Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry has recently been bolstered by empirical research suggesting that people’s concrete-case intuitions are vulnerable to irrational biases (e.g., the order effect). What is more, skeptics argue that we have no way to ‘‘calibrate” our intuitions against these biases and no way of anticipating intuitional instability. This paper challenges the skeptical position, introducing data from two studies that suggest not only that people’s concrete-case intuitions are often stable, but also (...) that people have introspective awareness of this stability, providing a promising means by which to assess the epistemic value of our intuitions. (shrink)

College cheating is prevalent, with rates ranging widely from 9 to 95% (Whitley, 1998). Research has been exclusively conducted with enrolled college students. This study examined the prevalence of cheating in a sample of college alumni, who risk less in disclosing academic dishonesty than current students. A total of 273 alumni reported on their prevalence and perceived severity of 19 cheating behaviors. The vast majority of participants (81.7%) report having engaged in some form of cheating during their undergraduate career. The (...) most common forms of cheating were “copying from another student's assignment” and “allowing others to copy from your assignment.” More students reported cheating in classes for their major than other classes. Males and females cheated at the same rates in classes for their major, and males reported higher rates of cheating than females in nonmajor classes. Respondents reported that their top reasons for cheating were “lack of time” and “to help a friend.”. (shrink)

We used a retrospective survey to model the patterns of appraisal, motivation, and coping that uniquely correspond with 12 positive emotions (affection/love, amusement, awe, challenge/det...

There is growing interest in the processes by which entrepreneurial opportunities are cocreated between entrepreneurs and their stakeholders. The longitudinal case study of de novo firm Wakefield Seafoods seeks to understand the underlying dynamics of phenomena that play out over time as stakeholders emerge and their contributions become essential to the opportunity formation process. The king crab data show that under conditions of uncertainty, characterized by incomplete or missing knowledge, entrepreneurial processes of experimentation, failure, and learning were effective in forming (...) and exploiting an opportunity. Moreover, contrary to existing literature that either emphasizes heroic entrepreneurs or downplays their value, this article shows that both the vision of the entrepreneur and the stakeholder contributions are critical. This detailed examination of process data shows that the cumulative actions made by entrepreneurs in concert with their stakeholders formed an opportunity that coalesced into a new market. (shrink)

‘Intuition deniers’ are those who—like Timothy Williamson, Max Deutsch, Herman Cappelen and a few others—reject the claim that philosophers centrally rely on intuitions as evidence. This ‘Centrality’ hypothesis, as Cappelen terms it, is standardly endorsed both by traditionalists and by experimental philosophers. Yet the intuition deniers claim that Centrality is false—and they generally also suggest that this undermines the significance of experimental philosophy. Three primary types of anti-Centrality argument have cross-cut the literature thus far. These arguments, I’ll claim, have differing (...) potential consequences on metaphilosophical debate. The first sort of argument centers on worries about the term ‘intuition’—for instance, worries about whether it has clear application, or whether anything actually falls under it. Call this the Argument from Unclear Application. The second argument type involves the claim that evidence in philosophy consists not of facts about intuitions, but of facts about e.g. knowledge and causation. Call this the Argument from Antipsychologism. The third type involves an attempt to demonstrate that philosophers support their claims not via bald appeal to intuition, but via argumentation. Call this the Argument from Argumentation. Although these three arguments have merit, none of them undermines the importance of experimental philosophy. Nonetheless, they do have significant consequences for the methodological debates that dominate meta-philosophy, and for experimental philosophy in particular. (shrink)

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the (...) ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. -/- Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. -/- A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves. (shrink)

Previous research has identified different moral judgments in liberals and conservatives. While both care about harm/fairness (‘individualizing’ foundations), conservatives emphasize in-group/authority/purity (‘binding’ foundations) more than liberals. Thus, some argue that conservatives have a more complex morality. We suggest an alternative view—that consistent with conservatism as ‘motivated social cognition’, binding foundation activation satisfies psychological needs for social structure/security/certainty. Accordingly, we found that students who were dispositionally threat-sensitive showed stronger binding foundation activation, and that conservatives are more dispositionally threat-sensitive than liberals. We (...) also found that in a heightened threat situation liberals (especially social liberals) showed increased binding foundation activation. These results support the view that the binding foundations function differently in our moral cognition than the individualizing foundations. (shrink)

We applaud Gasper for reviewing five approaches to operationalizing neutral states. To supplement Gasper’s important contribution, we express the five neutral conditions at the appraisal lev...

The rise of experimental philosophy is generating pressing methodological questions for philosophers. Can findings from experimental studies hold any significance for philosophy as a discipline? Can philosophical theorizing be improved through consideration of such studies? Do these studies threaten traditional philosophical methodology?

It is well established that language production and comprehension are influenced by information status, for example, whether information is given, new, topical, or predictable, and many scholars suggest that an important component of information status is keeping track of what information is in common ground, and what is not. Information status affects both speakers' choices and how listeners interpret the speaker's meaning. Although there is a wealth of scholarly work on information status, there is no consensus on the mechanisms by (...) which it is used, and in fact relatively little discussion of the underlying representations and psycholinguistic mechanisms. Moreover, a major challenge to understanding information status is that its effects are notoriously variable. This study considers existing proposals about information status, focusing on two questions: how is it represented; and by what mechanisms is it used? I propose that it is important to consider whether representations and mechanisms can be classified as either explicit or emergent. Based on a review of existing evidence, I argue that information status representations are most likely emergent, but the mechanisms by which they are used are both explicit and emergent. This review provides one of the first considerations of information status processing across multiple domains. (shrink)

An instructor's decision to drop an exam score and to assign a penalty to all class members because no one was willing to identify students who allegedly cheated is described, including how the class members felt about the incident. For the most part, students held the cheaters responsible for their penalties. The instructor received only slightly lower student evaluations, as compared to the 2 other courses she taught that year.

A Psychological Perspective on Folk Moral Objectivism is a thoroughly researched interdisciplinary exploration of the critical role metaethical beliefs play in the way morality functions. Whether or not people are "moral objectivists" is something that deserves much more empirical attention than it has thus far received, not only because it bears upon philosophical claims, but because it is a critical piece of the puzzle of human morality. This book aims to facilitate incorporating the study of metaethical beliefs into existing research (...) programs by providing a roadmap through the theoretical and empirical landscape as it currently exists and evaluating the methodological approaches used thus far. In doing so, it summarizes the key findings-both in terms of metaethical beliefs, and their correlates, causes, and consequences-that have emerged, and explores the value of this area of study for anyone interested in the development, function, causes, and/or consequences of morality. (shrink)

Lapses in ethical conduct by those in corporate and public authority worldwide have given business researchers and practitioners alike cause to re-examine the antecedents to personal ethical values. We explore the relationship between ethical values and an individual’s long-term orientation or LTO, defined as the degree to which one plans for and considers the future, as well as values traditions of the past. Our study also examines the role of work ethic and conservative attitudes in the formation of a person’s (...) long-term orientation and consequent ethical beliefs. Empirically testing these hypothesized relationships using data from 292 subjects, we find that long-term perspectives on tradition and planning indeed engender higher levels of ethical values. The results also support work ethic’s role in fostering tradition and planning, as well as conservatism’s positive association with planning. Additionally, we report how tradition and planning mediate the influence of conservatism and work ethic on the formation of ethical values. Limitations of the study and future research directions, as well as implications for business managers and academics, are also discussed. (shrink)

Critical discourse analysis is a useful and productive qualitative methodology but has been underutilized within nursing research. In order to redress this deficiency the research presented in this article represents an exploration of the way in which critical discourse analysis may be applied to the analysis of public debates around policy for nursing practice. In this article the author discusses the history of the application of critical discourse analysis and provides an example of its application to the debate around the (...) use of nurse practitioners within the Australian healthcare system. (shrink)

What might a synaesthetic cinema look like? Or, better, what might it sound, smell, taste and feel like? This essay approaches David Lynch's Mulholland Drive as a means of thinking through conceptual but concrete descriptions of synaesthesia not as an artistic device, a metaphor, an historical trend, or a rare clinical condition, but as a way of being in space and time — and being in cinema — that is simultaneously abstract and very real. Lynch's film becomes, as well, an (...) opportunity to think about cinematic spectacle and ‘excess’ in sensorily specific ways. The hallucinatory sensual disjunctions that occur throughout the film reveal a double system of reference: vision and proprioception mutually informing and interrupting one another, in ways that recall Brian Massumi's discussion of topological architecture. Those moments of cinematic, sensory ‘excess’ are sensual reminders of the degree to which vision is entangled with other senses in the experience of cinema. (shrink)

The peptide hormone oxytocin plays a critical role in regulating affiliative behaviors including mating, pair‐bond formation, maternal/parenting behavior, social recognition, separation distress and other aspects of attachment. Jin and colleagues1 recently reported intriguing findings that CD38, a transmembrane receptor with ADP‐ribosyl cyclase activity, plays a critical role in maternal nurturing behavior and social recognition by regulating oxytocin secretion. This research may have implications for understanding disorders marked by deficits in social cognition and social functioning, including autism, social anxiety disorder, borderline (...) personality disorder and schizophrenia. BioEssays 29:837–841, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Sunstein's characterization of moral blunders jointly indicts an intuitive process and the structure of heuristics. But intuitions need not lead to error, and the problems with moral heuristics apply also to moral principles. Accordingly, moral development may well involve more, rather than less, intuitive responsiveness. This suggests a novel trajectory for future research into the development of appropriate moral judgments.

Psychiatrists working with war veterans have, in recent years, constructed ‘moral injury’ as a separate manifestation of war trauma that is distinct from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This paper argues that for moral degradation to occur, it necessarily involves one’s commissions or omissions that transgresses one’s personal morality, and hence, distinguishes sufferers of moral injury from PTSD sufferers who were witnesses to traumatic and morally abhorrent events. To this end, it clarifies how some of the situations surrounding moral injury are misunderstood, (...) by discussing the process of moral reasoning in the context of moral dilemmas, dirty hands, and moral blind alleys. Finally, it concludes that when we conceptualise moral injury as being caused by one’s commissions and omissions in moral dilemmas, we find that shame and guilt are situation-appropriate responses with a role to play in what ethics mean. (shrink)

The Rencontres de Bamako or ‘African Photography Biennial’, held in Mali’s capital city, is the only biennial devoted to photography from Africa and the only international photography festival routinely held on the African continent. Since its first edition in 1994, the event has picked up impressive momentum and has caught the attention of jet-setting curators, critics, and dealers and brought exposure and international patronage to a lucky handful of photographers. The biennial has also been controversial. Some of the reasons for (...) this controversy are familiar and echo long-standing issues in the presentation of African art to Euro-American audiences. Other criticisms raise broader problems connected with the globalization of markets and of image culture. These are increasingly voiced by a younger generation of artists, activists, and curators who are exploring new ways of working in and with the global art market. This essay seeks to give a critical and analytical account of the biennial, through conversations with key players, and it explores emergent strategies to avoid dependence on the old North-South funding structures. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Of Ouija Boards and Bar Owners1 Bad Reasons for Condemning Tattoos Some Moral Compliments My Complaint Traditional Virtue Ethics Virtue Ethics and Tattoos Tough Tattoos … What Lies Beneath.

Bedbugs are tiny, wingless insects which feed on mammal blood and leave behind painful, itchy sores. Although they can live in other settings, they are most commonly found in warm, dark places inhabited by humans, like beds. After being absent in the United States for over 60 years, thanks to powerful pesticides, bed bugs, have returned in force and are present in every state and nearly every city. For reasons not entirely understood, bed bugs have developed resistance to traditional pesticides (...) such as Permethrin and are therefore difficult to control. Although commonly believed to be associated with dirty housekeeping and associated with substandard housing, bed bugs are equally likely to be present in five-star hotels as they are in homeless shelters. (shrink)

This is the first collection dedicated to presenting research directly influenced by the innovative and groundbreaking ideas of the eminent linguist Ruqaiya Hasan. The collection offers an insight into the breadth and depth of Hasan's distinctive linguistic approaches and theoretical concerns. The chapters cover areas such as verbal art, context of situation, semantic networks, cohesive harmony, text structure and literacy education, contributed by well-known scholars in the field such as M.A.K. Halliday, Geoffrey Williams, David Butt, Donna Miller, Wendy L. Bowcher, (...) Tom Bartlett and Margaret Berry. The volume contains an interview with Ruqaiya Hasan by David Butt and Jennifer Yameng Liang, and a section in which the contributors describe their connection and/or history with Ruqaiya Hasan and her work. This book is of particular value to scholars and students working in sociolinguistics, literary criticism, stylistics, functional linguistic theories, literacy pedagogy, social semiotics, multimodality and applied linguistics. (shrink)

Le module ESLO-Enfants est un corpus variationniste longitudinal issu du grand corpus de langue française : Enquêtes SocioLinguistiques à Orléans (ESLO). Variationniste car il s’appuie sur un public varié (enfants de 2 ans à 7 ans avec leur entourage proche) provenant de familles de différentes catégories socio-économico-culturelles et enregistré dans des situations naturelles variées formant le quotidien des enfants. Ce corpus, qui sera mis à disposition à la fois sur ESLO et Childes, a été créé dans le but d’étudier l’impact (...) de l’environnement langagier (input) sur les productions enfantines (output). Pour cette étude, la liaison, objet à la fois stable et variable, s’est révélée être un phénomène sociolinguistique propice pour observer sa transmission à des enfants en cours d’acquisition du langage mais aussi pour observer d’éventuelles différences entre les familles. (shrink)

In Heidegger's phenomenological ontology and his critique of the 'metaphysics of subjectivity,' the world is understood not as an 'object' at the disposal of a 'subject,' but as a phenomenal 'nearness' given revelation in language. Heidegger's ontology of language relies upon the work of Friedrich Holderlin, whose poetry Heidegger understands as giving 'voice' to Being in a peculiar proximity. For Heidegger, Holderlin's articulations are not those of a subject 'expressing' a meaning , but rather those of a poet whose 'remembrance' (...) recalls a sense of Being metaphysics has forgotten. Heidegger argues that Holderlin's language is of Being, beyond the self as defined by humanist notions of subjectivity which reduce Being, along with beings, to the subject's objectifying examination. In 'dialogue' with poetic language, Heidegger's philosophy aims to achieve a genuine thinking of Being, as well as Gelassenheit, the stance of receptivity. ;Holderlin's philosophical writings, however, challenge some of Heidegger's views both of poetic language and of the self or subject implied by language. Holderlin offers a critique of Kantian and Fichtean transcendental idealism and a theory of poetic language as promising a nontranscendental grasp of the 'ideal,' 'spirit' , or Being. Holderlin's examination of the 'poetic I' involves both skepticism and utopiainism, in which a self is understood to encounter the world outside the auspices of possessive, determinative, or objectifying relations. Thus I show that Holderlin suggests a model of 'poetic subjectivity' which conforms to dimensions of Heidegger's critique of the modern subject, yet which also does not leave behind the self and the human concerns of that self In Holderlin a non-anthropocentric humanism is imagined, one which furthers the Gelassenheit dimensions of Heideggerian philosophy while subverting the political determinations of his aesthetic ontology. The work of Julia Kristeva, in which poetic language reveals the 'subject in process' and which recognizes in Holderlin a poetic dimension of modern subjectivity, is employed to further examine these insights. (shrink)

This book explores the mystical thought of Gregory Barhebraeus (1226-1286CE) and its contemporary relevance, to offer a reading of Barhebraeus' mystical texts by bringing them into conversation with critical religious studies and the hermeneutical tradition of philosophy. Griggs emphasises the problem of conceptual categories for the academic study of mysticism, seeking to avoid traditional assumptions concerning 'mysticism' and attend to the particularity of 'mystic' traditions. Through this approach, she examines the mystical hermeneutics of the love of God developed by Barhebraeus, (...) as a response to the elaboration of this theme by the Islamic theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazālī (1058-1111CE), and as a resolution of the tensions between scholastics and ascetics within his own Syriac tradition. (shrink)

Phenomenal intentionality is a view about the representational content of conscious experiences that grounds the content of experiences in their phenomenal character. The view is motivated by evidence from introspection, as well as theoretical considerations and intuitions. This paper discusses one potential problem with the view. The view has difficulty accounting for the intentionality of color experiences. Versions of the view either fail to count things as part of the content of color experience that should be counted, resulting in verdicts (...) that some color experiences are inaccurate which should not be, or they admit properties as part of their contents that ought not to be admitted, resulting in color experiences being considered to be accurate when they ought not to be considered so. This is a problem because color predicates are usefully employed in sciences such as biology, cognitive science, and engineering. They are used in generalizations that take the form of laws governing the presence and behavior of properties. Scientific practice relies on the assumption that the laws governing how entities behave employ terms that refer to actual properties that entities really have. We should therefore assume that there is some consistent set of properties to which our color terms refer. (shrink)

In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll appeals to teleology to account for the way that dispositions seem to be directed toward their merely possible manifestations. He argues that his teleological account of dispositions does a better job of making sense of this directedness than rival approaches that appeal to conditional statements or physical intentionality. In this short critique, I argue that, without satisfactory clarification of a number of issues, TAD does not adequately account for the directedness of dispositions. I focus on (...) two aspects of TAD: the Activation Principle, and the proposed necessary and sufficient conditions for being a dispositional property. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy, at least in its ‘negative’ variety, has standardly been portrayed as presenting a dramatic challenge to traditional philosophical methodology. As such, it has prompted a large variety of counter-arguments and defenses of intuition. In this paper, I argue that many of these objections to experimental philosophy rest on various oversimplifications that both experimental philosophers and their opponents have made regarding intuitions and philosophical methodology. Once these oversimplifications are abandoned, I argue that the experimentalist critique of current philosophical methods (...) becomes somewhat less dramatic, but also much less open to objection. (shrink)

In this thesis, I examine recent proposals for the creation of African and Native American forms of Indigenous philosophy and show how the discussions and debates in these fields challenge the disciplinary boundaries of modern Academic Western philosophy. With regard to African philosophy, I critique the debates in the Anglophone literature, teasing out those aspects of the debates which pose substantial epistemological challenges to mainstream [Western] philosophy, focusing, in particular, on assumptions about the intersections between philosophy, culture, science, and universality (...) which manifest themselves in the Euro-traditional critiques the "Professional" school philosophers make of the Afri-traditional approach of the "Ethnophilosophy" school philosophers. Looking at the works of such "Ethnophilosophers" as Kagame, Mbiti, Wright, and Gyeke and the critiques made of them by "Professional" school philosophers such as Wiredu, Bodunrin, Oruka, and Appiah, I present and critique both sides of the universal European argument, the literacy argument, the objective individual male argument, and the logical-scientific vs. magical-religious arguments, highlighting the epistemological implications of each. With regard to Native American Philosophy, I discuss recent proposals being made by Native American academic philosophers, and also do a philosophical analysis of traditional Native American culture as expressed in a variety of Native-authored sources. I argue, based on the works of Native authors, that three main methodological problems condition the formulation of Native American philosophy, namely 'problems of conquest,' 'problems of translation,' and 'problems of identity' and that each of these problems manifest as epistemological problems. I then go on to make proposals for five possible beginning points for the formulation of Native American philosophy by identifying themes which recur in the works of philosophers Deloria, Cordova, and Hester; traditional sages such as Black Elk, and Lame Deer; critical theorists such as Warrior, Guerrero, Gunn-Allen, Durham, and Forbes; and novelists Silko and King. I argue that both African and American forms of Indigenous philosophy provoke a reevaluation of many of the epistemic frames heretofore assumed to be universal in modern academic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines one of the central complaints regarding Locke’s Essay, namely, its supposed incoherence. The question is whether Locke can successfully maintain a materialistic conception of matter, while advancing a theory of knowledge that will constrain the possibilities for a cognitive accessto matter from the start. In approaching this question I concentrate on Locke’s account of unity. While material unity can be described in relation to Locke’s account of substance, real essence, and nominal essence, a separate discussion will be (...) called for altogether in the case of organic unity. In closing, I turn to Kant as a model for locating Locke’s purported incoherence, suggesting that his “skeptical idealism” yields the same epistemic advantages as those won by Kant’s “empirical realism.”. (shrink)

The Conference on Dispositions and Laws of Nature was held at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in February 2003, and by all accounts was a great success. Upon seeing the program for the conference, John Symons of Synthese thought the papers would make an excellent special issue, and so here we are. Roughly speaking, dispositions are tendencies or powers—a fragile glass’s disposition to break when struck. Laws of nature, like Newton’s laws of motion, are commonly thought to be true (...) generalizations that supports counterfactuals, play an important role in scientific explanation, and can be inductively confirmed by their instances. Dispositions and laws are components of different, perhaps competing, metaphysical views regarding the source of power and activity in the universe. Supposing that dispositions and laws of nature exist, in some sense, I see two basic options as to how they are related: 1. Laws give otherwise inert particulars their dispositions. 2. Particulars have certain dispositions, and general truths about these dispositions constitute the laws of nature. (shrink)

This introduction to a special section on ‘Photography and the State’ reflects on trends in photography theory exemplified in essays by Jens Andermann, Ariella Azoulay, Andrea Noble, and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen. It suggests that the contributors make a powerful argument for photography’s emergent contribution to theories of the state and of sovereignty. It situates this work in the context of a growing body of scholarship (by theorists such as Natalia Brizuela, Paula Cortés-Rocca, Clare Harris, Chris Pinney, and Karen Strassler) attuned to (...) photography’s role in political imagination in post-colonial and post-imperial spaces, and underscores movement of the field away from inter-subjective conceptions of photographic ethics and debates about indexicality. (shrink)