Consciousness is known by the company it keeps. Story is its constant companion. This is the case even when it addresses itself to itself and says what it sees. It is like the pilot of a ship in one tale, but a thinking "I" in another. It is a theater where perceptions come and go, or an aviary where thoughts fly in and out like birds, or a stream. It is the manifestation of an immortal soul, or perhaps the first (...) rumor left behind by the disappearing soul on the air of philosophy. It is an ineffective nothing, a lyric cry in the midst of business, or the whistle of a steam engine. It is a mill, a tablet written on by experience, a telephone switchboard, a hologram, a computer. Anciently and most pertinently here... (shrink)

This paper is designed to do three things. First, it discusses some of the key trends in business ethics in the academic and corporate communities. Initiatives like the Arthur Andersen Business Ethics Program are noted. Secondly, the paper examines certain basic misconceptions about the field and concludes that the adage that good ethics is good business is still true. Finally, the paper highlights fourteen business attitudes or practices that may put a firm at ethical risk. For example, the paper discusses (...) the risk of using ethics as simply a public relations initiative.Man's life is not a state of unalloyed happiness. The earth is no paradise. Although this is not the fault of social institutions, people are wont to hold them responsible for it. The foundation of any and every civilization, including our own, is private ownership of the means of production. Whoever wishes to criticize modern civilization, therefore, begins with private property. It is blamed for everything that does not please the critic, especially those evils that have their origin in the fact that private property has been hampered and restrained in various respects so that its full social potentialities cannot be realized.1. (shrink)

During the last decade, the intensity of interest in the subject of business ethics has surprised even the most ardent defenders of the movement. It is easy to become euphoric over such developments. Yet, we should not be lulled into believing that such growth has no limits. The fact is that the movement stands at a watershed where certain alternative courses of action are available. In this paper, I outline what some of those crossroads are and what the consequences will (...) be if certain actions are or are not taken. The key to success is dependent upon a multidisciplinary approach that relies on dialogue and cooperation among colleagues in the academy and in business. This will ensure a true mix of theory and practice. (shrink)

The authors review the empirical literature in order to assess which variables are postulated as influencing ethical beliefs and decision making. The variables are divided into those unique to the individual decision maker and those considered situational in nature. Variables related to an individual decision maker examined in this review are nationality, religion, sex, age, education, employment, and personality. Situation specific variables examined in this review are referent groups, rewards and sanctions, codes of conduct, type of ethical conflict, organization effects, (...) industry, and business competitiveness. The review identifies the variables that have been empirically tested in an effort to uncover what is known and what we need to know about the variables that are hypothesized as determinants of ethical decision behavior. (shrink)

As the interest in the quality of work life grows, it becomes increasingly apparent that certain practices within this arena require critical scrutiny. This paper is an examination of one such area, performance appraisal (PA). We examine some of the main conceptual issues in PA, and we sketch some key, practical dilemmas that may arise in the use of PA. We conclude that one can morally justify the use of PA under certain condition, and we suggest possible solutions to key (...) ethical dilemmas that are faced by the manager and the employee. (shrink)

The nature and time course of sleep onset (hypnagogic) mentation was studied in the home environment using the Nightcap, a reliable, cost-effective, and relatively noninvasive sleep monitor. The Nightcap, linked to a personal computer, reliably identified sleep onset according to changes in perceived sleepiness and the appearance of hypnagogic dream features. Awakenings were performed by the computer after 15 s to 5 min of sleep as defined by eyelid quiescence. Awakenings from longer periods of sleep were associated with (1) an (...) increase in reported sleepiness, (2) a decrease in the length of mentation reports, (3) a decrease in the frequency of reports of normal, wake-like thoughts, (4) an increase in the frequency of ''unusual thoughts,'' and (5) increased frequencies of formal dream features, including visual hallucination, self-representation, fictive movement, narrative plot, and bizarreness. While sleep-onset reports can include all features of rapid eye movement (REM) dream reports, the number of such features is markedly reduced at sleep onset, suggesting that this mentation is a greatly diminished version of REM dreaming. (shrink)

This paper synthesises a collaborative review of social capital theory, with particular regard for its relevance to the changing educational landscape within Scotland. The review considers the common and distinctive elements of social capital, developed by the founding fathers-Putnam, Bourdieu and Coleman-and explores how these might help to understand the changing contexts and pursue opportunities for growth.

Human beings, like other organisms, are the products of evolution. Like other organisms, we exhibit traits that are the product of natural selection. Our psychological capacities are evolved traits as much as are our gait and posture. This much few would dispute. Evolutionary psychology goes further than this, claiming that our psychological traits -- including a wide variety of traits, from mate preference and jealousy to language and reason -- can be understood as specific adaptations to ancestral Pleistocene conditions. In (...) Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology, Robert Richardson takes a critical look at evolutionary psychology by subjecting its ambitious and controversial claims to the same sorts of methodological and evidential constraints that are broadly accepted within evolutionary biology. The claims of evolutionary psychology may pass muster as psychology; but what are their evolutionary credentials? Richardson considers three ways adaptive hypotheses can be evaluated, using examples from the biological literature to illustrate what sorts of evidence and methodology would be necessary to establish specific evolutionary and adaptive explanations of human psychological traits. He shows that existing explanations within evolutionary psychology fall woefully short of accepted biological standards. The theories offered by evolutionary psychologists may identify traits that are, or were, beneficial to humans. But gauged by biological standards, there is inadequate evidence: evolutionary psychologists are largely silent on the evolutionary evidence relevant to assessing their claims, including such matters as variation in ancestral populations, heritability, and the advantage offered to our ancestors. As evolutionary claims they are unsubstantiated. Evolutionary psychology, Richardson concludes, may offer a program of research, but it lacks the kind of evidence that is generally expected within evolutionary biology. It is speculation rather than sound science -- and we should treat its claims with skepticism. (shrink)

The Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool (ECQAT) establishes standards by which the quality of ethics consultation records (ECRs) can be assessed. These standards relate to the ethics question, consultation-specific information, ethical analysis, and recommendations and/or conclusions, and result in a score associated with one of four levels of ethics consultation quality. For the ECQAT to be useful in assessing and improving the quality of healthcare ethics consultations, individuals who rate the quality of ECRs need to be able to reliably use (...) the tool.We developed a short course to train ethics consultants in using the ECQAT, and evaluated whether the participants (1) achieved an acceptable level of calibration in matching expert-established quality scores for a set of ethics consultations, and (2) were satisfied with the course. We recruited 28 ethics consultants to participate in a virtual, six-session course. At each session participants and faculty reviewed, rated, and discussed one to two ECRs. The participants’ calibration in matching expert-established quality scores improved with repeated exposure at all levels of ethics consultation quality. Participants were generally more accurate when assessing consultation quality at the dichotomous level of “acceptable” (scores of three or four) versus “unacceptable” (scores of one or two) than they were with a more specific score. Participants had higher rates of accuracy with the extreme ratings of “strong” (level four) or “poor” (level one). Although participants were highly satisfied with the course, only a minority of participants achieved the prespecified acceptable level of calibration (that is, 80 percent or greater accuracy between their score and expert-established scores). These results suggest that ECQAT training may require more sessions or need modification in the protocol to achieve higher reliability in scoring. Such trainings are an important next step in ensuring that the ECQAT is a tool that can be used to promote improvement in ethics consultation quality. (shrink)

It is here argued that functionalist constraints on psychology do not preclude the applicability of classic forms of reduction and, therefore, do not support claims to a principled, or de jure, autonomy of psychology. In Part I, after isolating one minimal restriction any functionalist theory must impose on its categories, it is shown that any functionalism imposing an additional constraint of de facto autonomy must also be committed to a pure functionalist--that is, a computationalist--model for psychology. Using an extended parallel (...) to the reduction of Mendelian to molecular genetics, it is shown in Parts II and III that, contrary to the claims of Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, there is no inconsistency between computational models and classical reductionism: neither plurality of physical realization nor plurality of function are inconsistent with reductionism as defended by Ernest Nagel. Employing the results of Part I, the conclusions of Parts II and III are generalized in Part IV to cover any version of functionalism whatsoever; thus, functionalism and reductionism are shown to be consistent. It is urged in conclusion that although a de facto form of autonomy is defensible, there are sound methodological grounds for unconditionally rejecting any principled version of the autonomy of psychology. (shrink)

We offer a systematic examination of propensity interpretations of fitness, which emphasizes the role that fitness plays in evolutionary theory and takes seriously the probabilistic character of evolutionary change. We distinguish questions of the probabilistic character of fitness from the particular interpretations of probability which could be incorporated. The roles of selection and drift in evolutionary models support the view that fitness must be understood within a probabilistic framework, and the specific character of organism/environment interactions supports the conclusion that fitness (...) must be understood as a propensity rather than as a limiting frequency. (shrink)

There is often substantial disparity between philosophical ideals and scientific practice. Philosophical reductionism is motivated by a drive for ontological austerity. The vehicle is conceptual parsimony: the fewer our conceptual primitives, the less are our ontological commitments. A general moral to be drawn from my “Functionalism and Reductionism” is that scientific reduction does not, and should not be expected to, facilitate conceptual economy; yet reduction it still is, and in the classical mold. Those who press for the irreducibility of a (...) functional psychology have been seduced by an inadequate account of scientific reduction. Patricia Kitcher is unhappy with my argument because it fails to live up to her philosophical ideals. “The claim that psychology is irreducible to neurophysiology,” she suggests, “rests to a large extent on the fact that, even in principle, neurophysiology is not capable of carrying out the explanatory work of a functional psychology”. (shrink)

Multiple realization historically mandated the autonomy of psychology, and its principled irreducibility to neuroscience. Recently, multiple realization and its implications for the reducibility of psychology to neuroscience have been challenged. One challenge concerns the proper understanding of reduction. Another concerns whether multiple realization is as pervasive as is alleged. I focus on the latter question. I illustrate multiple realization with actual, rather than hypothetical, cases of multiple realization from within the biological sciences. Though they do support a degree of autonomy (...) for higher levels of explanation and organization, they do not have the dire consequences critics of multiple realization fear. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221‐0374; e‐mail: robert.richardson@uc.edu. (shrink)

John Bickle's Psychoneural reduction: the new wave (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) aims to resurrect reductionism within philosophy of mind. He develops a new model of scientific reduction, geared to enhancing our understanding of how theories in neuroscience and cognitive science are interrelated. I put this discussion in context, and assess the prospects for new wave reductionism, both as a general model of scientific reduction and as an attempt to defend reductionism in the philosophy of mind.

The mutual influence of science and values in biology is exhibited in several cases from the biological literature. It is argued in a number of cases, from R. A. Fisher's argument for the optimality of a 50:50 sex ratio to A. Jensen's defense of a genetic basis for intelligence, and including work on the evolution of sexual dimorphism and muted aggression, that the credence accorded the views is disproportionate with their theoretical and empirical warrant. It is, furthermore, suggested that the (...) proper explanation for the attraction and persistence of such views lies in their conformity with ideological norms. There is thus an important, if circumscribed, role for ideological critique in the evaluation of scientific theories; in particular, it lies in the explanation of the acceptance and persistence of scientific views, given independent grounds for questioning their justifiability. (shrink)

Biographer Richardson has written a moving portrait of James--pivotal member of the Metaphysical Club and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. The biography, ten years in the making, draws on unpublished letters, journals, and family records. Richardson paints extraordinary scenes from what James himself called the "buzzing blooming confusion" of his life, beginning with childhood, as he struggled to achieve amid the domestic chaos and intellectual brilliance of Father, brother Henry, and sister Alice. James was a beloved (...) teacher who taught courage and risk-taking, and served as mentor to W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and many other Harvard outsiders. Richardson also illuminates James's hugely influential works. One of the great figures in mysticism here brought richly to life, James is a man "whose leading ideas are still so fresh and challenging that they are not yet fully assimilated by the modern world they helped to bring about."--From publisher description. (shrink)

Multiple realization was once taken to be a challenge to reductionist visions, especially within cognitive science, and a foundation of the “antireductionist consensus.” More recently, multiple realization has come to be challenged on naturalistic grounds, as well as on more “metaphysical” grounds. Within cognitive science, one focal issue concerns the role of neural plasticity for addressing these issues. If reorganization maintains the same cognitive functions, that supports claims for multiple realization. I take up the reorganization involved in language dysfunctions to (...) deal with questions concerned with multiple realization and neural plasticity. Beginning with Broca’s case for localization and the nineteenth century discussion of “reorganization,” and returning to more recent evidence for neural plasticity, I argue that, in the end, there is substantial support for multiple realization in cognitive systems; I further argue that this is wholly consistent with a recognition of methodological pluralism in cognitive science. (shrink)

The "Nightcap," a relatively nonintrusive and "user-friendly" sleep monitoring system, was used by 11 subjects on 10 consecutive nights in their homes. Eighty-eight sleep mentation reports were obtained after spontaneous awakenings from Nightcap-identified REM sleep and 61 were obtained from NREM awakenings. Sleep mentation was recalled in 83% of REM reports and 54% of NREM reports. The median length of REM reports was 148 words compared to 21 words for NREM reports. Twenty-four percent of the REM reports were over 500 (...) words long; no NREM reports over 500 words were obtained. REM report lengths were lowest during the first 15 min of the REM cycle and longest 15–45 min into the period. In contrast, 7 of the 9 NREM reports more than 100 words long occurred within the first 15 min of NREM periods. The Nightcap thus appears to be an effective and efficient method of collecting large numbers of sleep mentation reports with correlated sleep staging under normal ecological conditions. (shrink)

A novel "dream splicing" technique allows the objective evaluation of thematic coherence in dreams. In this study, dream reports were cut into segments and segments randomly recombined to form spliced reports. Judges then attempted to distinguish spliced reports from intact ones. Five judges correctly scored 22 spliced and intact reports 82% of the time ; 13 of the 22 reports were correctly scored by all five judges . We conclude that most dream reports contain sufficient coherence to allow judges to (...) distinguish intact from spliced reports. In contrast, abridged reports, which had all but their first and last five lines removed, were correctly identified in only 10 of 38 reports, suggesting that thematic continuity does not normally extend from the beginning to the end of dreams. The continuity identified in this minority of the reports depended on easily identifiable features, such as specific characters, objects, locations, and emotions, rather than on "latent" themes. (shrink)

The classic charge against Freudian theory is that the therapeutic success of psychoanalysis can be explained without appeal to the mechanisms of repression and insight. Whatever therapeutic success psychoanalysis might enjoy would then provide no support for the diagnostic claim that psychological disorders are due to repressed desires or for the therapeutic claim that the gains in psychoanalysis are due to insight into repressed causes. Adolf Grünbaum has repeated the charge in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), arguing that Freud's response (...) to it in what he calls the "Tally Argument" is woefully inadequate. Grünbaum claims that Freud's defense depends on the view that only psychoanalytic techniques can yield therapeutic effects, and therefore that the transience of some psychoanalytic "cures", the existence of alternative treatment modalities, and the frequency of spontaneous remission undermine Freud's defense of psychoanalysis. I argue that, whatever the merits of psychoanalysis, Freud is not logically committed to any view as extreme as that attributed to him by Grünbaum; and, furthermore, Grünbaum's rendering of Freud is historically inaccurate. (shrink)

Biomedical Ontologies integrate diverse biomedical data and enable intelligent data-mining and help translate basic research into useful clinical knowledge. We present the RNA Ontology (RNAO), an o...

An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result (...) in divergent explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993. (shrink)

Genetic regulatory networks are complex, involving tens or hundreds of genes and scores of proteins with varying dependencies and organizations. This invites the application of artificial techniques in coming to understand natural complexity. I describe two attempts to deploy artificial models in understanding natural complexity. The first abstracts from empirically established patterns, favoring random architectures and very general constraints, in an attempt to model developmental phenomena. The second incorporates detailed information concerning the genetic structure, organization, and dependencies in actual systems (...) in an attempt to explain developmental differences. The results offered by these models, pitched at these different levels of abstraction, are different. The more detailed models are more continuous with classical developmental approaches. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology purports to explain human capacities as adaptations to an ancestral environment. A complete explanation of human language or human reasoning as adaptations depends on assessing an historical claim, that these capacities evolved under the pressure of natural selection and are prevalent because they provided systematic advantages to our ancestors. An outline of the character of the information needed in order to offer complete adaptation explanations is drawn from Robert Brandon (1990), and explanations offered for the evolution of (...) language and reasoning within evolutionary psychology are evaluated. Pinker and Bloom's (1992) defense of human language as an adaptation for verbal communication, Robert Nozick's (1993) account of the evolutionary origin of rationality, and Cosmides and Tooby's (1992) explanation of human reasoning as an adaptation for social exchange, are discussed in light of what is known, and what is not known, about the history of human evolution. In each case, though a plausible case is made that these capacities are adaptations, there is not enough known to offer even a semblance of an explanation of the origin of these capacities. These explanations of the origin of human thought and language are simply speculations lacking the kind of detailed historical information required for an evolutionary explanation of an adaptation. (shrink)

A re-examination of determinism and compatibilism and incompatibilism in free will debates.

Bounded rationality is a fundamental feature of cognition. We make choices between alternatives in light of our goals, relying on incomplete information and limited resources. As a consequence, PROBLEM SOLVING cannot be exhaustive: we cannot explore all the possibilities which confront us, and search must be constrained in ways that facilitate search efficiency even at the expense of search effectiveness. If we think of problem solving as a search through the space of possibilities as it was conceptualized by Allen Newell (...) and Herbert A. Simon, limitations on search entail that for all but the simplest problems we can investigate at most a small proportion of the possibilities. Moreover, our evaluation of these possibilities will be uncertain and incomplete. We must rely on heuristic methods for pruning the tree of possibilities and for evaluating the possibilities we consider. In medical diagnosis, for example, the problem is one of inferring what disease is present from a given set of symptoms, when no one symptom is invariably present with a given disease, and the same symptom can have various causes. Moreover, patients can be suffering from more than one disease, a fact which compounds the difficulties of accurate diagnosis. Given that symptoms cannot generally be assumed to be independent and are noisy indicators of the underlying disease, the size of the search space turns out to be large, and inference concerning underlying diseases is inevitably uncertain. One solution is to limit the range of the search, eliminating some candidates as implausible; that is, we may adopt assumptions limiting the range of diseases considered to a narrow range of those antecedently likely. Good diagnosticians evidently narrow the range to no more than a handful of candidates. Search must be limited in order to be efficient. (shrink)