Errol Lord explores the boundaries of epistemic normativity. He argues that we can understand these better by thinking about which mental states are competitors in rationality’s competition. He argues that belief, disbelief, and two kinds of suspension of judgment are competitors. Lord shows that there are non-evidential reasons for suspension of judgment. One upshot is an independent motivation for a certain sort of pragmatist view of epistemic rationality.

The COVID-19 pandemic tempted some governments to promise to wage “war” against it and implement “world-beating” control mechanisms. In view of their limited success, such claims soon came in for m...

The dominant view on the ethics of cognitive enhancement (CE) is that CE is beholden to the principle of autonomy. However, this principle does not seem to reflect commonly held ethical judgments about enhancement. Is the principle of autonomy at fault, or should common judgments be adjusted? Here I argue for the first, and show how common judgments can be justified as based on a principle of service.

Whether or not capitalism is compatible with ethics is a long standing dispute. We take up an approach to virtue ethics inspired by Adam Smith and consider how market competition influences the virtues most associated with modern commercial society. Up to a point, competition nurtures and supports such virtues as prudence, temperance, civility, industriousness and honesty. But there are also various mechanisms by which competition can have deleterious effects on the institutions and incentives necessary for sustaining even (...) these most commercially friendly of virtues. It is often supposed that if competitive markets are good, more competition must always be better. However, in the long run competition enhancing policies that neglect the nurturing and support of the bourgeois virtues may undermine the continued flourishing of modern commercial society. (shrink)

The traditional military-territorial model of the nation state defines international duties in terms of protecting citizens' property from foreign threats. In this 1992 book about the principles of the US agricultural policy and foreign aid, Professor Thompson replaces this model with the notion of the trading state that sees its role in terms of the establishment of international institutions that stabilize and facilitate cultural and intellectual, as well as commercial, exchanges between nations. The argument focuses on protectionist challenges to foreign (...) aid and development assistance programs, and engages with the views of a variety of economists, commodity organizations, and philosophers on world hunger and development. What emerges is a new interpretation of social contract theory that can determine goals for international trade and development policy. (shrink)

This is a paperback reissue of a 1988 special issue of Cognition - dated but still of interest. The book consists of three chapters, each making one major negative point about connectionism. Fodor & Pylyshyn (F&P) argue that connectionist networks (henceforth 'nets') are not good models for cognition because they lack 'systematicity', Pinker & Price (P&P) argue that nets are not good substitutes for rule-based models of linguistic ability, and Lachter & Bever (L&B) argue that nets can only model the (...) associative relations between cognitive structures, not the structures themselves. (shrink)

In Republic 1, Thrasymachus makes the radical claim that being just is ‘high-minded simplicity’ and being unjust is ‘good judgment’ (348c–e). Because injustice involves benefiting oneself, while justice involves benefiting others, the unjust are wise and good and the just are foolish and bad (348d–e). The “greedy craftsperson” argument (1.349b–350c) attempts to show that the unjust person's desire to outdo or have more than ( pleon echein) everyone is a symptom of her ignorance. Many commentaries have found the argument problematic (...) and unclear. However, this paper argues that the greedy craftsperson argument defends plausible constraints on the nature of justice and wisdom. (shrink)

Contains full reports on the meetings in 1990 (held Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam) and features recent interviews, essays and artworks by all twenty panalists, who include artists, spiritual leaders, economists and scientists.

The paper examines the conception of health of the Graeco-Roman medical and philosophical author Galen. On the basis of a range of texts, especially Matters of Health and Thrasybulus, the most significant and influential characteristics of this conception are considered: the twofold definition of health in terms of balance of elements and of organic function; the notion of a latitude within health; the extent to which health is conceived as a specialist expertise, and against this the possible role of the (...) patient in understanding his/her own health. Galen's health writings are also considered in their social-historical context and in relation to their intellectual predecessors – Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle and a range.. (shrink)

Recently Kretchmar attempted to apply and to explore Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological method in relation to clarifying, in the context of sport particularly, the main features of competition. He concludes with the strong claim that competition is unintelligible unless understood in relation to the four elements of plurality, comparison, normativity, and disputation. Roughly, the idea is that competition needs to be understood as a context in which more than one competitor is involved; where competitors are compared; that comparisons (...) are evaluations of their performance/entry in the competition; and that the expected result of the latter is a matter of dispute between or among contestants. In investigating these points some refinement of this basic outline is attempted against occasional reference to others who in the past made similar claims about the conditions of competition. I conclude that Kretchmar’s claims are mistaken. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive explanation for the likely failure in the decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation, and also intends to offer perspectives on the new role of competition in a steady state or a degrowth economy. The analysis is based on five different scenarios, and uses the European Union as an example. It is concluded that we must prepare ourselves for a potential incompatibility between sustainability and economic growth. In this respect one can say (...) that the current EU situation is in some ways already quite close to an economic system without growth, although far from sustainable as yet. Two of the four perspectives developed, regarding the new role of competition in an economy without growth, indicate an increase of direct and indirect competition over resources. The other two perspectives point out that regulatory public intervention as well as financial intervention will increase in order to ensure that - despite the revised role of competition - the poorest are still given a chance to develop (e.g. through basic minimum incomes), even in a degrowth economy. (shrink)

This article compares the rhetorical strategies employed by American and French scientists in the research article introductions published by both research teams during the so-called ‘AIDS War’. The controversy concerned priority rights for the discovery of the AIDS virus. Using Swales’s CARS model as a comparative template, the results indicated that while the Americans proceeded with a deductive, bold and highly elaborated pattern of rhetorical presentation, the French opted for an inductive, more nuanced and unelaborated rhetoric which prioritized the communication (...) of scientific content at the expense of the writers’ attitude and personal perspective. The observed variations can be accounted for on the basis of perceptions of what constitutes appropriate academic style during the debate, audience design, power relationships and the sociopolitics of knowledge production in American and French scientific cultures. The article concludes by exploring the implications of these results for the use of English in the resolution of global research problems across the intercultural continuum. (shrink)

Luminescence‐based sensing schemes for oxygen have experienced a fast growth and are in the process of replacing the Clark electrode in many fields. Unlike electrodes, sensing is not limited to point measurements via fiber optic microsensors, but includes additional features such as planar sensing, imaging, and intracellular assays using nanosized sensor particles. In this essay, I review and discuss the essentials of (i) common solid‐state sensor approaches based on the use of luminescent indicator dyes and host polymers; (ii) fiber optic (...) and planar sensing schemes; (iii) nanoparticle‐based intracellular sensing; and (iv) common spectroscopies. Optical sensors are also capable of multiple simultaneous sensing (such as O2 and temperature). Sensors for O2 are produced nowadays in large quantities in industry. Fields of application include sensing of O2 in plant and animal physiology, in clinical chemistry, in marine sciences, in the chemical industry and in process biotechnology. (shrink)

A quintessential challenge for any perceptual system is the need to focus on task-relevant information without being blindsided by unexpected, yet important information. The human visual system incorporates several solutions to this challenge, one of which is a reflexive covert attention system that is rapidly responsive to both the physical salience and the task-relevance of new information. This paper presents a model that simulates behavioral and neural correlates of reflexive attention as the product of brief neural attractor states that are (...) formed across the visual hierarchy when attention is engaged. Such attractors emerge from an attentional gradient distributed over a population of topographically organized neurons and serve to focus processing at one or more locations in the visual field, while inhibiting the processing of lower priority information. The model moves towards a resolution of key debates about the nature of reflexive attention, such as whether it is parallel or serial, and whether suppression effects are distributed in a spatial surround, or selectively at the location of distractors. Most importantly, the model develops a framework for understanding the neural mechanisms of visual attention as a spatiotopic decision process within a hierarchy and links them to observable correlates such as accuracy, reaction time, and the N2pc and PD components of the EEG. This last contribution is the most crucial for repairing the disconnect that exists between our understanding of behavioral and neural correlates of attention. (shrink)

Social cognition differs from general cognition in its focus on understanding, perceiving, and interpreting social information. However, we argue that the significance of domain‐general processes for controlling cognition has been historically undervalued in social cognition and social neuroscience research. We suggest much of social cognition can be characterized as specialized feature representations supported by domain‐general cognitive control systems. To test this proposal, we develop a comprehensive working model, based on an interactive activation and competition architecture and applied to the (...) control of action. As such, we label the model “ICON” (interactive activation and competition model for the control of action). We used the ICON model to simulate human performance across various laboratory tasks. Our simulations emphasize that many laboratory‐based social tasks do not require socially specific control systems, such as those that are argued to rely on neural networks associated with theory‐of‐mind. Moreover, our model clarifies that perceived disruptions in social cognition, even in what appears to be disruption to the control of social cognition, can stem from deficits in social representation instead. We advocate for a “default stance” in social cognition, where control is usually general, but representation is specific. This study underscores the importance of integrating social cognition within the broader realm of domain‐general control processing, offering a unified perspective on task processing. (shrink)

Literature relating to gender and discourse has shown that the features and structure of women's talk are highly cooperative. The implicature taken from this research has led to a binary opposition of gender stereotyping that allows for the inference that if women's talk is stylistically cooperative then it follows that cooperativity is a characteristic feature of women's social lives. Further, in opposition to this, men are seen as competitive and, as Cameron has rightly noted, analysis that focuses on the `style (...) rather than the substance of what is said' obscures the complex nature of talk and results in unhelpful `competitive/cooperative oppositions'. This article explores the genre of gossip and suggests two main sub-genres `bitching' and `peer group news-giving'. Analysis of instances of women's `bitching' reveals that while women's conversations may rely on interlocutor cooperativity and a collaborative floor, the conversations are underpinned by a need to discursively claim symbolic capital through competition for socially acceptable images of femininity which reproduce a hegemonic ideology of gender. (shrink)

The enterprise network is of great significance in explaining the risk-taking of individual firm. However, some unobservable networks hidden in different firms have long been neglected. Using the text data of the annual reports of China’s listed firms from 2007 to 2018, this paper adopts a textual analysis method to capture the managers’ perceptions of pressure, and build a special kind of hidden inter-firm networks, that is, the perceived competition networks of managers. In addition, this paper discusses the impact (...) of network characteristics on corporate risk-taking behavior. Empirically, there is a positive association between competition strength and corporate risk-taking, as well as the density of perceived competition network. Furthermore, this paper explores the risk-taking behaviors of peer firms in focal firm’s perceived competition network, and finds that the improvement of peer firms’ risk-taking significantly increases the risk bearing level of focal firm, that is, the positive spillover effect of risk-taking behavior among firms in perceived competition networks. Moreover, managers’ personal traits significantly moderate the impact of network characteristics on corporate risk-taking, which is mainly reflected in younger and male managers. Our findings can enrich the literature on social interactions and corporate behaviors, and help firms to improve their understanding of perceptible peer firms. (shrink)

The sociobiology of bacteria, largely unappreciated and ignored by the microbiology research community two decades ago is now a major research area, catalyzed to a significant degree by studies of communication and cooperative behavior among the myxobacteria and in quorum sensing (QS) and biofilm formation by pseudomonads and other microbes. Recently, the topic of multicellular cooperative behaviors among bacteria has been increasingly considered in the context of evolutionary biology. Here we discuss the significance of two recent studies1,2 of the phenomenon (...) of “cheating” mutants and their exploitation of cooperating microbial populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. BioEssays 30:296–298, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)