An important function of the self is to identify external objects that are potentially personally relevant. We suggest that such objects may be identified through mere ownership. Extant research suggests that encoding information in a self-relevant context enhances memory , thus an experiment was designed to test the impact of ownership on memory performance. Participants either moved or observed the movement of picture cards into two baskets; one of which belonged to self and one which belonged to another participant. A (...) subsequent recognition test revealed that there was a significant memory advantage for objects that were owned by self. Acting on items had no impact on memory. Results are discussed with reference to the importance of self-object associations in cognition. (shrink)

People who score high in the jumping to conclusions bias (JTC) require relatively little evidence to reach highly confident conclusions. However, they often feel as though they have done ample research in informing their decisions. What factors could account for this discrepancy? The current research examines one potential factor: how individuals (with varying degrees of the JTC bias) generate hypotheses to explain uncertain events prior to searching for evidence. Study 1 demonstrated that high JTC participants generated fewer hypotheses but were (...) more confident that one was right (compared to low JTC participants). Study 2 showed that, when given the choice between generating alternative hypotheses and supporting initial hypotheses, individuals high in JTC chose to support their initial hypotheses more often. Thus, while the JTC bias is associated with limited hypothesising for unexplained events, it also corresponds with “doubling down” and investing research efforts in confirming initial hunches. (shrink)

It is often argued that human emotions, and the cognitions that accompany them, involve refinements of, and extensions to, more basic functionality shared with other species. Such refinements may rely on common or on distinct processes and representations. Multi-level theories of cognition and affect make distinctions between qualitatively different types of representations often dealing with bodily, affective and cognitive attributes of self-related meanings. This paper will adopt a particular multi-level perspective on mental architecture and show how a mechanism of subsystem (...) differentiation could have allowed an evolutionarily “old” role for emotion in the control of action to have altered into one more closely coupled to meaning systems. We conclude by outlining some illustrative consequences of our analysis that might usefully be addressed in research in comparative psychology, cognitive archaeology, and in laboratory research on memory for emotional material. (shrink)

For many years, researchers and practitioners have sought out meaningful indicators of sales performance. Yet, as the concept of performance has broadened, the understanding of what makes up a successful seller, has become far more complicated. The complexity of buyer–seller relationships has changed therefore as the definition of sales performance has expanded, cultivating a growing interest in ethical/unethical actions since they could potentially have impacts on sales performance. Given this environment, the purpose of this study is to explore the impact (...) of moral judgment on sales performance and sellers engaging in a customer-oriented selling approach. Specifically, by utilizing a sample of 345 business-to-business salespeople, this study examines the relationships between moral judgment, customer-oriented selling, and outcome and behavior based performance. Results, managerial implications, and opportunities for future research are provided. (shrink)

This book is a collection of papers presented at an interdisciplinary workshop at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities in May 1980. The three broad issues covered are: the physician-patient relationship, the allocation of responsibility among doctors and nurses, and the political and social framework of the health care system. The first set of essays is concerned with the moral and legal aspects of the physician-patient relationship. The link between knowledge and power is examined as well as the moral dilemmas (...) posed by medical technology. These initial essays would alone justify this publ. (shrink)

Death in the Clinic fills a gap in contemporary medical education by explicitly addressing the concrete clinical realities about death with which practitioners, patients, and their families continue to wrestle. Visit our website for sample chapters!

A comparison of attitudes among managers from France, Germany and the United States is made with respect to codes of ethics and ethical business philosophy. Findings are also compared with past studies by Baumhart and by Brenner and Molander where data are available. While the current data appear to be consistent with the past studies, there appear to be differences in attitudes among the managers from the three countries.

Academic staff owe a duty of fidelity to uphold institutional standards of integrity. They also have their own values and conceptions of integrity as well as personal responsibilities and commitments. The question of how academic practitioners address or reconcile conflicting values and responsibilities has been underexplored in the literature. Before we can examine effectiveness of academic integrity strategies and develop best practices, we need to examine the breadth of integrity decisions. To this end we posited the academic integrity problem as (...) a set of seven dilemmas and presented them to post-secondary education staff (N = 80) located in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Asia. We asked the participants to recommend a solution to each dilemma. This yielded a modest sample of 498 themes across 30 categories. We expected the responses to fall on a binary scale where decisions either support the integrity or ignore it. However, the data suggests that academic integrity decisions are better suited to continuum where participants aim to reconcile personal and institutional obligations. We further argue that academic integrity decisions are predicated on personal experience and therefore pose a challenge for policy standardization and enforcement. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for practice. (shrink)

Introduction Adolescents’ physical activity (PA) behavior can be driven by several psychosocial determinants at the same time. Most analyses use a variable-based approach that examines relations between PA-related determinants and PA behavior on the between-person level. Using this approach, possible coexistences of different psychosocial determinants within one person cannot be examined. Therefore, by applying a person-oriented approach, this study examined a) which profiles regarding PA-related psychosocial variables typically occur in female sixth-graders, b) if these profiles deliver a self-consistent picture according (...) to theoretical assumptions, and c) if the profiles contribute to the explanation of PA. Materials and Methods The sample comprised 475 female sixth-graders. Seventeen PA-related variables were assessed: support for autonomy, competence and relatedness in PE as well as their satisfaction in PE and leisure-time; behavioral regulation of exercise (five subscales); self-efficacy and social support from friends and family (two subscales). Moderate-to-vigorous PA was measured using accelerometers. Data were analyzed using the self-organizing maps (SOM) analysis, a cluster analysis including an unsupervised algorithm for non-linear models. Results According to the respective level of psychosocial resources, a positive, a medium and a negative cluster were identified. This superordinate cluster solution represented a self-consistent picture that was in line with theoretical assumptions. The three-cluster solution contributed to the explanation of PA behavior, with the positive cluster accumulating an average of six minutes more moderate-to-vigorous PA per day than the medium cluster and ten minutes more than the negative cluster. Additionally, SOM detected a subgroup within the positive cluster that benefited from a specific combination of intrinsic and external regulations with regard to PA. Discussion The results underline the relevance of the assessed psychosocial determinants of PA behavior in female sixth-graders. The results further indicate that the different psychosocial resources within a given person do not develop independently of one another, which supports the use of a person-oriented approach. In addition, the SOM analysis identified subgroups with specific characteristics, which would have remained undetected using variable-based approaches. Thus, this approach offers the possibility to reduce data complexity without overlooking subgroups with special demands that go beyond the superordinate cluster solution. (shrink)

Some business schools have integrated business ethics issues into their core functional courses rather than simply offering a separate ethics course. To accommodate such a strategy, functional faculty members usually teach ethical issues, a task for which they are rarely trained. However, learning materials are available: some core course textbooks provide additional coverage of ethics, and case studies (and accompanying teaching notes for instructors) are also available which cover ethical issues.This paper reports on an analysis of these materials. We find (...) that a sample of the leading textbooks provides only very superficial coverage of ethical issues. Cases provide a wide range of issues suitable for class discussion, but their teaching notes in many cases provide little guidance for instructors unfamiliar with teaching ethics. Thus there remains a need for teaching resources for business faculty new to teaching ethics. (shrink)

Bentham's dictum, ‘everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one’, is frequently noted but seldom discussed by commentators. Perhaps it is not thought contentious or exciting because interpreted as merely reminding the utilitarian legislator to make certain that each person's interests are included, that no one is missed, in working the felicific calculus. Since no interests are secure against the maximizing directive of the utility principle, which allows them to be overridden or sacrificed, the dictum is not usually (...) taken to be asserting fundamental rights that afford individuals normative protection against the actions of others or against legislative policies deemed socially expedient. Such non-conventional moral rights seem denied a place in a utilitarian theory so long as the maximization of aggregate happiness remains the ultimate standard and moral goal. (shrink)

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making can be considered to have legitimate moral responsibilities and any legitimate claim to moral consideration. The machine question poses a (...) fundamental challenge to moral thinking, questioning the traditional philosophical conceptualization of technology as a tool or instrument to be used by human agents. Gunkel begins by addressing the question of machine moral agency: whether a machine might be considered a legitimate moral agent that could be held responsible for decisions and actions. He then approaches the machine question from the other side, considering whether a machine might be a moral patient due legitimate moral consideration. Finally, Gunkel considers some recent innovations in moral philosophy and critical theory that complicate the machine question, deconstructing the binary agent--patient opposition itself. Technological advances may prompt us to wonder if the science fiction of computers and robots whose actions affect their human companions could become science fact. Gunkel's argument promises to influence future considerations of ethics, ourselves, and the other entities who inhabit this world. (shrink)

[This is an edited version of a keynote talk at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on November 28, 2022, with some minor additions and subtractions.] -/- There has recently been widespread discussion of whether large language models might be sentient or conscious. Should we take this idea seriously? I will break down the strongest reasons for and against. Given mainstream assumptions in the science of consciousness, there are significant obstacles to consciousness in current models: for example, their (...) lack of recurrent processing, a global workspace, and unified agency. At the same time, it is quite possible that these obstacles will be overcome in the next decade or so. I conclude that while it is somewhat unlikely that current large language models are conscious, we should take seriously the possibility that successors to large language models may be conscious in the not-too-distant future. (shrink)

The physician-patient relationship has changed over the last several decades, requiring a systematic reevaluation of the competing demands of patients, physicians, and families. In the era of genetic testing, using a model of patient care known as the family covenant may prove effective in accounting for these demands. The family covenant articulates the roles of the physician, patient, and the family prior to genetic testing, as the participants consensually define them. The initial agreement defines the boundaries of autonomy and benefit (...) for all participating family members. The physician may then serve as a facilitator in the relationship, working with all parties in resolving potential conflicts regarding genetic information. The family covenant promotes a fuller discussion of the competing ethical claims that may come to bear after genetic test results are received. (shrink)

(1a) If Prince Albert Victor killed those people, he is Jack the Ripper (and Jack the Ripper killed those people). (1b) If Prince Albert Victor had killed those people, Jack the Ripper wouldn't have (and Prince Albert wouldn't have been Jack the Ripper).

There has been much interest in the possibility of connectionist models whose representations can be endowed with compositional structure, and a variety of such models have been proposed. These models typically use distributed representations that arise from the functional composition of constituent parts. Functional composition and decomposition alone, however, yield only an implementation of classical symbolic theories. This paper explores the possibility of moving beyond implementation by exploiting holistic structure-sensitive operations on distributed representations. An experiment is performed using Pollack’s Recursive (...) Auto-Associative Memory. RAAM is used to construct distributed representations of syntactically structured sentences. A feed-forward network is then trained to operate directly on these representations, modeling syn- tactic transformations of the represented sentences. Successful training and generalization is obtained, demonstrating that the implicit structure present in these representations can be used for a kind of structure-sensitive processing unique to the connectionist domain. (shrink)

*[[This paper is largely based on material in other papers. The first three sections and the appendix are drawn with minor modifications from Chalmers 2002c . The main ideas of the last three sections are drawn from Chalmers 1996, 1999, and 2002a, although with considerable revision and elaboration. ]].

Does consciousness collapse the quantum wave function? This idea was taken seriously by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but is now widely dismissed. We develop the idea by combining a mathematical theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) with an account of quantum collapse dynamics (continuous spontaneous localization). Simple versions of the theory are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect, but more complex versions remain compatible with empirical evidence. In principle, versions of the theory can be tested by experiments with (...) quantum computers. The upshot is not that consciousness-collapse interpretations are clearly correct, but that there is a research program here worth exploring. (shrink)

*[[This paper appears in _Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates_ (S. Hameroff, A. Kaszniak, and A.Scott, eds), published with MIT Press in 1998. It is a transcript of my talk at the second Tucson conference in April 1996, lightly edited to include the contents of overheads and to exclude some diversions with a consciousness meter. A more in-depth argument for some of the claims in this paper can be found in Chapter 6 of my (...) book _The Conscious Mind_ (Chalmers, 1996). ]]. (shrink)

William of Ockham's semantic theory was founded on the idea that thought takes place in a language not unlike the languages in which spoken and written communication occur. This mental language was held to have a number of features in common with everyday languages. For example, mental language has simple terms, not unlike words, out of which complex expressions can be constructed. As with words, each of these terms has some meaning, or signification; in fact Ockham held that the signification (...) of everyday words derives precisely from the signification of mental terms. Furthermore, the meaning of a mental expression depends directly on the meaning of its constituent terms, as is the case with expressions in more familiar languages. (shrink)

In this book, David Stump traces alternative conceptions of the a priori in the philosophy of science and defends a unique position in the current debates over conceptual change and the constitutive elements in science. Stump emphasizes the unique epistemological status of the constitutive elements of scientific theories, constitutive elements being the necessary preconditions that must be assumed in order to conduct a particular scientific inquiry. These constitutive elements, such as logic, mathematics, and even some fundamental laws of nature, (...) were once taken to be a priori knowledge but can change, thus leading to a dynamic or relative a priori. Stump critically examines developments in thinking about constitutive elements in science as a priori knowledge, from Kant’s fixed and absolute a priori to Quine’s holistic empiricism. By examining the relationship between conceptual change and the epistemological status of constitutive elements in science, Stump puts forward an argument that scientific revolutions can be explained and relativism can be avoided without resorting to universals or absolutes. (shrink)

At the April 2006 meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, in an author-meets-critics session on Scott Soames' book _Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism_ , I presented a comment on Soames' book, "Scott Soames' Two-Dimensionalism" . The other critic was Robert Stalnaker. Soames presented his response to critics . Below is a reply to Soames' response to me, for those who were at the session and interested others. Note that this response was mostly written before (...) the session, except for one or two paragraphs where the discussion in the session is mentioned. (shrink)

John Searle's review of my book The Conscious Mind appeared in the March 6, 1997 edition of the New York Review of Books. I replied in a letter printed in their May 15, 1997 edition, and Searle's response appeared simultaneously. I set up this web page so that interested people can see my reply to Searle in turn, and to give access to other relevant materials.

Mechanistic interpretability is the program of explaining what AI systems are doing in terms of their internal mechanisms. I analyze some aspects of the program, along with setting out some concrete challenges and assessing progress to date. I argue for the importance of propositional interpretability, which involves interpreting a system’s mechanisms and behav- ior in terms of propositional attitudes: attitudes (such as belief, desire, or subjective probabil- ity) to propositions (e.g. the proposition that it is hot outside). Propositional attitudes are (...) the central way that we interpret and explain human beings and they are likely to be central in AI too. A central challenge is what I call thought logging: creating systems that log all of the rel- evant propositional attitudes in an AI system over time. I examine currently popular methods of interpretability (such as probing, sparse auto-encoders, and chain of thought methods) as well as philosophical methods of interpretation (including those grounded in psychoseman- tics) to assess their strengths and weaknesses as methods of propositional interpretability. (shrink)

This book argues against the common view that there are no essential differences between Plato and the Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus, on the issues of mysticism, epistemology, and ethics. Beginning by examining the ways in which Plato and Plotinus claim that it is possible to have an ultimate experience that answers the most significant philosophical questions, David J. Yount provides an extended analysis of why we should interpret both philosophers as mystics. The book then moves on to demonstrate that both (...) philosophers share a belief in non-discursive knowledge and the methods to attain it, including dialectic and recollection, and shows that they do not essentially differ on any significant views on ethics. Making extensive use of primary and secondary sources, Plato and Plotinus on Mysticism, Epistemology and Ethics shows the similarities between the thought of these two philosophers on a variety of philosophical questions, such as meditation, divination, wisdom, knowledge, truth, happiness and love. (shrink)

In Kierkegaard’s Instant, David J. Kangas reads Kierkegaard to reveal his radical thinking about temporality. For Kierkegaard, the instant of becoming, in which everything changes in the blink of an eye, eludes recollection and anticipation. It constitutes a beginning always already at work. As Kangas shows, Kierkegaard’s retrieval of the sudden quality of temporality allows him to stage a deep critique of the idealist projects of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. By linking Kierkegaard’s thought to the tradition of Meister Eckhart, (...) Kangas formulates the central problem of these early texts and puts them into contemporary light—can thinking hold itself open to the challenges of temporality? (shrink)

The philosophical interest of verbal disputes is twofold. First, they play a key role in philosophical method. Many philosophical disagreements are at least partly verbal, and almost every philosophical dispute has been diagnosed as verbal at some point. Here we can see the diagnosis of verbal disputes as a tool for philosophical progress. Second, they are interesting as a subject matter for first-order philosophy. Reflection on the existence and nature of verbal disputes can reveal something about the nature of concepts, (...) language, and meaning. In this article I first characterize verbal disputes, spell out a method for isolating and resolving them, and draw out conclusions for philosophical methodology. I then use the framework to draw out consequences in first-order philosophy. In particular, I argue that the analysis of verbal disputes can be used to support the existence of a distinctive sort of primitive concept and that it can be used to reconstruct a version of an analytic/synthetic distinction, where both are characterized in dialectical terms alone. (shrink)

This paper is the introduction to Function, Selection, and Design, consisting of the following sections: 1. Introduction 2. The Philosophical Problem 3. Recent Prehistory: The "State of the Art" in the 1960s 4. Wright and Cummins 5. Millikan 6. The Core Consensus and the Peripheral Disagreements 7. Unconclusion.

In everyday language, concepts appear alongside related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female names collocate with art- related concepts, and African American names collocate with negative concepts. It is unknown whether such collocations merely reflect societal biases or contribute to them. Concepts that are themselves neutral in valence but nevertheless collocate with valenced concepts provide a unique opportunity to address this question. For example, when asked, most people evaluate the concept “cause” as neutral, but “cause” is (...) frequently followed by negative concepts. We use such semantically prosodic concepts to test the influence of collocation on the emergence of implicit bias: do neutral concepts that frequently collocate with valenced concepts have corresponding implicit bias? In evaluative priming tasks, participants evaluated positive/negative nouns or pictures after seeing verb primes that were strongly valenced, neutral in valence but collocated with valenced concepts in corpora, or neutral in valence and not collocated with valenced concepts in corpora. Throughout, neutral primes with positive collocates facilitated the evaluation of positive targets much like strongly valenced primes, whereas neutral primes without valenced collocates did not. That neutral concepts with valenced collocates parallel the influence of valenced concepts suggests that their collocations in natural language may be sufficient for fostering implicit bias. Societal implications of the causal embedding hypothesis are discussed. (shrink)

A complete sourcebook for philosophical discussion of the nature of function in biology.