After proposing an alternative definition of what “law” (jurisprudential concept) is, this article demonstrates the impossibility of identifying “the law” (what law-makers announce, relative to a particular jurisdiction) as something that is in a particular way. Rather, the law is a more or less abstract range of options. Drawing upon this conclusion, the article calls for a reassessment of how we view the role of law-makers. We need to remove the mystery that surrounds the law so as to provide for (...) greater transparency. This transparency can be gained by requiring law-makers to declare their inescapable biases where they influence their lawmaking. (shrink)

Groups do better at reasoning tasks than individuals, and, in some cases, do even better than any of their individual members. Here is an illustration. In the standard version of Wason selection task (Wason, 1966), the most commonly studied problem in the psychology of reasoning, only about 10% of participants give the correct solution, even though it can be arrived at by elementary deductive reasoning.1 Such poor performance begs for an explanation, and a great many have been offered. What makes (...) the selection task relevant here is that the difference between individual and group performance is striking. Moshman & Geil for instance (1998, see also Maciejovsky & Budescu, 2007) had participants try and resolve the task either individually or in groups of five or six participants. While, unsurprisingly, only 9% of the participants working on their own found the correct solution, an astonishing 70% of the groups did. Moreover, when groups were formed with participants who had first tried to solve the task individually, 80% of the groups succeeded, including 30% of the groups in which none of the members had succeeded on his or her own. How are such differences between individual and group performance to be explained? (shrink)

There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? (...) While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making. (shrink)

The idea that cultural evolution exhibits variation, competition, and inheritance and therefore can be studied by adjusting the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is an attractive one. It has been argued by a number of authors (e.g., Campbell 1960; Monod 1970; Dawkins 1976; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1991; Aunger 2002; Mesoudi et al. 2004) and pursued in a variety of ways, some (Dawkins and memeticists) staying close to the Darwinian model, others (e.g., Boyd, (...) Richerson, and their collaborators) being more innovative. We agree that there are relevant analogies between biological and cultural evolution and, in particular, that cultural items do exhibit variation, competition, and cumulative modification. On the other hand, we believe that a proper understanding of the mechanisms of cultural propagation drawing on the work of cognitive and social scientists (see Sperber and Hirschfeld 1999 for a review) contradicts the idea that culture exhibits inheritance in the strict sense needed for the theory of evolution by natural selection to apply straightforwardly to it. If so, it will take more than adjusting the Darwinian model to be faithful to the Darwinian inspiration. (shrink)

Communicate. We humans do it all the time, and most of the time we do it as a matter of course, without thinking about it. We talk, we listen, we write, we read - as you are doing now - or we draw, we mimic, we nod, we point, we shrug, and, somehow, we manage to make our thoughts known to one another. Of course, there are times when we view communication as something difficult or even impossible to achieve. Yet, (...) compared to other living kinds, we are amazingly good at it. Other species, if they communicate at all, have a narrow repertoire of signals that they use to convey again.. (shrink)

According to cognitive psychologists, moral decision-making is a dual-process phenomenon involving two types of cognitive processes: explicit reasoning and implicit intuition. Moral development involves training and integrating both types of cognitive processes through a mix of instruction, practice, and reflection. Serious games are an ideal platform for this kind of moral training, as they provide safe spaces for exploring difficult moral problems and practicing the skills necessary to resolve them. In this article, we present Morality Play, a model for the (...) design of serious games for ethical expertise development based on the Integrative Ethical Education framework from moral psychology and the Lens of the Toy model for serious game design. (shrink)

The ‘self’ is increasingly used as a variable in cognitive experiments and correlated with activity in particular areas in the brain. At first glance, this seems to transform the self from an ephemeral theoretical entity to something concrete and measurable. However, the transformation is by no means unproblematic. We trace the development of two important experimental paradigms in the study of the self, self-face recognition and the adjective self ascription task. We show how the experimental instrumentalization has gone hand in (...) hand with a simplification of the self-concept, and how more conceptual and theoretical reflections on the structure, function and nature of self have either disappeared altogether or receded into the background. We argue that this development impedes and complicates the interdisciplinary study of self. (shrink)

I argue for the merits of studying historical moral revolutions to inform moral and political philosophy. Such a research program is not merely of empirical, historical interest but has normative implications. To explain why, I situate the proposal in the tradition of naturalized epistemology. As Alison M. Jaggar and other scholars have argued, a naturalistic approach is characteristic of much feminist philosophy. Accordingly, I argue that the study of moral revolutions would be especially fruitful for feminist moral and political philosophers.

Several theorists have been attracted to the idea that in order to account for counterpossibles, i.e. counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, we must appeal to impossible worlds. However, few have attempted to provide a detailed impossible worlds account of counterpossibles. Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno’s ‘Remarks on Counterpossibles’ is one of the few attempts to fill in this theoretical gap. In this article, I critically examine their account. I prove a number of unanticipated implications of their account that end up implying (...) a counterintuitive result. I then examine a suggested revision and point out a surprising implication of the revision. (shrink)

The theories of information ethics articulated by Luciano Floridi and his collaborators have clear implications for law. Information law, including the law of privacy and of intellectual property, is especially likely to benefit from a coherent and comprehensive theory of information ethics. This article illustrates how information ethics might apply to legal doctrine, by examining legal questions related to the ownership and control of the personal data representations, including photographs, game avatars, and consumer profiles, that have become ubiquitous with the (...) proliferation of information and communication technologies. Recent controversy over the control of player performance statistics in “fantasy” sports leagues provides a limiting case for the analysis. Such data representations will in many instances constitute the kind of personal data that information ethics asserts constitutes an information entity. Legal doctrine in some instances proves sympathetic to such an assertion, but remains largely inchoate as to which data might constitute a given information entity in a given instance. Neither is information ethics, in its current state of development, entirely helpful in answering this critical question. While information ethics holds some promise to bring coherence to this area of the law, further work articulating a richer theory of information ethics will be necessary before it can do so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Moral Synonymy: John Stuart Mill and the Ethics of StyleDan BurnstoneI“A common language in which values may be expressed”: this is a phrase John Stuart Mill might well have used to describe utility—the common denominator of different ethical values in utilitarian moral reckoning. In fact, this is Mill’s phrase describing money as a circulating medium. 1 In utilitarianism, utility is the ubiquitous form of moral currency; like money in (...) the capitalist economy, it functions as the “universal equivalent” in the moral economy. 2 It is therefore unsurprising that economic idioms abound in discussions of utilitarianism, with their talk of trade-offs, calculation, and costs. But it is not the parallel with economic exchange that I want to focus on in this article. Mill’s reference to “a common language” points succinctly to a different connection which will be the center of attention, and that is between forms of ethical and linguistic equivalence.It is this conjunction that the term “moral synonymy” is intended to capture. By moral synonymy I want to indicate a particular conjunction of perspectives on ethics and language, or more precisely, style—a conjunction which, I shall argue, Mill’s work can help us both to see and to see through. A bare and schematic anticipation of my approach would be to say that what a belief in commensurability is to the realm of ethics, a belief in synonymy is to the realm of language. This article will explore the interrelationship of these two ideas. In the end I shall suggest that the collaboration between ethics and style denoted by moral synonymy imposes severe limitations on thinking about ethics and literature, and that an examination of moral synonymy and its [End Page 46] implications should be part of the currently revived attempts to work out the relationship between ethics and literature.Synonymy is the idea that identical meaning can be expressed in different linguistic forms. Style—as linguistic form of expression—can be varied or discarded without altering the body of sense it clothes. 3 To believe in moral commensurability is to believe that there is some common value by means of which different values can be measured against each other, and conflicts between them rationally decided. One leading candidate for the role of common value is, of course, utility, and utilitarianism will be taken here as typical of a commensurabilist approach. So, to outline the parallel between ethics and style that we will focus on: just as the believer in synonymy thinks that distinct linguistic styles may be shown to be so many different vehicles for expressing common meanings, so the utilitarian thinks that distinct values turn out ultimately to be so many forms for conveying the common value of utility. Utilitarians, as commensurabilists, happily commit the ethical variety of the “heresy of paraphrase.” They are happy to reduce different values merely to styles of utility. This is why I want to call utilitarianism a kind of moral synonymy.IIWe can understand ethical commensurability more clearly by turning briefly to Mill’s work. Mill relies on utility as the single criterion for settling ethical conflicts. In Utilitarianism he proposes happiness not as one among the ends or criteria of morality, but as the only one. He argues that “to desire anything except in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and metaphysical impossibility” (X, p. 238). Such assertions are the source of familiar difficulties for Mill’s moral theory, for there would seem to be ends other than happiness under the title of which people desire things. Moreover, some of these ends are arguably not only irreducible but also prone to come into conflict with utility (autonomy is a good example of one such value). So it is improbable that happiness is the unique categorial end. 4 There is in fact a tension—vital to Mill and to this article—between Mill’s formal philosophical adherence to utility and his practical recognition of the diversity of values; but nevertheless, he always professes ultimate allegiance to the idea that utility can be considered as the “common umpire” in ethical disputes (X, p. 226). [End Page 47]We... (shrink)

What is the interplay of high-tech industrial agglomeration and urban innovation? How does high-tech industrial agglomeration affect urban innovation? What are the heterogeneous effects of high-tech industry agglomeration on urban innovation in different conditions? To answer these questions, this paper analyzes the interrelationship between high-tech industry agglomeration and urban innovation based on panel data of China’s Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration from 2010 to 2019. We discuss the influence mechanism of high-tech industrial agglomeration on urban innovation by exploring the mediating (...) effect of industrial structure optimization and the threshold effect of industrial attributes. The heterogeneous impact of high-tech industry agglomeration on urban innovation is also been further studied. We find that the interaction relationship between high-tech industry agglomeration and urban innovation output is positive. The advancement of industrial structure plays a positive intermediary role between high-tech industrial agglomeration and urban innovation output, while the rationalization of industrial structure shows a suppressing effect. There are different threshold effects between capital intensity and technology intensity. The influence of high-tech agglomeration on urban innovation is positive only when the capital intensity exceeds 1.125. However, the influence is always positive in different levels of technology intensity, significantly. When the technology intensity is higher than 9.012E − 06, the degree and significance of this positive impact would decrease. There are heterogeneous impacts of high-tech industry agglomeration on urban innovation output in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration in different time stages, urban innovation development stages, and urban circles. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe objective of the study was to explore the relationship between social support and fatigue as well as the mediating role of social functioning on that relationship.BackgroundPsychosocial factors such as social support and social functioning may influence patients’ fatigue symptoms. There is limited evidence on the relationship between social support, social functioning, and fatigue in liver transplant recipients.MethodsA total of 210 patients with liver transplants from two tertiary hospitals were enrolled in the current study. Questionnaires used include one for general (...) demographic data, the Perceived Social Support Scale, Social Disability Screening Schedule, and Fatigue Symptom Inventory.ResultsA total of 126 recipients reported fatigue. Gender, residence, BMI, and liver function were the primary factors affecting fatigue. Social support was positively correlated with social functioning and was negatively correlated with fatigue. The effect of social support on fatigue was partially mediated by social functioning.ConclusionThe fatigue of liver transplant recipients should be attended to. The higher the social support, the lower the fatigue of liver transplant recipients. Social support may also reduce fatigue through social functioning. The liver transplant team should help the liver transplant recipient establish a social support system, restore social functioning, and reduce fatigue symptoms. (shrink)

In previous studies, as an important object of inheritance and promotion of Chinese culture in Chinese colleges and universities, the psychological change mechanism of college students in the process of receiving cultural identity education has not attracted widespread attention. This study focuses on ideological and political education in colleges and universities, and innovatively believes that in order to improve college students’ identification with Chinese culture, and make them consciously “internalize in mind and externalize in practice,” it is necessary to explore (...) their psychological structure and mechanism of action in the process of accepting identity education and take measures to actively intervene. The study employs the method of questionnaire investigation, acquiring 1,119 effective samples from 30 universities in Fujian province. By establishing the theoretical framework of “cognitive identity—emotional identity—ideological identity—behavioral identity,” analyzing and examining the data, it is found out that: cognitive identity affecting behavioral identity positively in a noticeable way; by raising individual emotional identity, cognitive identity strengthening university students’ behavioral identity; cognitive identity inspiring behavioral identity with benefits of ideological identity; it being verified that there exists an intermediary chain reaction between emotional identity, ideological identity, cognitive identity, and behavioral identity. As a result, the followings are proposed: further integrating the worthy Chinese traditional culture into university curriculum and developing students’ cognitive education of traditional culture; exploring the aesthetic dimension of worthy Chinese traditional culture and deepening the students’ emotional identity of traditional culture; demonstrating the essence of the worthy Chinese traditional culture and advancing the students’ ideological identity of traditional culture; and intensifying the practice of the worthy Chinese traditional culture and motivating the students’ behavioral identity of traditional culture. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Life and Death: Philosophical Essays in Biomedical Ethics. By Dan W. Brock.

In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the ‘confidence heuristic’. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence (...) and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making. (shrink)

In her editorial introduction to the special issue 10 years of Viewing from Within: the Legacy of Francisco Varela as well as in her co-authored contribution 'The validity of first-person descriptions as authenticity and coherence' , Claire Petitmengin expresses some reservations about the way I have been characterizing reflection in some of my earlier writings. In replying to the criticism, I will use the occasion to amplify some of my previous remarks, pinpoint what I take to be some ambiguities in (...) Petitmengin and Bitbol's own positive proposal, make some additional points that relate directly to the important questions that they raise in their joint paper, and finish off with a few remarks regarding one of the central claims made by Vermersch in his contribution to the special issue. (shrink)

Despite the effort on DSM-5 and ICD-11, few appear satisfied with these classification systems. We suggest that the core reason for dissatisfaction is expecting too much from them; they do not provide discrete categories that map to specific causes of disease, they describe clinical syndromes intended to guide treatment choices. Here we review work on anxiety and anxiety disorders to argue that while clinicians draw a pragmatic distinction between normal and abnormal emotions based on considerations such as severity and duration, (...) understanding the evolutionary origins and utility of the emotions, including the adaptive value of adverse emotions, is key for formulating comprehensive assessments of an individual patient’s symptoms and for providing a conceptual foundation for pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, and public health. (shrink)

The availability of a range of new psychotropic agents raises the possibility that these will be used for enhancement purposes (smart pills, happy pills, and pep pills). The enhancement debate soon raises questions in philosophy of medicine and psychiatry (eg, what is a disorder?), and this debate in turn raises fundament questions in philosophy of language, science, and ethics. In this paper, a naturalistic conceptual framework is proposed for addressing these issues. This framework begins by contrasting classical and critical concepts (...) of categories, and then puts forward an integrative position that is based on cognitive-affective research. This position can in turn be used to consider the debate between pharmacological Calvinism (which may adopt a moral metaphor of disorder) and psychotropic utopianism (which may emphasize a medical metaphor of disorder). I argue that psychiatric treatment of serious psychiatric disorders is justified, and that psychotropics are an acceptable kind of intervention. The use of psychotropics for sub-threshold phenomena requires a judicious weighing of the relevant facts (which are often sparse) and values. (shrink)

In 1981, Paris and Wilkie raised the open question about whether and to what extent the axiom system did satisfy the Second Incompleteness Theorem under Semantic Tableaux deduction. Our prior work showed that the semantic tableaux version of the Second Incompleteness Theorem did generalize for the most common definition of appearing in the standard textbooks.However, there was an alternate interesting definition of this axiom system in the Wilkie–Paris article in the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 35 , pp. 261–302 (...) which we did not examine in our year-2002 article in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Our first goal is to show that the incompleteness results of our prior paper can generalize in this alternate context. We will also develop a formal analysis, using a new technique called Passive Induction, that is simpler than the formalism we had used before.A further reason our results are of interest is that we have shown in a companion paper published in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 165 , pp. 213–226 that some very unorthodox axiomizations for are anti-thresholds for the Herbrandized version of the Second Incompleteness Theorem. Thus, different axiomizations for have nearly fully opposite incompleteness properties.This paper is self-contained. It will not require a knowledge of our earlier results. (shrink)

My topic in this paper will be Hume’s claim that we have no idea of a vacuum. I offer a novel interpretation of Hume’s account of our ideas of extension that makes it clear why those ideas cannot include any ideas of vacuums, and I distinguish my interpretation from prominent readings offered by other Hume scholars. An upshot of Hume’s account, I will argue, is his commitment to a remarkable and distinctly Humean view I call “perceptual relationism.” Perceptual relationism is (...) a fundamental characteristic of Hume’s “universe of the imagination,” and a manifestation of just how “loose and separate” the constituents of that inner universe are. Once we understand perceptual relationism and its entailments, we are in a better position to understand the rest of Hume’s sometimes puzzling remarks on space and the vacuum. (shrink)

Nous remercions Dan Frost et Rebecca Guy de nous avoir autorisés à reproduire ce texte qui a déjà paru dans Recherches et pratiques pédagogiques en langues de spécialité, Vol. 35, N° spécial 1 | 2016 : Du secteur Lansad et des langues de spécialité. Résumé : La production orale pose de nombreuses difficultés pour les apprenants francophones en anglais et peut-être plus encore dans le secteur Lansad où ils sont souvent adultes et où le temps et les ressources sont particulièrement (...) limités. Le langage et - Linguistique et théorie du langage – Nouvel article. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates (...) of taste and by proposing a general solution to the problem raised by it on behalf of the relativist. The core claim of the solution (" multiple indexing ") is that utterances of sentences containing perspectival expressions should be evaluated with respect to (possibly infinite) sequences of perspective parameters. (shrink)

Od objavljivanja Chalmersova utjecajnog rada The Conscious Mind , bilo je uobičajeno dijeliti filozofijske probleme svijesti na dvije grupe. Dok se tzv. »teški problem svijesti« tiče prirode fenomenalne svijesti i perspektive prve-osobe, »laki problem svijesti« uglavnom se bavi pojmom intencionalnosti. No je li stvarno moguće potpuno istraživati intencionalnost bez uzimanja u obzir iskustvene dimenzije? I vice versa, je li moguće razumjeti prirodu subjektivnosti i iskustva ako ignoriramo intencionalnost, te, ne izlažemo li se tako riziku ponovnog postavljanja kartezijskog dualizma subjekt-svijet, koji (...) ignorira sve obuhvaćeno frazom »bitka-u-svijetu«? U mom članku, istražit ću da li su fenomenalna svijest i intencionalnost dvije strane istoga novčića što se ne mogu razdvojiti a da se počini pogreška razdiobe.Since the publication of Chalmer’s influential work, The Conscious Mind , it has been customaryto divide the philosophical problems of consciousness into two groups. Whereas the socalled“hard problem” of consciousness concerns the nature of phenomenal awareness and thefirst-person perspective, the “easy problems of consciousness” mainly concern the notion of intentionality.But is it really possible to investigate intentionality thoroughly without taking the experientialdimension into account? And vice versa, is it possible to understand the nature of subjectivityand experience if we ignore intentionality, or do we not run the risk of thereby reinstating a Cartesiansubject-world dualism that ignores everything captured by the phrase “being-in-the-world”? Inmy article, I will inquire whether phenomenal consciousness and intentionality are two sides of thesame coin that cannot be separated without committing a fallacy of division. (shrink)

There is a conventional discourse in favor of interdisciplinary research. At the same time there is much indifference or even disregard for such research and there are important institutional obstacles to its development. This first contribution to a virtual seminar aims at feeding reflexion on the conditions in which this research is either truly beneficial, even necessary, or is of little value. Favorable conditions for interdisciplinary research have a history, linked to that of scientific disciplines and their institutions. Is this (...) history in the process of taking a new turn with the development of new forms of scientific communication through the Internet? I draw on my experience in the social and the cognitive sciences to reflect on the strength and weaknesses of interdisciplinary research and on its future. (shrink)