This study examined the effect of fake news on electoral outcome. Using post-election surveys, previous studies found associations between exposure to fake news and voting behavior, though these observational studies failed to show that these changes were actually caused by fake news. To examine whether fake news really affects voting behavior, we need to experimentally manipulate voters’ exposure to fake news in real elections and see if voters regret their vote choice knowing that the information was false. For this purpose, (...) our study focused on Mexico’s 2018 presidential election, which provided an ideal setting. During the campaign, false information about a scandal allegedly involving Ricardo Anaya, a candidate from the National Action Party, was widely disseminated. However, his innocence was officially acknowledged after the election. Using this correction of fake news as a treatment, we tested a sample of 1,561 individuals to assess whether the retraction of fake news caused post-election regret: would Mexican voters have voted differently if they had not been exposed to such false information. Our multivariate analyses found that the retraction of fake news did cause post-election regret among voters with lower internal political efficacy, but voters associated with higher political knowledge and internal political efficacy were not affected by the retraction and were less likely to experience regret. About 20% of the respondents experienced post-election regret, and of those, about 35% would have switched their vote to Anaya. The findings corroborate lasting effects of fake news, which may have non-negligible effects on electoral outcomes. (shrink)

Yuriko Saito, the leading figure in the field, explores the nature and significance of the aesthetic dimensions of people's everyday lives. She argues that everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing humanity's collective and cumulative world-making project.

Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday aesthetic tastes and judgments (...) can exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues. (shrink)

Neglect of everyday aesthetics -- Significance of everyday aesthetics -- Aesthetics of distinctive characteristics and ambience -- Everyday aesthetic qualities and transience -- Moral-aesthetic judgments of artifacts.

I propose that the appropriate appreciation of nature must include the moral capacity for acknowledging the reality of nature apart from humans and the sensitivity for listening to its own story. I argue that appreciating nature exclusively as design is inappropriate to the extent that we impose upon nature a preconceived artistic standard as well as appreciation based upon historical/cultural/literary associationsinsofar as we treat nature as a background of our own story. In contrast, aesthetic appreciation informed by our attempt to (...) make sense of nature, such as science, mythology, and folklore, is appropriate because it guides our experience toward understanding nature’s own story embodied in its sensuous surface. (shrink)

自己決定概念は、患者の自律やインフォームド・コンセント、プライバシー概念等の基礎にあり、生命倫理において核となる重要な概念である。しかし、その歴史的由来について、またその概念の意味するところについて、 これまで本巻のように主題的に扱われることはほとんどなかった。ここでの諸論考は、「自己決定権」や「自律」概念の理解にも大いに役立つはずである。.

This essay discusses how the aesthetics of body movements contributes to cultivating other-regarding moral virtues, such as respect and care. The moral and aesthetic assessment of body movements is commonly regarded as a matter of etiquette and manners, which is considered to be nothing more than a superficial convention or a means of maintaining social hierarchy. I argue instead that body movements often facilitate an aesthetic communication of social virtues. As such, body aesthetics is an indispensable ingredient of a good (...) society. The Japanese aesthetic tradition offers a particularly rich legacy of developing the moral character of a person through bodily practices in the artistic, religious, and everyday realms. I will present and analyze various examples from Japanese cultural tradition to illustrate the significance of body aesthetics as a vehicle of cultivating moral virtues. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that the prime mover of contemporary consumerism is aesthetics. However, today's consumer aesthetics often leads to decisions and actions that have negative environmental consequences. By taking apparel industry, represented by fast fashion, as a quintessential example of this problem, I argue that aesthetics can no longer claim immunity from environmental considerations—there needs to be a paradigm shift for consumer aesthetics. A proposed new environmentally minded consumer aesthetics promotes a paradoxical role for material ephemerality in enhancing an (...) object's longevity, and it places importance on the personal connection with an object's story, as well as our engagement with the material world more generally. (shrink)

Yuriko Saito discusses aspects of our everyday experience that have been neglected by modern Western aesthetic theories.

After half a century, environmental aesthetics successfully expanded the scope of modern art-centred Western aesthetic discourse. I argue that further expansion is in order. First, we should explore the aesthetics of the constituents of the environment, namely artefacts, human activities and social relationships, which determine the quality of life and the state of the world. Second, we need to cultivate aesthetic literacy as well as a normative discourse to steer our aesthetic practice toward a better world-making. Finally, environmental aesthetics needs (...) to be globalised to include rich aesthetic traditions of nature and environment from diverse cultures. (shrink)

Performing various tasks to manage our daily lives does not fit comfortably with the predominant model of aesthetics, which consists of a disinterested spectator making a judgment on the aesthetic value of an object. Taking ‘cleaning’ as an example, this paper illuminates its rich aesthetic potential, which includes sensory and bodily engagement, development of aesthetic sensibility, activation of imagination, and cultivation of a care relationship with other people and the world.

Aesthetic value cannot be discussed separately from aesthetic experience. According to Western aesthetics discourse, the paradigm of aesthetic experience is a s.

In recent decades, designers, architects, and landscape architects concerned with their contribution to today’s ecological problems started formulating a new way of designing and creating artifacts. Called “ecological design” and promoted as a corrective alternative to conventional practice, its basic tenet is to draw from nature a guidance for design, rather than imposing our design on nature. This newapproach signifies a welcome change, first by calling attention to the ecological implications of artifacts, a subject matter generally neglected in environmental ethics, (...) and, second, by providing useful, specific suggestions regarding the ecologically responsible way of designing artifacts. However, the conceptual basis and resultant implications of ecological design deserve and need critical analyses. I argue that the basic premise of ecological design—that nature should act as the authority—is problematic by examining analogous strategies from social, political, moral, and aesthetic realms, as well as by exploring its specific application in the promotion of “native” plants in gardens. I end with another issue often neglected in the practice of ecological design: our aesthetic response to the created objects. (shrink)

The project of world-making is carried out not only by professional world-makers, such as designers, architects, and manufacturers. We are all participants in this project through various decisions and judgments we make in our everyday life. Aesthetics has a surprisingly significant role to play in this regard, though not sufficiently recognized by ourselves or aestheticians. This paper first illustrates how our seemingly innocuous and trivial everyday aesthetic considerations ha ve serious consequences which determine the quality of life and the state (...) ofthe world, for better or worse. This power ofthe aesthetic should be harnessed to direct our cumulative and collective enterprise toward better world-making. Against objections to introducing a norma ti ve dimension to everyday aesthetics, 1 argue for the necessity of doing so and draw an analogy between everyday aesthetics and art-centered aesthetics which has dominated modern Western aesthetics discourse. (shrink)

We often derive aesthetic pleasure from nature as well as from works of art. Although our experiences of both are analogous in some respects, there are some important differences. Since nature is not created specifically for aesthetic enjoyment it can be appreciated in more various ways than art. Hence, the distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experience is crucial in examining the aesthetic appreciation of nature. ;An appreciation of any object is considered aesthetic if it is directed toward the sensuous surface (...) of the object for its own sake. This notion of the aesthetic, however, does not necessarily preclude the aesthetic relevance of various conceptual considerations. Examples are provided to illustrate how associated facts can modify our perception of the object's sensuous surface. Thus, a variety of aesthetic appreciations of the same object are possible. ;Among various possible appreciations of an artwork, the range of appropriate responses is limited by cultural, historical, and institutional determinations. In contrast, nature lacks such determinations; consequently, aesthetic considerations in most cases cannot show that certain responses toward nature are inappropriate. Neither can we claim that certain aesthetic responses toward nature are improper because they do not help justify the preservation of nature, hence are ethically undesirable. An aesthetic justification for preserving nature, therefore, presupposes its ethical justification. ;Contrary to a widely held view, such ethical considerations against destroying nature are not suggested by the traditional Japanese love of nature. The Japanese traditionally have appreciated nature for its psychological, aesthetic, and metaphysical values and thus their love toward nature lacks an ethical dimension. I suggest instead that the most fundamental reason for preserving nature concerns its functional unity which is indispensable to our health and survival. In this sense, the aesthetic appreciation of nature that incorporates the scientific considerations regarding such unity helps us develop an ecologically sensitive attitude toward nature. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical dimensions of aesthetic engagement, the central theme of Arnold Berleant’s aesthetics. His recent works on social aesthetics and negative aesthetics explicitly argue for the inseparability of aesthetics from the rest of life, in particular ethical concerns. Aesthetic engagement requires overcoming the subject-object divide and adopting an attitude of open-mindedness, responsiveness, reciprocity, and collaboration, as well as the willingness and readiness to expose negative aesthetics for what it is. These requirements characterize not only the nature of (...) aesthetic experience but also, perhaps more fundamentally, our mode of being in the world and the accompanying ethical responsibility. Among the present paper’s principal aims is to show how this view of aesthetic and ethical stance is also shared by the important aspects of the Japanese worldview, aesthetics, and artistic practices. (shrink)

In this thesis, we study the least fixed point principle in a constructive setting. A constructive theory of functions and sets has been developed by Feferman. This theory deals both with sets and with functions over sets as independent notions. In the language of Feferman's theory, we are able to formulate the least fixed point principle for monotone inductive definitions as: every operation on classes to classes which satisfies the monotonicity condition has a least fixed point. This is called the (...) principle of monotone inductive definition. Furthermore, we may formulate this principle in a uniform way as: there is an operation which maps a monotone operation to its least fixed point. This is called the principle of uniform monotone inductive definition. Feferman raised the question of the strength of the principle of monotone inductive definition when adjoined to his theory . This question is our primary concern in this thesis. ;Our main results are the consistency of both the principle of monotone inductive definition and the principle of uniform monotone inductive definition adjoined to his theory, and the proof theoretical equivalence between the principle of monotone inductive definition with Feferman's system without the inductive generation axiom and the system of the Pi-one-one Comprehension Axiom. Determination of the proof-theoretical strength of the principle of monotone inductive definition adjoined to Feferman's theory still remains open. ;The consistency of both the principle of monotone inductive definition and the principle of uniform monotone inductive definition with Feferman's theory will be achieved by constructing their models in set theoretical sense. The proof theoretical equivalence between the principle of monotone inductive definition with Feferman's system without the inductive generation axiom and the system of the Pi-one-one Comprehension Axiom can be obtained by a careful examination of the model construction for the principle of monotone inductive definition with Feferman's system without the inductive generation axiom, which is parallel to the model construction for the principle of monotone inductive definition with his theory. (shrink)

Comparative quantifiers, such as more than three books, cannot take scope over any quantifier in subject position if they occupy object position. This is clearly different from the behavior of other quantifiers (e.g., universal quantifiers). This paper argues that this scope puzzle is due to a more complex internal structure of comparative quantifiers than other quantifiers. In the decompositional approach that I pursue, comparative quantifiers are decomposed into two generalized quantifiers (i.e., in the case above, the comparative operator er than (...) three and the DP many books). In this approach, obligatory narrow scope of comparative quantifiers in object position is a consequence of the interplay of the independently motivated principles of grammar that also constrain other quantifiers. On the basis of the scope puzzle, I specifically argue for two constraints on Scope Shifting Operations (SSOs) a locality condition on SSOs and Scope Economy, proposed by Fox (2000), which prohibits SSOs that have no effect on semantic interpretation. Thus, I argue that the apparently peculiar facts of comparative quantifiers are, in fact, additional evidence for the core properties of SSOs. (shrink)

The Dominican theologian Albert the Great was one of the first to investigate into the system of the world on the basis of an acquaintance with the entire Aristotelian corpus, which he read under the influence of Islamic philosophers. The present study aims to understand the core of Albert's natural philosophy. Albert's emblematic phrase, “every work of nature is the work of intelligence” , expresses the conviction that natural things are produced by the intellects that move the celestial bodies, just (...) as houses are made by architects moving their instruments. Albert tried to fathom the secret of generation of natural things with his novel notion of “formative power” , which flows from the celestial intellects into the sublunary elements. His conception of the natural world represents an alternative to the dominant medieval view on the relationship between the artificial and the natural. (shrink)

This book is an excellent book on business ethics and will be an invaluable resource for all readers who are keen to learn about the business ethics and key characteristics of a successful company. It focuses on the case study of a global company, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), which oversees more than 250 operating units throughout the world. Through extensive interviews with top executives at J&J's headquarters, including Masami Atarashi and Mitsuo Hirose and attending workshops, Prof Hiroo Takahashi acquired (...) an in-depth understanding of the management style of J&J, grasped the company's ethics and the code of business conduct which is shared by J&J's members throughout the world. (shrink)

In the monograph [1] of Chang and Keisler, a considerable extent of model theory of the first order continuous logic is ingeniously developed without using any notion of provability.In this paper we shall define the notion of provability in continuous logic as well as the notion of matrix, which is a natural extension of one in finite-valued logic in [2], and develop the syntax and semantics of it mostly along the line in the preceding paper [2]. Fundamental theorems of model (...) theory in continuous logic, which have been proved with purely model-theoretic proofs in [1], will be proved with proofs which are natural extensions of those in two-valued logic. (shrink)

This essay aims to deepen our comprehension of the economic ethics of different peoples in Asia, as well as realizing a degree of cultural relativism, in order to enhance amicable economic associations. It counterbalances the conventionally strong West-oriented views which regard exotic features of non-Western economies as backward and illogical elements that disturb smooth and orthodox development and, hence, should be eradicated. The author, first, recalls a number of facts which depict the eruptive economic transformation in Asia. He, then, criticizes (...) the imposition of Western-style development and exploitation without excluding Japan’s colonialism in Taiwan and Korea, and pleads for multiple forms of development and modernity. Economic transactions should be analysed in relation to sociocultural aspects, and, therefore, communities and ethics groups play a substantive role between the public and private sectors, the market, and individuals. For instance, small farmers in Southeast Asia, struggling with the weakness of tenant farmers and pressures of the market mechanism, developed ingenious and participatory forms of survival, increasingly supported by non-governmental organizations. Case studies from Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines give a vivid picture of these activities. Because the developing economies are composed of market and non-market sectors, reasonable attention should be given to theethics beyond market principles, with particular emphasis on community as foundation. (shrink)

This paper examines the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese causal connective mono. We show that the meaning of mono has three components: a causal relation, an emotive attitude toward the causing proposition, and an indication that the causal relation is of high quality. Further, we show that the latter two components are not at-issue content but expressive content. A formalization is provided in terms of the analysis of mixed content in McCready (2010). Finally, the proposal is briefly compared with (...) previous, informal, accounts of the meaning of mono. (shrink)

Hegel, in his work _Philosophy of Right_, defines ownership through three elements: acquisition by occupation, use, and transfer. To own something involves mere acquisition and encompasses its appropriate use and potential transfer to others. Subsequently, the final aspect mentioned was the concept of infinite judgement. The acts of owning and transferring to others are diametrically opposed, and Hegel’s unique logic forcibly connects these opposing concepts. This form of infinite judgement was advocated by the young Hegel during the era of _Phenomenology (...) of Spirit_. There, he stated, “Spirit is a bone”. However, when he later wrote _Science of Logic_ or _Encyclopedia_, the formulation of infinite judgement changed to “Spirit is not something that is bone”. This shift was influenced by Kant. In _Logic_, the discourse advances into syllogism, inferential theory, leading to “Spirit is a bone for such-and-such reasons”. In essence, Hegel binarily connected spirit and bone in his youth and introduced a mediating term in this connection later in his life, establishing inferential links. However, the notion of forcibly connecting opposing concepts remains. Therefore, the statement “Ownership is transfer” represents an infinite judgement while simultaneously signifying syllogism that “I truly own this object if I can transfer it to others”. This contributes to the reasoning that “I and objects can be connected through the intermediary of others”, progressing to the inference that “I and others can be connected through objects”, thereby laying the foundation for society. (shrink)