Airline pilots are attributed ultimate responsibility and final authority over their aircraft to ensure the safety and well-being of all its occupants. Yet, with the advent of automation technologies, a dissonance has emerged in that pilots have lost their actual decision-making authority as well as their ability to act in an adequate fashion towards meeting their responsibilities when unexpected circumstances or emergencies occur. Across the literature in human factor studies, we show how automated algorithmic technologies have wrestled control away from (...) airline pilots. The inter-related ethical and pragmatic consequences resulting from such a dissonance are presented. This includes pilots serving as ‘legal sponges’, being caught in ‘moral crumple zones’, as well as real impacts on safety and well-being of passengers and crew. One potential avenue presented in the literature involves a redistribution of responsibility towards all agential entities within the cockpit system. We discuss the possible pitfalls to this approach, including the reinforcement of pilot skills erosion as well as technology’s own limitations in adaptively dealing with unexpected circumstances. We justify our position by showing how algorithmic technology’s representational frames mask or severely limit the pilots’ natural reflex to ‘practically cope’ and gain an ‘optimal grip’ with a given context/situation at hand. Here, we present the concept of relevant or meaningful control, which pilots, when allowed to develop their natural brain-body reflexes, gain across gradual mastery of the aircraft. Finally, we propose a socio-technical design approach in which pilots can re-appropriate full human meaningful control of the aircraft, thus allowing them to meet their attributed responsibilities. (shrink)

"Technological balance" occurs automatically when the designer, builder, and user of a tool is the same person. "Technological imbalance" occurs when these activities become separated and in opposition to one another. Tools become menacing exoge nous objects. We see a shift in connotation of the word technology from the skill of the person to the object produced. Designers and builders create tools with the passive consent and willful ignorance of users. Curricula often contribute to this imbalance. Apprentice designers and builders (...) receive specialized instruction in creating objects, whereas users uncritically learn the procedural requirements of the resulting objects. This system of education turns "machine tending" into a pedagogical goal. The university has the potential to become a model of technological balance for the soci ety as a whole using such means as selecting tools that encourage balance, "technology audits, " and break ing down the specializations among designers, builders, and users. (shrink)

Activity anorexia illustrates selection of behavior at the biological, behavioral, and neural levels. Based on evolutionary history, food depletion increases the reinforcement value of physical activity that, in turn, decreases the reinforcement effectiveness of eating – resulting in activity anorexia. Neural opiates participate in the selection of physical activity during periods of food depletion.

Recent developments in quantum physics postulate the existence of some form of multiverse, often considered inimical to theism. We argue that a cosmology of many worlds is not novel either to philosophy or to theism. The multiverse is not a monolithic concept and we refer to and use the four levels of categorization proposed by Max Tegmark. We trace the idea of a multiverse back to the Milesians and Epicureans in order to initially demonstrate its use of a plenitude argument. (...) We then examine the argument for possible compatibility based on a theistic principle of plenitude in three specifically Christian theists: Origen, Thomas Aquinas, and G. W. Leibniz. We conclude that this argument is sustainable so that if any level of the multiverse actually exists then it is harmonious with theism, and we argue that its fit is most successful if a multiverse is considered as a single possible world. We call this view Thomistic modal realism. (shrink)

Skinner has assigned the persistence of cognitive explanations to the literature of freedom and dignity. This view is challenged especially as it applies to behavioral scientists. It is argued that cognitive explanations persist because current behaviorism does not challenge cognitive epistomology; because behavior analysts have failed to provide research evidence at the level of human behavior, and finally because a science of behavior based solely on operant principles is necessarily incomplete. The implications of these problems for behavior analysis are addressed.

How To Think Philosophically invites reflection on curiosity, wonder, and inquiry. Part I explains philosophy as a way of developing the disciplines and intellectual virtues for seeing and inhabiting the world. Part II introduces the domains of philosophical thinking: epistemology (how we know), metaphysics (what we know), and ethics (how to live).

The following hypothetical case study was developed for bioengineering students and is concerned with choosing between two devices used for development of a pediatric tissue engineered heart valve (TEHV). This case is intended to elicit assessment of the devices, possible future outcomes, and ramifications of the decision making. It is framed in light of two predominant ethical theories: utilitarianism and rights of persons. After the case was presented to bioengineering graduate students, they voted on which device should be released. The (...) results revealed that these bioengineering students preferred the more reliable (and substantially more expensive) design, though this choice precludes the majority of the world from having access to this technology. This case is intended to examine and explore where the balance lies between design, cost, and adequate distribution of biomedical devices. (shrink)

In the context of a discussion of time symmetry in the quantum mechanical measurement process, Aharonov et al. (1964) derived an expression concerning probabilities for the outcomes of measurements conducted on systems which have been pre- and postselected on the basis of both preceding and succeeding measurements. Recent literature has claimed that a resulting "time-symmetrized" interpretation of quantum mechanics has significant implications for some basic issues, such as contextuality and determinateness, in elementary, nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Bub and Brown (1986) have (...) shown that under the standard interpretation of the aforementioned expression, these claims employ ensembles which are not well defined. It is argued here that under a counterfactual interpretation of the expression, these claims may be understood as employing well-defined ensembles; it is shown, however, that such an interpretation cannot be reconciled with the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Philosophers like Duhem and Cartwright have argued that there is a tension between laws' abilities to explain and to represent. Abstract laws exemplify the first quality, phenomenological laws the second. This view has both metaphysical and methodological aspects: the world is too complex to be represented by simple theories; supplementing simple theories to make them represent reality blocks their confirmation. We argue that both aspects are incompatible with recent developments in nonlinear dynamics. Confirmation procedures and modelling strategies in nonlinear dynamics (...) show that there are simple, abstract theories that can be confirmed without encountering the problems pointed to by Cartwright. (shrink)

We contend that social science variables are the product of multiple partly heritable traits. Genetic associations with socioeconomic status (SES) may differ across populations, but this is a consequence of the intermediary traits associated with SES differences also varying. Furthermore, genetic data allow social scientists to make causal statements regarding the aetiology and consequences of SES.

A certain order or stability of nature has often been seen as a necessary presupposition of many of our scientific practices, in particular of our use of information gained in one kind of circumstance to explain or predict what happens in quite different situations. John Maynard Keynes and, more recently, Nancy Cartwright have argued that these practices commit us to the existence of stable ‘atoms’ or ‘natures’ or ‘tendencies.’ The phenomena we observe in nature are, on this view, the result (...) of superimposing the invariable, context-independent effects of all the different tendencies involved. (shrink)