Leandra Medine indicates that she wants the Man Repeller multi-author blog to ‘serve as an open forum for women to draw their own conclusions’ instead of making ‘any sort of feministic statement’. Medine renders feminism as amorphous and an individual choice but she has been widely lauded for offering a feminist engagement in fashion. Her practices and position, as I argue throughout this article, allow her to fashion feminism, including associating feminism with the man repeller style and replacing aspects of (...) second wave and rights-based feminisms with the purportedly more equitable and liberating website ethos of choice and equality feminism. Yet in replacing ‘feministic’ critiques with promises of stylish cultural change and clothing that reportedly repels men, Medine and other Man Repeller authors elide how systemic oppression functions. This ambivalent relationship to feminism, and dearth of intersectional advocacy, prompted a backlash in 2020. Critics interrogated Medine's facile statement about #BlackLivesMatter, the company's lack of diversity and the unsuccessful restructuring of the blog. As a means of analysing Man Repeller, I employ textual analysis, feminist and queer literature and media theory. I define fashioning feminism as a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thinking, including the negation of certain forms of feminism. I assert that attending to the fashioning of feminism can foreground central and developing feminist theories; the appeal, unstylishness and effacement of feminism; and the connection between style and politics. This includes readers’ interrogations of Man Repeller's politics, which are occurring along with contemporary examinations of racism. Since fashioning feminism is a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thought, engaging with its concepts and debates can further the critical study of feminism, nurture feminist conversations and advocate for social change. (shrink)

__Neurotechnology and Direct Brain Communication__ focuses on recent neuroscientific investigations of infant brains and of patients with disorders of consciousness, both of which are at the forefront of contemporary neuroscience. The prospective use of neurotechnology to access mental states in these subjects, including neuroimaging, brain simulation and brain computer interfaces, offers new opportunities for clinicians and researchers, but has also received specific attention from philosophical, scientific, ethical and legal points of view. This book offers the first systematic assessment of these (...) issues, investigating the tools neurotechnology offers to care for verbally non-communicative subjects and suggesting a multidisciplinary approach to the ethical and legal implications of ordinary and experimental practices. The book is divided into three parts: the first and second focus on the scientific and clinical implications of neurological tools for DOC patient and infant care. With reference to these developments, the third and final part presents the case for re-evaluating classical ethical and legal concepts, such as authority, informed consent and privacy. Neurotechnology and Direct Brain Communication will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of cognitive science, medical ethics, medical technology, and the philosophy of the mind. With implications for patient care, it will also be a useful resource for clinicians, medical centres and health practitioners. (shrink)

The 20th century produced overwhelming advances in biomedicine with the 1990s introducing 148,000 patents as part of the mapping and sequencing of the human genome. Bioethical realities and debates of prenatal genetic testing, new reproductive technologies, stem cell research, human cloning and DNA data banks have obscured the less provocative public and social issues of gun control, immunization, employee leave programs to assist care for dying relatives, emergency room use as primary care sites by the uninsured, and medical care provision (...) to the homeless. With the events of September 11, the focus has shifted to bioterrorism: an international and global concern that portends broad environmental consequences while requiring a local, community response of which the business enterprise is a part. The tension that results from a required local and global response to bioterrorism and biotechnology by the business community forms a dialectic and provides a venue for addressing business ethics in an international forum. This paper explores the relationship of events and its meaning for business. Part I provides the background of biotechnology and bioterrorism and how the two form a dialectic reality that shapes ethical debate. Part II presents provocations and questions for an emerging ethic based on the integrative response from the public health, medical, business and religious communities. Four areas for business contribution in shaping emerging ethics in the age of biotechnology—bioterrorism are suggested. (shrink)

In English, deictic verbs of motion, such ascomecan encode the perspective of the speaker, or another individual, such as the addressee or a narrative protagonist, at a salient reference time and location, in the form of an indexical presupposition. By contrast, Spanish has been claimed to have stricter requirements on licensing conditions forvenir(“to come”), only allowing speaker perspective. An open question is how a bilingual learner acquiring both English and Spanish reconciles these diverging language-specific restrictions. We face this question head (...) on by investigating narrative productions of young Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish, in comparison to English monolingual and Spanish dominant adults and children. We find that the young heritage speakers producevenirin linguistic contexts where most Spanish adult speakersdo not, but where English monolingual speakersdo, and also resemble those of young monolingual Spanish speakers of at least one other Spanish dialect, leading us to generate two mutually-exclusive hypotheses: (a) the encoding of speaker perspective in the young heritage children is cross-linguistically influenced by the more flexible and dominant language (English), resulting in a wider range of productions by these malleable young speakers than the Spanish grammar actually allows, or (b) the young Spanish speakers are exhibiting productions that are in fact licensed in the grammar, but which are pruned away in the adult productions, being supplanted by other forms as the lexicon is enriched. Given independent evidence of the heritage speakers' robust Spanish linguistic competence, we turn to systematically-collected acceptability judgments of three dialectal varieties of monolingual adult Spanish speakers of the distribution of perspective-taking verbs, to assess their competence and adjudicate between (a) and (b). We find that adultsaccept venirin contexts in which they do notproduceit, leading us to argue that (a)venirisnotobligatorily speaker-oriented in Spanish, as has been claimed, (b) adults may not producevenirin these contexts because they instead select more specific motion verbs, and (c) for heritage bilingual children, the more dominant language (English) may support the grammatically licensed but lexically-constrained productions in Spanish. (shrink)

This special issue of the Journal Law, Medicine & Ethics takes up the concern of informed consent, particularly in times of controversy. The dominant moral dilemmas that frame traditional bioethical concerns address medical experimentation on vulnerable subjects; physicians assisting their patients in suicide or euthanasia; scarce resource allocation and medical futility; human trials to develop drugs; organ and tissue donation; cloning; xenotransplantation; abortion; human enhancement; mandatory vaccination; and much more. The term “bioethics” provides a lens, language, and guideposts to the (...) study of medical ethics. It is worth noting, however, that medical experimentation is neither new nor exclusive to one country. Authors in this issue address thorny subjects that span borders and patients: from matters dealing with children and vaccination to the language and perception of consent. (shrink)

This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating (...) in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This article will consider three key bonds using both a 100 million-word corpus of posts and a smaller specialized corpus collected by capturing the entire Twitter stream of a particular user. (shrink)

One goal of the scientific research enterprise is to improve the lives of individuals and the overall health of societies. This goal is achieved through a combination of factors, including the composition of research portfolios. In turn, this composition is determined by a variety of scientific and societal needs. The recent history of polio research highlights the complex relations between research policy, scientific progress and societal benefits. Here, we briefly review the circumstances leading to the possibility of eradication of poliovirus, (...) evaluate the research environment that emerged following the introduction of a vaccine, and compare and contrast the current research framework with that for other infectious diseases. From this analysis, policy lessons with general applicability to scientific research are identified. (shrink)

Allocating attention determines what we remember later. Attentional demands vary in a task-switching paradigm, with greater demands for switch than for repeat trials. This also results in lower subsequent memory performance for switch compared to repeat trials. The main goal of the present study was to investigate the consequences of task switching after a long study-test interval and to examine the contributions of the two memory components, recollection and familiarity. In the study phase, the participants performed a task-switching procedure in (...) which they had to switch between two classifications tasks with pictures. After a short vs. a long study-test interval of a week, the participants performed a surprise memory test for the pictures and gave remember/know judgements. The results showed that recognition memory declined after 1 week and this was mainly due to a decrease in “remember” responses. The results also showed that the task-switching effect on memory was enduring. Whereas the results of the immediate test were mixed, the results of the delayed tests showed that the task-switching effect was based on recollection, expressed in more “remember” responses for repeat than for switch trials. As recollection is more sensitive to attention manipulations than familiarity, the results align with the notion that attentional requirements at study determine what we remember, in particular after a long study-test interval. (shrink)

It is usually believed that a picture of Quantum Mechanics in terms of true probabilities cannot be given due to the uncertainty relations. Here we discuss a tomographic approach to quantum states that leads to a probability representation of quantum states. This can be regarded as a classical-like formulation of quantum mechanics which avoids the counterintuitive concepts of wave function and density operator. The relevant concepts of quantum mechanics are then reconsidered and the epistemological implications of such approach discussed.

We argue about a possible scenario of physical reality based on the parallelism between Poincare group and the sunyata philosophy of Nagarjuna. The notion of "relational" is the common denominator of two views. We have approached the relational concept in third-person perspective (ontic level). It is possible to deduce different physical consequence and interpretation through first-person perspective approach. This relational interpretation leave open the questions: i)we must abandon the idea for a physical system the possibility to extract completeness information? ii)we (...) must abandon the idea to infer a possible structure of physical reality? (shrink)

In the original publication of the article, the funding information was inadvertently missed out. The information is provided in this Correction.

Clients may feel trapped into sharing their private digital data with insurance companies to get a desired insurance product or premium. However, private insurance must collect some data to offer products and premiums appropriate to the client’s level of risk. This situation creates tension between the value of privacy and common insurance business practice. We argue for three main claims: first, coercion to share private data with insurers is pro tanto wrong because it violates the autonomous choice of a privacy-valuing (...) client. Second, we maintain that irrespective of being coerced, the choice of accepting digital surveillance by insurers makes it harder for the client to protect his or her autonomy. The violation of autonomy also makes coercing customers into digital surveillance pro tanto morally wrong. Third, having identified an economically plausible process involving no direct coercion by insurers, leading to the adoption of digital surveillance, we argue that such an outcome generates further threats against autonomy. This threat provides individuals with a pro tanto reason to prevent this process. We highlight the freedom dilemma faced by regulators who aim to prevent this outcome by constraining market freedoms and argue for the need for further moral and empirical research on this question. (shrink)

BackgroundEthical analyses of disorders of consciousness traditionally focus on residual awareness. Going one step further, this paper explores the potential ethical relevance of the unawareness retained by patients with disorders of consciousness, focusing specifically on the ethical implications of the description of the unconscious provided by recent scientific research.MethodsA conceptual methodology is used, based on the review and analysis of relevant scientific literature on the unconscious and the logical argumentation in favour of the ethical conclusions.ResultsTwo conditions that are generally considered (...) critical components in the ethical discussion of patients with disorders of consciousness might arguably be both conscious and unconscious.ConclusionsThe unconscious, as well as consciousness, should be taken into account in the ethical discussions of patients with disorders of consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that transparency of machine learning algorithms, just as explanation, can be defined at different levels of abstraction. We criticize recent attempts to identify the explanation of black box algorithms with making their decisions (post-hoc) interpretable, focusing our discussion on counterfactual explanations. These approaches to explanation simplify the real nature of the black boxes and risk misleading the public about the normative features of a model. We propose a new form of algorithmic transparency, that consists in (...) explaining algorithms as an intentional product, that serves a particular goal, or multiple goals (Daniel Dennet’s design stance) in a given domain of applicability, and that provides a measure of the extent to which such a goal is achieved, and evidence about the way that measure has been reached. We call such idea of algorithmic transparency “design publicity.” We argue that design publicity can be more easily linked with the justification of the use and of the design of the algorithm, and of each individual decision following from it. In comparison to post-hoc explanations of individual algorithmic decisions, design publicity meets a different demand (the demand for impersonal justification) of the explainee. Finally, we argue that when models that pursue justifiable goals (which may include fairness as avoidance of bias towards specific groups) to a justifiable degree are used consistently, the resulting decisions are all justified even if some of them are (unavoidably) based on incorrect predictions. For this argument, we rely on John Rawls’s idea of procedural justice applied to algorithms conceived as institutions. (shrink)

1. I am grateful to the respondents for the opportunity provided, to clarify the concept of a libertarian right to test and its normative implications. To sum up, I concede that genomes have a normatively salient informational aspect, that exercising the LRT may cause informational harm and violate rights of genetically related individuals, and that this is relevant to the regulation of genetic testing. But such considerations are logically compatible with a non-absolute LRT and its libertarian justification. The LRT is (...) practically relevant because it inverts the burden of justification and recognising a LRT may affect the way in which other rights are protected in a conflict of rights case. I will try to clarify this further, in what follows. 2. Consider B, an individual who is, and is aware of being, genetically related to A. Admittedly, while person A has a LRT, the interests of person B should also be protected.1 …. (shrink)

_ABSTRACT_ A relevant part of the literature about the metaphysical problem of persistence of concrete particulars exhibits, I believe, too much freedom as far as the use of terms like “Four-Dimensionalism”, “Perdurantism” and “Doctrine of temporal parts” is concerned. This attitude clashes against the rigorous and valid arguments of many four-dimensionalist views and it is mainly due to a lack of precision on the four-dimensionalist side. In this work I analyse Parsons’ attempt to clarify the content of these notions. His (...) clarification, based on the postulation of a difference between temporal parts and temporal extent, is aimed at demonstrating that Four-Dimensionalism and Perdurantism have not the same content and are not tied by any apriori connection. I endorse Parsons’ clarification as legitimate from a logical and semantic point of view, but I maintain that, despite his useful distinction between Perdurantism as a theory of persistence and Four-Dimensionalism as a theory of extension, these doctrines are ultimately equivalent, when it comes to formulating a general view about material objects. Indeed, I argue that objects extended four-dimensionally necessarily persist by perduring, and perduring objects necessarily extend four-dimensionally in space-time. (shrink)

Pragmatists always had clear ideas about the relations between the natural and the social worlds. Most of them tell us, first of all, that human beings have evolved within nature as creatures that solve their survival problems through intelligence. The emergence of intelligence, on the other hand, must not be seen as a purpose of nature itself, but rather as our functional version of survival mechanisms such as physical force or numerousness. The systematic use of this intelligence in a conte...

En 1989, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham exprimait ainsi ses regrets : « Aujourd'hui encore, la voix de la femme noire est largement passée sous silence... L'histoire africaine-américaine n'a pas su aborder suffisamment la question du genre, de même que l'histoire des femmes a échoué à aborder la question raciale ». D'après elle, l'histoire des femmes africaines-américaines n'était ni un domaine marginal ni un sous-thème pittoresque. Elle soutenait au contraire que le fait d'inclure les femmes noi...

This paper presents a model for the implementation of educational activities involving musical improvisation that is based on a review of the literature on the psychology of music. Psychology of music is a complex field of research in which quantitative and qualitative methods have been employed involving participants ranging from novices to expert performers. The cognitive research has been analyzed to propose a pedagogical approach to the development of processes rather than products that focus on an expert’s use of improvisation. (...) The intention is to delineate a reflective approach that goes beyond the mere instruction of some current practices of teaching improvisation in jazz pedagogy. The review highlights that improvisation is a complex, multidimensional act that involves creative and performance behaviors in real-time in addition to processes such as sensory and perceptual encoding, motor control, performance monitoring, and memory storage and recall. Educational applications for the following processes are outlined: anticipation, use of repertoire, emotive communication, feedback, and flow. These characteristics are discussed in relation to the design of a pedagogical approach to musical improvisation based on reflection and metacognition development. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss an often-neglected topic in the literature on the ethics of voting. Our aim is to provide an account of what states are obligated to do, so that voters may fulfil their role as public decision-makers in an epistemically competent manner. We argue that the state ought to provide voters with what we call a substantive opportunity for competence. This entails that the state ought to actively foster the epistemic capabilities that are necessary to achieve competent (...) participation in political decision-making practices. (shrink)

The desire to control how others see us is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Decades of research have suggested that the results associated with how others see us are too great an influence to ignore. The tactics we use and behaviors we engage in to control how others see us is known as impression management. This study examines the relationship between regulatory focus and the use of exemplification or supplication impression management tactics. We use regulatory focus theory to examine this phenomenon. First, (...) we investigate the main effects that occur between prevention-focused individuals and exemplification, and between promotion-focused individuals and exemplification and supplication. We then introduce supervisor behavioral integrity as a moderator between regulatory focus and impression management. Our findings suggest a positive relationship between prevention-focused and exemplification, and between promotion-focused and exemplification and supplication. We also find that behavioral integrity strengthens the relationship between prevention-focused and exemplification and promotion-focused and supplication, but not promotion-focused and exemplification. Implications and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

By recognizing Immanuel Kant as the founder of the so-called being-knowing fallacy, the Italian new realism proposed and defended by Maurizio Ferraris argues for the autonomy of ontology from epistemology. The dependence of reality on our conceptual framework would in fact transform our world in a system of beliefs that loses its connection with the “hardness” of the given data. This paper discusses Ferraris’s claims by maintaining that they are based upon an insufficient reading of history of philosophy, particularly, upon (...) a misinterpretation of Kant’s philosophy. Firstly, we shortly analyze the relationship between transcendental philosophy and post-modernism through a comparison with Friedrich Nietzsche: we criticize their conflation. Secondly, we take into consideration Kant’s arguments about science and answer a particular objection of Ferraris by investigating how we can legitimately acquire knowledge in the deep past without contradicting Kantianism. In this sense, we believe that the new realism presents inconsistent arguments. (shrink)

Tradition has it that first-person thought is somehow special. It is also commonplace to maintain that the first-person concept obeys a rule of reference to the effect that any token first-person thought is about the thinker of that thought. Following Annalisa Coliva and, more recently, Santiago Echeverri, I take the specialness claim to be the claim that thinking a first-person thought comes with a certain guarantee of its pattern of reference. Echeverri maintains that such a guarantee is explained by a (...) fairly flatfooted interpretation of the thinker-reflexive rule. I argue, however, that the explanatory aspirations of the thinker-reflexive rule are fulfilled only if we accept an epistemically loaded gloss on the notion of a thinker of a thought featuring the rule. That gloss is unpacked in terms of the subject’s ability to be acquainted with the phenomenal character of their thoughts. (shrink)

La présente contribution met en évidence le rôle fondamental du principe de précaution dans l’élaboration et la mise en œuvre de l’Union bancaire. Trois piliers la composent, le Mécanisme de supervision unique, le Mécanisme de résolution unique et le Système unifié de protection des dépôts, reflètant en forme pyramidale une approche graduée du risque systémique. La montée en puissance de l’usage des technologies de gouvernance algorithmique pour traiter les opérations financières sur les marchés engendre de nouveaux types de risques, liés (...) à la vitesse et au volume inédits des ordres traités à l’intervention de robots. Pour tenter d’en désamorcer les dangers, les régulateurs ont recours au même type d’instruments automatisés, de manière à ajuster leur vitesse de réaction à celle des transactions à contrôler. Enfin, le phénomène de génération de monnaies privées par des mécanismes de cryptographie autocertifiés, telle la blockchain, en ce qu’ils cherchent à se passer de l’appareil d’État, représentent un défi pour la souveraineté des autorités en charge de politiques publiques, fondées sur un socle de légitimité constitutionnelle. Là encore, le principe de précaution invite à mettre en place une monnaie de même nature mais non affranchie de tout système juridique l’encadrant. Le processus est à l’étude au sein de l’Union européenne et de certains Etats membres, dont la France. (shrink)