Background To describe the preferences for disclosure of individual biomarker results among mothers participating in a longitudinal birth cohort. Methods We surveyed 343 mothers that participated in the Health Outcomes and Measures of the Environment Study about their biomarker disclosure preferences. Participants were told that the study was measuring pesticide metabolites in their biological specimens, and that the health effects of these low levels of exposure are unknown. Participants were asked whether they wanted to receive their results and their child's (...) results. In addition, they were asked about their preferred method (letter vs in person) and format (more complex vs less complex) for disclosure of results. Results Almost all of the study participants wanted to receive their individual results (340/343) as well as their child's results (342/343). However, preferences for receiving results differed by education level. Mothers with less than a college degree preferred in-person disclosure of results more often than mothers with some college education or a college degree (34.3% vs 17.4% vs 7.9%, p<0.001). Similarly, mothers with less than a college education preferred a less complex disclosure format than mothers with some college education or a college degree (59.7% vs 79.1% vs 86.3%, p<0.0001). Conclusion While almost all study participants preferred to receive results of their individual biomarker tests, level of education was a key factor in predicting preferences for disclosure of biomarker results. To ensure effective communication of this information, disclosure of biomarker results should be tailored to the education level of the study participants. (shrink)

This scoping review maps social work scholarship that engages the broader more-than-human turn in social theory to de-center the human as a privileged locus of ethical subjectivity. The review searched English-language peer-reviewed scholarship published between January 1, 2000, and December 31, 2024, focusing on four broad literatures: (1) post-anthropocentric or more-than-human scholarship, (2) natural environment scholarship, (3) Indigenous scholarship, and (4) technology scholarship. Twenty-four (24) works that addressed both ethical issues for social work and more-than-human considerations were identified, and subjected (...) to data charting and thematic mapping. This literature characterizes more-than-human ethical issues as outcomes of and challenges to modern Western liberal humanism, as well as non-standard and boundary-crossing. The reviewed authors recommend future work to (1) extend established social work to include the more-than-human, (2) radically deconstruct and rebuild social work, (3) learn to sense and be differently, and (4) collaborate beyond existing boundaries. The review suggests that social work’s engagement with more-than-human ethical concerns remains in an early stage, and the discussion considers how the field might understand the growing concern for the more-than-human within an evolving history of prioritized ethical-political problematics. (shrink)

Staged 2 different videotaped interviews with the same individual—a college instructor who spoke English with a European accent. In one of the interviews the instructor was warm and friendly, in the other, cold and distant. 118 undergraduates were asked to evaluate the instructor. Ss who saw the warm instructor rated his appearance, mannerisms, and accent as appealing, whereas those who saw the cold instructor rated these attributes as irritating. Results indicate that global evaluations of a person can induce altered evaluations (...) of the person's attributes, even when there is sufficient information to allow for independent assessments of them. Furthermore, Ss were unaware of this influence of global evaluations on ratings of attributes. In fact, Ss who saw the cold instructor actually believed that the direction of influence was opposite to the true direction. They reported that their dislike of the instructor had no effect on their rating of his attributes but that their dislike of his attributes had lowered their global evaluations of him. (shrink)

We present the first comprehensive taxonomic revision and review the biology of the olingos, the endemic Neotropical procyonid genus Bassaricyon, based on most specimens available in museums, and with data derived from anatomy, morphometrics, mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, field observations, and geographic range modeling. Species of Bassaricyon are primarily forest-living, arboreal, nocturnal, frugivorous, and solitary, and have one young at a time. We demonstrate that four olingo species can be recognized, including a Central American species (Bassaricyon gabbii), lowland species with (...) eastern, cis-Andean (Bassaricyon alleni) and western, trans-Andean (Bassaricyon medius) distributions, and a species endemic to cloud forests in the Andes. The oldest evolutionary divergence in the genus is between this last species, endemic to the Andes of Colombia and Ecuador, and all other species, which occur in lower elevation habitats. Surprisingly, this Andean endemic species, which we call the Olinguito, has never been previously described; it represents a new species in the order Carnivora and is the smallest living member of the family Procyonidae. We report on the biology of this new species based on information from museum specimens, niche modeling, and fieldwork in western Ecuador, and describe four Olinguito subspecies based on morphological distinctions across different regions of the Northern Andes. (shrink)

Sarah E. Wilson, University of Central LancashireThis paper's account of the core issues at stake in relation to genetic enhancement is presented as an alternative to mainstream liberal defenses of enhancement. The mainstream arguments are identified as being associated with reproductive autonomy, individual choice, and a `neutral', passive interpretation of technology. The alternative account is associated with the perspective of `woman' or child-bearer, with a fundamental concern for social justice, and an understanding of society in both a global and (...) a contextual sense. This paper adopts a theoretical framework informed by feminist ethics, particularly a feminist ethic of care. The paper begins by outlining some of the key points of the care perspective, highlighting how this contrasts with a mainstream `justice' perspective, and illustrating how this is reflected in arguments relating to genetic enhancement. The paper then turns to a consideration of how a care perspective might be applied to questions of genetic enhancement, and how this may bring forward new issues. This includes in particular a consideration of IVF technologies and how applying understandings from research into this area brings forward usually unaddressed concerns in considering genetic enhancement. The final section of the paper covers some of the questions that there is space to ask once the narrow focus on individual rights is overcome. (shrink)

I construe the question Are species sets? as a question about whether species can be conceived of as sets, as the term set is understood by contemporary logicians. The question is distinct from the question Are species classes?: The conception of classes invoked by Hull and others differs from the logician's conception of a set. I argue that species can be conceived of as sets, insofar as one could identify a set with any given species and that identification would satisfy (...) three desiderata: the set would be a set of organisms, the identification would be apposite, and the identification would permit the formulation of statements about species in set-theoretic terms. One cannot, however, identify a species with any given set. Understanding the claim that species are sets in this way enables one to understand better the dispute between some who accept the claim (e.g., Kitcher 1984, 1987) and some who apparently reject it (e.g., Mayr 1987). (shrink)

Vigilante justice may identify the attempts of Holocaust victims to avenge themselves by punishing or executing the oppressors, and victor’s justice may identify rescuers’ advantageous exercise of power against perpetrators. At the time of liberation, while perpetrators were within easy reach of the hands of their victims, they were subjected to violent reprisals and executions without trial. The ability of surviving victims to corner and detain their enemies was short-lived. Perpetrators sought to distance themselves from their victims by taking flight (...) or by disappearing into the mass of bystanders. Some officers who had the forethought to anticipate the Allies’ victory placed a change of civilian clothes at hand to make a quick escape. By evading prosecution these perpetrators extended the injustice. When the moment of liberation passed, society would have to determine how to deal justly with the perpetrators they were able to detain. This chapter looks at traditional ways that have been used to conduct lustrations. (shrink)

Victims of genocidal violence like the Muselmänner test our notions of dignity. In practice it is not altogether clear if respect of dignity is deserved, earned, or to be granted. Here and previously I borrow Joel Feinberg’ notion that the dignity of respect is owed to individuals as bearers of rights. In this chapter I examine a peculiar class of individuals who were victims of genocide during the Holocaust. These victims were suffering under a slow-death sentence. I point out that (...) a misuse of the Platonic notion of dignity can become the occasion for dehumanization. In the view of the perpetrators it licensed the disrespectful use of genocidal violence with tragic results. When perpetrators were dehumanizing their victims, the perpetrators were demonstrating a vice of inhuman cruelty. I suggest that Feinberg’s notion of dignity gives us a better sense of the defensibility of dignity. If I am correct, then this could justify the suicide of some victims, like ghetto resisters who were under the ghetto slow-death sentence. (shrink)

This chapter examines the role of bystanders in genocide. To achieve their objectives perpetrators had to rely on bystanders to be neutral or supportive. Bystanders are not victims or perpetrators, but they can easily be swept into supporting one or the other sides in a genocidal conflict. Borrowing from Gregory Mellema’s discussion on complicity the author considers nine ways that bystanders could have become complicitous. Their omissions, endorsements, and cooperation could count as complicitous behaviors. Four case studies are considered to (...) demonstrate how actors became complicitous in the Holocaust: the case of Pastor Martin Niemöller, the case of A. J. Topf & Sons, the case of the German church, and the case of neighboring nations. In order these cases represent a loyal citizen who endorsed the politics of the Nazis, a corporation making goods to be used for mass murder, a social collective supportive of the genocide, and a sovereign nation that refused to intervene in the initial stages of mass murder. Attention is given to the failure of churches to speak out against the killing of Jews. In genocide perpetrators can anticipate and take advantage of the complicity of bystanders. (shrink)

The triage required to aid surviving victims to overcome the lasting effects of capture and torture is but one beginning point in reparations. Returning goods, making services available, and the payment of lost wages become parts of the reparation process. In addition, rights may be restored to victims. This process of reparations assumes that the victim can reenter society and resume routine activities without notable change or loss. They should enjoy as many rights and privileges as they had previously, or (...) more. Former victims should attain ethical parity with other members of society. Earlier we discussed the coordination of survivors’ reentry into society. Now we shall examine how their experience has impacted their social standing. Upon their reentry into society surviving victims should not return to a state of oppression if reparations are effective. Thus, in addition to reclaiming a victim’s net worth, reparations should restore health and social status. The surviving victim should be reimagined as a person with intrinsic worth and positive rather than negative social utility. (shrink)

Species are thought by many to be important units of evolution. In this paper, I argue against that view. My argument is based on an examination of the role of species in the synthetic theory of evolution. I argue that if one adopts a gradualist view of evolution, one cannot make sense of the claim that species are units in the minimal sense needed to claim that they are units of evolution, namely, that they exist as discrete entities over time. (...) My second argument is directed against an appeal to Eldredge and Gould's theory of punctuated equilibria to support the claim that species are units of evolution. If one adopts their view, it may be possible to identify discrete temporal entities that can plausibly be termed species, but there is no reason to claim that those entities are units of evolution. Thus, on two plausible interpretations of the role of natural selection in the process of evolution, species are of no special importance. I then consider some of the reasons why species have been thought to be important evolutionary units by many contemporary evolutionary biologists. Finally, I discuss briefly the implications of this conclusion for evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Genocide has been discussed as a process, and denials may be made throughout the process. Bystanders may deny the events that are happening around them rather than confront the events. This may provide a psychological cushion for the bystanders to remain detached from the wrongdoing and avoid implication in the wrongs. Perpetrators may deny that the events are taking place to maintain their public reputation or to take advantage of the element of surprise in their attacks on victims. These acts (...) of denial happening during the genocide have an identifiable utility for perpetrators. Denial of mass murder during the Holocaust could shield the perpetrators from outside intervention, and denial immediately after the killing stops could provide sufficient cover for some perpetrators to evade capture. The phenomenon that has come to be identified as Holocaust denial may have arisen weeks or months after the events in question as an attack on the historicity of the Holocaust. It is this phenomenon of denial after the fact that shall be the focus of attention here. Denial conceals intentions and invites doubt. Deniers of the Holocaust make use of a faulty reasoning process for a thinly veiled agenda that aligns with the perpetrator’s original intentions. (shrink)

Wars decimate a nation’s infrastructure. Genocide murders the innocents in a society, and it leaves behind moral corruption and societal twistedness. A genocide like the Holocaust can happen only if the normative ethical commitments of many individuals and collectives to honor the fundamental right to life are compromised or abandoned. When a society lives through a genocide, the moral imagination of peoples and collectives, their ethical behaviors, and even the underlying social contract become twisted and broken. Societies and individuals caught (...) within a genocide need an ethical rehabilitation in its wake to move a post-genocide society out of its ethical degradation. Mass graves that were hidden from the global community must be exposed, and disguised ethical wrongdoing must be openly addressed. Most often societies rely upon a process of transitional justice to accomplish a post-genocide makeover.Transitional justice includes three components—memorialization, reparations, and lustrations. These refer to the honoring of deceased victims and survivors, the restoration of goods and services to surviving victims and their families along with compensation for past wrongs, and the capture, prosecution, and punishment of perpetrators. Some additional steps may be needed to restore a justice that produces social stability and harmony. (shrink)

In the final two chapters we return to the role of the individual in promoting transitional justice. A holistic approach for the individual to support transitional justice is prescribed that involves the individual in mind and deed. Individuals need to self-assess their moral sympathies to determine if they are prepared to support transitional justice. Likewise, they must self-access the social and political climate of their times and society. These first two steps represent a significant exercise in agent autonomy. While the (...) exercise of one’s autonomy can be taxing, exercising autonomy for peace is a praiseworthy end. The individual will be reversing some of the ill effects and societal tainting that a genocide incurs. To complete the operations, the individual must reject societal training in racism and injustice, and the individual must fairly appraise the political climate of his or her environment. Once these steps of self-assessment are completed, they should perform the behaviors that will promote transitional justice in their times and society. (shrink)

This chapter investigates how killing non-Aryans was justified from an individual viewpoint and before the international community. One’s ancestry can be understood as a matter of moral luck, but the Nazis saw Aryan ancestry as their entitlement. Nazis used the Aryan Protocol to classify persons of Aryan descent and non-Aryans. The defense of an exclusive Aryan right to life amounts to special pleading. Under the guise of eugenics Nazis engaged in the T-4 campaign, where they tested the efficiency of various (...) types of mass murder on persons who were institutionalized. The realpolitik national posture of Germany positioned it to deny some members of society their basic rights including the right to life. In this instance the voice of the clergy and public did succeed in persuading the Nazis to cease the T-4 campaign of terror. Having acquired the expertise to kill in mass, Nazis officials directed subordinates to kill those they deemed to be enemies of the state like the Jews. The majority of subordinates willingly acted upon those orders rather than resisting and confronting ridicule or censure. (shrink)

Eduardo Frei Montalva, co-founder of the Christian Democratic Party and President of Chile, represented for Jacques Maritain, French neo-Thomist philosopher, an example of prophetic leadership in contemporary times. According to Maritain, modem democracy could not survive without a profound spiritual revolution of political leadership--the "prophetic factor" of democracy--which he observed in Frei as a public official, senator, and ultimately the Presient of the Republic of Chile (1964-1970). Under his famed "Revolution in Liberty," Frei endeavored to meld socio-economic reforms with an (...) effort to build a more participatory democratic culture in his native land. Guided by Maritain's political philosophy, Frei's initiatives set into motion the possibility of a "third way" of politics in the Southern hemisphere. In the end, this revolution ended in political disappointment due to economic stagnation, social disruption, political infighting, and the impractical idealism of Christian democracy itself. (shrink)

The last decade has seen a slow but steady increase in the number of postdoctoral scholars employed in faculties of education. In this article, seven postdoctoral scholars who worked in the same Ca...

After encountering this book, you will never look at the tiniest sliver of your own backyard or neighborhood park the same way; instead, you will be stunned by the unexpected variety of species found in an area so small.

I assess Zhong’s new “causal argument” for physicalism, which differs from previous such arguments in that the premises and conclusion pertain (not just to physical, but) to “physically acceptable” entities or features, which may be either physical or “grounded by” (i.e., metaphysically dependent on) the physical. Zhong argues that his new causal argument improves on previous versions in that the conclusion (unlike previous causal arguments, he maintains) supports non-reductive as well as reductive versions of physicalism, and in that the premises (...) of his argument are better motivated than those of the original arguments. I argue that neither of these motivations are in place. Along the way, I offer a new reason to reject non-contrastive counterfactual accounts of causation. (shrink)

The use of technology and teaching techniques derived from technology is currently a bourgeoning topic in higher education. Teachers at all levels and types of institutions want to know how these new technologies will affect what happens in and outside of the classroom. Many teachers have already embraced some of these technologies but remain uncertain about their educational efficacy. Other teachers have waited because they are reluctant to try tools or techniques that remain unproven or, as is often the case, (...) lack institutional support. This book is designed to help both groups, so that those with technological expertise can extend their knowledge, while technological novices can "ramp up" at their own pace and for their own purposes. Best Practices for Technology-Enhanced Teaching and Learning brings together expert teacher-scholars who apply and assess technology's impact on traditional, hybrid or blended, or completely on-line courses, relying on technology as a teaching tool for classroom management and interaction (e.g., Blackboard, PowerPoint, student response or "clicker systems," multimedia tools), as well as student-based uses of technology largely independent of instructors (e.g., social networking on popular sites including Facebook and MySpace). Each chapter will address how technological improvements can be connected to assessment initiatives, as is now routinely advocated in psychology and social science education. The book features current scholarship and pedagogy involving innovative technology that impacts on student learning in psychology and related disciplines, focusing also on student reactions to these novel technologies, and proper assessments of how well they promote learning. This text will serve as the standard reference on emerging technologies for undergraduate instructors. (shrink)

In the week that China's vice-president, Xi Jinping, was reported reaffirming the official status of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a “ruling” rather than a “revolutionary” party,1 I found myself in the Red Classics (Hongse jingdian)2 restaurant in the suburbs of Beijing. Entering through a star-shaped doorway flanked by green-uniformed “soldiers,” customers are faced by a riot of propaganda iconography: revolutionary slogans and posters adorn its walls, facsimile People's Daily headlines cover the ceiling, and in the corner a bright (...) red tractor is bursting through. The year is 1968: our waiters are cap-wearing “workers,” and at the far end…. (shrink)

Our book Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986) treats utterance interpretation as a two-phase process: a modular decoding phase is seen as providing input to a central inferential phase in which a linguistically encoded logical form is contextually enriched and used to construct a hypothesis about the speaker's informative intention. Relevance was mainly concerned with the inferential phase of comprehension: we had to answer Fodor's challenge that while decoding processes are quite well understood, inferential processes are not only not understood, (...) but perhaps not even understandable (see Fodor 1983). Here we will look more closely at the decoding phase and consider what types of information may be linguistically encoded, and how the borderline between decoding and inference can be drawn. It might be that all linguistically encoded information is cut to a single pattern: all truth conditions, say, or all instructions for use. However, there is a robust intuition that two basic types of meaning can be found. This intuition surfaces in a variety of distinctions: between describing and indicating, stating and showing, saying and conventionally implicating, or between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional, conceptual and procedural, or representational and computational meaning. In the literature, justifications for these distinctions have been developed in both strictly linguistic and more broadly cognitive terms. The linguistic justification goes as follows (see for example Recanati 1987). Utterances express propositions; propositions have truth conditions; but the meaning of an utterance is not exhausted by its truth conditions, i.e. the truth conditions of the proposition expressed. An utterance not only expresses a proposition but is used to perform a variety of speech acts. It can.. (shrink)

Introduction in chapter viii of book ii of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke provides various putative lists of primary qualities. Insofar as they have considered the variation across Locke's lists at all, commentators have usually been content simply either to consider a self-consciously abbreviated list (e.g., "Size, Shape, etc.") or a composite list as the list of Lockean primary qualities, truncating such a composite list only by omitting supposedly co-referential terms. Doing the latter with minimal judgment about what (...) terms are co-referential gives us the following list of eleven qualities (in the order in which they appear in this chapter of the Essay): solidity, extension, figure, mobility, motion or rest, number, bulk, texture, motion, size, and situation. Perhaps surprisingly given the attention to the primary/secondary distinction since Locke, Locke's primary qualities themselves have received little more than passing mention in the bulk of the subsequent literature. In particular, no discussion both offers an interpretation of Locke's conception of primary qualities and makes sense of Locke's various lists as lists of primary qualities. A central motivation for this paper is the idea that these two tasks are not independent. (shrink)

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. (...) Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. (shrink)

Embora Nietzsche não cite explicitamente em seus textos o psicólogo e filósofo francês Théodule Ribot, a semelhança entre algumas noções do filósofo alemão e de Ribot é inquestionável: a proposta de uma nova psicologia não metafísica (uma psicofisiologia); a continuidade entre o físico, o biológico (fisiológico) e o psicológico (moral e cultural); o corpo, a vontade e o sujeito enquanto multiplicidades; a saúde enquanto presença de um centro de coordenação; etc. O objetivo deste artigo é investigar a proposta, presente nos (...) dois autores, de uma psicologia ou psicofisiologia que supere a psicologia metafísica, ou seja, que rejeite a investigação da alma e de suas faculdades. No entanto, há uma diferença axial entre o filósofo alemão e Ribot: enquanto a psicofisiologia francesa é uma morfologia de reflexos, que são processos físico-químicos e, portanto, materiais, a psicofisiologia nietzschiana é uma morfologia da vontade de potência, que é um processo impulsional de crescimento de potência, e esses impulsos não são nem corporais nem espirituais. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME'S SCEPTICAL ARGUMENT AGAINST REASON In the section of the Treatise entitled Of scepticism with regard to reason Kume considers the mind as reflecting upon its own activities, monitors them as it were, and then adjusts them in accordance with certain principles and strategies. ^ What it discovers is that in drawing inferences, the mind sometimes errs. In the light of this knowledge, and in accordance with rational principles (...) of epistemic probabilities, it adjusts its response to any inference it makes from one of certainty to one with epistemic probability of a degree somewhat less than certainty. But this rational adjustment is itself the consequence of an inference, which will be subject to the same qualifications. By repeating this process, it seems that all certainty reduces to probability and all probability to zero. Hume's argument begins this way: Our reason must be consider 'd as a kind of cause, of which truth is the natural effect; but such-a-one as by _ the irruption of other causes, and by the inconstancy of our mental powers, may frequently be prevented. By this means all knowledge degenerates into probability ; and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question. 2 It is important to be clear on the logical structure of this argument. Consider an actual case of inference. This produces a state of belief or affirmation. Hume does not say that the inference does not produce truth, i.e., a true belief. But there is the possibility it does not. Nor is this a mere logical possibility. One can form the hypothesis about causes that this process of reasoning was in fact one which introduced an 91. element of error. One does not know that this hypothesis is true. But one does know that there is a certain probability that this causal hypothesis is true; as Hume puts it, it may frequently be true. Knowing that we have reasoned poorly sometimes (though not always) in the past, the hypothesis that we have on this occasion reasoned poorly has a certain probability, and we know this even though we have not verified the hypothesis for this particular occasion. On the basis of this unverified but nonetheless somewhat probable causal hypothesis we must as a matter of reason reduce the probability we attach to the belief or affirmation that was produced by the original inference. This reduction of probability is itself a matter of reasoning, however. Therefore about it, also, one can form the hypothesis that it is erroneous, and that the probability of the original affirmation was not reduced sufficiently. On the basis of this new hypothesis we must as a matter of reason reduce still further the probability of the first affirmation. And so on: as I reflect upon my use of reason, all the rules of logic require a continual diminution, and at last a total extinction of belief and evidence. (T183) The result here of the mind applying to its own activities what it discovers about itself is its ceasing to make any causal inferences. Feedback here yields the attitude of total scepticism, in the sense of rendering it reasonable that one ought totally to suspend judgment. To be sure, Hume does hold that no one is in fact such a total sceptic: Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin 'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel; nor can we any more forbear viewing certain objects in a stronger and fuller light, upon account of their customary connexion with a present impression, than we can hinder ourselves from thinking as long as we are awake, or see the 92. surrounding bodies, when we turn cur eyes towards them in broad sunshine. (T183) Inferences from sample to population cannot but be fallible, and this is the best we can do, given the logical gap between sample and population.The argument for scepticism with regard to reason concludes not only that such inferences are fallible, that they may be wrong, but more strongly that we have the strongest of reasons for supposing that they... (shrink)

Han Feizi’s criticisms of Confucian and Mohist political recommendations are often thought to involve materialist or historicist arguments, independently of their epistemological features. Drawing largely on Amia Srinivasan’s recent taxonomy of genealogical arguments, this paper proposes a genealogical reading of passages in “The Five Vermin [五蠹 wudu]” and “Eminence in Learning [顯學 xianxue].” This reveals Han Feizi’s arguments to be more comprehensively appreciated as problematizing Confucian and Mohist political judgments as arising from undermining contingencies, rendering them irrelevant, if not detrimental, (...) to any lasting excellence of a state. In doing this, it is also suggested that there is a ‘master argument’ underlying Han Feizi’s criticisms, according to which the epistemology of the Confucians and Mohists are fundamentally unreliable. (shrink)

The dual role of olfaction in both smelling and tasting, i.e. flavour perception, makes it an important test case for philosophical theories of sensory individuation. Indeed, the psychologist Paul Rozin claimed that olfaction is a “dual sense”, leading some scientists and philosophers to propose that we have not one, but two senses of smell: orthonasal and retronasal olfaction. In this paper I consider how best to understand Rozin’s claim, and upon what grounds one might judge there to be one or (...) two distinct olfactory modalities. I conclude that while Rozin may be right that humans have dual occurrences of an olfactory ‘sense’, the concept of a sense-modality, and hence the ‘sense’ of smell, is ambiguous between two different notions: a physiological sensory channel and an experiential modality, along the lines suggested by J. J. Gibson. Furthermore, recognising that these are complementary rather than competing conceptions of a sense-modality enables the formulation of a powerful ‘dual-concept’ framework for posing and addressing questions concerning the complex architecture of human multisensory experience. (shrink)

"Studies the path of natural philosophy (i.e., physics) from Isaac Newton through Scotland into the nineteenth-century background to the modern revolution in physics.

There is an active debate within the field of phonology concerning the cognitive status of substantive phonetic factors such as ease of articulation and perceptual distinctiveness. A new framework is proposed in which substance acts as a bias, or prior, on phonological learning. Two experiments tested this framework with a method in which participants are first provided highly impoverished evidence of a new phonological pattern, and then tested on how they extend this pattern to novel contexts and novel sounds. Participants (...) were found to generalize velar palatalization (e.g., the change from [k] as in keep to [t⌢∫S] as in cheap) in a way that accords with linguistic typology, and that is predicted by a cognitive bias in favor of changes that relate perceptually similar sounds. Velar palatalization was extended from the mid front vowel context (i.e., before [e] as in cape) to the high front vowel context (i.e., before [i] as in keep), but not vice versa. The key explanatory notion of perceptual similarity is quantified with a psychological model of categorization, and the substantively biased framework is formalized as a conditional random field. Implications of these results for the debate on substance, theories of phonological generalization, and the formalization of similarity are discussed. (shrink)

We demonstrate in two experiments that real and imagined body movements appropriate to metaphorical phrases facilitate people's immediate comprehension of these phrases. Participants first learned to make different body movements given specific cues. In two reading time studies, people were faster to understand a metaphorical phrase, such as push the argument, when they had previously just made an appropriate body action (e.g., a push movement) (Experiment 1), or imagined making a specific body movement (Experiment 2), than when they first made (...) a mismatching body action (e.g., a chewing movement) or no movement. These findings support the idea that appropriate body action, or even imagined action, enhances people's embodied, metaphorical construal of abstract concepts that are referred to in metaphorical phrases. (shrink)

This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with professional boundary (...) issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change. (shrink)