We offer a functional perspective on hate, showing that hate has a unique pattern of appraisals and action tendencies. Hate is based on perceptions of a stable, negative disposition of persons or groups. We hate persons and groups more because of who they are, than because of what they do. Hate has the goal to eliminate its target. Hate is especially significant at the intergroup level, where it turns already devalued groups into victims of hate. When shared among group members, (...) hate can spread fast in conflict zones where people are exposed to hate-based violence, which further feeds their hate. Hate can be reassuring and self-protective, because its message is simple and helps confirming people’s belief in a just world. (shrink)

We know that animals are harmed in plant production. Unfortunately, though, we know very little about the scale of the problem. This matters for two reasons. First, we can’t decide how many resources to devote to the problem without a better sense of its scope. Second, this information shortage throws a wrench in arguments for veganism, since it’s always possible that a diet that contains animal products is complicit in fewer deaths than a diet that avoids them. In this paper, (...) then, we have two aims: first, we want to collect and analyze all the available information about animal death associated with plant agriculture; second, we try to show just how difficult it’s to come up with a plausible estimate of how many animals are killed by plant agriculture, and not just because of a lack of empirical information. Additionally, we show that there are significant philosophical questions associated with interpreting the available data—questions such that different answers generate dramatically different estimates of the scope of the problem. Finally, we document current trends in plant agriculture that cause little or no collateral harm to animals, trends which suggest that field animal deaths are a historically contingent problem that in future may be reduced or eliminated altogether. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the development of robot use cases in an elderly care facility in the context of exploring the method of Integrative Social Robotics when used on top of a user-centered design approach. Integrative Social Robotics is a new proposal for how to generate responsible, i.e. culturally and ethically sustainable, social robotics applications. Starting point for the discussion are the five principles that characterize an ISR approach, which are discussed in application to the three use cases for (...) robot support in a Danish elderly care facility developed within the smooth project. The discussion by an interdisciplinary design team explores what attention to the five principles of ISR can offer for use case development. We report on the consequences of this short-time exposure to the basic ideas of ISR for use case development and discuss the value of approaching robot development from an ISR perspective. (shrink)

Die elf Beiträge dieses Bandes gehen aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln dem Problem der Verkörperung von Sinn nach: phänomenologische, psychoanalytische und sprachwissenschaftliche Ansätze bilden dabei den Schwerpunkt; sie werden aber durch Studien aus der Literaturtheorie, der politischen Theorie und der Filmwissenschaft ergänzt. Was heißt es – das ist die zentrale Frage –, den Körper als leibliches Medium aufzufassen, welches Sinn nicht nur verkörpert, sondern überhaupt erst entstehen lässt? Gibt es bereits eine Sprache des Leibes diesseits der Ebene ausdrücklicher Rede?

What can be said in favor of consuming animal products? This chapter surveys the options, with special focus on it attempts to exploit pro-vegan principles for anti-vegan ends. Utilitarian, rights-based, contractualist, and agrarian proposals are explored, as well as some recent arguments that attempt to revive a form of speciesism. Ultimately, the chapter considers how such arguments might inform a broad case for consuming animal products—that is, one that might earn respect from those in a variety of moral camps—and it (...) suggests that there may be good reasons to eat roadkill, bugs, bivalves, in vitro meat, animal products that will be wasted, and the bodies and byproducts of animals that live full, pleasant lives. (shrink)

Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings (...) with pupillometry to document this “salience bias.” We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate. (shrink)

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of (...) experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent's ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent's bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied (...) are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence, although we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage versus online generation as well as on representation-specific properties. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility (...) ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

The ethical behavior prevalent in an organization often determines business success or failure. Much research in the business context has scrutinized ethical behavior, but there are still few insights into its roots; this study furthers this line of inquiry. In line with identity work theory, we examine how employees’ identification with a family business shapes internal ethical decision-making processes. Because it is individuals who engage in decision-making—be it ethical or not—our research perspective centers on the individual level. We followed an (...) inductive, qualitative approach and conducted interviews with 19 employees in seven family businesses. We found that individuals engage in identity work when they identify as individual family firm employees and when they identify with the perceived characteristics of the family firm. These processes of identification, in turn, influence how employees cope with ethical situations. Our findings contribute to ethics and family business research, as well as to identity theory. (shrink)

Accounts of modal knowledge are many and varied. How should we choose between them? I propose that we employ inference to the best explanation, and I suggest that there are three desiderata that we should use to rank hypotheses: conservatism, simplicity, and the ability to handle disagreement. After examining these desiderata, I contend that they can’t be used to justify belief in the modal epistemology that fares best, but that they can justify our accepting it in an epistemically significant sense. (...) Finally, I outline a modal epistemology that seems to do well by the standards I’ve recommended. (shrink)

An important strand of current experimental philosophy promotes a new kind of methodological naturalism. This chapter argues that this new ‘metaphilosophical naturalism’ is fundamentally consistent with key tenets of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, and can provide empirical foundations for therapeutic conceptions of philosophy. Metaphilosophical naturalism invites us to contribute to the resolution of philosophical problems about X by turning to scientific findings about the way we think about X – in general or when doing philosophy. This new naturalism encourages us to use (...) resources from psychology that can empirically vindicate precisely some of the most controversial aspects of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy: They can establish the need, and provide key tools, for something worth calling ‘therapy’, in philosophy. As ‘pudding proof’ this chapter shows how methods and findings from psycholinguistics motivate and facilitate a therapeutic approach to a characteristically philosophical problem: ‘the problem of perception’. (shrink)

In the fall 2009 issue of The Pluralist, Tommy Curry and Dwayne Tunstall challenged the current, dominant view of Royce as an antiracist. In "Royce, Racism, and the Colonial Ideal," Curry presents Royce as a white supremacist, an admirer of British colonialism, and an advocate of black assimilation to Anglo-Saxon cultural practices (14-15). Tunstall, in "Josiah Royce's 'Enlightened' Antiblack Racism?," presents Royce as a non-essentialist regarding race, yet as a cultural antiblack racist, with a colonial attitude comparable to that held (...) by John Stuart Mill (Tunstall 40). In the same issue of The Pluralist, Jacquelyn Kegley analyzes Royce's 1905 essay, "Race Questions and Prejudices," and maintains that Royce was .. (shrink)

Assuming that every set is constructible, we find a${\text{\Pi }}_1^1 $maximal cofinitary group of permutations of$\mathbb{N}$which is indestructible by Cohen forcing. Thus we show that the existence of such groups is consistent with arbitrarily large continuum. Our method also gives a new proof, inspired by the forcing method, of Kastermans’ result that there exists a${\text{\Pi }}_1^1 $maximal cofinitary group inL.

Analogical reasoning is often employed in problem-solving and metaphor interpretation. This paper submits that, as a default, analogical reasoning addressing these different tasks employs different mapping strategies: In problem-solving, it employs analogy-maximising strategies (like structure mapping, Gentner & Markman 1997); in metaphor interpretation, analogy-minimising strategies (like ATT-Meta, Barnden 2015). The two strategies interact in analogical reasoning with conceptual metaphors. This interaction leads to predictable fallacies. The paper supports these hypotheses through case-studies on ‘mind’-metaphors from ordinary discourse, and abstract problem-solving in (...) the philosophy of mind, respectively: It shows that (1) default metaphorical interpretations for vision- and space-cognition metaphors can be derived with a variant of the analogy-minimising ATT-Meta approach, (2) philosophically influential introspective conceptions of the mind can be derived with conceptual metaphors only through an analogy-maximising strategy, and (3) the interaction of these strategies leads to hitherto unrecognised fallacies in analogical reasoning with metaphors. This yields a debunking explanation of introspective conceptions. (shrink)

There isn’t one conversation about animal ethics. Instead, there are several important ones that are scattered across many disciplines. This volume both surveys the field of animal ethics and draws professional philosophers, graduate students, and undergraduates more deeply into the discussions that are happening outside of philosophy departments. To that end, the volume contains more nonphilosophers than philosophers, explicitly inviting scholars from other fields—such as animal science, ecology, economics, psychology, law, environmental science, and applied biology, among others—to bring their own (...) disciplinary resources to bear on matters that affect animals. -/- The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics is composed of 44 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, and organized into the following six sections: -/- I. Thinking About Animals -/- II. Animal Agriculture and Hunting -/- III. Animal Research and Genetic Engineering -/- IV. Companion Animals -/- V. Wild Animals: Conservation, Management, and Ethics -/- VI. Animal Activism -/- The chapters are brief, and they have been written in a way that is accessible to serious undergraduate students, regardless of their field of study. The volume covers everything from animal cognition to the state of current fisheries, from genetic modification to intersection animal activism. It is a resource designed for anyone interested in the moral issues that emerge from human interactions with animals. (shrink)

How come we ought to do things? Current metanormative debates often suffer from the fact that authors implicitly use adequacy conditions not shared by their opponents. This leads to an unsatisfying dialectical gridlock: One author accuses her opponents of not being able to account for stuff she judges essential, but the opponents do not think this to be a major flaw. In an attempt to meet the problem of gridlock head-on, the current investigation approaches oughtness differently. -/- I start with (...) the introduction of a grounding framework for thinking about oughtness -- the central normative property -- that allows a lucid presentation of the views on the market. It soon becomes clear that one necessary part of any plausible assessment of accounts of oughtness is a discussion of their adequacy conditions. I continue with a detailed evaluation of four different accounts, as presented by Halbig (2007), Schroeder (2007), Stemmer (2006), and Scanlon (2014). My main result is that desire-based or Humean theories of oughtness are more plausible because desire-independent accounts fail to explain something crucial: the for-me character of oughtness. Based on the insights gathered thus far, I then develop a new Humean theory – metaethical conativism – and defend it against some historically influential objections. (shrink)

We should disassociate ourselves from wrongdoing. If Hobby Lobby is against LGBTQ rights, we shouldn’t shop there. If Old Navy sources their clothing from sweatshops, we shouldn’t buy them. If animals are treated terribly in factory farms, we shouldn’t eat the meat, eggs, and dairy products that come from them. Let’s call these disassociation intuitions. What explains the existence and force of disassociation intuitions? And based on that explanation, are they intuitions worth taking seriously? In other words, depending on the (...) etiology of these intuitions, should we accept that you ought to dissociate yourself from wrongdoing? Our aim here is to outline a hypothesis that would, if true, answer the first question, and which suggests a way to vindicate some disassociation intuitions as morally correct. (shrink)

We use a cultural psychology approach to examine the relevance of the Health Belief Model for predicting a variety of behaviors that had been recommended by health officials during the initial stages of the COVID-19 lockdown for containing the spread of the virus and not overburdening the health system in Europe. Our study is grounded in the assumption that health behavior is activated based on locally relevant perceptions of threats, susceptibility and benefits in engaging in protective behavior, which requires careful (...) attention to how these perceptions might be structured and activated. We assess the validity of the HBM in two European countries that have been relatively understudied, using simultaneous measurements during acute periods of infection in Romania and Italy. An online questionnaire provided a total of valid answers from both countries. First, to understand individual difference patterns within and across populations, we fit a General Linear Model in which endorsement was predicted by behavior, country, their interaction, and a random effect for participants. Second, we assess the effect of demographics and health beliefs on prevention behaviors by fitting a multi-group path model across countries, in which each behavior was predicted by the observed health belief variables and demographics. Health beliefs showed stronger relationships with the recommended behaviors than demographics. Confirming previously reported relationships, self-efficacy, perceived severity, and perceived benefits were consistently related to the greater adoption of individual behaviors, whereas greater perceived barriers were related to lower adoption of health behaviors. However, we also point to important location specific effects that suggest that local norms shape protective behavior in highly contextualized ways. (shrink)

Este estudo é uma investigação histórica dos pressupostos culturais e científicos doperíodo de Alfonso X, o Sábio, Rei de Leão e Castela. Alfonso X dá forte impulso à ciência e à cultura, principalmente por meio do apoio às escolas, traduções e pesquisas. O artigo enfoca a “resolução” dos conteúdos do assim chamado“Libro de las cruzes”, um tratado sobre astrologia que mostra a tradição teórica árabe do séc. XI e traça a relação entre questões culturais e interesses científicos da época.

The study has two objectives: to introduce grip force recording as a new technique for studying embodied numerical processing; and to demonstrate how three competing accounts of numerical magnitude representation can be tested by using this new technique: the Mental Number Line, A Theory of Magnitude and Embodied Cognition account. While 26 healthy adults processed visually presented single digits in a go/no-go n-back paradigm, their passive holding forces for two small sensors were recorded in both hands. Spontaneous and unconscious grip (...) force changes related to number magnitude occurred in the left hand already 100–140 ms after stimulus presentation and continued systematically. Our results support a two-step model of number processing where an initial stage is related to the automatic activation of all stimulus properties whereas a later stage consists of deeper conscious processing of the stimulus. This interpretation generalizes previous work with linguistic stimuli and elaborates the timeline of embodied cognition. We hope that the use of grip force recording will advance the field of numerical cognition research. (shrink)

Feminist theory and philosophy has evinced an ongoing scholarly interest in the body and embodiment. Corporeal feminism, as it has been called by some, theorises the effects of patriarchal power structures on the female body, and hence, on women’s subjectivity and social position. As we progress into the 21st Century, despite several decades of feminist activism and scholarship, women’s bodies continue to be sites of control and contention both materially and symbolically. Issues such as reproductive rights and technologies, sexual violence, (...) objectification and normalization, motherhood, sexuality, and sex trafficking, among others, continue to be pressing concerns for women’s bodies in our contemporary milieu, arguably exacerbated in a neoliberal world where bodies are instrumentalized as sites of human capital, and biopolitical forces increasingly focus on controlling the minutiae of embodied life. (shrink)

There are several intertwined debates in the area of contemporary philos- ophy of time. One field of inquiry is the nature of time itself. Presentists think that only the present moment exists whereas eternalists believe that all of (space-)time exists on a par. The second main field of inquiry is the question of how objects persist through time. The endurantist claims that objects are three-dimensional wholes, which persist by being wholly1 present, whereas the perdurantist thinks that objects are four- dimensional (...) and that their temporal parts are the bearers of properties. The third debate in the field of contemporary philosophy of time is about tense- versus tenseless theory. Tensers are at odds with detensers about the status of the linguistic reference to the present moment. These are only very crude characterizations and it is even disputed by some ad- vocates of the corresponding positions that they are accurate. However this very sketchy picture already reveals a fundamental difference: The eternalism/presentism and endurance/perdurance discussions belong to the field of metaphysics, whereas tense is in the first instance a linguistic phenomenon. (shrink)

According to Humean promotionalism about practical reasons, the fact that I have a reason to φ holds in virtue of the fact that φ-ing promotes one or more of my desires. The topic of this discussion note is the question of how best to understand the promotion relation. In particular, I defend a probabilistic understanding of promotion against a line of argument recently brought forth by Jeff Behrends, Joshua DiPaolo, and Nate Sharadin. Roughly, their argument is that probabilistic promotion leads (...) to implausible results in cases in which the relevant desires are certain to be satisfied. In these cases, a probabilistic understanding tells us that we do not have a reason to φ because the probability of desire satisfaction is 1 already. Contrary to Behrends', DiPaolo's, and Sharadin's claims, I argue that this is precisely the result a Humean theory of reasons should generate. According to Humeanism, we have reasons for actions because these actions make a difference to the occurrence of desire satisfaction - where the causal route to desire satisfaction is normatively irrelevant. Thus, if desire satisfaction is dead certain, we have no reason to do anything. (shrink)

The emerging field of neuroeducation, concerned with the interaction between mind, brain and education, has proved revolutionary in educational research, introducing concepts, methods, and technologies into many advanced institutions around the world. The Educated Brain presents a broad overview of the major topics in this new discipline: Part I examines the historical and epistemological issues related to the mind/brain problem and the scope of neuroeducation; Part II provides a view of basic brain research in education and use of imaging techniques, (...) and the study of brain and cognitive development; and Part III is dedicated to the neural foundations of language and reading in different cultures, and the acquisition of basic mathematical concepts. With contributions from leading researchers in the field, this book features the most recent and advanced research in cognitive neurosciences. (shrink)

Assurance of Learning (AoL) is a critical component of AACSB accreditation because students need to demonstrate skills acquired in the programs they enroll in. The purpose of this paper is to describe how a business school developed its ethics assessment program to fulfill the requirement of AoL when seeking AACSB accreditation. Three learning goals were identified based on the literature, assessment rubrics were created based on learning goals, and a Harvard Business Case was used as the assessment tool. The result (...) of the first round of summative assessments showed that almost all students at least met the standard of these three learning goals. To close the loop, an ethics module and a one-hour video were added to a junior-level course. In the second round of summative assessment, we added a marginal level of competency to the rubric. We conclude with a plan for future student learning and assessment. (shrink)

Relational complexity theory has important virtues, but the present model omits key aspects and evidence. In contrast, skill theory specifies (1) a detailed series of developmental changes in relational complexity from birth to age 30, (2) processes of interaction of content and structure that produce variability in complexity, (3) the role of cortical development, and (4) empirical criteria for complexity levels, including developmental discontinuities. Many findings support these specifications.

Der Beitrag befasst sich mit religiösen Deutungen von Krankheit und ihren ethischen Implikationen, und zwar aus einer christlichen Perspektive. Er problematisiert die verbreitete Auffassung, dass Religion es ermöglicht, Kontingenzerfahrungen wie eine Krankheit mit einem Sinn zu verbinden und dadurch in das eigene Leben zu integrieren. Das Spezifische religiöser Deutungen und Praktiken liegt eher darin, dass sie es ermöglichen, mit Sinnlosigkeit zu leben. Sie haben dabei ethische Implikationen in Bezug auf den Umgang mit Krankheit und Sterben.

What are the underlying processes that enable human beings to recognize a happy face? Clearly, featural and configural cues will help to identify the distinctive smile. In addition, the motivational state of the observer will influence the interpretation of emotional expressions. Therefore, a model accounting for emotion recognition is only complete if bottom-up and top-down aspects are integrated.