This essay examines Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and his cultivation of a new form of authoritarian and hyper-nationalist neoliberalism, which I call ordonationalist. With particular emphasis placed on tracing resurgence of the national state, ordonationalism points to the neoliberal intensifications, but also the ruptures to neoliberalism through post-neoliberal advances, exemplified by the Hungarian state. Ordonationalism combines: (1) a newly empowered nationalist state invested in flexibilizing domestic labour and controlling access to domestic capitalist accumulation; (2) a national state captured by political actors (...) as a means towards controlling access to domestic capital accumulation; (3) a novel regime of social reproduction, linking financialization, flexibilization of labour, steep decline in supporting social reproduction, and supporting consumption as a source of social reproduction. This project is hegemonic. However, the contradictions between radical neoliberalization and radical nationalism generate ever-more instances where an authoritarian state steps in to solve crises generated by its contradictions. (shrink)

How did the state protect and then subvert men’s household authority when the state was exclusively staffed by men? I answer the above question by critically fusing neo-Weberian scholarship on modern state development with feminist political sociology on gender and the state, and by examining establishment of the French conscription system. When first creating a mass army in the nineteenth century, the French state offered family-based exemptions, balancing between expanding state power and maintenance of men’s household authority. However, intensification of (...) twentieth-century total war led to a decrease in family-based exemptions, and the state’s diminished support of men’s household authority. I thereby identify how the fiscal-military state first supported then diminished men’s household authority through one of the state’s most masculine arms. (shrink)

Inner speech emerges in early childhood, in parallel with the maturation of the dorsal language stream. To date, the developmental relations between these two processes have not been examined. We review evidence that the dorsal language stream has a role in supporting the psychological phenomenon of inner speech, before considering paediatric studies of the dorsal stream’s anatomical development and evidence for its emerging functional roles. We examine possible causal accounts of the relations between these two developmental processes, and consider their (...) implications for phylogenetic theories about the evolution of inner speech and the accounts of the ontogenetic relations between language and cognition. (shrink)

This paper develops a typology of moral problems in business. The cross-classification of two fundamental dimensions of ethical conduct: judgment and motivation, is employed to distinguish four types of moral problems: genuine dilemmas, compliance problems, moral laxity, and no-problem problems. Actual cases are brought to illustrate each type of problem, and corresponding coping strategies are presented. The paper highlights the need to design a dynamic strategy that will take into account the relationships among different types of ethical problems. In its (...) capacities as both an analytical tool for identifying and clarifying an ethical problem and a strategic tool for handling it, the typology has direct implications for developing ethical awareness, assigning accountability, and unfolding typical rationalizations in business activity. (shrink)

The theme of this book is the documentarian—what the documentarian is and how we can understand it as a concept. Working from the premise that the documentarian is a special—extended—sign, the book develops a model of a quadruple sign structure for-and-of the documentarian, growing out of enduring traditions in philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and documentary theory. Dan Geva investigates the intellectual premise that allows the documentarian to show itself as an extremely sophisticated, creative, and purposeful being-in-the-world—one that is both embedded (...) in its own history and able to manifest itself throughout its entire documentary life project, as a stand-alone conceptual phase in the history of ideas. (shrink)

This book presents a chronology of thirty definitions attributed to the word, term, phrase, and concept of “documentary” between the years 1895 and 1959. The book dedicates one chapter to each of the thirty definitions, scrutinizing their idiosyncratic language games from close range while focusing on their historical roots and concealed philosophical sources of inspiration. Dan Geva's principal argument is twofold: first, that each definition is an original ethical premise of documentary; and second, that only the structured assemblage of (...) the entire set of definitions successfully depicts the true ethical nature of documentary insofar as we agree to consider its philosophical history as a reflective object of thought in a perpetual state of being-self-defined: an ethics sui generis. (shrink)

Animals exist as biodiverse composite organisms that include microbial residents, eukaryotic cells, and organs that collectively form a human being. Through an interdependent relationship and an inherent ability to transmit and reciprocate stimuli in a bidirectional way, a human body or the holobiont secures growth, health, and reproduction. As such, the survival of a holobiont is dependent on the maintenance of biological order including metabolic homeostasis by tight regulation of the communication between its eukaryotic and prokaryotic residents. In this review (...) an overview and perspective are provided on the bidirectional communication between microbes and their host in mutually nurturing biochemical, biological, and social interconnected relationships between the components of the holobiont. An emphasis is placed on exemplifying microbiome‐mediated effects on host functions—aiming to integrate microbiome functionality to host physiology, be it health or disease. Nutrition, immunology, and sexual dimorphism have been traversed extensively to reflect on health and mind states, social interactions, and urbanization defects/effects. Finally, examples of molecular mechanisms potentially orchestrating these complex transkingdom interactions are provided. (shrink)

The employment of foreign workers is one of the most crucial problems today in the domain of work relations. Absorbing workersfrom abroad poses serious questions concerning the moral obligations of the employers as well as the government authorities in the migrantreceiving country. Unfortunately, the moral dilemmas of foreign labor have been largely neglected by business ethics researchers. This paper develops a conceptual framework based on the multinational corporation (MNC) ethical research to help examine the moral obligations of employers and states (...) toward foreign workers, as opposed to citizens. The main argument is that domestic employers, who have the power to affect crucial aspects in the lives of migrant workers, incur obligations to these people and bear moral responsibility for their subsistence. As regards the host country in a universal social order based on the existence of nation-states, the employment of foreign workers poses a genuine ethical dilemma between two valid moral duties: the duty to improve the welfare of nationals and the duty to promote the interests of everyone, regardless of their nationality. (shrink)

Business myth is generally treated in business ethics literature as a mental obstacle that must be removed in order to prepare the ground for rational thinking on the ethical aspect of business conduct. This approach, which focuses on the content of myth, does not explicate the nature and function of myth. Based on the study of myth in the fields of humanities and social sciences, this paper develops a theoretical framework and analytical tool-the revolving-door model-for researching myth in business. The (...) proposed framework (I) offers new perspectives on myth: the consumer's, the producer's, the mythologist's, and the ethicist's; (2) explicates various distortion mechanisms ofthe myth; and (3) enables a redefinition of the relation of business myth to business ethics. The applicability of this framework is demonstrated by means of a real case which sets the stage for examining a set of common myths. (shrink)

Rapid development of e-learning courses for ethics-and-compliance programs led to substantial success in producing engaging multimedia training toolkits aimed at breaking through barriers of indifference and distrust by combining learning with fun. However, a pleasant training experience is no guarantee of its ultimate success in improving organizational ethics. Drawing on Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory, this paper presents a model for evaluating multimedia learning from a moral viewpoint. The main argument advanced in the paper is that entertaining multimedia training modules, as (...) commonly offered in the business world, may deliver an unintended message which runs counter to the very goal of ethics training. The Rocked or Shocked? videogame—a multimedia-based ethics training module—will serve as a case study for detecting the complicated role of entertainment in ethics training and examining the ethical meanings conveyed through the pictorial/event channel. The paper concludes with recommendations for the design of multimedia ethics training. (shrink)

Functional imaging studies of neurologically intact adults have demonstrated that the right posterior cerebellum is activated during verb generation, semantic processing, sentence processing, and verbal fluency. Studies of patients with cerebellar damage converge to show that the cerebellum supports sentence processing and verbal fluency. However, to date there are no patient studies that investigated the specific importance of the right posterior cerebellum in language processing, because: case studies presented patients with lesions affecting the anterior cerebellum, and group studies combined patients (...) with lesions to different cerebellar regions, without specifically reporting the effects of right posterior cerebellar damage. Here we investigated whether damage to the right posterior cerebellum is critical for sentence processing and verbal fluency in four patients with focal stroke damage to different parts of the right posterior cerebellum. We examined detailed lesion location by going beyond common anatomical definitions of cerebellar anatomy, and employed a recently proposed functional parcellation of the cerebellum. All four patients experienced language difficulties that persisted for at least a month after stroke but three performed in the normal range within a year. In contrast, one patient with more damage to lobule IX than the other patients had profound long-lasting impairments in the comprehension and repetition of sentences, and the production of spoken sentences during picture description. Spoken and written word comprehension and visual recognition memory were also impaired, however, verbal fluency was within the normal range, together with object naming, visual perception and verbal short-term memory. This is the first study to show that focal damage to the right posterior cerebellum leads to language difficulties after stroke; and that processing impairments persisted in the case with most damage to lobule IX. We discuss these results in relation to current theories of cerebellar contribution to language processing. Overall, our study highlights the need for longitudinal studies of language function in patients with focal damage to different cerebellar regions, with functional imaging to understand the mechanisms that support recovery. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the view that facts about whether or not an agent is justified in having a particular belief are entirely determined by facts about the agent’s evidence; the agent’s practical needs and interests are irrelevant. I examine an array of arguments against evidentialism (by Jeremy Fantl, Matthew McGrath, David Owens, and others), and demonstrate how their force is affected when we take into account the relation between degrees of belief and outright belief. Once we are sensitive to one of (...) the factors that secure thresholds for outright believing (namely, outright believing that p in a given circumstance requires, at the minimum, that one’s degree of belief that p is high enough for one to be willing to act as if p in the circumstances), we see how pragmatic considerations can be relevant to facts about whether or not an agent is justified in believing that p—but largely as a consequence of the pragmatic constraints on outright believing. (shrink)

This paper claims that indefinite descriptions, singular and plural, have different scope properties than genuine quantifiers. This claim is based on their distinct behavior in island constructions: while indefinites in islands can have intermediate (and maximal) scope readings, quantifiers cannot. Further, the simplest in situ interpretation strategy for indefinites results in incorrect truth conditions for intermediate (and maximal) scope readings. I introduce a mechanism which “auto-matically” preserves the restriction on free variables corresponding to indefinites, in a way which allows the (...) restriction to be carried up in the course of semantic interpretation and to be used at the level where the variable is quantified. This mechanism is a realization of the “indefinites-as-free-variables” proposal of Lewis, Kamp, and Heim, but emphasizes the role of the restriction. I then show that distributive readings of plural indefinites also display island-escaping behavior and argue for an independent, island-insensitive distribution mechanism. (shrink)

When sharing a task with another person that requires turn taking, as in doubles games of table tennis, performance on the shared task is similar to performing the whole task alone. This has been taken to indicate that humans co-represent their partner’s task share, as if it were their own. Task co-representation allows prediction of the other’s responses when it is the other’s turn, and leads to response conflict in joint interference tasks. However, data from our lab cast doubt on (...) the view that task co-representation and resulting response conflict are the only or even primary source of effects observed in task sharing. Recent findings furthermore suggest another potential source of interference in joint task performance that has been neglected so far: Self-other discrimination and conflict related to agent identification (i.e., determining whether it is “my” or the other’s turn). Based on these findings we propose that participants might not always co-represent what their partner is supposed to do, but instead co-represent that another agent is responsible for part of the task, and when it is his turn. We call this account the actor co-representation account. (shrink)

Ankeny et al.’s “Developing a Reflexive, Anticipatory, and Deliberative Approach to Unanticipated Discoveries: Ethical Lessons from iBlastoids” cites several places in the lite...

Dorit Bar-On develops and defends a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, she offers original and systematic answers to many long-standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. We are all very good at telling what states of mind we are in at a given moment. When it comes to our own present states of mind, what we say goes; (...) an avowal such as "I'm feeling so anxious" or "I'm thinking about my next trip to Paris," it is typically supposed, tells it like it is. But why is that? Why should what I say about my present mental states carry so much more weight than what others say about them? Why should avowals be more immune to criticism and correction than other claims we make? And if avowals are not based on any evidence or observation, how could they possibly express our knowledge of our own present mental states? Bar-On proposes a Neo-Expressivist view according to which an avowal is an act through which a person directly expresses, rather than merely reports, the very mental condition that the avowal ascribes. She argues that this expressivist idea, coupled with an adequate characterization of expression and a proper separation of the semantics of avowals from their pragmatics and epistemology, explains the special status we assign to avowals. As against many expressivists and their critics, she maintains that such an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states. The view that emerges preserves many insights of the most prominent contributors to the subject, while offering a new perspective on our special relationship to our own minds. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship between slavery and plant knowledge for cultivational activities and medicinal purposes on Isle de France (Mauritius) in the second half of the eighteenth century. It builds on recent scholarship to argue for the significance of slaves in the acquisition of plant material and related knowledge in pharmaceutical, acclimatization, and private gardens on the French colonial island. I highlight the degree to which French colonial officials relied on slaves’ ethnobotanical knowledge but neglected to include such information (...) in their published works. Rather than seeking to explore the status of such knowledge within European frameworks of natural history as an endpoint of knowledge production, this essay calls upon us to think about the plant knowledge that slaves possessed for its practical implementations in the local island context. Both female and male slaves’ plant-based knowledge enriched – even initiated – practices of cultivation and preparation techniques of plants for nourishment and medicinal uses. Here, cultivational knowledge and skills determined a slave’s hierarchical rank. As the case of the slave gardener Rama and his family reveals, plant knowledge sometimes offered slaves opportunities for social mobility and, even though on extremely rare occasions, enabled them to become legally free. (shrink)

IntroductionIncivility is defined as an interpersonal misconduct involving disregard for others and a violation of norms of respect . This phenomenon has been extensively investigated in workplaces . However, only a few studies have focused their attention on the academic setting, investigating both student and faculty general incivilities .While previous studies’ theoretical framework was mainly informed by organizational and psychosocial theories , this study suggests viewing incivility through the lens of justice psychology, which examines individual justice concerns . According to (...) this theory, in order to understand psychological processes, individual experiences should be considered alongside objective environmental conditions . Drawing on justice psychology, the way students in .. (shrink)

The existence of shoulder abduction (SA) and finger extension (FE) movement capacity shortly after stroke onset is an important prognostic factor, indicating favorable functional outcome for the hemiparetic upper limb. Here we asked whether variation in lesion topography affects these two movements in a similar or a distinct way, and whether lesion impact is similar or distinct for left and right hemisphere damage. SA and FE movements were examined in 77 chronic post-stroke patients using relevant items of the Fugl-Meyer test. (...) Lesion effects were analyzed separately for left and right hemispheric damage (LHD, RHD) patient groups using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. In the LHD group, SA and FE were affected only by damage to the cortico-spinal tract in its passage through the corona radiata. In contrast, following RHD, these two movements were affected not only by cortico-spinal tract damage but also by damage to white matter association tracts, the putamen and the insular cortex. In both groups, voxel clusters have been found where damage affected SA and also FE, along with voxels where damage affected only one of the two movements. The capacity to execute SA and FE movements following stroke is affected significantly by damage to shared and distinct voxels in the cortico-spinal tract in LHD patients and by damage to shared and distinct voxels in a larger array of cortical and subcortical regions in RHD patients. (shrink)

This paper comments on Emar Maier’s “Unreliability and point of view in filmic narration”. It is suggested that, without having discourse representations that include embedding operators, films can be unreliable in the broad sense of having propositional contents that depart from inferable, realistic scenarios. Second, films and embedded shots in film can convey agent-centered information without being composed of point-of-view shots. The reason is that the discourse representation can include information about discourse referents that identifies a depicted individual as a (...) counterpart of the experiencer. (shrink)

Reflective journal writing has been recognized as an effective pedagogical tool for nurturing students’ lifelong learning skills. With the paucity of empirical work on the dimensionality of reflective writing, this research sought to qualitatively analyze students’ RJ writing and design a generic reflection scheme for identifying dimensions of reflective thinking. Drawing on the theoretical scheme, another aim was to design and validate a questionnaire to measure students’ perceptions of their reflective writing experiences. The last aim was to quantitatively measure the (...) link between perceived reflective writing and students’ tendency to use RJs in their future careers and personal lives. This exploratory sequential research included the following steps: First, experts’ review and analysis of 1312 RJ entries were attained. This step led to the design of a theoretical scheme of reflective writing and a 31-item questionnaire, used to gather data from 171 students. Partial Least Squares analysis corroborated the structure suggested by the theoretical scheme: two timelines–reflections regarding the current course assignments and those related to the student’s future development. Students’ tendency to use reflective skills in their future professional lives was highly connected to their long-term reflections, including learning experiences linked to academic, professional, personal, and multicultural development. The current study’s suggested validated generic scheme can be adapted and integrated into different curricula, thereby possibly increasing the potential of infusing RJ instructional strategies into higher education curricula, improving the quality of reflection in student journals, and promoting lifelong learning skills. (shrink)

In their thoughtful, nuanced and interesting discussion, Jonathan Pugh, Julian Savulescu, Rebecca Brown and Dom Wilkinson argued that officials should recognise proof of prior infection as a valid exemption from vaccination requirements.1 This commentary agrees with parts of their analysis, but argues that the case for the exemption is less clear than the authors suggest, and the better approach is to allow officials flexibility: an exemption for natural immunity may be appropriate or may not. In part, the disagreements may stem (...) from different experiences in different societies. The authors are in the UK, and their experience may differ from the USA in multiple ways, three very glaring. First, the UK broadly used the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has higher risks than the mRNA vaccines, so our assessment of vaccine risks differs. Second, the UK has universal health insurance, so some of the access to testing issues that I raise concerns about may not apply there. And third, the risk of fraud or misrepresentation may be less in the UK—and other countries—than in the USA, where real concerns about, for example, fake vaccine cards have led to multiple arrests.2 Another issue is that information about COVID-19 changes fast—what was known when the authors wrote may no longer fit the current picture. In their article, the authors argue that it is ethically imperative that COVID-19 mandates exempt those with natural immunity. The authors argue that those who have become immune through infection are ‘potentially equivalent’ to those who were vaccinated, and refusing them an exemption is ethically unjustified—they call this the ‘unnaturalistic fallacy’. The authors convincingly conclude that existing data suggest that previous infection leads to durable immunity for at least several months and protects against reinfection. The …. (shrink)

“Counterfactual” readings of might/could have were previously analyzed using metaphysical modal bases. This paper presents examples and scenarios where the assumptions of such a branching-time semantics are not met, because there are facts at the base world that preclude the complement of the modal becoming true. Additional arguments show that counterfactual readings are context dependent. These data motivate a semantics using a circumstantial (or factual) modal base, which refers to context-dependent facts about a world and time. The analysis is formulated (...) in a version of premise semantics for modality. (shrink)

The present study is aimed at comprehensively assess tendency to neutralize (justify) academic cheating as a function of individual experience of teachers’ just behavior and new learning environments (NLE), while considering the Belief in a Just World (BJW) as a personal resource that has the potential to enhance those experiences. Data were collected from a sample of 193 second-year undergraduate college students. Path analysis main results showed that students who evaluated their teachers’ behavior toward them personally as just, held more (...) positive evaluation of the learning environment, and were less inclined toward academic cheating neutralization. Personal BJW was partly associated with the perceived NLE, this connection was primarily mediated by the experience of teacher justice. Moreover, students’ evaluation of their teachers’ just behavior was a stronger negative predictor of academic cheating neutralization than perceived forms of NLE. Interpretation of these results, applications and implications for future research are discussed. (shrink)

This article argues that the Supreme Court should not require a religious exemption from vaccine mandates. For children, who cannot yet make autonomous religious decision, religious exemptions would allow parents to make a choice that puts the child at risk and makes the shared environment of the school unsafe — risking other people’s children. For adults, there are still good reasons not to require a religious exemption, since vaccines mandates are adopted for public health reasons, not to target religion, are (...) an area where free riding is a real risk, no religion actually prohibits vaccinating under a mandate, and policing religious exemptions is very difficult. (shrink)

Incivility in the academic arena elicits a wide range of reactions: it interferes with learning, increases stress, feelings of disrespect and helplessness. Although reactions to incivility were mainly tested in workplaces, an extensive, robust framework to explain and measure responses to faculty incivility is yet to be offered. This study used Facet theory approach with a multidimensional scaling method of smallest space analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the theoretical structure of reactions to FI. A mapping sentence was constructed (...) expressing the composite of three individual facets based on the theoretical framework: Facet A including four types of reactions Exit Voice Loyalty and Neglect ; Facet B reflecting the destructiveness – constructiveness dimension, and Facet C illustrating a dimension ranging from passive to active responses. Data were gathered by a scale measuring students’ reactions to FI. According to the findings, the CFA result presented four relatively interpretable factors while the SSA showed these factors as well as additional facets. (shrink)

Philosophical debates about the mental life of non-human animals provide an especially vivid illustration of how radically philosophers‘ intuitions concerning other minds can diverge. Do animals have mental states? Of what sort? Do any of the beasts have minds that overlap with ours? Is there any significant continuity between their minds and ours? Davidson is well known for arguing that, for conceptual reasons, at least when it comes to beliefs and other propositional attitudes, non-human animals differ from us in having (...) none. For example, he has argued that having beliefs requires having the concept of belief, which in turn requires language (Davidson (2001a), (2001b)). He has also argued that possession of any propositional attitude presupposes possession of belief, and that attributing any propositional attitude to a creature requires crediting them with the concepts that figure in the specification of the attitude‘s content (Davidson (2001a), (2001b) (2004)). Davidson‘s arguments are tantalizing, but also puzzling, and far from explicit; and they have been subjected to sharp scrutiny and powerful objections from a number of authors in recent years. (shrink)

The impact of stroke on motor functioning is analyzed at different levels. ‘Impairment’ denotes the loss of basic characteristics of voluntary movement. ‘Activity limitation’ denotes the loss of normal capacity for independent execution of daily activities. Recovery from impairment is accomplished by ‘restitution’ and recovery from activity limitation is accomplished by the combined effect of ‘restitution’ and ‘compensation.’ We aimed to unravel the long-term effects of variation in lesion topography on motor impairment of the hemiparetic lower limb (HLL), and gait (...) capacity as a measure of related activity limitation. Gait was assessed by the 3 m walk test (3MWT) in 67 first-event chronic stroke patients, at their homes. Enduring impairment of the HLL was assessed by the Fugl–Meyer Lower Extremity (FMA-LE) test. The impact of variation in lesion topography on HLL impairment and on walking was analyzed separately for left and right hemispheric damage (LHD, RHD) by voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM). In the LHD group, HLL impairment tended to be affected by damage to the posterior limb of the internal capsule (PLIC). Walking capacity tended to be affected by a larger array of structures: PLIC and corona radiata, external capsule and caudate nucleus. In the RHD group, both HLL impairment and walking capacity were sensitive to damage in a much larger number of brain voxels. HLL impairment was affected by damage to the corona radiata, superior longitudinal fasciculus and insula. Walking was affected by damage to the same areas, plus the internal and external capsules, putamen, thalamus and parts of the perisylvian cortex. In both groups, voxel clusters have been found where damage affected FMA-LE and also 3MWT, along with voxels where damage affected only one of the measures (mainly 3MWT). In stroke, enduring ‘activity limitation’ is affected by damage to a much larger array of brain structures and voxels within specific structures, compared to enduring ‘impairment.’ Differences between the effects of left and right hemisphere damage are likely to reflect variation in motor-network organization and post-stroke re-organization related to hemispheric dominance. Further studies with larger sample size are required for the validation of these results. (shrink)

There are presently two leading foreign policy decision-making paradigms in vogue. The first is based on the classical or rational model originally posited by von Neumann and Morgenstern to explain microeconomic decisions. The second is based on the cybernetic perspective whose groundwork was laid by Herbert Simon in his early research on bounded rationality. In this paper we introduce a third perspective — thepoliheuristic theory of decision-making — as an alternative to the rational actor and cybernetic paradigms in international relations. (...) This theory is drawn in large part from research on heuristics done in experimental cognitive psychology. According to the poliheuristic theory, policy makers use poly (many) heuristics while focusing on a very narrow range of options and dimensions when making decisions. Among them, the political dimension is noncompensatory. The paper also delineates the mathematical formulations of the three decision-making models. (shrink)

There are presently two leading foreign policy decision-making paradigms in vogue. The first is based on the classical or rational model originally posited by von Neumann and Morgenstern to explain microeconomic decisions. The second is based on the cybernetic perspective whose groundwork was laid by Herbert Simon in his early research on bounded rationality. In this paper we introduce a third perspective -- the poliheuristic theory of decision-making -- as an alternative to the rational actor and cybernetic paradigms in international (...) relations. This theory is drawn in large part from research on heuristics done in experimental cognitive psychology. According to the poliheuristic theory, policy makers use poly (many) heuristics while focusing on a very narrow range of options and dimensions when making decisions. Among them, the political dimension is noncompensatory. The paper also delineates the mathematical formulations of the three decision-making models. (shrink)

Crafted within a knowledge-first epistemological framework, Mona Simion’s engaging and wide-ranging work ensures that both the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) and Classical Invariantism (CI) can be part of a viable and productive research program.Dissatisfied with current strategies on offer in the literature, she successfully counters objections to the pair sourced in “shiftiness intuitions”—intuitions that seem to indicate that mere changes in practical context can impact the propriety of assertions and knowledge attributions. For example, in Keith DeRose’s famous pair of (...) low stakes versus high stakes bank cases, the consequences of Keith’s acting on The bank is open on Saturday if it were false change from trivial in low stakes to catastrophic in high stakes. We are to suppose that the proposition is true, and that Keith has access to the same quantity and quality of evidence for it in both cases. In low stakes, but not in high stakes, we are inclined to think that Keith can appropriately assert to his inquiring wife “The bank is open on Saturday.” In low stakes, Keith’s knowledge ascription “I know that the bank is open on Saturday” strikes us as aptly asserted and true. In high stakes only a knowledge denial on Keith’s part strikes us as aptly asserted and true.If we want to hang on to KNA, it looks like we will have to abandon CI and concede that ‘knows’ or knowledge is sensitive to changes in practical considerations. If we want to retain CI, we can try to say that, while Keith does still know that the bank is open on Saturday in high stakes, he does not have sufficient warrant to properly assert that it is. But such a move seems to run counter to KNA. We appear to be stuck in the Shiftiness Dilemma.Keen to get us out of the dilemma and to preserve the idea that epistemically good thinking and asserting are independent of practical concerns, Simion suggests a strategy that can also be used to protect other epistemic speech-act norms and notions from similar threats of practical shiftiness. She notes that having an impact on the degree of epistemic warrant required is not enough to make a norm an epistemic one. Fair enough. If I am given strong practical reason (a million dollars, or a gun to the head) not to adopt full belief until I have gathered more evidence, there is potentially some nonepistemic norm at work in the demand for further evidence. So it is a live possibility (indeed, a plausible one, as Simion would say) that our intuitions in the Shiftiness Dilemma are being misdescribed: they are tracking all-things-considered propriety of assertion, not epistemic propriety. In high stakes, practical norms override the epistemic norm KNA. Keith’s asserting “The bank is open on Saturday” would be epistemically proper but all-things-considered improper.Simion backs up her account with an etiological-function origin story and typology for the norms of assertion. Here is her characterization of etiological function for traits, artifacts, and actions. E-function.A token of type T has the e-function of type B of producing effect E in a system S iff (1) tokens of T produced E in the past, (2) producing E resulted in benefit of type B in S/S’s ancestors, and (3) producing E’s having B-benefited S’s ancestors contributes to the explanation of why T exists in S.In this schema, norms governing an action are typed by the functions or purposes of the action, which in turn are typed by the benefits the action delivers. The epistemic norm of assertion will be the one that characteristically and reliably enables participants in the practice of assertion to secure its primary epistemic good, which Simion identifies as knowledge (testimonial knowledge in hearers generated under normal conditions by the assertions of knowledgeable speakers). Moves in a practice either directly or indirectly aim at fulfilling the goal of the practice. Assertion is a move in the practice of inquiry, which has the generation of knowledge as its aim. Hence, Simion concludes, assertion aims at generating knowledge.This account helps to explain why, in cases like high stakes, Keith all-things-considered ought not to assert “The bank is open on Saturday,” even though he knows it is true. Prudential norms of assertion override the epistemic KNA, for when multiple functions come into conflict, the ones that are more important to the survival of the organism will generate weightier normative constraints.Simion then applies her account to the general category of constatives—for example, speech acts that express a speaker’s belief and the intention that the hearer form or continue to hold the like belief. Employing the taxonomy of Bach and Harnish, she argues that, as expressions of belief and hence varieties of assertion, constatives are subject to knowledge norms as well. Bach and Harnish identify fifteen different subcategories of constatives, each characterized in terms of the kind of belief and intention they express. The norms governing a species have to be at least as strong as the norms governing the corresponding type. As species of the type assertion, each subcategory, then, is subject to at least the necessary direction of KNA. Ultimately, we arrive at a knowledge norm for every speech act on the list, such as The Knowledge Norm of Conjecture (KNC):One’s conjecture that p is epistemically permissible only if one knows that there is reason, but not sufficient reason, to believe that p. Most of the proposed interpretations of various constatives are on the whole reasonable enough, though J. L. Austin would surely be unhappy to see so many different speech acts fashioned into varieties of assertion. Simion concludes with reflections on conjecturing, telling, and moral assertion.Construing the challenge of shiftiness intuitions in terms of the Shiftiness Dilemma allows Simion to declare success when the compatibility of KNA and CI with the relevant data of intuition is secured. Ensuring empirical adequacy for an explanatory framework is an important step, but pronouncements of victory by way of inference to the best explanation would be premature.Other candidates have been shown to match KNA’s familiar explanatory successes (involving lottery propositions, Moorean statements, etc.). Unlike KNA, alternatives that require only epistemically justified or rational belief or credence can allow that a subject is epistemically proper to assert what they believe when their belief is epistemically rational, even under conditions where there are defeating reasons that they are not in a position to be aware of. Furthermore, such norms seem better suited for philosophical or heated moral discussions where there is little consensus and individuals routinely fail to know that what they assert is true. Simion sounds the alarm that the Shiftiness Dilemma threatens to generalize “to epistemic normativity as a whole” (xi–xii), but norms concerning rational credence seem particularly immune.As Simion notes, the etiological-function model of norms that she proposes could be rebuilt with a different central epistemic aim at its core. Indeed, Millikan-inspired models along these lines are appealed to in other areas in philosophy where the concept of information takes center stage—a concept that may be more amenable to rigorous definition and use in dialogue with the sciences than knowledge. We can wonder, also, what special weight the etiological-function model accords to a knowledge-first perspective on epistemic normativity when the model is malleable in this way.The effectiveness of Simion’s strategy for shielding epistemically good thinking and assertion from practical shiftiness becomes less apparent when we try to apply it to Keith’s belief or judgment that the knowledge ascription/denial he asserts is true. It is unclear whether we are to suppose that, in high stakes, Keith epistemically ought to believe/judge that his asserted knowledge denial is false, but all-things-considered he ought to believe/judge that it is true. We do not have to accept that the knowledge-first, etiological function account of normativity for assertion carries over to belief, of course, but then what progress have we made in accounting for the shiftiness in Keith’s judgment that he knows the bank is open on Saturday in low stakes but not in high stakes?Furthermore, there are other ways to generate problems for fallibilist Classical Invariantists in low versus high stakes pairs of cases. Here is a simplified version of a puzzle from the debate over pragmatic encroachment. Consider low cases where you meet the invariant standards for knowing that p, but your justified confidence falls short of certainty. Among these cases, there must be some where you also meet the invariant standards for knowing that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome. Say, for instance, that you have a machine with a ϕ button, and your machine, which you know to be extremely reliable, tells you what the cost or benefit will be if you push the button and p is true versus if p is false. If you ϕ (push the ϕ button) and p is true, you win one hundred dollars; if you ϕ and p is false, you lose one hundred dollars. You face the choice: to ϕ or not to ϕ. Since you know that p, and you know that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, you rationally conclude that ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, and hence that you ought to ϕ. If you know which choice of action has the best overall outcome, that is what you all-things-considered should do. Now consider high, where the quantity and quality of your evidence for p is the same, and you still know that your machine is extremely reliable. This time, however, the machine tells you that if you push ϕ and p is true, you win one hundred dollars, but if you push ϕ and p is false, you lose $1 million. Your rational confidence in p is not high enough to justify pushing the button, so you rationally conclude that you ought not to ϕ. Since in high nothing evidentially relevant has changed (all that has changed is the machine informing you of a new, more serious cost of acting on p if p is false), the classical invariantist will have to say that you still know that ϕ, and you still know that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome. So, according to CI, you should still be able to reason properly as follows: you know that p, and you know that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, so you know that ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, hence you ought to ϕ. Classical invariantists owe us an explanation concerning how we can avoid the paradox here without conceding that knowledge is practically shifty. (shrink)

This article examines the Israeli documentary My Land Zion and the Palestinian documentary Paradise Lost. Both films are critical autobiographical texts and in both, the woman filmmaker negotiates her emotional and ideological ties with her culture, history, and nation. Naaman proposes that by using the autobiographical genre and by engaging emotionally as well as rationally, the women filmmakers discussed offer a particular gendered position rebelliously outside nationalism and the place of women within it.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for online counseling to preserve therapeutic processes that have begun face to face and to provide service to others in need during lockdowns. Previous studies underscored the importance of providing updated training as counselors frequently hesitate to use technological advances in therapeutic sessions. This study aims at reducing such barriers by revealing personal characteristics of future professionals that might inhibit or encourage their openness toward providing online counseling. To this end, (...) this study is focused on several precursors of openness to provide online counseling: preference to communicate emotions online, identification of emotional expressiveness advantages in providing online counseling, innovative behavior, creativity, and future problem-solving thinking skills. The question at focus is which constructs would be found contributive to students’ openness to provide online counseling. The sample included 277 undergraduate students who filled out questionnaires. Data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. Our findings pointed to the centrality of students’ preference to communicate their emotions online in explaining their openness to conducting online counseling. This study might help pinpointing the adjustments curriculum designers should address to better reflect the intensive changes within the counseling field that necessitate transferring face-to-face skills to online settings. (shrink)

Pictorial free perception reports are sequences in comics or film of one unit that depicts an agent who is looking, and a following unit that depicts what they see. This paper proposes an analysis in possible worlds semantics and event semantics of such sequences. Free perception sequences are implicitly anaphoric, since the interpretation of the second unit refers to the agent depicted in the first. They are argued to be possibly non-extensional, because they can depict hallucination or mis-perception. The semantics (...) proposed here employs an account of anaphora using discourse referents, a formalized possible worlds semantics for pictorial narratives, and, to model the epistemic consequences of perceptual events, the event alternative construction from dynamic epistemic logic. In intensional examples, the second unit depicting what is seen is analyzed as embedded. It is argued that a semantics for embedding where the attitudinal state of the depicted agent is required to entail the semantic content of the picture attributes too much information to the agent. This is addressed with a model of normal looking, and a semantics for the embedding construction that uses existential quantification over alternatives, rather than universal quantification. (shrink)