In this article, the important but neglected link between workplace safety-enhancing behavior and ethics is explored. Using data from 237 employees from five manufacturing plants in the Midwest, we investigated how specific local ethical climate types are linked to incidences of injuries and two types of safety-enhancing behaviors: safety compliance and safety participation. It was hypothesized that egoist climates are positively related to injuries and negatively related to safety-enhancing behaviors. In contrast, it is proposed that both benevolent and principled climates (...) have negative relationships with injuries and positive relationships with safety-enhancing behaviors. Results provided support only for our principled climate types while benevolence has the desired negative relationship with injuries. Egoism and benevolence are not related to safety-enhancing behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications of findings are discussed. (shrink)

Shigeto Tsuru is one of Japan's most respected senior economists. In these lectures, he provides a reappraisal of institutionalism as a school of thought and discusses its relevance for the issues which the economic profession today must tackle. Tsuru reconsiders Marxian political economy as an 'institutionalist school', which provides a context for the following discussion of J. M. Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter and Thorstein Veblen. He goes on to present the four key elements of modern institutionalism - i.e., the open-system character (...) of the economy; the problem of planning; the evolutionary process of modern economics; and the normative character of economics - by way of an examination of three present-day institutionalists, Gunnar Myrdal, John K. Galbraith, and K. William Kapp. Tsuru concludes with an evaluation of modern institutionalism and the future of institutional economics. (shrink)

We argue that understanding of autism can be strengthened by increasing involvement of autistic individuals as researchers and by exploring cascading impacts of early sensory, perceptual, attentional, and motor atypicalities on social and communicative developmental trajectories. Participatory action research that includes diverse participants or researchers may help combat stigma while expanding research foci to better address autistic people's needs.

There is a tendency in decision‐making research to treat uncertainty only as a problem to be overcome. But it is also a feature that can be leveraged, particularly in social interaction. Comparing the behavior of profitable and unprofitable poker players, we reveal a strategic use of information processing that keeps decision makers unpredictable. To win at poker, a player must exploit public signals from others. But using public inputs makes it easier for an observer to reconstruct that player's strategy and (...) predict his or her behavior. How should players trade off between exploiting profitable opportunities and remaining unexploitable themselves? Using a recent multivariate approach to information theoretic data analysis and 1.75 million hands of online two‐player No‐Limit Texas Hold'em, we find that the important difference between winning and losing players is not in the amount of information they process, but how they process it. In particular, winning players are better at integrative information processing—creating new information from the interaction between their cards and their opponents’ signals. We argue that integrative information processing does not just produce better decisions, it makes decision‐making harder for others to reverse engineer, as an expert poker player's cards act like the private key in public‐key cryptography. Poker players encrypt their reasoning with the way they process information. The encryption function of integrative information processing makes it possible for players to exploit others while remaining unexploitable. By recognizing the act of information processing as a strategic behavior in its own right, we offer a detailed account of how experts use endemic uncertainty to conceal their intentions in high‐stakes competitive environments, and we highlight new opportunities between cognitive science, information theory, and game theory. (shrink)

In Generalizing Generalizability in Information Systems Research Lee and Baskerville (2003) attempt to clarify generalization and distinguish four types of generalization. Although this is a useful objective, what they call generalization is often not generalization at all in the proper sense of the word. We elucidate generalization by locating their major errors. A main source of these is their failure to understand the depth of Hume’s problem of induction. We give a thorough explication of the problem and then give a (...) solution. Lastly, we propose an alternative taxonomy of generalization: theoretical, within-population, cross-population, contextual, and temporal. (shrink)

Discussions concerning whether there is a natural right to health care may occur in various forms, resulting in policy recommendations for how to implement any such right in a given society. But health care policies may be judged by international standards including the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rights enumerated in the UDHR are grounded in traditions of moral theory, a philosophical analysis of which is necessary in order to adjudicate the value of specific policies designed to enshrine (...) rights such as a right to health care. We begin with an overview of the drafting of the UDHR and highlight the primary influence of natural law theory in validating the rights contained therein. We then provide an explication of natural law theory by reference to the writings of Thomas Aquinas, as well as elucidate the complementary “capabilities approach” of Martha Nussbaum. We conclude that a right to health care ought to be guaranteed by the state. (shrink)

In cognitive science, there is a tacit norm that phenomena such as cultural variation or synaesthesia are worthy examples of cognitive diversity that contribute to a better understanding of cognition, but that other forms of cognitive diversity (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder/ADHD, and dyslexia) are primarily interesting only as examples of deficit, dysfunction, or impairment. This status quo is dehumanizing and holds back much-needed research. In contrast, the neurodiversity paradigm argues that such experiences are not necessarily deficits but rather (...) are natural reflections of biodiversity. Here, we propose that neurodiversity is an important topic for future research in cognitive science. We discuss why cognitive science has thus far failed to engage with neurodiversity, why this gap presents both ethical and scientific challenges for the field, and, crucially, why cognitive science will produce better theories of human cognition if the field engages with neurodiversity in the same way that it values other forms of cognitive diversity. Doing so will not only empower marginalized researchers but will also present an opportunity for cognitive science to benefit from the unique contributions of neurodivergent researchers and communities. (shrink)

I begin with a note about moral goodness as a quality, disposition, or trait of a person or human being. This has at least two different senses, one wider and one narrower. Aristotle remarked that the Greek term we translate as justice sometimes meant simply virtue or goodness as applied to a person and sometimes meant only a certain virtue or kind of goodness. The same thing is true of our word “goodness.” Sometimes being a good person means having all (...) the virtues, or at least all the moral ones; then goodness equals the whole of virtue. But sometimes, being a good person has a narrower meaning, namely, being kind, generous, and so forth. Thus, my OED sometimes equates goodness with moral excellence as a whole and sometimes with a particular moral excellence, viz., kindness, beneficence, or benevolence; and the Bible, when it speaks of God as being good sometimes means that God has all the virtues and sometimes only that he is kind, mereiful, or benevolent. When Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good: None is good, save one, that is God,” he seems to be speaking of goodness in the inclusive sense, but when the writer of Exodus has God himself say that he is “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” God is using “goodness” in the narrower sense in which it means benevolence, for he goes on to make it clear that he is also just and severe. Similarly, “good will” may mean either “morally good will” in general, as it does in Kant, or it may mean only “benevolent will,” as it usually does; in “men of good will” it is perhaps ambiguous. (shrink)

This essay, one of the last that Frankena wrote, provides a scrupulously detailed exploration of the various possible meanings of one of Sidgwick's most famous footnotes in the Methods Long intrigued by what Sidgwick had in mind when he said that he would explain how it came about that for moderns it is not tautologous to claim that one's own good is one's only reasonable ultimate end, Frankena uses this note as a point of departure for a penetrating review of (...) Sidgwick's insights and ambiguities on the differences between ancient and modern ethics. (shrink)

Catalan translation, introductory study and notes on W. K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief”. Published in Clifford, W.K. “L’ètica de la creença”. Quaderns de Filosofia, vol. III, n. 2 (2016), pp. 129–150. // Catalan translation, introductory study and notes on William James’s “The Will to Believe”. Published in James, William. “La voluntat de creure”. Quaderns de Filosofia, vol. III, n. 2 (2016), pp. 151–172. [Introductory study published in Oya, Alberto. “Introducció. El debat entre W. K. Clifford i (...) class='Hi'>William James”. Quaderns de Filosofia, vol. III, n. 2 (2016), pp. 123–127]. (shrink)

[This download includes the table of contents and chapter 1.] -/- When we praise, blame, punish, or reward people for their actions, we are holding them responsible for what they have done. Common sense tells us that what makes human beings responsible has to do with their minds and, in particular, the relationship between their minds and their actions. Yet the empirical connection is not necessarily obvious. The “guilty mind” is a core concept of criminal law, but if a defendant (...) on trial for murder were found to have serious brain damage, which brain parts or processes would have to be damaged for him to be considered not responsible, or less responsible, for the crime? The authors argue that evidence from neuroscience and the other cognitive sciences can illuminate the nature of responsibility and agency. They go on to offer a novel and comprehensive neuroscientific theory of human responsibility. (shrink)

K Williams; The Labour We Delight In, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 32, Issue 2, 28 June 2008, Pages 293–303, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.000.

Taking reduction in the traditional deductive sense, the programmatic claim that most of genetics can be reduced by molecular genetics is defended as feasible and significant. Arguments by Ruse and Hull that either the relationship is replacement or at best a weaker form of reduction are shown to rest on a mixture of historical and logical confusions about the nature of the theories involved.

This paper argues for the importance of approaching medicine, as a theoretical science, through values. The normative concepts of benefit and harm are held to provide a framework for the analysis of medicine which reflects the obligations of the doctor-patient relationship, suffices to define the key concept of medical relevance, yields a general necessary condition for the basic concepts of medicine, explains the role of such nonnormative conceptions as discomfort, dysfunction, and incapacity, and avoids the mistakes of other normative approaches (...) which hold that unhealthy conditions are disvaluable or should be treated. Neutralist analyses are criticized, especially those approaching health through proper functioning. (shrink)

I critically examine an argument, due to howard wettstein, purporting to show that sentences containing definite descriptions are semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive readings. Wettstein argues that many sentences containing nonidentifying descriptions--descriptions that apply to more than one object--cannot be given a Russellian analysis, and that the descriptions in these sentences should be understood as directly referential terms. But because Wettstein does not justify treating referential uses of nonidentifying descriptions differently than attributive uses of nonidentifying descriptions, his argument fails.

Exploring what a scientific metaphysics grounded in biological practices could look like and how it might impact the way we investigate the world around us, the contributors to From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics review and discuss long-held objections to metaphysics by natural scientists. They illuminate how, in order to learn about the world as it truly is, we must look not only at what scientists say but also what they do.

This book is an introduction to three important philosophies of education. It's main purpose, however, is to help teach the the student how to do philosophy of education.

First steps are taken toward a formulation of quantum mechanics which avoids the use of probability amplitudes and is expressed entirely in terms of observable probabilities. Quantum states are represented not by state vectors or density matrices but by “probability tables,” which contain only the probabilities of the outcomes of certain special measurements. The rule for computing transition probabilities, normally given by the squared modulus of the inner product of two state vectors, is re-expressed in terms of probability tables. The (...) new version of the rule is surprisingly simple, especially when one considers that the notion of complex phases, so crucial in the evaluation of inner products, is entirely absent from the representation of states used here. (shrink)