This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive road map of the important and rapidly growing field of emotion regulation.

Both the psychology of perception and the philosophy of perception seem to show a new face when the process is considered at its own level, distinct from that of sensation. Unfamiliar conceptions in physics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, and phenomenology are required to clarify the separation and make it plausible. But there have been so many dead ends in the effort to solve the theoretical problems of perception that radical proposals may now be acceptable. Scientists are often more conservative than philosophers (...) of science. I end, therefore, as I began, with a plea for help. (shrink)

For centuries psychologists have been trying to explain how a man or an animal could perceive space. They have thought of space as having three dimensions and the difficulty was how an observer could see the third dimension. For depth, as Bishop Berkeley asserted at the outset of the New Theory of Vision (1709), “is a line endwise to the eye which projects only one point in the fund of the eye.” Space was its dimensions. It was empty save for (...) a collection of objects or bodies. For an observer, the objects were in different directions at various distances and the question was how these distances could be detected. For two hundred and fifty years we have tried to answer this question and failed. The explanations have been controversial, contradictory, and confused. (shrink)

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. (...) Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d’, where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer’s willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness. (shrink)

For all its popularity as a psychological construct, willpower is irremediably polysemous. A more helpful construct is self-control, defined as the self-regulation of conflicting impulses. We show how the process model of self-control provides a principled framework for examining how undesirable impulses may be weakened and desirable impulses may be strengthened.

Postnatal parent-infant physiological regulatory effects described in the previous paper (Part I) are viewed here as being biologically contiguous with events that occur prenatally, preparing and sensitizing the fetus to the average microenvironment into which the infant is expected, based on its evolutionary past, to be born. Following McKenna (1986), evidence (some of which is circumstantial) is presented concerning fetal hearing and fetal amniotic liquid breathing as they are affected both by maternal cardiovascular blood flow sounds in the uterus and (...) by fluctuating maternal blood sugar levels. These data are linked in turn to the infant’s postulated postnatal responsivity to parental sensory cues, including auditory and vestibular respiratory cues that may assist infants as they “learn” to breathe and, for some, to resist a SIDS event. Data on the respiratory and vocalizing behavior of normal and hearing-impaired persons are used to show that not all forms of human breathing are innate; some forms develop with experience. These data reveal how human infants learn, for example, to coordinate higher and lower brain respiratory nuclei in the context of learning initially to cry with intent and purpose and later to speak. Voluntary, cortex-based breathing emerges at the same time that infants are most likely to die from SIDS, between 2 and 4 months of age. This switch between voluntary and involuntary breathing during both sleep (while dreaming) and wake cycles, which depends on the integration of higher cortical and lower brain stem nuclei, is complex and is possibly the basis of the human species’ unique susceptibility to SIDS—a syndrome as yet unrecognized in other species. These human infant vulnerabilities, including delayed maturity, can explain in part why natural selection ought to favor increased infant sensitivity to parental sensory cues provided by a caregiver—stimuli available in the evolving parental care environment that included parent-infant co-sleeping for more than 4–5 million years of human evolution. (shrink)

In the target article, Bowers et al. dispute deep artificial neural network (ANN) models as the currently leading models of human vision without producing alternatives. They eschew the use of public benchmarking platforms to compare vision models with the brain and behavior, and they advocate for a fragmented, phenomenon-specific modeling approach. These are unconstructive to scientific progress. We outline how the Brain-Score community is moving forward to add new model-to-human comparisons to its community-transparent suite of benchmarks.

In this article I consider the future of the field of emotion. My conclusion—borrowing the title of a little-remembered song from the 1980s—is that “the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.” I begin this article by considering some of the many daunting conceptual and empirical challenges here; this is clearly not a field for the faint of heart. I then turn to some of the incredible conceptual and empirical opportunities here; there are so many it’s easy to feel dizzy. (...) In the final section, I predict that the field of emotion will broaden and become more problem focused, and hazard a “top 10” list of hot topics. (shrink)

Rodger et al 1 present a thoughtful case for the ethical defensibility of genetic disenhancement targeting unnecessary harm and suffering of the pigs raised for xenotransplantation research. On the assumption that xenotransplantation research is unlikely to be halted (and by my lights, also that no other short-term palliative options can be identified or developed), their view appears to be largely reasonable and aligned with recent proposals by animal ethicists for targeting pain in factory-farmed animals. Yet, despite their thoughtful responses to (...) anticipated objections, the authors overlook an important class of recent harm-based objections grounded in the ethics of care. Drawing on recent work in animal ethics, I present a case for potential (a) care-based harms to pigs and (b) care-based harms to humans that are relevant to genetic disenhancement interventions of the sort these authors propose. I discuss each in turn below. The first concern over care-based harm draws on Mark Rowlands’2 notion that at least some non-human animals may be considered moral subjects, even if they are not considered moral agents. Rowlands’ view is based on the positive capacities that many animals possess for sympathy, compassion, kindness, patience and tolerance, as well as negative capacities including malice, anger and …. (shrink)

Price discrimination is widespread in the American economy and sometimes can be defended as achieving socially preferable economic outcomes. However, the separation of markets required for price discrimination is often difficult to sustain. Sometimes those whom the seller wishes to charge higher prices are identified by imprecise markers. (Thus, as one example, airlines have traditionally attempted to identify business travelers willing to pay higher fares as those travelers unwilling to stay at their destination over a Saturday night.) Imprecise targeting complicates (...) efforts to prevent strategies of circumvention and sellers sometimes resort to claiming that buyers are morally bound to observe rules which sellers cannot otherwise enforce. This paper examines whether buyers can be morally bound by sellers to put themselves into discriminated-against classes.This paper takes the position that if, as often seems to be the case, there is a social consensus that consumers would not be morallyobliged to sort themselves into categories precisely designed to achieve the goals of price discrimination, then there is, a fortiori,a social consensus that consumers are not morally obliged to sort themselves into categories which are only crudely designed toachieve the goals of price discrimination, and which may in fact be counterproductive. (shrink)

Successful deployment of “artificial womb technology (AWT)” is anticipated within a decade or so. In the case of “partial” ectogestation, in vivo gestation precedes fetal transfer to an artificial...

In the present research, we qualitatively document the process by which spiritual leader and leadership emerge in religion-based organizations. Data from 26 participants in three religion-based organizations revealed three cardinal themes that depict the development of spiritual leader and spiritual leadership, the process of developing a spiritual leader and spiritual leadership, and outcomes of spiritual leader and leadership development. Based on the results, we propose a model that depicts the phases involved in the development of spiritual leader/leadership in the religion-based (...) workplace. These phases are proposed to impact the outcomes for the leader, followers, and the organization. The implications of our results are discussed. (shrink)

Although the title of this book is misleading, Terry Godlove offers valuable insights into Kant’s approach to concept formation, and how this relates to conceptualizing religion.The book deliberately sets narrow limits to its discussion of a complex and far-ranging topic that spans most of Kant’s major writings. In six loosely-connected chapters, Godlove explores various aspects of the relation between Kant’s epistemology and the way we understand and classify religions, hence eschewing “the ‘official’ philosophy of religion,” including Kant’s own . Godlove (...) generally ignores the predominant approaches to Kant and religion, such as exploring “the denial of the knowledge of God in favor of a moral faith” , which unfortunately for him seems to include the crucial issue of the ethical dimension of religious concepts. He also rejects, quite rightly in my judgment, the endeavors of “those of a traditional theological bent whose views are difficult to square with Kant’s texts” (p. .. (shrink)

Scientific misconduct includes the fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP) of concepts, data or ideas; some institutions in the United States have expanded this concept to include “other serious deviations (OSD) from accepted research practice.” It is the absence of this OSD clause that distinguishes scientific misconduct policies of the past from the “research misconduct” policies that should be the basis of future federal policy in this area. This paper introduces a standard for judging whether an action should be considered research (...) misconduct as distinguished from scientific misconduct: by this standard, research misconduct must involve activities unique to the practice of science and must have the potential to negatively affect the scientific record. Although the number of cases of scientific misconduct is uncertain (only the NIH and the NSF keep formal records), the costs are high in terms of the integrity of the scientific record, diversions from research to investigate allegations, ruined careers of those eventually exonerated, and erosion of public confidence in science. Existing scientific misconduct policies vary from institution to institution and from government agency to government agency; some have highly developed guidelines that include OSD, others have no guidelines at all. One result has been that the federal False Claims Act has been used to pursue allegations of scientific misconduct. As a consequence, such allegations have been adjudicated in federal courts, rather than judged by scientific peers. The federal government is now establishing a first-ever research misconduct policy that would apply to all research funded by the federal government regardless of which agency funded the research or whether the research was carried out in a government, industrial or university laboratory. Physical scientists, who up to now have only infrequently been the subject of scientific misconduct allegations, must nonetheless become active in the debate over research misconduct policies and how they are implemented since they will now be explicitly covered by this new federal wide policy. (shrink)

To the age-old debate over what it means to be human, the relatively new fields of sociobiology and artificial intelligence bring new, if not necessarily compatible, insights. What have these two fields in common? Have they affected the way we define humanity? These and other timely questions are addressed with colorful individuality by the authors of _The Boundaries of Humanity_. Leading researchers in both sociobiology and artificial intelligence combine their reflections with those of philosophers, historians, and social scientists, while the (...) editors explore the historical and contemporary contexts of the debate in their introductions. The implications of their individual arguments, and the often heated controversies generated by biological determinism or by mechanical models of mind, go to the heart of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and humanistic studies. (shrink)

Members of organizations are continually making decisions that have important consequences for themselves and the firms for which they work. In some cases these decisions affect human well being and social welfare and thus have important ethical impacts for those affected by the decisions.This study examines if certain strategic situations (enhancement of firm profits versus personal economic well being) cause decision makers to act more or less ethically. A questionnaire consisting of two vignettes which depicted actual business situations was used (...) to collect data from 171 managers of a large Southeastern financial and communication conglomerate. Results from multivariate repeated measures tests suggest that managers will vary their level of ethical response when faced with a situation where their own economic well being is at stake. (shrink)

This article re-examines the anthropological scholarship of Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955), who served as the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1914–1917), the Royal Anatomical Society (1918), and the British Association of the Advancement of Science (1927), who wrote prolifically on anatomy, evolution, and the idea of race. While most commonly associated with the Piltdown man hoax, Keith's contributions to the discipline were far greater and more complex. This essay specifically considers how Keith sought to problematize the concept of the (...) nation, considering the nation-state as an evolutionary unit. The first half of this essay examines Keith's theories on the mechanism of evolution (hormonal instincts) and how this informed his ideas of races and nations as evolutionary units. The second half of the essay considers how Keith deployed his ideas about evolutionary instincts, with the goal of advising Britons about how an evolutionary perspective would help understand, if not resolve, modern political challenges, both international and domestic, that faced the British Empire around the time of the First World War. (shrink)