Several recent studies have demonstrated context-based, high-confidence misperceptions in hearing, referred to as false hearing. These studies have unanimously found that older adults are more susceptible to false hearing than are younger adults, which the authors have attributed to an age-related decline in the ability to inhibit the activation of a contextually predicted response. However, no published work has investigated this activation-based account of false hearing. In the present study, younger and older adults listened to sentences in which the semantic (...) context provided by the sentence was either unpredictive, highly predictive and valid, or highly predictive and misleading with relation to a sentence-final word in noise. Participants were tasked with clicking on one of four images to indicate which image depicted the sentence-final word in noise. We used eye-tracking to investigate how activation, as revealed in patterns of fixations, of different response options changed in real-time over the course of sentences. We found that both younger and older adults exhibited anticipatory activation of the target word when highly predictive contextual cues were available. When these contextual cues were misleading, younger adults were able to suppress the activation of the contextually predicted word to a greater extent than older adults. These findings are interpreted as evidence for an activation-based model of speech perception and for the role of inhibitory control in false hearing. (shrink)

In this paper, we attempt to refine the concept of corporate citizenship. Traditionally, research on corporate citizenship has paid greater attention to corporateduties, leaving corporate rights relatively unattended in the corporate citizenship literature. However, some scholars have recently explored corporate citizenship as the corporation’s implementation of both of its respected rights and duties. Others have conceptualized the corporate citizenship concept with a specific focus on the corporation’s expansion of its new duties and rights. Integrating existing conceptualizations of corporate citizenship, we (...) propose a refined definition of corporate citizenship as a dynamic process by which corporations implement and expand their respective corporate rights and duties. (shrink)

General Electric has a rich history of being in the center of public discourse regarding the intersection of corporate strategy and environmental concerns. During Jeffrey Immelt’s tenure as Chief Executive Officer, G.E. has taken a proactive approach to coupling corporate social responsibility with organizational profitability in its Ecomagination initiatives. Critics abound with some investor groups questioning the utility of Immelt’s approach for shareholder returns while other stakeholder groups question G.E.’s motives and methods. This case study reviews G.E.’s past CSR efforts (...) and the more recent Ecomagination program and its efficacy and sustainability. The case was developed from public sources. (shrink)

Art theory has consistently emphasised the importance of situational, cultural, institutional and historical factors in viewers’ experience of fine art. However, the link between this heavily context-dependent interpretation and the workings of the mind is often left unexamined. Drawing on relevance theory—a prominent, cogent and productive body of work in cognitive pragmatics—we here argue that fine art achieves its effects by prompting the use of cognitive processes that are more commonly employed in the interpretation of words and other stimuli presented (...) in a communicative context. We describe in particular how institutional factors effectively co-opt these processes for new ends, allowing viewers to achieve cognitive effects that they otherwise would not, and so provide cognitivist backing for an Institutional Theory of Art, such as that put forward by Arthur Danto. More generally, we situate and describe the Western fine art tradition as a phenomenon that is a consequence of both the cognitive processes involved in communication, and of cultural norms, practices and institutions. (shrink)

This book analyzes the moral confusion of contemporary society, relating rival conceptions of morality with a wide variety of views about the nature and predicament of man. Mitchell argues that many secular thinkers possess a traditional "Christian" conscience which they find hard to defend in terms of an entirely secular world-view, but which is more in line with a Christian understanding of man.

Is there a dominant global image—call it a world picture—that links the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring? Or is there any single image that captures and perhaps even motivated the widely noticed synergy and infectious mimicry between Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park?

This paper explores Nietzsche's account of the free spirit's genesis, as primarily given in the 1886 prefaces written for the works of his ?free spirit trilogy?. In particular, it will focus on how what will be argued is the free spirit's distinguishing capacity for radical questioning is created out of the process described there. That is, it will examine how what Nietzsche calls, ?the experience of sickness?, in enabling the free spirit's liberation, helps forge a mode of philosophical awareness which (...) is not otherwise attainable. However, the second half of this paper goes on to explore how the success of this process is endangered by a certain psychological tendency to which free spirits are susceptible. In other words, the free spirit's chance of enduring those painful depths of sickness necessary for liberation is threatened by the appeal of ?romantic pessimism?; a perspective which offers consolation by idealizing the sufferer's state. As such, then, in our final section, we will examine Nietzsche's efforts to combat this phenomenon. In particular, we will look at his advocacy of a specific kind of asceticism for this purpose, and with it his attempt to show how a true liberation of the spirit can be achieved. (shrink)

At the University of Newcastle, health law and ethics is taught and assessed in each year of the five-year curriculum. However, the critical question for assessment remains: 'Does teaching ethics have a measurable effect on the clinical activity of medical students who have had such courses?' Those responsible for teaching confront this question each year they sit down to construct their assessment tools. Should they assess what the student knows? Should they assess the student's moral reasoning, that is, what decisions (...) the student makes, and, how these decisions are justified, or should they assess what the student actually does when dealing with patients in the clinical setting, and how he or she does it? From 1982 to 1991, assessment at Newcastle was primarily aimed at determining the quality of the students' ethics knowledge base. This paper describes the strengths and limitations of a purely knowledge-based method of evaluation and why in 1992, we are now attempting to redefine and assess, what we call 'clinical ethical competence' in terms of how students actually apply this knowledge base in a controlled clinical context. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on a subset of experiences in which action-properties are presented—namely, those in which objects in our perceptual surroundings or environment ‘demand’ that certain actions be carried out, as experienced mandates (EMs). The critical part of the paper argues that a complex contents view, which builds all of the distinctiveness of such experiences into their perceptual content, is unsatisfactory. As an alternative, I argue that EMs involve bodily potentiation, which is best understood in terms of felt (...) action readiness. I then outline a hybrid account, which combines content-based features of EMs with action-readiness. (shrink)

The authors surveyed hospitals across the country on their policies regarding overlapping surgery, and found large variation between hospitals in how this practice is regulated. Specifically, institutions chose to define “critical portions” in a variety of ways, ultimately affecting not only surgical efficiency but also the autonomy of surgical trainees and patient experiences at these different hospitals.

The 1979 partial nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island was simultaneously hyper-visible and hidden from public view. It was the subject of non-stop media attention, but its causes and consequences required expert explanation. No fire or explosion marked the moment when insensible radionuclides escaped the facility. Yet, residents recalled a variety of troubling sights, sounds, odors, tastes, and sensations. Public distrust percolated in the interstices between government assertions that little radiation had escaped the facility and residents’ sense memories of (...) the incident. This article traces intertwined networks of activists from Japan and Pennsylvania as they mobilized legally, politically, and scientifically to develop evidence about the offsite effects of Three Mile Island. Exploring the distinct cosmology of evidence that activists marshaled, the article shows how they placed the messy, contingent, dynamic living world at the center of inquiries about the meltdown’s consequences. Activists developed new practices of biological witness that reconfigured the interplay between scientific, legal, and moral authority, while concurrently reformulating sufferers’ subjectivities and notions of scientific objectivity. In the process, they suggested that environmental justice entailed epistemic justice. Their cosmology of evidence served as an argument and a material proof that the beloved but suffering living world, and the sciences used to understand it, could and should frame the governance of industrial society’s invisible harms. (shrink)

This article outlines current safe harbors in the law for healthcare practitioners who work in a disaster setting. It reviews available legal protection in crisis situations with respect to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), criminal liability, and licensure.

_Supervision of Sandplay Therapy_, the first book on this subject, is an internationally-based volume that describes the state of the art in supervision of sandplay therapy. Recognizing that practitioners are eager to incorporate sandplay therapy into their practice, Harriet Friedman and Rie Rogers Mitchell respond to the need for new information, and successfully translate the theories of sandplay therapy into supervision practice. The book provides a meaningful connection and balance between theoretical principles, practical application, and ongoing therapeutic encounter involved (...) in sandplay. Divided into six sections, contributors cover: original supervision models contemporary supervision models special challenges in supervision international sandplay supervision supervision of special groups connections with other arts therapies. _Supervision of Sandplay Therapy _expands the vision of what is possible in supervision and will be vital reading for those studying supervision and sandplay therapy, as well as for those wanting to provide a depth-oriented approach during supervision. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that two domains of uncertainty should inform our strategies for making social policy on new genetic technologies. The first is biological complexity, which includes both unknown consequences on known variables and unknown unknowns. The second is value pluralism, which includes both moral conflict and moral pluralism. This framework is used to investigate policy on genetically modified food and suggests that adaptive management is required to track changes in biological knowledge of these interventions and that less (...) simplistic, polemic representations of scientific knowledge are required to permit democratic decision making. (shrink)

The literature on ‘institutional corruption’ has paradoxically missed what seems a central application of this expression, its application to institutions that are corrupt. In this article, I defend a view of what it is for an institution to be corrupt, in terms of the motivation of the institution’s rules. If an individual office-holder or role-occupant is corrupt when their actions are improperly motivated by private gain, then an institution is corrupt when the same can be said of its rules: the (...) institution’s rules are improperly motivated by private gain. Or if we should prefer a narrower account of corrupt conduct by individuals, as necessarily involving transactions with third parties, a correspondingly narrower account of an institution’s corruptness can also be given. Under either of these versions of my view, an institution’s being corrupt is to be distinguished from something else that might be called ‘institutional corruption’, namely the corruption of institutions, in the sense of their being degraded or undermined. I argue that some of the literature’s best-known accounts of ‘institutional corruption’ are best interpreted as being about the degrading of institutions, rather than about what it is for an institution to be corrupt. (shrink)

30th Nov. and 1st Dec. 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Takeshi Sakon.

In 2000, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson mobilized the US public health infrastructure to deal with escalating trends of excess body weight. A cornerstone of this effort was a report entitled The Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity. The report stimulated a great deal of public discussion by utilizing the distinctive public health terminology of an epidemic to describe the growing prevalence of obesity in the US population. We suggest (...) that the ensuing controversy was fueled in part by the report's ambiguous usage of the evocative term “epidemic.” In some passages, the report seems to use “epidemic” in a literal sense, suggesting that rising prevalence of excess body weight should be defined technically as a disease outbreak. Other passages of the report present the same key term metaphorically, leaving readers with the impression that the epidemic language is invoked primarily for rhetorical effect. Here, we explore dynamics and implications of both interpretations. This analysis sheds light on the ongoing public argument about the appropriate societal response to steadily increasing body sizes in the US population; likewise, it capitalizes on the accumulated knowledge that the field of public health has garnered from combating diverse historic epidemics. Our interdisciplinary approach deploys critical tools from the fields of rhetoric, sociology and epidemiology. In particular, we draw from metaphor theory and public address scholarship to elucidate how the Call to Action frames public deliberation on obesity. We turn to the applied public health literature to develop a reading of the report that suggests a novel approach to the problem—application of the Epidemic Investigation protocol to streamline the public health response and reframe the public argument about obesity. (shrink)

Efforts to trace the concept of the political in India and South Asia have looked for equivalent terms in the languages of the subcontinent and have traced textual influences of ideas both globally and within South Asian literary traditions. While not diminishing the importance of textual approaches, this article traces the historical emergence of associations between the concept of the political and the joint actions and collective practices of amplification frequently used to communicate with rulers. It argues that under British (...) rule many of the accepted methods and moral economies condoned for communicating with rulers were explicitly criminalized and came to be recognized as political only in response to this criminalization. By attending to a history of practices and their associations with wider “semantic nets,” the article also offers methodological reflections on the relationships between histories of doing, histories of concepts, and the lexicons through which these can be traced. (shrink)

It is commonly recognized that the modern capacity for mass online communication carries various dangers: fake news, rampant conspiracy theories, trolling, and so forth. It is less commonly realized that moral problems remain when the contents of online communications are completely innocuous. This article discusses one of the noteworthy features of modern digital technology, the fact that it is possible to precisely target specific audiences, and argues that this can make mass communications such as advertising and political campaigns morally problematic. (...) What is more, this holds even if the communicator is using only rational persuasion. In being selective about who sees which arguments, one becomes liable to mislead the audience despite sticking to honest, evidence-based, rational argumentation. (shrink)

This paper looks at discourses related to animal farming in a popular South African farming magazine. The paper analyzes four ar ticles using a form of Critical Discourse Analysis . Despite varying widely in content and style, all articles draw from the discourses of production and science; two also show a minor discourse of achievement. With further work, it is possible to discern a fourth, deeply embedded discourse: that of enslavement. This also was present in all the articles. These discourses (...) objectify nonhuman animals and support a world-view of teleological anthropocentrism that fits well with present capitalist practices. (shrink)

Human kinship systems play a central role in social organization, as anthropologists have long demonstrated. Much less is known about how cultural schemas of relatedness are transmitted across generations. How do children learn kinship concepts? To what extent is learning affected by known cross-cultural variation in how humans classify kin? This review draws on research in developmental psychology, linguistics, and anthropology to present our current understanding of the social and cognitive foundations of kinship categorization. Amid growing interest in kinship in (...) the cognitive sciences, the paper aims to stimulate new research on the ontogeny of kinship categorization, a rich domain for studying the nexus of language, culture, and cognition. We introduce an interdisciplinary research toolkit to help streamline future research in this area. (shrink)

Princeton Readings in Political Thought is one of the most engaging and up-to-date samplers of the standard works of Western political thinking from antiquity through modern times. Organized chronologically, from Thucydides to Foucault, the book brings together forty-four selections of enduring intellectual value--key articles, book excerpts, essays, and speeches--that have shaped our understanding of Western society and politics. Readers will find this work to be an invaluable reference, and they will enjoy not only the varied selections but also the lucid (...) introductions to each historical era and the brief sketches of each thinker. The book includes the writings of many of the most distinguished observers of the Western experience from classical times, the Middle Ages, modern times, or the ideas of twentieth-century political philosophers and ideologists. (shrink)