In this book, Kristina Musholt offers a novel theory of self-consciousness, understood as the ability to think about oneself. Traditionally, self-consciousness has been central to many philosophical theories. More recently, it has become the focus of empirical investigation in psychology and neuroscience. Musholt draws both on philosophical considerations and on insights from the empirical sciences to offer a new account of self-consciousness—the ability to think about ourselves that is at the core of what makes us human. -/- Examining theories (...) of nonconceptual content developed in recent work in the philosophy of cognition, Musholt proposes a model for the gradual transition from self-related information implicit in the nonconceptual content of perception and other forms of experience to the explicit representation of the self in conceptual thought. A crucial part of this model is an analysis of the relationship between self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Self-consciousness and awareness of others, Musholt argues, are two sides of the same coin. -/- After surveying the philosophical problem of self-consciousness, the notion of nonconceptual content, and various proposals for the existence of nonconceptual self-consciousness, Musholt argues for a non-self-representationalist theory, according to which the self is not part of the representational content of perception and bodily awareness but part of the mode of presentation. She distinguishes between implicitly self-related information and explicit self-representation, and describes the transitions from the former to the latter as arising from a complex process of self–other differentiation. By this account, both self-consciousness and intersubjectivity develop in parallel. (shrink)

I examine ramifications of the widespread view that scientific objectivity gives us a permission to trust scientific knowledge claims. According to a widely accepted account of trust and trustworthiness, trust in scientific knowledge claims involves both reliance on the claims and trust in scientists who present the claims, and trustworthiness depends on expertise, honesty, and social responsibility. Given this account, scientific objectivity turns out to be a hybrid concept with both an epistemic and a moral-political dimension. The epistemic dimension tells (...) us when scientific knowledge claims are reliable, and the moral-political dimension tells us when we can trust scientists to be socially responsible. While the former dimension has received a fair amount of attention, the latter is in need of analysis. I examine what it means for scientists to be socially responsible, that is, to follow “sound” moral and social values in different stages of scientific inquiry. Social responsibility is especially important when scientists function as experts in society. Members of the public and policymakers do not want to rely on scientific research shaped by moral and social values they have good reasons to reject. Moreover, social responsibility is important in social research in which moral and social values can legitimately play many roles. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different answers to the question of how social scientists can identify appropriate moral and social values to inform their research. I argue that procedural accounts of social responsibility, such as well-ordered science and deliberative polling, have limitations. (shrink)

Platons Konzept der periagōgē, wie es im Höhlengleichnis dargestellt wird, dient als grundlegender Bestandteil seiner Bildungsphilosophie und veranschaulicht den Prozess des “Richtungswechsels” oder der “Umleitung” des geistigen Auges von der Unwissenheit auf die Form des Guten. Platons Verständnis von Kultur oder Bildung, paideia, betont die Änderung von passiver Beobachtung zu aktivem Engagement in der Suche nach dem ultimativem Wissen und der ethischen Exzellenz. Diese bildungsbezogene Richtungsänderung, von passiv zu aktiv, entfaltet sich während unsere gesamte Seele sich zu der Form des (...) Guten zuwendet. Die Aufrechterhaltung der richtigen Ausrichtung der Seele erfordert die Pflege der niederen Teile der Seele durch die Nachahmung guter Gewohnheiten, guten Verhaltens und angemessener Gefühle, während gleichzeitig die höheren, vernünftigen Kräfte durch mathematische Wissenschaften gestärkt werden, die in der Dialektik gipfeln. Eine solche edukative Umdrehung der Seele zielt auf die Form des Guten als ihrer teleologischen, praktischen und paradigmatischen Achse ab, in Bezug zu der wir uns drehen, während wir unseren täglichen Bestrebungen nachgehen. Diejenigen, die die Form des Guten erfassen konnten, durchlaufen nicht nur zwangsläufig eine persönliche Veränderung, sondern tragen auch die Verantwortung, andere zu einer solchen Transformation zu führen, als ihre Lehrer und Mentoren, ganz so wie es Sokrates tat. Folglich fördert die periagōgē in die richtige Richtung und das Streben nach den richtigen Idealen liegt nicht nur in der persönlichen Verbesserung, sondern erstreckt sich auch auf die Gesellschaft, wo solche erleuchteten Individuen anderen helfen, auf dem richtigen Weg zu bleiben. (shrink)

Taiwan is considered to be one of the most progressive countries in Asia but has no asylum law. Does it need one? Many in Taiwan, including officials and politicians, claim that the regulations that are currently in place are sufficient. There are, however, some people in Taiwan who require protection, and the government is not able to respond effectively in the absence of an asylum law. The author has identified several different groups in Taiwan that would benefit from an asylum (...) law — from Hong Kong protesters facing persecution, through Chinese dissidents or descendants of the ROC army from the Thai-Myanmar border region, to Turkish people with revoked passports; grouped into two major categories — persons from the PRC, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Macau and persons from other countries. The draft of the asylum law has been sitting in the Parliament for 14 years, and the reason for it not yet having passed is the “China Factor.” The Taiwan-China relationship thus cannot be disconnected from this issue, and the article discusses the three most common concerns with regard to this in the Taiwanese society. While these are legitimate concerns, they could be solved by adopting a dual asylum system dealing with group 1 and group 2 separately. Compared to UN member countries, Taiwan is on its own when it comes to the asylum issue, although adopting an asylum law is part of a broader push to bring Taiwan’s legal system in line with international human rights law. The article provides a comprehensive description and analysis of the refugee situation in Taiwan; it is based on document studies and interviews conducted in Taipei in autumn 2020. (shrink)

Friedrich Hölderlin's 1802 “Patmos” poetically answers a theological challenge. Dedicated to the Landgraf von Homburg, it responds unsolicited to the count's call for a poem that might counter contemporary Biblical exegesis, originally addressed to Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. And indeed, a poetic refutation could hardly be more appropriate, when it comes to Enlightenment theologians : One of the most scandalous texts of the era, Hermann Samuel Reimarus' fragment, “Über die - XVIIIe siècle – Nouvel article.

Feeling old: being in a phase of transition in later life The aim of the study was to illuminate very old persons’ experiences of feeling old in order to get a nuanced understanding of the ageing process in later life. Fifteen persons 85–96 years of age, living in their own homes, were interviewed in‐depth. Data were analysed utilising a phenomenological‐hermeneutic approach. Eight persons reported that they felt old. The experience of feeling old entailed four characteristics: being able to date the (...) beginning of feeling old, fear of helplessness and of being unable to manage one’s life situation, not recognising one’s former self, and feeling different from others. These characteristics corresponded to the main properties of a transition process. The comprehensive understanding was that the very old persons who also felt old were in a phase of transition. The distinguishing qualities of those that felt old were also found to be in line with the dystonic dominance in the ninth stage designated by Joan Erikson of the previously described life cycle. Knowledge about transition processes and sensitivity to very old people’s experiences of feeling old are of great importance to nursing in order to provide adequate health care services and prevent unhealthy transitions. (shrink)

The subject matter of the essay is the autonomy of art, which will be analysed from a Jungian perspective. What Jung had in mind with his notion of the independence of the artistic process is its freedom from the conscious mind of an artist, rather than its independence from the current social, political or cultural conditions. Art, according to Jung, is autonomous if it comes from deeper levels of the human psyche, and that is unconsciousness. To test the validity of (...) Jung’s "autonomous complex", I will be checking the empirical reality of artistic creation, by providing professional artists’ accounts of the creative process. Also, I will challenge the categorically laid and the deeply rooted idea of a close link between artistic talent and mental illness, trying to see if the artistic process can be independent of an artist’s psychological state. In Jung’s view, art happens instead of and not because of potential illness of an artist. Additionally, I am going to contrast his view with Freud’s, for whom an artwork is a sublimation of sexual drive or a product of neurosis. This idea was not acceptable to Jung, as he believed in the existence of not only sexual but also art complex. Finally, I will try to argue that Jung’s view is more accurate in the depiction of artistic process than Freud’s and that his emphasis on the autonomy in art, although radical, deserves more attention from scholars in philosophy and psychology of art. (shrink)

Much work in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience has argued for continuism about remembering and imagining (see, e.g., Addis J R Soc N Z 48(2–3):64–88, 2018). This view claims that episodic remembering is just a form of imagining, such that memory does not have a privileged status over other forms of episodic simulation (esp. imagination). Large parts of contemporary philosophy of memory support continuism. This even holds for work in semantics and the philosophy of language, which has pointed out substantial similarities (...) in the distribution of the verbs remember and imagine. Our paper argues against the continuist claim, by focusing on a previously neglected source of evidence for discontinuism: the semantics of episodic memory and imagination reports. We argue that, in contrast to imagination reports, episodic memory reports are essentially diachronic, in the sense that their truth requires a foregoing reference-fixing experience. In this respect, they differ from reports of experiential imagination, which is paradigmatically synchronic. To defend our claim about this difference in diachronicity, we study the truth-conditions of episodic memory and imagination reports. We develop a semantics for episodic uses of remember and imagine that captures this difference. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 67-69.

The main thesis of this article is that in Christian Wolff’s Deutsche Metaphysik, empirical sources of knowledge play important if not foundational roles and that inductive methods of reasoning are extensively applied. It is argued that experiential self-awareness plays a foundational role and that empirical evidence, phenomena, and scientific theories from the empirical sciences of Wolff’s time are used for inferential purposes. Wolff also makes use of inductive reasoning, i.e., abduction to hidden causes of empirical phenomena, and inferences to the (...) best or to the only possible explanation. Wolff’s Deutsche Metaphysik is therefore a prefiguration and an interesting case of inductive metaphysics in the contemporary sense. From this contemporary perspective, Wolff draws the distinction between valid and speculative abductions in a different way – but it is also different from that of his more empirically oriented contemporaries. (shrink)

In todays’ super-diverse societies, communication and interaction in clinical encounters are increasingly shaped by linguistic, cultural, social and ethnic complexities. It is crucial to better understand the difficulties patients with migration background and healthcare professionals experience in their shared clinical encounters and to explore ethical aspects involved. We accompanied 32 migrant patients during their medical encounters at two outpatient clinics using an ethnographic approach. Overall, data of 34 interviews with patients and physicians on how they perceived their encounter and which (...) difficulties they experienced are presented. We contrasted the perspectives on the difficult aspects and explore ethical questions surrounding the involved issues. Patients and physicians describe similar problem areas, but they have diverging perspectives on them. Two main themes were identified by both patients and physicians: >patients’ behaviour in relation to doctors’ advice relationship issues<. A deeper understanding of the difficulties and challenges that can arise in cross-cultural settings could be provided by bringing together healthcare professionals’ and patients’ perspectives on how a cross- cultural clinical encounter is perceived. Ethical aspects surrounding some of the difficulties could be highlighted and should get more attention in clinical practice and research. (shrink)

Epistemic trustworthiness depends not only on one’s epistemic but also on moral qualities. Such qualities need to be upheld by scientific communities and institutions as well as by individual scientific experts. While non-experts can often take scientific experts’ epistemic trustworthiness for granted, in some cases they cannot rationally treat it as the default, and they need to be convinced of the experts’ commitment to the well-being of others. This study contributes to philosophical discussions on public trust in science by introducing (...) an impact assessment model. The model helps philosophers understand how scientific experts can build and maintain epistemic trustworthiness in relation to those social groups who have reasons to distrust scientists. (shrink)

This paper inquiries into the complex issue of informed consent applying artificial intelligence in medical diagnostic consultations. The aim is to expose the main ethical and legal concerns of the New Health phenomenon, powered by intelligent machines. To achieve this objective, the first part of the paper analyzes ethical aspects of the alleged right to explanation, privacy, and informed consent, applying artificial intelligence in medical diagnostic consultations. This analysis is followed by a legal analysis of the limits and requirements for (...) the explainability of artificial intelligence. Followed by this analysis, recommendations for action are given in the concluding remarks of the paper. (shrink)

The topic of this study is to what extent standards of rational inquiry can be rationally criticized and revised. It is argued that it is rational to treat all such standards as open to criticism and revision. Arguments to the effect that we are fallible with regard to all standards of rational inquiry are presented. Standards cannot be ultimately justified and with certainty established either as adequate or as inescapable presuppositions. Apel's attempt to give ultimate justifications of certain moral and (...) logical rules is examined and criticized. Special attention is given to our fallibility with regard to logical inference rules. The idea that certain logical rules cannot be put into question because any critical argument presupposes them is criticized. It has been claimed that there must be some basic standards which are such that they cannot be rationally evaluated and hence are rationally unrevisable. This is called "the unrevisability thesis". Related to this thesis is the normative policy according to which rationality requires that some standards be treated as unrevisable, the unrevisability policy. Two arguments that have been used to defend the unrevisability thesis and policy are examined and criticized. The conclusion is that we are not forced to accept either the thesis or the policy. The negation of the unrevisability policy is the revisability policy, according to which it is rational to treat all standards as open to rational criticism and revision. Objections that have been directed against the revisability policy are discussed and criticized. According to the objections, the revisability policy leads to rationality relativism. These objections are refuted, and it is argued that it is, on the contrary, rational to adopt the revisability policy and treat all standards of rational inquiry as criticizable and revisable. It is proposed that the rational change of standards should be viewed as a bootstrap process. General features of a bootstrap view of rational change of standards are presented, and it is argued that it is impossible to formulate a real theory of bootstrapping. Two models of standard change are presented and discussed: Laudan's reticulated model of scientific rationality and Briskman's bootstrap theory. It is claimed that in spite of defects and limitations, these models contribute to a richer understanding of bootstrapping. The fallibility and revisability of standards of rational inquiry have consequences for how the normativity of rationality should be understood. The book ends with an account of how the rationality of cognitive actions is related to the idea of the adequacy of standards. A distinction between absolute and standard-relative rationality is made, and it is argued that what an inquiring agent rationally ought to do coincides with what it is standard-relatively rational for him to do. It is shown that this view of rationality of inquiry is nevertheless inconsistent with rationality relativism, and that it is compatible with an objectivistic view of rationality. (shrink)

In practice, the role of lay members of research ethics committees (RECs) often involves checking the accessibility of written materials, checking that the practical needs of participants have been considered and ensuring that a lay summary of the research will be produced. In this brief report, I argue that all these tasks would be more effectively carried out through a process of patient involvement (PI) in research projects prior to ethical review. Involving patients with direct experience of the topic under (...) investigation brings added value beyond the contributions typically made by lay REC members, who are often not patients themselves. This is because PI tailors the design and conduct of research to the specific interests and concerns of the people who will actually take part in a project and make use of its findings. If a project has PI in its early stages, then a similar input from lay REC members could at best result in duplication of effort and at worst create the potential for conflict. The rationale for lay REC membership will therefore need to change from ‘contributing a patient perspective’ to ‘ensuring transparency and public accountability in REC decisions’. This has implications for addressing more strategic questions about lay REC membership, including who is best recruited to the role and how they should be expected to contribute in practice. (shrink)

The last major work of the giant of the field. Martin P. Nilsson set himself the task of tracing the elements of Greekmythology, as they appear in Homer's Iliad, to their source in Mycenaean culture, a much earlier period. His conclusions, drawn from a very limited empirical material - archaeology, very few relevant Linear B texts - are remarkably compelling.

This research replicates Bhattacharjee et al. :1167–1184, 2013) moral decoupling model and extends the original along the dimensions of theory, method, and context. Adopting a branding perspective and focusing on the corporate domain rather than the public figures investigated by Bhattacharjee and colleagues, this research examines the proposition that consumers dissociate judgments of morality from judgments of performance to justify purchasing from companies deemed to act immorally. The original study is further extended by applying the model in a different cultural (...) context and employing a more realistic stimulus to establish external and ecological validity. The results of the replication generally support the original findings, in particular, under conditions of higher product involvement, a theoretical extension. (shrink)

It is now recognized that relations of trust play an epistemic role in science. The contested issue is under what conditions trust in scientific testimony is warranted. I argue that John Hardwig's view of trustworthy scientific testimony is inadequate because it does not take into account the possibility that credibility does not reliably reflect trustworthiness, and because it does not appreciate the role communities have in guaranteeing the trustworthiness of scientific testimony.

Theodor Adorno has been quoted as responding to the Humanist Union stating ‘I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself “humanist”’. Adorno’s opposition to forms of humanism (both liberal and Marxist) which posit the existence of our humanity is reflected in readings of The Frankfurt Institute’s history such as that produced by Martin Jay. While this is the case, one of Adorno’s highly admired (...) students, Alfred Schmidt, commemorated his teacher by proclaiming him a ‘philosopher of Real Humanism’. In categorising Adorno’s work as embodying a ‘Real Humanism’, Schmidt points towards an understanding and orientation towards the human (and our understanding of it) which cannot be accurately characterised through the philosophies of Humanism and Anti-Humanism as oppositional viewpoints. Rather, the Real Humanism of Adorno (as well as some of his fellow travellers) understands the human as the negative image of our currently existing society’s inhumanity, and urges us to take an ethical orientation towards the constitution of the human through the abolition of our inhumanity. If we, like Adorno, are to believe in the new categorical imperative that we must make sure ‘that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen[s] again’, then we must fundamentally orient ourselves towards the goal of ‘real humanism’ – a society free from the domination of ourselves and the other. (shrink)

It is a widely accepted assumption within the philosophy of mind and psychology that our ability for complex social interaction is based on the mastery of a common folk psychology, that is to say that social cognition consists in reasoning about the mental states of others in order to predict and explain their behavior. This, in turn, requires the possession of mental-state concepts, such as the concepts belief and desire. In recent years, this standard conception of social cognition has been (...) called into question by proponents of so-called ‘direct-perception’ approaches to social cognition and by those who argue that the ‘received view’ implies a degree of computational complexity that is implausible. In response, it has been argued that these attacks on the classical view of social cognition have no bite at the subpersonal level of explanation, and that it is the latter which is at issue in the debate in question. In this paper, I critically examine this response by considering in more detail the distinction between personal and subpersonal level explanations. There are two main ways in which the distinction has been developed. I will argue that on either of these, the response proposed by defenders of the received view is unconvincing. This shows that the dispute between the standard conception and alternative approaches to mindreading is a dispute concerning personal-level explanations - what is at stake in the debate between proponents of the classical view of social cognition and their critics is how we, as persons, navigate our social world. I will conclude by proposing a pluralistic approach to social cognition, which is better able to do justice to the multi-faceted nature of our social interactions as well as being able to account for recent empirical findings regarding the social cognitive abilities of young infants. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall present the theoretical view on the reliability democracy as presented in Prijić Samaržija’s book Democracy and Truth, and examine its validity through the case of the division of epistemic labour in the process of deliberation on autism treatment policies. It may appear that because of their strong demands, namely, the demand for rejection of medical authority and for exclusive expertise on autism, autistic individuals gathered around the neurodiversity movement present a threat to the reliability democracy.

Fenomenológia ducha, zdôrazňuje Heidegger, je prvou časťou Hegelom plánovaného systému vied. Jej podtitul znie: Veda o skúsenosti vedomia. Tou vedou (Wissenschaft) bude filozofia, chápaná ako veda o skúsenosti vedomia, teda o skúsenosti, ktorú má vedomie seba samého. Filozofii, podľa Hegela, ide o absolútne poznanie, teda o poznanie v najvšeobecnejšom zmysle slova. Možno teda tvrdiť, že kým Hegelovi išlo vo Fenomenológii ducha o vzťah človeka, poznávajúceho subjektu, schopného sebauvedomenia, k absolútnu, tak Heideggerovi v jeho interpretácii Hegelovej Fenomenológie ducha išlo predovšetkým o (...) absolútno samé, teda o bytie, ako ho chápal. Pre Heideggera nie je problematika obsiahnutá vo Fenomenológii ducha ničím iným ako artikuláciou protikladu: nekonečnosť bytia verzus konečnosť jestvujúcna. (shrink)

In this paper I propose to do the following: I will discuss the notions of intentionality and self-understanding of Dasein as developed in Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology. In doing so, I will try to show the interrelation of Dasein's always being intentionally directed towards something and its self-interpretation. As we will see, the everyday world has, for Heidegger, a character of "equipmental contexture." This means that Dasein returns to itself from out of things, equipment, tools, or - quite differently (...) - the work of art. In a word, Dasein is mirrored back toward itself from the things made, from the products of techne. From this will follow the important distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity. There is a sense in which the following pairings could be discerned: tools or pieces of equipment link up with inauthenticity, while the work of art links up with authenticity. I will say more on the subject of tools a bit later in the essay. Both kinds of things are things insofar as they are entrenched in techne. The common root seems almost inexplicable in the light of the vast difference between tools and the artwork. Moreover, both Dasein and techne seem to have another equally enigmatic common root: that of temporality. Temporality is the essential bond between Dasein and the double sense of techne, which suggests the double-sidedness of temporality itself. It is precisely this doublesidedness that I would like to have as the backdrop to my discussion as a whole. Finally, I will turn to a few pages of Heidegger's Being and Time and Bernard Stiegler's book Technics and Time I in order to complicate this notion of the two senses of temporality, the owned and disowned, originary and everyday, and its relation to work and techne. The overarching question here will be: Can the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity be sustained? (shrink)

La conscience de soi a-t-elle été méconnue des hommes du Haut Moyen Âge? Se restreignant à l’époque de Charlemagne et parcourant les diverses sources théologiques – les commentaires exégétiques, les traités anti-adoptianistes, l’œuvre rédigée afin de réfuter l’adoration des icônes instaurée par le concile de Nicée II, les traités sur les vices et les vertus – la recherche permet de mieux percer la relation dialectique entre natura et persona ou encore entre commun et individuel et de détecter quelques modèles de (...) la perception de soi. Le « souci de soi » carolingien met en œuvre une stratégie : comment, en évitant la corruption de soi par les vices, on parvient à la perfection de la persona aux temps eschatologiques. (shrink)

In this article we use proportional hazards models to examine how low-level processes affect the probability of making a saccade over time, through the period of fixation, during reading. We apply the Cox proportional hazards model to investigate how launch distance (relative to word beginning), fixation location (relative to word center), and word frequency affect the hazard of a saccadic response. This model requires that covariates have a constant impact on the hazard over time, the assumption of proportional hazards. We (...) show that this assumption is not supported. The impact of the covariates changes with the time passed since fixation onset. To account for the non-proportional hazards we fit step functions of time, resulting in a model with time-varying effects on the hazard. We evaluate the ability to predict the timing of saccades on held-out fixation data. The model with time-varying effects performs better in predicting the timing of saccades for fixations as short as 100 ms and as long as 500 ms, when compared both to a baseline model without covariates and a model which assumes constant covariate effects. This result suggests that the time-varying effects model better recovers the time course of low-level processes that influence the decision to move the eyes. (shrink)

The article addresses the production of reproducibility as a topic that has become acutely relevant in the recent discussions on the replication crisis in science. It brings the ethnomethodological stance on reproducibility into the discussions, claiming that reproducibility is necessarily produced locally, on the shop floor, with methodological guidelines serving as references to already established practices rather than their origins. The article refers to this argument empirically, analyzing how a group of novice neuroscientists performs a series of measurements in a (...) transcranial magnetic stimulation experiment. Based on ethnography and video analysis, the article traces a history of the local measurement procedure invented by the researchers in order to overcome the experimental uncertainty. The article aims to demonstrate how reproducibility of the local procedure is achieved in the shop floor work of the practitioners and how the procedure becomes normalized and questioned as incorrect in the course of experimental practice. It concludes that the difference between guidelines and practical actions is not problematic per se; what may be problematic is that researchers can be engaged in different working projects described by the same instruction. (shrink)

The fashion industry needs to become more circular, given the unsustainable levels of waste it produces. Our research empirically explores and theoretically develops how adopting a virtue ethics approach can encourage and support second-hand clothing consumption as a form of reuse and a way of practicing sustainability. Based on ethnographic interviews with consumers who shop in UK charity shops, our grounded theory study focuses on how consumers experience second-hand clothing consumption as constitutive of sources of (in)action that encourage or inhibit (...) virtuous, sustainable behaviour. We find that pleasure and/or shame or guilt (pain) are key to enabling virtuous moral decision-making towards reuse and sustainability. We furthermore argue that seduction and conversion, hand in hand with pleasure, act as levers supporting such moral decision-making, mitigating aversions and wayward desires that obstruct good moral intentions to consume second-hand clothing. By engaging empirically with moral decision-making, our research theoretically advances scholarship on virtue ethics and second-hand clothing consumption, whilst contributing to an ethically informed vision of the circular economy. We conclude with implications for charity retail practices in support of circularity and sustainability informed by a virtue ethics perspective, as well as suggestions for future research. (shrink)

This article addresses the growing industry of retail socially responsible investment (SRI) profiled mutual funds. Very few previous studies have examined the final consumer of SRI profiled mutual funds. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to, in an exploratory manner, examine the impact of a number of pro-social, financial performance, and socio-demographic variables on SRI behavior in order to explain why investors choose to invest different proportions of their investment portfolio in SRI profiled funds. An ordinal logistic regression analysis (...) on 528 private investors revealed that two of the three pro-social variables had a positive impact on how much the consumer invested in SRI profiled funds. Moreover, there was proof of a non-altruistic motive for investing in SRI as consumers who perceive that financial return of SRI is equal or better than "regular" mutual funds, invested a greater proportion of their portfolio in SRI profiled mutual funds. Furthermore, the results showed that women and better-educated investors were more likely to invest a greater proportion of their investment portfolio in SRI. Overall, the findings indicate that both financial perceptions and pro-social attitudes are connected to consumer investment in SRI. (shrink)

Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their classical discussion by Ernest Nagel, such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. This paper presents a case study of a new type of intertheoretic relation that is inspired by Montague’s analysis of the linguistic syntax-semantics relation. The paper develops a simple model of this relation. To motivate the adoption of our new model, we show that this model (...) extends the scope of application of the Nagelian models and that it shares the epistemological advantages of the Nagelian model. The latter is achieved in a Bayesian framework. (shrink)

I argue that in epistemically well-designed scientific communities, scientists are united by mutual epistemic responsibilities, and epistemic responsibilities are understood not merely as epistemic but also as moral duties. Epistemic responsibilities can be understood as moral duties because they contribute to the well-being of other human beings by showing respect for them, especially in their capacity as knowers. A moral account of epistemically responsible behaviour is needed to supplement accounts that appeal to scientists’ self-interests or personal epistemic goals. This is (...) because neither the self-interest nor the epistemic account can always explain why it is rational for an individual scientist to be epistemically responsible. (shrink)

How do people evaluate causal relationships? Do they just consider what actually happened, or do they also consider what could have counterfactually happened? Using eye tracking and Gaussian process modeling, we investigated how people mentally simulated past events to judge what caused the outcomes to occur. Participants played a virtual ball‐shooting game and then—while looking at a blank screen—mentally simulated (a) what actually happened, (b) what counterfactually could have happened, or (c) what caused the outcome to happen. Our findings showed (...) that participants moved their eyes in patterns consistent with the actual or counterfactual events that they mentally simulated. When simulating what caused the outcome to occur, participants moved their eyes consistent with simulations of counterfactual possibilities. These results favor counterfactual theories of causal reasoning, demonstrate how eye movements can reflect simulation during this reasoning and provide a novel approach for investigating retrospective causal reasoning and counterfactual thinking. (shrink)