this book are many, central being the extended, systematic presentation of Spartan women's lives in different social arenas, at different stages of their lives, and even, to the extent possible, in different social classes; as for others, the evidence for Spartan women pertains primarily to elite women, thereby limiting a complete picture. The first three chapters are organized chronologically across a woman's life, beginning with "Education" (1), next "Becoming a Wife" (2), and then "The Creation of Mothers" (3). These opening chapters present the issues important in the rearing of Spartan girls and in adult women's roles in the community. The next three chapters fill out this substantial framework by looking more specifically at "Elite Women" (4), "The Lower Classes" (5), and "Women and Religion" (6). The conclusion looks at the idea of distinctive Spartan ethnicity within the ancient Greek world through the lens of the distinctive Spartan women's gender identity. An extensive appendix critically examines the "Sources for the History of Spartan Women"; eleven black-and-white illustrations, a detailed bibliography, and an index round out the text.In presenting their roles, Pomeroy often reinforces the general scholarly perception of strong Spartan women with extensive documentary or archaeological support frequently providing new or refined interpretations of the evidence. Thus, in the section on physical education (12-27), having already established that Spartan girls went through an educational system parallel to but probably less strenuous than the boys' agoge, Pomeroy brings together documentary and art historical evidence that demonstrates that "Spartan women's intense involvement in such activities was probably unique in the Greek world," noting further that "an impressive proportion" of the works of art pertaining to [End Page 609] the lives of Spartan women is "relevant to their athletic pursuits" (12). While various Greek writers, including Alkman, Aristophanes, Euripides, Plato, Xenophon, and Theokritos, take note of Spartan women's interest in racing and other athletics, "Plutarch (Lyc. 14.2) gives a more explicit account of the physical curriculum, mentioning running, wrestling, discus throwing, and hurling the javelin" (13). Although he leaves out horsemanship, Spartan "women as well as men were actively involved with horses, riding, driving horse-drawn vehicles, and engaging in competitive equestrian events" (19). Nor is it surprising "that a Spartan was the first female star in Greek athletics"—Cynisca, her horses victorious in the 396 and 392 Olympiads (21). Athletics are important not only as part of the girls' physical preparation for motherhood, but as integral to their sense of identity as adult women, derived from the practice of athletics both for sports and for ritual purposes. Although she treats religion separately in a later chapter, Pomeroy notes here that "Considering the likelihood that attention was not paid to women's athletics anywhere but Sparta, and given the historical evidence for Spartan domination of Elis in the archaic period, it is likely that the games were established along Spartan principles" and with mostly Spartan participants (26), which provides another example of how "the education of Spartans apparently affected the social construction of their religion" (18).Central to Spartan girls' and women's athletic activities... (shrink)

Michela Bella & Anna Boncompagni – This conversation will focus on your role and your position with respect to pragmatism; those who you consider allies and enemies in the field; and then finally your ideas about the future of philosophy and the future of pragmatism. You worked with famous philosophers like Carnap, Reichenbach and many others. But let us start from the beginning. Hilary Putnam – My alma mater was the University of Pennsylvania. The first teacher who really influenced (...) me there... (shrink)

Decentralised ledgers are gaining momentum following the interest of industries and people in smart contracts. Major attention is paid to blockchain applications intended for trading assets that exploit digital cryptographic certificates called tokens. Particularly relevant tokens are the non-fungible tokens (NFTs), namely, unique and non-replicable tokens used to represent the cryptographic counterpart of assets ranging from pieces of art through to licenses and certifications. A relevant consequence of the hard-coded nature of blockchains is the hardness of probing, in particular when (...) advanced searchers involving the capabilities of the smart contracts or the assets digitised by NFTs are required. For this purpose, a formal representation for the operational semantics of smart contracts and of tokens has become particularly urgent, especially in economy and finance, where blockchains become increasingly relevant. Hence, we feel the need to tailor Semantic Web technologies to achieve that semantic representation at least for NFTS. This article reports on an ontology that leverages the Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (“OASIS”) towards the semantic representation of smart contracts responsible for managing ERC721-compliant NFTs and running on the Ethereum blockchain. Called Ether-OASIS, the proposed ontology adopts OASIS and tailors its behaviouristic approach to the Ethereum blockchain by conceiving smart contracts as agents running on the blockchain and, consequently, smart contract interactions as agent commitments. Smart contracts are represented in terms of their actions, purposes and tokens that they manage, thus realising a blockchain that is more usable both by users and automated applications. The ontology is evaluated using standard ontological metrics and applied on a case study concerning the minting and transferring of NFTs that digitise batches of wheat. (shrink)

This article aims to show the validity of an actualization of William James’s pragmatist epistemology of psychology for the construction of personal identity. Following Giovanni Maddalena’s theoretical hypothesis of “gesture” as a complete synthetic tool for the acquisition of knowledge, an in-depth analysis of the continuous and dynamic conception of personal identity proposed by James may be helpful today to better develop the emotional-somatic dimension of synthetic reasoning. As far as the epistemology of the Self is concerned, significant continuities and (...) discontinuities are drawn from James’s naturalized integrated conception of personal identity in the light of this new Peirce’s inspired interpretation. This attempt is part of a wider project in which recovering the character of psychological and ontological processual continuity in James’s epistemology makes a considerable contribution to the development of a comprehensive understanding of mental models, one that avoids to tighten up these models as it happens in most of the contemporary epistemologies of the self. (shrink)

Ontology after Philosophical Psychology develops a theoretical and historical analysis of William James’s psychology of the stream of consciousness and its connections with his philosophy of radical empiricism. This context enables a fuller understanding of James’s epistemological effort to deal with science, as well as his pluralistic metaphysics.

Présentation des articles qui suivent sur la réception européenne de la psychologie de William James. Comment la contribution de ce « philosophe américain » à l’édification conceptuelle de la « psychologie » a-t‑elle été reçue, traduite et discutée en son temps dans les espaces universitaires européens non anglophones : italophone, francophone et germanophone? Quelles définitions de la psychologie impliquaient les appropriations conceptuelles de différentes disciplines (médecine, sciences, lettres)? Pourquoi James s’est-il peu à peu imposé commune figure nodale de ce nouveau (...) savoir? (shrink)

The issue of the emergence of genuinely new events in a paradigm of natural continuity has been analyzed in different fields by Pragmatists authors like Peirce, Dewey, and Mead. Another way to consider the problematic relationship between novelty and continuity is by considering William James’s understanding of causal connections. This article addresses the concept of causality that James repeatedly addressed and deeply rethought throughout his career. I believe that the concept of causality provides an excellent platform from which to view (...) the various aspects that have made James’s epistemological and metaphysical thinking so influential in the history of theories of emergence, and which is experiencing currently a major revival. (shrink)

Cissexist perception involves a prejudicial judgment and an unmediated affective response, such as that of disgust, directed at the gendered aspects of another person. In this paper, I advance a view of how cissexist perception harms disabled people. On this view, there at least two morally problematic aspects of cissexist perception: that it has painful effects, and that it restricts bodily agency. I defend this claim through an analysis of a double bind faced by people subjected to cissexist perception: on (...) the one hand, such individuals are pressured into avoiding certain environments to dodge dangerous predicaments that can arise on behalf of looking different from others; this constitutes unfair exclusion from an environment and under some conditions causes pain. On the other hand, to avoid dangerous predicaments, targets of cissexist perception are pressured into concealing their gender non-conformity to fit into certain environments; concealing frustrates their bodily agency. I conclude with remarks about how trans-affirming artwork may have the capacity to interrupt cissexist perception. (shrink)

In an attempt to extract a coherent and still relevant structure of thought from its obsolete encumbrances, some of the recent interpretations of Kant have been needlessly hampered by neglect of the important concept of ‘possible experience’. Failure to make the full use of this concept that Kant himself made has inevitably been damaging to the Kantian doctrine of phenomenal objectivity; and any version of Kant that is so damaged falls drastically short of the original. I should like, therefore, after (...) making the problem a little clearer, to examine the concept of possible experience as Kant presents it; to attempt a clarification of difficulties in his presentation that may have contributed to the tendency to neglect the concept; and finally to indicate briefly the unfortunate consequences of this neglect in some recent instances. (shrink)

C i lewis, regarding himself as a pragmatist, repeatedly attempts to identify truth with verification. it is here argued, however, that a correspondence or semantic theory is required by (1) lewis's interpretation of objective judgments in terms of "possible experience" and of possible experience in terms of counterfactual conditions; (2) his distinction between the justification of knowledge and the truth of knowledge; and (3) his logical analysis of truth in terms of the extension (known or unknown) of propositions. it is (...) then argued that verification determines knowledge but reality determines truth, and that lewis himself emphasizes "the transcendence by reality of our present knowledge of it.". (shrink)

Nowadays philosophers as intellectuals are strongly encouraged to be more active on their cultural scene and particularly to direct their efforts towards creating or reconstructing possible bridges of communication. As is well known, some of the distances between intellectual worlds are often matters of ‘styles of writing,’ as well as socio-historical controversies which can be reconsidered in a different light at successive generational readings. In this view, both historical and theoretical...

The Ancrene Wisse, a guide for female recluses written in the West Midlands in the early thirteenth century, and the closely related religious works of the `Katherine Group', offer a vivid insight into the religious life of the time, and their rich and varied prose style blends Latin and native English stylistic traditions with remarkable skill and assurance. The difficulty of their language, however, has made them largely inaccessible except to experts in Middle English, and this edition is designed to (...) introduce them to a wider audience, including undergraduates with limited experience of Middle English and specialists in other disciplines, particularly history, theology, and women's studies. It provides a representative selection in new and readable critical texts, with a general introduction, notes, a select glossary, and interleaved translations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:...

In his well-known Discourse on Metaphysics , Leibniz puts individual substance at the basis of metaphysical building. In so doing, he connects himself to a venerable tradition. His theory of individual concept, however, breaks with another idea of the same tradition, that no account of the individual as such can be given. Contrary to what has been commonly accepted, Leibniz’s intuitions are not the mere result of the transcription of subject-predicate logic, nor of the uncritical persistence of some old metaphysical (...) assumptions. They grow, instead, from an unprejudiced inquiry about our basic ontological framework, where logic of truth, linguistic analysis, and phenomenological experience of the mind’s life are tightly interwoven. Leibniz’s struggle for a concept capable of grasping concrete individuals as such is pursued in an age of great paradigm changes – from the Scholastic background to Hobbes’s nominalism to the Cartesian ‘way of ideas’ or Spinoza’s substance metaphysics – when the relationships among words, ideas and things are intensively discussed and wholly reshaped. This is the context where the genesis and significance of Leibniz’s theory of ‘complete being’ and its concept are reconstrued. The result is a fresh look at some of the most perplexing issues in Leibniz scholarship, like his ideas about individual identity and the thesis that all its properties are essential to an individual. The questions Leibniz faces, and to which his theory of individual substance aims to answer, are yet, to a large extent, those of contemporary metaphysics: how to trace a categorial framework? How to distinguish concrete and abstract items? What is the metaphysical basis of linguistic predication? How is trans-temporal sameness assured? How to make sense of essential attributions? In this ontological framework Leibniz’s further questions about the destiny of human individuals and their history are spelt out. Maybe his answers also have something to tell us. This book is aimed at all who are interested in Leibniz’s philosophy, history of early modern philosophy and metaphysical issues in their historical development. (shrink)

When we use secure computer systems, we engage with carefully orchestrated and ordered interactions called “security ceremonies”, all of which exist to assure security. A great deal of attention has been paid to improving the usability of these ceremonies over the last two decades, to make them easier for end-users to engage with. Yet, usability improvements do not seem to have endeared end users to ceremonies. As a consequence, human actors might subvert the ceremony’s processes or avoid engaging with it. (...) Here, we consider whether beautification could be one way of making ceremonies more appealing. To explore beautification in this context, we carried out three studies. Study 1 surveyed 250 participants to derive a wide range of potential dimensions of “beautiful ceremonies”. These statements were sorted into dominant themes and converted into statements, which fed into the second study, with 309 respondents, to reveal the dominant dimensions constituting beauty. Study 3 asked 41 participants to carry out a Q-sort, which revealed the ways that people combine the identified dimensions when characterising security ceremonies as “beautiful”. These studies have allowed us to pin down the perceived dimensions of beauty in the context of security ceremonies, and also to understand how people combine these dimensions in different ways in judging security ceremonies to be beautiful, confirming the old adage of beauty being “in the eye of the beholder”. We conclude by highlighting the constraints imposed by the overarching requirement for security to be maintained in the face of any usability improvements and beautification endeavours. (shrink)