We introduce a novel mechanism to eliminate endgame effects in repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiments. In the main phase of a supergame our mechanism generates more persistent cooperation than finite horizon or random continuation rules. Moreover, we find evidence for cooperation-enhancing “active/reactive” strategies which concentrate in the initial phase of a supergame as subjects gain experience.

There is remarkable variety in emotional life. Not all mental states referred to by the same word (e.g., “fear”) look alike, feel alike, or have the same neurophysiological signature. Variability has been observed within individuals over time, across individuals from the same culture, and of course across cultures. In this paper, I outline an approach to understanding the richness and diversity of emotional life. This model, called the conceptual act model, is not only well suited to explaining individual differences in (...) the frequency and quality of emotion, but it also suggests the counter-intuitive view that the variety in emotional life extends past the boundaries of events that are conventionally called “emotion” to other classes of psychological events that people call by different names, such as “cognitions”. As a result, the conceptual act model is a unifying account of the broad variety of mental states that constitute the human mind. (shrink)

In this accessible yet throught-provoking work, Lisa Tessman takes us through gripping examples of the impossible demands of morality -- some epic, and others quotidian -- whose central predicament is: How do we make decisions when morality demands we do something that we cannot?

This paper questions the prevailing historical understanding that scientific racism "retreated" in the 1950s when anthropology adopted the concepts and methods of population genetics and race was recognized to be a social construct and replaced by the concept of population. More accurately, a "populational" concept of race was substituted for a "typological one"-this is demonstrated by looking at the work of Theodosius Dobzhansky circa 1950. The potential for contemporary research in human population genetics to contribute to racism needs to be (...) considered with respect to the ability of the typological-population distinction to arbitrate boundaries between racist society and nonracist, even anti-racist, science. I point out some ethical limits of "population thinking" in doing so. (shrink)

Although they produced vastly more turmoil, the uprisings in the Arab world shared many characteristics with other early 21st-century popular protests on both the left and the right, from Spain’s Indignados and Occupy Wall Street to the anti-elite votes for Brexit and Trump. The conviction that political elites and the states they rule, which were once responsible for welfare and development, now ignore and demean the interests and concerns of ordinary citizens takes many forms, but is virtually universal. The Arab (...) world was only one site of this discontent, but the story of the Arab Spring insurrections provides a cautionary illustration of the perils in abdication of political authority and accountability and provokes questions about how we understand historical moments when passions outstrip interests. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to elaborate two concerns: those of maternal ethics, and notions of making things public. I attempt to bring these two concerns together and think them alongside one another, in hopefully productive ways. I want, in other words, to think about the ethics of what mothers ‘make public’, whether this is understood in its most rudimentary form, of enabling a child to express something, to make public an affective state, for instance, even if it is only (...) the mother who is there to witness or receive it, through to more overt and material forms of ‘publication’ glimpsed when mothers parent in spaces we call ‘public’. This paper focuses on what happens to us all when we encounter ‘mothering’ – not in the enclosed, private, secluded spaces where we imagine mothering to take place, but in what Marc Augé has termed the ‘non-places of supermodernity’, where much of the day-to-day material practices of mothering in Western late-modern urban contexts actually occurs. As is often the case, it is when experience is dislodged from the contexts in which we expect to find it that its contours are shown up in relief, and we are called on to re-configure our understandings of experiences in ways that also shift our understandings of the contexts in which they occur. In this sense, mothering, that I am claiming ‘makes things public’, as well as occurring frequently and importantly ‘in public’, not only shows up something we may overlook about the maternal, but also deforms and reforms our understandings of ‘the public’ itself. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of emotional and affectively toned discourse in biomedical engineering researchers’ accounts of their problem solving practices. Drawing from our interviews with scientists in two laboratories, we examine three classes of expression: explicit, figurative and metaphorical, and attributions of emotion to objects and artifacts important to laboratory practice. We consider the overall function of expressions in the particular problem solving contexts described. We argue that affective processes are engaged in problem solving, not as simply tacked onto (...) reasoning but as integral to it. The examples we present illustrate the close relation of emotion to problem solving and experimentation; they also implicate social and cultural dimensions of emotion expression. The analysis underscores a need to consider emotional expression to be intimately and importantly tied to the cognitive achievements and social negotiations of laboratory practices. (shrink)

In this Article I argue that the emerging public/private nexus of surveillance involves the augmentation of state power and calls for new models of constitutional constraint. The key phenomenon is the role played by communications intermediaries in collecting the information that the state subsequently accesses. These intermediaries are not just powerful companies engaged in collecting and analyzing the information of users and the information they hold are not just business records. The key feature of these companies is that, through their (...) information practices and architecture, they mediate other relationships. I argue that this mediating function, and its underlying technological form, interacts with legal and social norms in ways that can lead to the erosion of constraints on state power. This Article maps two stories of erosion, rooted in two kinds of community displacement. The first involves the displacement of community participation in law enforcement and the emergence of “technological tattletales” where intermediaries cooperate with the state. Unlike citizen cooperation, this practice augments state power and undermines more traditional informal modes of constraint on state power. The second involves the displacement of national legal and political community. Communications intermediaries are often large multinational companies that operate in multiple jurisdictions and move their data to various datacenters across the world even as the individual data subject remains in one geographical location. Laws that treat nonresident aliens differently from residents and citizens can create “constitutional black holes” where the communications data of an individual is not protected by any constitutional constraints. (shrink)

This paper illustrates a role that bioethics should play in developing and criticizing protocols for breast cancer genetic screening. It demonstrates how a critical bioethics, using approaches and reflecting concerns of contemporary philosophy of science and science studies, may critically interrogate the normative and conceptual schemes within which ethical considerations about such screening protocols are framed. By exploring various factors that influence the development of such protocols, including politics, cultural norms, and conceptions of disease, this paper and the critical bioethics' (...) approach it endorses illuminate and critically assess some of the competing worldviews informing protocol development. One of the frequently neglected worldviews in traditional bioethics' treatment of protocols concerning breast care is constituted by women's own views of their breasts and breast cancer, both within the technologically-oriented social practice of American medicine and in light of the social construction of their breasted experience in American society. This paper attempts to redress and critically assess this neglect on the part of traditional bioethics. Finally, in contrast to traditional bioethics, critical bioethics critically interrogates its own normative and conceptual commitments. In this final capacity, a critical bioethics' approach makes a valuable contribution to the evolution of bioethics. (shrink)

Recent literature has suggested that generics can harbor and propagate worrying ideologies in a manner which is often not appreciated by speakers. In this article, I argue that the use of generics to convey information about mental illness is unhelpful, whether the knowledge structure conveyed by the generic is 'accurate' or not. Inaccurate generics contribute to insidious forms of social stereotyping and stigma by encouraging us to simplistically generalize characteristics found in very few category members to other members of that (...) kind.Yet, even where the knowledge structure underlying the generic is accurate, generics remain an unhelpful way of talking about mental illness. This is because... (shrink)

Although the category “race” fails as a postulated natural kind, racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, and other group designations might nonetheless be considered projectible insofar as they support inductive inferences in biomedicine. This article investigates what it might mean for group concepts in population genetics and genomics to be projectible and whether the projectibility of such predicates licenses the representation of their corresponding classes as natural kinds according to currently prevailing projectibility-based accounts of natural kinds. The article draws on a (...) case study from cancer genetics, specifically, breast cancer risk in Ashkenazi Jewish women. (shrink)

We describe our efforts to address theoretical opportunities and methodological challenges that arose in the context of our ethnographic investigation of research labs in four different fields of bioengineering science. The multiyear study compared the common and specific features of four sites of interdisciplinary practice and aimed to analyze personal and collective goals, problem formulations, methods, technologies, and social organization within each lab. In the second phase of the study we sought to inform curriculum development for biomedical engineering from the (...) ethnographic study, with the broader goal of positioning students to engage in the kind of thinking scientists actually do. Evaluating thinking in action posed considerable challenges, and required us to develop an approach to assessing the extent to which students enrolled in the new course were “thinking like a biomedical engineer.” Our principal point of emphasis for this chapter is that honest confrontation of the challenges of ethnographic study of science practice must lead to caution, yet that ethnographic study of science enables innovative adaptations of methods and can yield vital insights into psychological dimensions of science, including interdisciplinary science. (shrink)

Over the past decade, Convergence Research has increasingly gained prominence as a research, development, and innovation (RDI) strategy to address grand societal challenges. However, a dearth of research-based evidence is available to aid researchers, research teams, and institutions with navigating the complexities attendant to the specifics of Convergence Research. This paper presents a multilevel research agenda that accounts for an integral understanding of Convergence Research as a complex adaptive system. Furthermore, by developing a framework that accounts for ancillary, yet essential, (...) systems associated with Convergence Research, we enrich the agenda with a literature-steeped discussion that considers how systems-based practices of collaboration, inquiry, and context interact with the processes and products of Convergence Research. Finally, we synthesize and apply insights from the reviewed literature by providing paths for empirical exploration emphasizing systems-based practices. In so doing, we delineate an extended boundary for a research stream that both clarifies and enlarges our understanding of Convergence Research as a ‘system-of-systems’. (shrink)

Expanded edition with new chapters and updates to the translation and bibliography. Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life’s work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for the (...) very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness—through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences—of a certain index of universality. This edition includes a new introduction by the author and three entirely new chapters, as well as updated images and corrections to the original translation. Lisa Block de Behar is Professor of Communications at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay and is a renowned Jorge Luis Borges scholar. William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books, including In Defense of Religious Moderation. Christopher RayAlexander is a graduate student and language instructor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. (shrink)

The binary categories of harm and benefit have often shaped how historians frame discussions of insects. Scientists also leverage the binary framing of insects as tools and targets to carry out their work, especially in the development of biological technologies for pest control. This essay emphasizes how binaries function in scientific practice. Two case studies spanning from the twentieth century to the recent past illustrate the shift away from chemicals in pest management and, in doing so, show the instability of (...) binary categories over the longue durée. Noticing “ambivalent insects” affords a way to widen narrative options and identify new opportunities for investigating insect histories. (shrink)

It is not clear whether breast cancer screening is a public health intervention or an individual clinical service. The question is important because the concepts best suited for ethical reasoning in public health might be different to the concepts commonly employed in biomedical ethics. We consider it likely that breast screening has elements of a public health intervention and used an empirical ethics approach to explore this further. If breast screening has public health characteristics, it is probable that policy and (...) practice experts will employ socially embedded concepts when reasoning about it. We gathered data on whether and how these concepts existed in the discussion and reasoning of Australian breast screening experts. We found that experts employed these concepts when talking about the purpose and practices of breast screening, and the behaviour of breast screening professionals and consumers. Experts gave varied judgements about breast screening based on reasoning with these concepts, considering it to be more or less successful in contributing to the public interest and in incorporating socially embedded concepts into its operational agenda. Our findings are compatible with breast screening having public health characteristics. We advocate for the incorporation of socially embedded concepts in breast screening policy and practice. (shrink)

Shame is one of the most stigmatized and stigmatizing of emotions. Often characterized as an emotion in which the subject holds a global, negative self-assessment, shame is typically understood to mark the subject as being inadequate in some way, and a sizable amount of work on shame focuses on its problematic or unhealthy aspects, effects, or consequences. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Shame brings into view a more balanced understanding of what shame is and its value and social function. The contributors recognize (...) shame as a complex, richly layered, conscious or unconscious phenomenon, and the collection offers an understanding of what shame is, the scholarly discourse on shame, and how theories of shame help us to understand ourselves, others, and the world around us. It also highlights a diverse range of perspectives on shame, and how these unique perspectives can enlighten our understanding of both the positive and negative aspects of this powerful emotion. Edited by Cecilea Mun, the ten chapters by an international group of contributors reflect a broad range of methods, disciplinary perspectives, and both theoretical and practical concerns regarding shame. -/- 30% Discount Code: LEX30AUTH1. (shrink)

Résumé. – Catherine Macaulay a recours à un toute une gamme de genres littéraires en vue de développer une philosophie systématique fondée sur la liberté humaine et de défendre une philosophie politique républicaine. Les différents points du système sont articulés selon des genres littéraires particuliers cohérents avec les points eux-mêmes. Son système tient en trois principes centraux : (a) le primat de la liberté humaine ; (b) la promotion de la liberté publique comme mesure de la vertu ; enfin (c) (...) une éducation qui permet à la jeunesse de reconnaitre la liberté humaine et d’entrer dans la société civile avec l’engagement de s’assurer que le gouvernement la préserve. (shrink)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of an innovative web-based ethics module that was designed to integrate ethics education across four accounting courses over two years (second and third year courses) in a large Australian tertiary institution. Approach: The approach taken in designing the ethics web-based module was to base the foundations of the module on Rest’s (1976) ethical behavior model with the adoption of a longitudinal approach to thecoverage of financial reporting ethical issues. Practical (...) Implications: The key objectives of the module are to improve students’ awareness and sensitivity to accounting ethics, and to foster student learning in an interesting and stimulating manner, leading to in-depth understanding of accounting ethics. Originality/value of paper: This paper provides a description of an original web-based approach to delivering ethics education to accounting students across four university courses. Its value lies in not only the innovative and interactive ethics education approach but also in providing feedback from students and the profession. (shrink)

_Abstract_: We imagine the future of cognitive science by first considering its past, which shows remarkable transformation from a field that, although interdisciplinary, was initially marked by a narrow set of assumptions concerning its subject matter. In the last decades, multiple alternative frameworks with radically different ontological and epistemic commitments (e.g., situated cognition, embodied cognition, extended mind) found broad support. We address the question of how to understand these changes, noting as logical alternatives that (1) newer approaches are not properly (...) _cognitive_; (2) that newer approaches are cognitive but not _science_; and (3) that cognitive science has become pluralistic. We endorse the third position and venture to guess that the future of cognitive science is also pluralistic. We are left, however, with the question of what this _means. _After noting the polysemous nature of the term “pluralism”, we attempt to add clarity by distinguishing three forms: ontological, epistemic, and ethical. We then consider what each form might imply for the future of cognitive science. _Keywords_: Cognitive Science; Pluralism; Relativism; History of Science; Philosophy of Science _Il futuro della scienza cognitiva è pluralista, ma che vuol dire?_ _Riassunto_: Pensiamo al futuro della scienza cognitiva in primo luogo considerando il suo passato, il quale è notevolmente cambiato rispetto al presente. Per quanto si proponesse come un campo di studi interdisciplinari, la scienza cognitiva delle origini era caratterizzata da un insieme ristretto di assunzioni riguardanti il proprio oggetto. Negli ultimi decenni hanno trovato supporto diverse cornici teoriche in reciproca competizione e con impegni ontologici ed epistemologici radicalmente differenti (si pensi, per esempio, alla cognizione situata, alla cognizione incarnata, alla mente estesa). Proveremo a dare risposta alla domanda su come intendere questi cambiamenti, prendendo atto che ci troviamo di fronte a una serie di posizioni che sono logicamente alternative fra loro: (1) gli approcci più recenti non sono propriamente _cognitivi_; (2) oppure che gli approcci più recenti sono cognitivi, ma non _scientifici_; (3) la scienza cognitiva è diventata pluralista. Noi crediamo che la terza posizione sia corretta e scommettiamo su un futuro della scienza cognitiva che sia anche pluralista. Resta aperto, tuttavia, il problema di cosa questo _significhi_. Dopo aver preso atto della natura polisemica del termine “pluralismo”, cercheremo di far chiarezza distinguendo tre forme di pluralismo: ontologico, epistemico, ed etico. Considereremo quindi ciò che ciascuna può comportare per il futuro della scienza cognitiva. _Parole chiave_: Scienza cognitiva; Pluralismo; Relativismo; Storia della scienza; Filosofia della scienza. (shrink)

Rosemary Brown (1916-2001), a housewife from South-London, was one of the most famous mediums of her time. Throughout her lifetime, famous composers such as Liszt, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy and Chopin sought her from the realm of the dead to dictate their posthumous compositions. Brown’s ‘received’ musical pieces became a case study for musicians and psychologists. None, however, ever came up with a convincing explanation for the pieces’ existence. Rather than being a story of sheer madness or clairvoyance, in this paper (...) I read Brown’s musical forgeries as a ‘testament’ to twentieth‐century Western culture’s fascination with originality and the cult of genius. Ideologies of authorship and authenticity shape our aesthetic appreciation, so that music’s essential value is for us more than just ‘sounding good’. Drawing on recent philosophical discussion in aesthetics, I question this cultural framework by scrutinizing the concept of artistic creativity. It is because art is a form of creative achievement that history and provenance count as central factors of our evaluation. This, in turn, may reveal us something about the value of musical forgeries. (shrink)

Jonathan Franzen's The End of the End of the Earth is a collection of essays about climate change, nature conservation, and contemporary culture. They are good essays. But they left me with no new ways to think with about environment, climate, and the future. Perhaps this is the point. The "personal essay," Franzen reminds us, is a form of "honest self-examination and sustained engagement with ideas" within the structure of a "personal and subjective micronarrative". Its value lies not so much (...) in generating new analytical insights as in finding interesting ways of reflecting on shared experience from a partial and individual perspective.These essays are thoughtful on the distractedness of everyday life for... (shrink)

Since the traumas of the last quarter of the 20th century forced all professions into the light of public scrutiny, we have seen the destruction of the parochial boundaries of the ethical understandings of the past, and the development of a cosmopolitan professional ethics. It is now understood that we have to have an ethics that travels well, whose principles operate with equal force and plausibility in all disciplines. Without good passports, principles become locked into their own disciplines, Ethics as (...) a subject loses its integrity, and every profession has an excellent reason to insist that “their” ethics have nothing to do with the rest of the world. Consideration of professional ethics as a whole shows that the general principles that we use travel very well indeed, and rapidly smokes out those that do not. “The Doctrine of Double Effect” is one of the non-travelers; from that fact we explore the possibility that the Doctrine is radically misconceived even in its home discipline of­medicine. (shrink)

We argue that the goal of natural excellence, discoverable by scientific observation of the species, is appropriately called good, and the proper object of human development and education. That affirmation stands, but we are forced to acknowledge several conceptual difficulties (in the deliberate creation of “natural” excellences, for example, and in cases of plurality of excellences) and a final inability to reconcile human freedom—surely part of the natural excellence of human life—with the need to prevent humans from using that freedom (...) to sacrifice it (through, for instance, drugs, self-indulgence, and emotional enthusiasms). (shrink)