The failure to properly account forthe total value of environmental and natural resourcesresults in socially undesirable overexploitation anddegradation of complex ecosystems such as mangrovewetlands. However, most ecosystem valuation researchtoo often focuses on the question of “what is the value” and not enough on “what peoplevalue.” Nonmarket valuation practitioners have usedqualitative approaches in their work for some time.Yet, the relative strengths and weaknesses ofdifferent qualitative methods have been more thesubject of speculation than systematic research. Thestatistical examination of focus group and individualinterview (...) data on ecosystem services illustrates thatthe two methods generate important but differentecosystem service data. Further, the data show thatthe use of multiple data collection methods offers amore robust understanding of what people value. (shrink)

Ethical decision making measures are widely applied as the principal dependent variable used in studies of research integrity. However, evidence bearing on the internal and external validity of these measures is not available. In this study, ethical decision making measures were administered to 102 graduate students in the biological, health, and social sciences, along with measures examining exposure to ethical breaches and the severity of punishments recommended. The ethical decision making measure was found to be related to exposure to ethical (...) events and the severity of punishments awarded. The implications of these findings for the application of ethical decision making measures are discussed. (shrink)

The life–mind continuity thesis is difficult to study, especially because the relation between life and mind is not yet fully understood, and given that there is still no consensus view neither on what qualifies as life nor on what defines mind. Rather than taking up the much more difficult task of addressing the many different ways of explaining how life relates to mind, and vice versa, this paper considers two influential accounts addressing how best to understand the life–mind continuity thesis: (...) first, the theory of autopoiesis (AT) developed in biology and in enactivist theories of mind; and second, the recently formulated free energy principle in theoretical neurobiology, with roots in thermodynamics and statistical physics. This paper advances two claims. The first is that the free energy principle (FEP) should be preferred to the theory of AT, as classically formulated. The second is that the FEP and the recently formulated framework of autopoietic enactivism can be shown to be genuinely continuous on a number of central issues, thus raising the possibility of a joint venture when it comes to answering the life–mind continuity thesis. (shrink)

This study examined the role of key causal analysis strategies in forecasting and ethical decision-making. Undergraduate participants took on the role of the key actor in several ethical problems and were asked to identify and analyze the causes, forecast potential outcomes, and make a decision about each problem. Time pressure and analytic mindset were manipulated while participants worked through these problems. The results indicated that forecast quality was associated with decision ethicality, and the identification of the critical causes of the (...) problem was associated with both higher quality forecasts and higher ethicality of decisions. Neither time pressure nor analytic mindset impacted forecasts or ethicality of decisions. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

We develop a truism of commonsense psychology that perception and action constitute the boundaries of the mind. We do so however not on the basis of commonsense psychology, but by using the notion of a Markov blanket originally employed to describe the topological properties of causal networks. We employ the Markov blanket formalism to propose precise criteria for demarcating the boundaries of the mind that unlike other rival candidates for “marks of the cognitive” avoids begging the question in the extended (...) mind debate. Our criteria imply that the boundary of the mind is nested and multiscale sometimes extending beyond the individual agent to incorporate items located in the environment. Chalmers has used commonsense psychology to develop what he sees as the most serious challenge to the view that minds sometimes extend into the world. He has argued that perception and action should be thought of as interfaces that separate minds from their surrounding environment. In a series of recent papers Hohwy has defended a similar claim using the Markov blanket formalism. We use the Markov blanket formalism to show how both of their objections to the extended mind fail. (shrink)

Recounts the works of Immanuel Velikovsky and the controversies surrounding it, discussing his influence on the counterculture and debates with such luminaries as Carl Sagan.

It is commonly held that early career experiences influence ethical behavior. One way early career experiences might operate is to influence the decisions people make when presented with problems that raise ethical concerns. To test this proposition, 102 first-year doctoral students were asked to complete a series of measures examining ethical decision making along with a series of measures examining environmental experiences and climate perceptions. Factoring of the environmental measure yielded five dimensions: professional leadership, poor coping, lack of rewards, limited (...) competitive pressure, and poor career direction. Factoring of the climate inventory yielded four dimensions: equity, interpersonal conflict, occupational engagement, and work commitment. When these dimensions were used to predict performance on the ethical decision-making task, it was found that the environmental dimensions were better predictors than the climate dimensions. The implications of these findings for research on ethical conduct are discussed. (shrink)

This paper explores analyzing criminal responsibility from the Humean position that blame is for character traits. If untoward acts indicate undesirable character traits, then the agent is blameworthy; if they do not, then the actor is not blameworthy — he has an excuse. A distinctive feature of this approach is that that voluntariness of acts is irrelevant to determining blameworthiness.This analysis is then applied to a variety of issues in criminal law. Mens supports inferences to character traits, and the Humean (...) approach provides a reason for rejeting strict criminal liability. The Humean approach also helps resolve a number of issues about attempts, such as punishment for impossible attempts and the defense of abandonment. It also supports the broad outlines of the defense of mistake and provides a third alternative in the Wooton-Hart debate over punishment and treatment. (shrink)

Gave 42 19-26 yr. old insomniac Ss placebo pills to take a few min. before going to bed. Some Ss were told that the pills would cause arousal, and others were told that the pills would reduce arousal. As predicted, arousal Ss got to sleep more quickly than they had on nights without the pills, presumably because they attributed their arousal to the pills rather than to their emotions, and as a consequence were less emotional. Also as predicted, relaxation Ss (...) got to sleep less quickly than usual, presumably because they assumed that their emotions were unusually intense since their arousal level was high even after taking an arousal-reducing agent. Results have relevance for S. Schachter's theory of emotions and H. Kelley's attribution theory. Pragmatically, findings suggest the feasibility of a therapy based on reattribution of symptoms, and indicate that traditional suggestion effect practices should be modified. (shrink)

John McDowell rejects the idea that non-conceptual content can rationally justify empirical claims—a task for which it is ill-fitted by its non-conceptual nature. This paper considers three possible objections to his views: he cannot distinguish empty conception from the perceptual experience of an object; perceptual discrimination outstrips the capacity of concepts to keep pace; and experience of the empirical world is more extensive than the conceptual focusing within it. While endorsing McDowell’s rejection of what he means by non-conceptual content, and (...) appreciating his insight into the experiential synthesis of intuition and conception (in particular, its role in grasping objects), I will argue that Edmund Husserl presents an even more comprehensive account of perceptual experience that explains how we experience the contribution of receptivity and sensibility and how they cooperate in perceptual discrimination. Further, it reveals “horizons”—a unique kind of contents, surplus content (rather than independent non-conceptual content)—beyond the synthesis of intuitive and conceptual contents through which objects are grasped. Such horizons play a constitutive role, making experience with its conceptual dimensions and justificatory potential possible; they in no way function like a bare given that is to fulfill some independent justificatory role. Whereas McDowell focuses on how experience does not take place in isolation from the exercise of conceptual capacities, Husserl complements his view by situating experience in a more encompassing whole and by elucidating the surplus-horizons that exceed the conceptual content of experience; play an inseparable, constitutive role within it; and indicate the limits of conceptual comprehension. (shrink)

Sociologists of science and others have long been interested in how advances in science come about, and their potential social and economic impacts. Developments in nanoscience and nanotechnology will provide social scientists with a unique opportunity to explore how scientific activities form de novo. Additionally, scientists will have the opportunity to examine the factors that drive science and technology in certain directions by considering how different models of innovation may explain how the topography of the knowledge-based economy is being shaped (...) by radically new approaches to science. (shrink)

Systematic errors In performance are an important aspect of human behavior that have not received adequate explanation. One such systematic error is termed postcompletion error; a typical example is leaving one's card In the automatic teller after withdrawing cash. This type of error seems to occur when people have an extra step to perform in a procedure after the main goal has been satisfied. The fact that people frequently make this type of error, but do not make this error every (...) time, may best be explained by considering the working memory load at the time the step is to be performed: The error is made when the load on working memory is high, but will not be made when the load is low. A model of performance In the task was constructed using Just and Carpenter's (1992) CAPS that predicted that high working memory load should be associated with postcompletion errors. Two experiments confirmed that such errors can be produced in a laboratory as well as a naturalistic setting, and that the conditions under which the CAPS model makes the error are consistent with the conditions under which the errors occur in the laboratory. (shrink)

This paper is a nontechnical exposition of the author's view that mathematics is a science of patterns and that mathematical objects are positions in patterns. the new elements in this paper are epistemological, i.e., first steps towards a postulational theory of the genesis of our knowledge of patterns.

Using Canada as a case study, this article argues that regulating biotechnology and nanotechnology is made unnecessarily complex and inherently unstable because of a failure to consult the public early and of-ten enough. Furthermore, it is argued that future regulators (and promoters) of nanotechnology may learn valuable lessons from the mistakes made in regulating biotechnology.

This paper examines the relationship between perceiving and imagining on the basis of predictive processing models in neuroscience. Contrary to the received view in philosophy of mind, which holds that perceiving and imagining are essentially distinct, these models depict perceiving and imagining as deeply unified and overlapping. It is argued that there are two mutually exclusive implications of taking perception and imagination to be fundamentally unified. The view defended is what I dub the ecological–enactive view given that it does not (...) succumb to internalism about the mind-world relation, and allows one to keep a version of the received view in play. (shrink)

Within three of the most well-known contemporary approaches to argumentation, the notions of solo argumentation and arguing with one’s self are given little attention and are typically argued to be able to be subsumed within the dialectical aspects of the approach being propounded. Challenging these claims, this paper has two main aims. The first is to argue that while dialogical argumentation may be most common, there exists individual dialectical argumentation, which is not so easily subsumed within these theories. Second, in (...) order characterize this type of argumentation the paper also offers distinctions between the interrelated notions of dialectical, dialogical, and quasi-dialogical, reasoning and argumentation, within an individual or between multiple participants, which I hope provide useful precision for the field. (shrink)

I compare the tasks that Noam Chomsky and W. V. Quine assign the grammarian and point out that in many cases where Chomsky sees a question of fact Quine sees only a question of convenience. I argue that these differences are attributable, at least in part, to a difference in view concerning the data. Chomsky relies mostly on a speaker's reports of his linguistic intuitions. Quine finds this source methodologically moot. I develop a series of arguments that draw on Quine's (...) theory of radical translation to defend Quine's doubts. (shrink)

This paper offers insights into the nature and design of critical questions as they are found in argumentation schemes. In the first part of the paper, I address some general concerns regarding their purpose and formulation. These include a discussion of their evaluative function, their relationship with the patterns of reasoning they accompany, as well as the differing formulations of critical questions currently on offer. I argue that the purpose of critical questions for humans ought to be to provide the (...) means for a scalar evaluation of the reasoning at hand. To do so, critical questions should be closely paired with individual premises in the accompanying pattern of reasoning and be open-ended. Doing so allows the roles of raising considerations relevant for the reasoning and scrutinizing those considerations to be clearly distinguished. In the second part of the paper, I offer a positive methodological proposal for the construction of questions and premises that aims at overcoming a number of the individual and systematic shortcomings of extant question styles. The paper concludes by arguing that the newly proposed approach is both normatively strong and practically useful for argumentation in context. (shrink)

Previous ed. by : Lord Lloyd of Hampstead and M.D.A. Freeman.

In conducting research on humans, respect for human dignity requires investigators to obtain informed consent. Institutional pressures, however, often reduce the informed consent form to a signature on a document. Unfortunately, people often do not read or understand these documents. In the present effort, we argue that the key problem here arises because investigators often do not take into account the psychology of participants. Based on 3 articles, we argue that informed consent requires investigators to help participants “make sense” of (...) a study, and its implications, for both themselves and others. Informed consent procedures that might encourage participant sensemaking are discussed. (shrink)

This paper takes three distinct passes through the history of Machine Translation (MT) in the Soviet Union, which is typically understood as concentrating in a single boom period that lasted from roughly 1955 to 1965. In both the Soviet Union and the United States—in explicit competition with each other—there was a tremendous wave of investment in adapting computers to nonnumerical tasks that has only recently drawn the attention of historians, primarily focusing on the American example. The Soviet Union, however, quickly (...) came to assume prominence in the field both in terms of scale and diversity of approaches. At the same moment, Soviet linguists excavated a forgotten precursor, P. P. Smirnov-Troianskii, who had designed a translating machine in the early 1930s. Juxtaposing the multiple contexts in which Smirnov-Troianskii’s machine was reconceptualized and reappropriated for various ends, the article demonstrates the fundamental embodying of the algorithm in the early days of MT and also how the proliferation of narratives about Soviet MT exposes fault lines in contemporary historiography. (shrink)

Text classification involves deciding whether or not a document is about a given topic. It is an important problem in machine learning, because automated text classifiers have enormous potential for application in information retrieval systems. It is also an interesting problem for cognitive science, because it involves real world human decision making with complicated stimuli. This paper develops two models of human text document classification based on random walk and accumulator sequential sampling processes. The models are evaluated using data from (...) an experiment where participants classify text documents presented one word at a time under task instructions that emphasize either speed or accuracy, and rate their confidence in their decisions. Fitting the random walk and accumulator models to these data shows that the accumulator provides a better account of the decisions made, and a “balance of evidence” measure provides the best account of confidence. Both models are also evaluated in the applied information retrieval context, by comparing their performance to established machine learning techniques on the standard Reuters‐21578 corpus. It is found that they are almost as accurate as the benchmarks, and make decisions much more quickly because they only need to examine a small proportion of the words in the document. In addition, the ability of the accumulator model to produce useful confidence measures is shown to have application in prioritizing the results of classification decisions. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman claims to have given us a criterion for likeness of meaning that is more stringent than simple coextensiveness and yet that avoids the familiar extentionalist objections. The notion of a nominal compound plays a key role in his account. I show that Goodman's comments concerning this notion are inadequate, that his comments concerning expressions like unicorn-picture are subject to two serious objections: they don't support his claims about likeness of meaning and they make English an unlearnable language.

Child moral agency is dismissed in many historical and contemporary accounts based on children's supposed lack or marginal possession of agency-bearing capacities, including reason, deliberation, and judgment, amongst others. Given its prominence in the philosophical canon, I call this the traditional view of child agency. Recent advancements in moral developmental psychology challenge the traditional view, pointing toward the possession of relevant capacities and competencies for moral and responsible agency in early and middle childhood. I argue that both views—traditional and developmental—underdetermine (...) our practices of holding children responsible in our common interactions. For one, we face significant epistemic barriers in accurately assessing children’s agential status qua possession of responsibility-bearing capacities and competencies. Second, overreliance on assessments of individualistic capacities emphasizes an atomistic view of agency at the expense of relational views that are of particular relevance for children as uniquely developing persons. Our practices of holding children responsible and the values that guide these practices in the context of supportive relationships are central to both supporting current and drawing out future responsible agency in childhood and, importantly, provide us with a path to regard children as participants in our moral communities, as opposed to mere agents-in-waiting. (shrink)