Robert F. Schopp, Justification Defenses and Just Convictions Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. x + 212 pp.

Figuring prominently in their decisions regarding which theories to pursue are scientists' appeals to the promise or lack of promise of those theories. Yet philosophy of science has had little to say about how one is to assess theory promise. This essay identifies several indices that might be consulted to determine whether or not a theory is promising and worthy of pursuit. Various historical examples of appeals to such indices are introduced.

I argue that, in experiencing a recalcitrant emotion, one does not violate a rational requirement of any sort. Rational requirements, as the expression has come to be used, are requirements of coherence. Accordingly, my argument is that there is nothing incoherent in any way about experiencing a recalcitrant emotion. One becomes incoherent only if one allows the emotion to influence one's reasoning and/or action, in which case one violates the ‘consistency principle’ and/or the ‘enkratic principle’. From the standpoint of rationality, (...) it would even be counterproductive to put subjects under the obligation that their emotional experiences and their evaluative judgements must always fit together. When we nevertheless intuitively sense that the subject is irrational in experiencing a recalcitrant emotion this is in cases in which the emotion challenges the subject's agential identity. However, emotions can, but need not, challenge one's agential identity, and, furthermore, perceptions can do so as well. In any case, challenges of this kind do not involve the violation of a rational requirement. (shrink)

This article explores and compares cross-gender interactions of first and third graders in one child care center. Three prevalent forms of interaction are discussed: teasing, disputing, and playing. The author argues that these three forms of interaction are related to the use of space: Teasing often occurs when space is constricted, disputing is often the result of invaded space, and playing requires shared space and varying levels of cooperation. By focusing on the relationship between space and interaction, important power asymmetries (...) appear. Since boys are more likely to initiate invasions and more likely to determine the rules and terms of the play, they maintain a greater amount of power and control. (shrink)

Graeme Laurie stepped down from the Chair in Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. This edited collection pays tribute to his extraordinary contributions to the field. Graeme has often spoken about the importance of 'legacy' in academic work and has forged a remarkable intellectual legacy of his own, notably through his work on genetic privacy, human tissue and information governance, and on the regulatory salience of the concept of liminality. The essays in this volume animate the (...) concept of legacy as lens of analysis for the study and practice of medical jurisprudence. In this light, legacy reveals characteristics of both benefit and burden, as both an encumbrance to and facilitator of the development of law, policy and regulation. Overall, the contributions reconcile the ideas of legacy and responsiveness and show that both dimensions are critical to achieve and sustain the health of medical jurisprudence itself as a dynamic, interdisciplinary and policy-engaged field of thinking. (shrink)

If we maintain that free will requires the absence of determinism, Then can we claim to be free without any wants? if we had no wants at all, What sense would there to be talk about free will? the difference between free will and the absence of free will is not that between indeterminism and determinism. Free choice presupposes determinism in that in order to make a choice an individual must have some motive or reason for so doing. The difference (...) is found within determinism, Among the different kinds of motives that can influence an individual to make a choice. Furthermore, If I already possess the motive to change or eliminate undesirable motives then I increase my opportunity to realize more desires and thus increase freedom of choice, Even though my motive to change or eliminate undesirable motives is already predetermined. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the New Genetics raises complex social problems, particularly those of privacy. This book offers ethical and legal perspectives on the questions of a right to know and not to know genetic information from the standpoint of individuals, their relatives, employers, insurers and the state. Graeme Laurie provides a unique definition of privacy, including a concept of property rights in the person, and argues for stronger legal protection of privacy in the shadow of developments in human genetics. (...) He challenges the role and the limits of established principles in medical law and ethics, including respect for patient autonomy and confidentiality. This book will interest lawyers, philosophers and doctors concerned both with genetic information and issues of privacy; it will also interest genetic counsellors, researchers, and policy makers worldwide for its practical stance on dilemmas in modern genetic medicine. (shrink)

This article represents an attempt to organize, critique, and extend research findings on gender differences in business ethics. The focus is on two dependent variables—ethical judgment and behavioral intent. Differences in findings between student and professional groups are noted and theoretical implications are discussed. The new research provided for this article contains two benchmark studies undertaken with identical stimuli and identical measures. These studies were followed by two additional studies, using the same measures but different stimuli, as a partial replication (...) and extension of the first two. Findings suggest that little difference exists between the genders on behavioral intent for professional groups and only minimal differences for the ethical judgment measures. Student results, however, produced more substantial differences for behavioral intention. (shrink)

How should we make choices when we know so little about our futures? L. A. Paul argues that we must view life decisions as choices to make discoveries about the nature of experience. Her account of transformative experience holds that part of the value of living authentically is to experience our lives and preferences in whatever ways they evolve.

Across three studies, the authors examine the interactive effects of moral identity and the negative reciprocity norm in predicting revenge. The general argument is that moral identity provides the motivational impetus for individuals’ responses, whereas the normative framework that people adopt as a basis for guiding moral action influences the direction of the response. Results indicated that moral identity and the negative reciprocity norm significantly interacted to predict revenge. More specifically, the symbolization dimension of moral identity interacted with the negative (...) reciprocity norm to predict revenge when individuals were the targets of mistreatment, whereas the internalization dimension of moral identity interacted with the negative reciprocity norm to predict revenge when individuals were the observers of mistreatment. Theoretical implications related to the differences between the symbolization and internalization dimensions of moral identity, the importance of examining normative frameworks, and the functionality of revenge are discussed. (shrink)

The following paper is based on a broad understanding of communication that considers as text basically anything that has been created within the framework of a cultural interaction by an author and that is perceived by a recipient. The first part of the paper introduces, explains and follows mostly cases in which the author’s violations of the recipient’s expectations have a communication value, i.e. provoke, in the recipient, a communication effect that matches the author’s intentions. In such cases, this effect (...) results as a consequence of an violation of the communication „cooperative“ principles. This, at the recipient’s end, translates into an event of expectancy violation. Each of such violations provokes an arousal in the recipient, which further motivates him/her to search for its cause. Finding this cause, and being “confronted” with the related violation pertaining to it with the norm equals, for the recipient, getting to the meaning of the text, or identifying its communication value etc. As part of the conclusion, a commented scheme is presented which offers a spectrum of possible communication outcomes “positioned” between the predictability of each textual element and the stochasticity of choice. The effort to illustrate all the explained facts results, in the paper, in a rich set of examples stemming from miscellaneous spheres of human activity – from “high styles” to rather day-to-day activities, to pop-culture. The objective is to show that the described principles, if not valid in general, permeate at least all forms of interaction. (shrink)

Recipients always perceive texts in a successive and linear way. Often, the recipient’s perception of the text only lasts until the text has fulfilled the expectations the recipient has of it. Being well aware of this, authors build texts based on their goals, aims, or preferences that either meaningfully fulfill the expectations of the recipient - according to the authors’ own knowledge, estimation, or presumptions - or, on the contrary, more or less intentionally violate these expectations. While the fulfillment of (...) expectations results in a certain “comforting” impression on recipients, its violation causes an arousal in them. In this sense, violation of expectations does not only have a negative effect, but it can also have a communicative value. It can be argued that a) the author incorporates stimuli into the text that lead to the violation of the recipient’s expectations and does so with a communicatively functional - also artistic and aesthetic - kind of intent and b) an arousal is a consequence of violating the recipient’s expectations; then if an author’s artistic or aesthetic intention lies in a series of violations of the recipient’s expectations, this can provoke an aesthetic experience which will be caused - among other things - by the arousals themselves induced by the relevant violations. (shrink)

To practice medicine and ethics, physicians need wisdom and integrity to integrate scientific knowledge, patient preferences, their own moral commitments, and society's expectations. This work of integration requires a physician to pursue certain goals of care, determine moral priorities, and understand that conscience or integrity require harmony among a person's beliefs, values, reasoning, actions, and identity. But the moral and religious pluralism of contemporary society makes this integration challenging and uncertain. How physicians treat patients will depend on the particular beliefs (...) and values they and other health professionals bring to each instance of shared decision making. This book offers a framework for practical wisdom in medicine that addresses the need for integrity in the life of each health professional. In doing so, it acknowledges the challenge of moral pluralism and the need for moral dialogue and humility as professionals fulfil their obligations to patients, themselves, and society. (shrink)

Rosenberg was a chronicler and a good one, yet much of his inner dialogue was not with the present so much as the omnipresent artistic past. The central question, posed early in his life, concerned a man's individuality. Dostoyevsky had called it his "dearest" possession. At no time, even in his Marxist youth, did Rosenberg relinquish his vision of the individual as the central, most important player in any drama. Rosenberg was positively possessed with Dostoyevsky's doubts. One can hear the (...) rant of the man from the underground repeatedly in Rosenberg's written works—the stubborn hero who maintains the right even to be absurd and to "desire for himself what is positively harmful and stupid" if he claims it as a right. The right of the individual to live up to man's nature which, as Dostoyevsky said, "acts as one whole, with everything in it, conscious or unconscious" was Rosenberg's most consistent ideal. The individual he most admired, both in himself and in others, was the artist. But only in spite of everything. No one was more alert to the tartufferie that bedevils the world of the artist. Rosenberg craved sincerity with the same kind of passion for it he had found in Dostoyevsky. Art and artifact would not be a substitute for ethics and hard thought. Rosenberg's deepest conviction is revealed in his 1960 essay, "Literary Form and Social Hallucination," which begins with Dostoyevsky complaining about literature that does not lead to truth. Dore Ashton, professor of art history at The Cooper Union, is the author of numerous works, includingArt Before Columbus, Poets and the Past, A Reading Of Modern Art, and, most recently, A Fable of Modern Art. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "No More than an Accident?" appeared in the Winter 1976 issue. (shrink)

In the real world, there can be constraints on rational decision-making: there can be limitations on what I can know and on what you can know. There can also be constraints on my ability to deliberate or on your ability to deliberate. It is useful to know what the norms of rational deliberation should be in ideal contexts, for fully informed agents, in an ideal world. But it is also useful to know what the norms of rational deliberation should be (...) in the actual world, in non-ideal contexts, for imperfectly informed agents, especially for big, life-changing decisions. That is, we want to know how to deliberate as best we can, given the real-world limitations on what we can know, and given real-world limitations on how we are able to deliberate. In this paper, our concern is with the norms of rational deliberation in certain, important, non-ideal contexts, where the reasoning occurs from the agent’s first person, subjective point of view. The norms governing the process of deliberation for real people in the sorts of non-ideal contexts we’ll consider need to reflect the way that real agents, with an incomplete grasp on the facts and an imperfect ability to deliberate, can be expected to proceed. Our central contention is that framing and exploring the deliberative process from the first person perspective allows us to uncover and explore important, real-world constraints on boundedly rational agents deliberating from the subjective perspective. (shrink)

Phenomenal character is the what-it's-likeness of subjective experience. I develop an ontology of phenomenal feel as process. My being in some phenomenal state R is the process of my instantiating R’s neurological correlate. The ontology explains why we have asymmetric epistemic access to phenomenal characters: the ontological ground for the subjective or first-personal stance is different from the ontological ground for the objective or third-personal stance. I end by situating my account in debates about physicalism.

This paper contains a formal treatment of the system of quantified epistemic logic sketched in Appendix II of Carlson (1983). Section 1 defines the syntax and recapitulates the model set rules and principles of the Appendix system. Section 2 defines a possible worlds semantics for this system, and shows that the Appendix system is complete with respect to this semantics. Section 3 extends the system by an explicit truth operatorT it is true that and considers quantification over nonexistent individuals. Section (...) 4 formalizes the idea of variable identity criteria typical of Hintikkian epistemic logic. (shrink)

We examine the processes involved in the escalation of a plant closure from a local concern to a perceived organizational moral failure that commands national attention. Our empirical case covers the controversy over the decision of telecommunications giant Nokia to close a plant in Germany, despite having received significant state subsidies, and the relocation of production to Hungary and Romania. We conducted an inductive study that utilizes a semiotic analysis to identify how various actors framed the controversial plant closure and (...) sought to cast it as moral failure. Our analysis uncovered two distinctive moral framings of the plant closure and revealed how key actors used evocative labels to frame these events in moral terms. These moral framings drew in additional stakeholders, generated more widespread media coverage, and turned the case into an organizational moral failure in the eyes of the national public. We contribute to the literature on organizational moral failure by theorizing its escalating process and elaborating why and how local events may become moral issues of interest to broader stakeholder groups. (shrink)

W. Labov's & T. Labov's findings concerning their child grammar acquisition ("Learning the Syntax of Questions" in Recent Advances in the Psychology of Language, Campbell, R. & Smith, P. Eds, New York: Plenum Press, 1978) are interpreted in terms of different semantics of why & other wh-questions. Z. Dubiel.

This descriptive qualitative study examined how the Storypath (also known as Storyline) approach to teaching social studies involves elementary school students in action civics (authentic civic activities, self-chosen issues, ongoing reflection, decisions valued). Storypath, a project-based approach, utilizes the story structure to frame learning through an inquiry process whereby students consider an overarching question about a topic, create a relevant setting, become characters in the setting, and engage in the plot of the story (critical incidents). This Storypath engaged a class (...) of ethnically and culturally diverse fifth graders in creating a music company (setting) dedicated to producing songs for social change. As company employees (characters), students researched issues they chose (affirming their agency in the learning process), then created songs and music videos for social impact. The arts (songs and videos) and technology (digital media) became integral to students’ efforts as they created and recorded music to share with the world. Students responded to Padlet and worksheet prompts, wrote song lyrics, and recorded music videos which all were analyzed to address this research question: What did authentic civic advocacy through creating music within the Storypath approach reveal about elementary students’ civic disciplinary knowledge, thinking, and skills? Findings revealed two overarching types of thinking: civic and political. Evidence indicates that civic thinking was justice-oriented for social well-being while political thinking was influence-oriented for strategic impact. This suggests that the Storypath implemented in this study can engage elementary school students in authentic civic advocacy within the classroom to cultivate civic and political thinking for meaningful participation in democratic life beyond the classroom. (shrink)

Examines changes in the women's movement in the twenty years following women's suffrage, and describes the complex issues of that period.

Wenn es in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts so etwas wie die "arme Verwandtschaft" unter den philosophischen Themen gab, so waren das die Gefühle. Zwar hatten sich Klassiker wie Platon, Aristoteles, Spinoza, Descartes und Hume eingehend mit ihnen befaßt, aber seit Kant, der sie als "Gegner der Vernunft" abtat, wurde den Gefühlen in der Philosophie nur noch wenig Beachtung geschenkt. Erst seit den 1960er Jahren rückten sie wieder in den Fokus des Interesses, und zwar aufgrund der Einsicht, daß Gefühle (...) kognitive mentale Zustände sind, die dazu dienen können, andere Zustände und Handlungen rational zu machen. Strittig ist indes, von welcher Art emotionale Kognitionen sind. Der Band versammelt in historisch-systematischen Einzelstudien die wichtigsten Positionen in der Philosophie der Gefühle und eignet sich gleichermaßen als umfassende Einführung in die Thematik wie auch als Seminarvorlage. (shrink)

Many theodicists have maintained that God is justified in permitting suffering on the ground that His doing so is a necessary condition of the realization of certain intrinsically valuable ends which the suffering serves and whose value outweighs the suffering which occasions them. Examples of ends which are frequently cited in this connection are freely chosen actions in accordance with stringent obligations to be charitable and steadfast. To say that the value of these ends outweighs the suffering which gives rise (...) to them is to say that the existence both of these ends and of suffering is better than the non-existence of both. (shrink)

Many models of word recognition assume that processing proceeds sequentially from analysis of form to analysis of meaning. In the context of morphological processing, this implies that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings. Some interpret the apparent absence of differences in recognition latencies to targets (SNEAK) in form and semantically similar (sneaky-SNEAK) and in form similar and semantically dissimilar (sneaker-SNEAK) prime contexts at an SOA of 48 ms as consistent with this claim. (...) To determine the time course over which degree of semantic similarity between morphologically structured primes and their targets influences recognition in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared facilitation for the same targets after semantically similar and dissimilar primes across a range of SOAs. The effect of shared semantics on recognition latency increased linearly with SOA when long SOAs were intermixed (Exp. 1) and latencies were significantly faster after semantically similar than dissimilar primes at homogeneous SOAs of 48 ms (Exp. 2) and 34 ms (Exp. 3). Results limit the scope of form-then-semantics models of recognition and demonstrate that semantics influences even the very early stages of recognition. Finally, once general behavior across trials has been accounted for, we fail to provide evidence for individual differences in morphological processing that can be linked to measures of reading proficiency. (shrink)

Two librettos are examined, one of them baroque and the other contemporary, in which the character Socrates plays the major role. The libretto La patienza di Socrate con due moglie, written by N. Minato for A. Draghi (1680) and later reelaborated by G.P. Telemann for his opera Der geduldige Sokrates (1721), is based on an imaginary anecdote that dates back to antiquity, according to which Socrates was married to two wives, Xanthippa and Myrto. In the libretto written by E. Krenek (...) for his opera Pallas Athene weint (first production 1955), the end of the Peloponnesian War is transformed into a mirror of the fascist dictatorship of Adolf Hitler and of the time of cold war. At the center of the action is Socrates, fighting in vain against tyranny and lack of political freedom, and at the end he will be a victim of this struggle. (shrink)

This article analyses the representational stakes of queer of colour performance, by taking the case study of the Cocoa Butter Club: queer of colour cabaret night in London. Within a British landscape that has silenced queer subjectivities of colour at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, I explore the potential of QPOC performance to redress historical erasure. To enact their presence, I argue that the Cocoa Butter Club’s performers showcase their collective disidentification from the scripts pre-assigned to their bodies (...) within the European imagination. By doing so, they disrupt hegemonic representations of queerness and racialised otherness, making room for a multitude of queer of colour becomings kept otherwise invisible from public view. Such disidentifications unleash ‘ghosts’ into the public space, spectres of elided subjectivities and unresolved coloniality within a city that likes to think of itself as a post-racial LGBT haven. Drawing on ethnographic material and interviews with performers, I analyse what happens when such queer of colour hauntings reach the audience’s gaze. I consider their unsettling effects in relation to the white gaze, as well as their empowering function in relation to desiring QPOC subjects, seeking reflections of themselves in spectatorship. (shrink)