The concept of lying is generally assumed to be closely related to the concept of assertion. However, the literature on lying has focused almost exclusively on lies expressed by unqualified assertions. Sometimes a speaker chooses to qualify her assertion by hedging, making her utterance a hedged declarative. This paper defends the thesis that lies can be expressed by untruthful hedged declaratives, and explores the implications of this thesis for the definition of lying. Many standard approaches to the definition of lying (...) allow lies to be expressed by untruthful hedged declaratives, which may explain why these cases have been ignored in the literature. However, untruthful hedged declaratives present a problem for a recently-proposed theory that analyzes lying in terms of the Knowledge Norm of Assertion. According to this theory, a necessary condition on lying is that in asserting that p, the speaker represents herself as knowing that p; however, in making an untruthful hedged declarative a speaker represents herself as having an epistemic attitude weaker than knowledge. The fact that such a theory fails to adequately explain untruthful hedged declaratives provides a reason to prefer alternative theories of lying. The discussion draws out some important observations about the concepts of lying, assertion, belief, and the relations between them. (shrink)

Whether to treat autism as exculpatory in any given circumstance appears to be influenced both by models of autism and by theories of moral responsibility. This article looks at one particular combination of theories: autism as theory of mind challenges and moral responsibility as requiring appropriate experience of the reactive attitudes. In pursuing this particular combination of ideas, we do not intend to endorse them. Our goal is, instead, to explore the implications of this combination of especially prominent ideas about (...) autism and about moral responsibility. These implications can be quite serious and practical for autists and those who interact directly with autists, as well as for broader communities as they attend to the fair, compassionate, and respectful treatment of increasing numbers of autistic adults. We find that these theories point to a limited range of situations in which autists should not be blamed for transgressive actions for which neurotypical individuals should be blamed. We build on what others have written on these issues by bringing in a recent cognitive model of the role theory of mind plays in empathy, by discussing the social implications of the theoretical findings, and by raising questions about the compatibility of reactive attitude theories of moral responsibility with the neurodiversity approach to autism. (shrink)

A notion of completeness and completion suitable for use in the absence of countable choice is developed. This encompasses the construction of the real numbers as well as the completion of an arbitrary metric space. The real numbers are characterized as a complete Archimedean Heyting field, a terminal object in the category of Archimedean Heyting fields.

Definitions of health and disease are of more than theoretical interest. Understanding what it means to be healthy has implications for choices in medical treatment, for ethically sound informed consent, and for accurate assessment of policies or programs. This deeper understanding can help us create more effective public policy for health and medicine. It is notable that such contentious legal initiatives as the Americans with Disability Act and the Patients' Bill of Rights fail to define adequately the medical terms on (...) which their effectiveness depends. In Ethics and the Metaphysics of Medicine, Kenneth Richman develops an "embedded instrumentalist" theory of health and applies it to practical problems in health care and medicine, addressing topics that range from the philosophy of science to knee surgery."Embedded instrumentalist" theories hold that health is a match between one's goals and one's ability to reach those goals, and that the relevant goals may vary from individual to individual. This captures the normative implications of the term health while avoiding problematic relativism. Richman's embedded instrumentalism differs from other theories of health in drawing a distinction between the health of individuals as biological organisms and the health of individuals as moral agents. This distinction illuminates many difficulties in patient-provider communication and helps us understand conflicts between promoting health and promoting ethically permissible behavior. After exploring, expanding, and defending this theory in the first part of the book, Richman examines its ethical implications, discussing such concerns as the connection between medical beneficence and respect for autonomy, patient-provider communication, living wills, and clinical education. (shrink)

Purpose Cyberbullying occurs when a minor is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child. Given that cyberbullying entails defamation or spreading false information or portfolios about someone, it is regarded as a violation of the ethical code of information use. The purpose of the study was to explore the perceptions, experiences and challenges of post-high school youth with regards to cyberbullying. This is a quantitative study that used a survey approach to gather data using a self-administered (...) questionnaire, which was distributed to 60 youth from the KwaZulu-Natal computer literacy community engagement project. The findings attest that youth recognise that cyberbullying might have detrimental effects on victims, such as alcohol and drugs abuse, low self-esteem, high level of absenteeism, poor grades and depression and suicidal thoughts. There is a low percentage of victims and perpetrators of cyberbullying in rural contexts in South Africa. It is hoped that findings may will a positive impact in the rural communities and enable the youth to interact with the modern technologies and handle them in an ethical manner. The study recommends that parents need to take cognisance of the probable possible dangers of the various technologies so that they could be instrumental in educating their children about children cyberbullying. Further, the schools and the Department of Education can play a fundamental role in educating children about cyberbullying and cyber ethics. Design/methodology/approach This survey was conducted to explore youth perceptions and experiences, as well as violations, of ethics through cyberbullying as experienced by the rural community at Mbazwana in the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal. Convenience sampling was used, because although the questionnaire was distributed to all 60 participants in the project, not all of them completed the instrument, as participation was voluntary. Only 43 were completed, which is equal to 72 per cent response rate. The validity of the data collection instrument used was enhanced by the fact that questions were derived from the main objective of the study. Some themes of the instrument were self-designed and others were adapted from a similar study by Dehue et al., who looked at cyberbullying experiences of youth. The instrument was tried out in a pilot study in grade 12 classes in two high schools at Mbazwana in a bid to find out whether the learners would understand the questionnaire. Post-high school learners were considered to be at a similar level as the grade 12 learners polled. The pilot study proved its own importance: students who filled in the questionnaire indicated that they were not familiar with some terms and the researchers had to simplify the language to make it more understandable. Findings A large portion of the youth studied indicated that they used their smartphones to access the internet, 25 per cent identified libraries as their source of access to the internet and 13 per cent reported accessing the internet from community laboratories. In total, 13 per cent of respondents reported accessing the internet from friends’ computers. Last, the smallest proportion at 4 per cent reported having internet access via their home desktop computers. The South African Mobile Report reveals that a great majority of South Africans access the internet via their own smartphones. These findings might indicate that many people nowadays do indeed have internet access in their regions. Research limitations/implications The results of this study indicate that not all households own a desktop computer, as some people rely on community laboratories and others rely on friends who own desktop or laptop computers. Practical implications The study results reveal that most students who did the computer literacy course consider themselves at an “intermediate” level. It was noted that cellphones/smartphones play a significant role in gaining access to the internet and to social networking applications in rural communities. The social media applications most visited by youth in this study were shown to be Facebook and WhatsApp. Only a relatively low percentage of the respondents in this study in a rural context in South Africa reported being either victims or perpetrators of cyberbullying. Social implications Social media give people ample opportunities to interact and socialise with other people in global context. Only a relatively low percentage of the respondents in this study in a rural context in South Africa reported being either victims or perpetrators of cyberbullying. It is hoped that insights gained from these findings may have a positive effect in the rural communities if awareness programmes are put in place to enable the youth to interact with the modern technologies and handle them in an ethical manner. Originality/value The contribution to the world of knowledge is that this study gives a clear indication of experiences and perceptions of cyberbullying in rural areas in South Africa. This will inform other scholars who want to engage in similar studies in different contexts that can be compared with the results of this study. It is notable that one cannot predict one’s own knowledge of a certain aspect of a community until one has fully engaged in research. Prior to this study, the researchers did not know whether the rural community youth participated in cyberbullying. (shrink)

The modern theory of computability is based on the works of Church, Markov and Turing who, starting from quite different models of computation, arrived at the same class of computable functions. The purpose of this paper is the show how the main results of the Church-Markov-Turing theory of computable functions may quickly be derived and understood without recourse to the largely irrelevant theories of recursive functions, Markov algorithms, or Turing machines. We do this by ignoring the problem of what constitutes (...) a computable function and concentrating on the central feature of the Church-Markov-Turing theory: that the set of computable partial functions can be effectively enumerated. In this manner we are led directly to the heart of the theory of computability without having to fuss about what a computable function is.The spirit of this approach is similar to that of [RGRS]. A major difference is that we operate in the context of constructive mathematics in the sense of Bishop [BSH1], so all functions are computable by definition, and the phrase “you can find” implies “by a finite calculation.” In particular ifPis some property, then the statement “for eachmthere isnsuch thatP” means that we can construct a functionθsuch thatP)for allm. Church's thesis has a different flavor in an environment like this where the notion of a computable function is primitive.One point of such a treatment of Church's thesis is to make available to Bishopstyle constructivists the Markovian counterexamples of Russian constructivism and recursive function theory. The lack of serious candidates for computable functions other than recursive functions makes it quite implausible that a Bishopstyle constructivist could refute Church's thesis, or any consequence of Church's thesis. Hence counterexamples such as Specker's bounded increasing sequence of rational numbers that is eventually bounded away from any given real number [SPEC] may be used, as Brouwerian counterexamples are, as evidence of the unprovability of certain assertions. (shrink)

Ethicists, researchers and policy makers have paid increasing attention to the ethical conduct of research, especially research involving human beings. Research performed with and by undergraduates poses a specific set of ethical challenges. These challenges are often overlooked by the research community because it is assumed that undergraduate student researchers do not have a significant impact on the research community and that their projects are not host to research posing important ethical issues. This paper identifies several features characteristic of research (...) in undergraduate environments. The paper pays special attention to selective small liberal arts colleges, an important segment of higher education in the US, and advocates integrating instruction in research ethics wherever undergraduates are engaged in research. (shrink)

We suggest that there is confusion between why consciousness developed and what additional functions, through continued evolution, it has co-opted. Consider episodic memory. If we believe that episodic memory evolved solely to accurately represent past events, it seems like a terrible system—prone to forgetting and false memories. However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a good system. We (...) argue that consciousness originally developed as part of the episodic memory system—quite likely the part needed to accomplish that flexible recombining of information. We posit further that consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language. We suggest that this theory is compatible with many phenomena, such as the slow speed and the after-the-fact order of consciousness, that cannot be explained well by other theories. We believe that our theory may have profound implications for understanding intentional action and consciousness in general. Moreover, we suggest that episodic memory and its associated memory systems of sensory, working, and semantic memory as a whole ought to be considered together as the conscious memory system in that they, together, give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness. Lastly, we suggest that the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that makes consciousness possible, and that every cortical region contributes to this conscious memory system. (shrink)

We consider notions of boundedness of subsets of the natural numbers ℕ that occur when doing mathematics in the context of intuitionistic logic. We obtain a new characterization of the notion of a pseudobounded subset and we formulate the closely related notion of a detachably finite subset. We establish metric equivalents for a subset of ℕ to be detachably finite and to satisfy the ascending chain condition. Following Ishihara, we spell out the relationship between detachable finiteness and sequential continuity. Most (...) of the results do not require countable choice. (shrink)

The contribution of this study to existing scholarship is threefold. First, it extends heterology’s timeline beyond the late 1930s to encompass the final phase of Bataille’s career (1955–62) devoted to prehistory. It argues that heterology’s keyword – the wholly other – furnished an entry point into the prehistoric past marginalized by traditional historiography. Second, it demonstrates that the exemplar of prehistory’s otherness is silence. Along with Maurice Blanchot, Bataille forged a modernist aesthetics that promotes silence as an interruption of speech. (...) It therefore concludes that interruption – frequently dismissed as a sign of Bataille’s deficiencies or in contradiction with his goal of continuity – recaptures the continuum lost when archaic humans invented work, language, and a deferral to the future. With sections on religious experience, markings, eroticism, and the rupture between animals and humans, this study offers an introduction to prehistory in Bataille for specialists and general readers willing to plunge into what scholars now describe as deep history. (shrink)

A very weak omniscience principle is formulated, related omniscience principlesare considered, and the theorem that a function of bounded variation is the difference of two increasing functions is shown to be equivalent to the omniscience principle WLPO. It is a so shown that an arbitrary function with located variation on an interval is the difference of two increasing functions.

This article's polemical thrust begins with Georges Bataille's 1956 critique of Tristes Tropiques, where Lévi-Strauss omits the Palaeolithic while extolling the Neolithic advent of agriculture and sedentism. Whereas Lévi-Strauss describes his own thinking as Neolithic, he characterizes it in ways that resemble the behaviour of hunter-gatherers and nomads. I trace this contradiction to current scholarship willing to challenge the long-standing narrative bias that either ignores the Palaeolithic and/or derides it in favour of the Neolithic, now subject to refutations of its (...) alleged advantages. Further theoretical backbone is provided by Ibn Khaldun and Bataille on the centrality of luxury. Thus, Palaeolithic cave art's social dimension as the expression of a privileged few is contrasted with the view of scholars who see it as the product of an egalitarian society indifferent to material gain. Bataille remains a key reference due to his exceptional commitment to prehistory, a relatively underexploited facet of his work. (shrink)