The paper will revolve around Shulamith Firestone’s claims that women’s biology is the root cause of prejudices against women and at the same time the basis for solutions that seek to end such prejudices. In the rational attack to these claims, it is argued that Firestone does not really debunk the patriarchal view but actually agrees with it. The attack focused on her avowed solution to the women problem that turns out to be defeatist in nature. In the attempt to (...) prevent, if not end discrimination against women, the paper carefully offers possible solutions to consider. (shrink)

En las tres últimas décadas del siglo XX, muchos filósofos analíticos han abordado cuestiones de ética práctica, ampliando radicalmente el campo de la filosofía moral más allá de los temas metaéticos que habían sido su foco principal durante la mayor parte del siglo. Sin embargo, abordar este tipo de controversias prácticas rápidamente hizo surgir la cuestión de cómo justificar las afirmaciones morales normativas. Muchos filósofos analíticos se basaron en el intuicionismo, que tiene un linaje muy antiguo dentro de la filosofía (...) moral anglófona. Este artículo evalúa tres formas en las que los filósofos analíticos del siglo XX recurrieron a las intuiciones para apoyar o rebatir las afirmaciones morales. Argumentamos que esos métodos fracasaron en su objetivo de promover un conocimiento moral digno de confianza porque se basaron en supuestos que, cuando se presumen en contextos de injusticia epistémica estructural, son sistemáticamente engañosos. A pesar de que las intuiciones se encuentran entre las fuentes de conocimiento en las que los agentes morales deben confiar, la epistemología moral debe prestar especial atención a los procesos sociales a través de los cuales se recogen, refinan y evalúan las intuiciones y otras formas de evidencia. Producir un conocimiento moral digno de confianza requiere procesos de razonamiento democráticos que sean sensibles a la omnipresencia de la injusticia epistémica y la dominación, así como desarrollar estrategias para contrarrestarlas. (shrink)

On the cusp of the 14th century, a new means of visualizing plants arose in the herbal manuscript tradition of South Italy. Unlike the previous medieval tradition’s stylized plant representations or antique manuscripts with their lifelike representations, these new images are characterized by their similarity to nature and pressed herbs. Based on two ‘Tractatus de herbis’ manuscripts, namely the MS lat. 6823 in Paris and the MS Egerton 747 in London, this article examines such a new form of nature as (...) a measurement for art. The images themselves alternate between naturalistic impressions, fantastic creations, and pure aesthetic pleasure for the beholder. Together with the accompanying medical treatise they address the boundaries between measurements and excessiveness pertaining not only to artifice but also the body, which has come out of the balance of the four humors and therefore has lost its right measure. (shrink)

Words are processed more easily when they have canonical phonotactic shapes, i.e., shapes that are frequent both in the lexicon and in usage. We explore whether this cognitively grounded constraint or preference implies testable predictions about the implementation of sound change. Specifically, we hypothesise that words with canonical shapes favour, or ‘select for’, sound changes that produce words with the same shapes. To test this, we investigate a Middle English sound change known as Open Syllable Lengthening. OSL lengthened vowels in (...) disyllables such as ME /ma.kə/ make, but more or less only when they became monosyllabic and when their vowels were non-high. We predict that word shapes produced by this implementation pattern should correspond to the shapes that were most common among morphologically simple monosyllables and disyllables at the time when OSL occurred. We test this prediction against Early Middle English corpus data. Our results largely confirm our prediction: monosyllables produced by OSL indeed conformed to the shapes that were most frequent among already existing monosyllables. At the same time, the failure of OSL to affect disyllables prevented them from assuming shapes that were far more typical of morphologically complex word forms than of simple ones. This suggests that the actuation and implementation of sound changes may be even more sensitive to lexical probabilities than hitherto suspected. Also, it demonstrates how diachronic data can be used to test hypotheses about constraints on word recognition and processing. (shrink)

Nel corso degli ultimi 20 anni c’è stata una espansione globale in materia di istruzione dottorale e in particolare di ‘dottorati professionali’. Difficoltà nell’avanzamento e nel completamento diventano sempre più il centro dell’attenzione per tutti i tipi di dottorato. È stato riconosciuto che una serie di fattori al di là di quelli prettamente demografici potrebbe influire sulla possibilità di completare gli studi. C’è ancora molto da imparare sul motivo per cui l’avanzamento e il completamento del dottorato sono così impegnativi. In (...) questo articolo vorremmo mettere in evidenza un settore che sembra trascurato dalla ricerca: l’esperienza emotivamente complessa del percorso di dottorato.Offriamo un contributo al dibattito su ciò che è necessario per facilitare il successo e intrinsecamente un soddisfacente avanzamento all’interno di un programma di dottorato professionale. Noi sosteniamo che una maggiore attenzione debba essere prestata al cammino esperienziale di studenti di dottorato dal momento che essi hanno il difficile compito di integrare la loro vita personale, professionale e accademica. Il nostro interesse per le risorse emotive di cui gli studenti possono avvalersi durante il loro percorso di dottorato è iniziato con la progettazione e lo sviluppo del nostro primo dottorato professionale in materia di sanità e cura. Attraverso la nostra iniziale esperienza con due gruppi di studenti, abbiamo riflettuto sullo sviluppo del dottorato professionale, in generale, e trasversalmente a diverse altre discipline, per comprendere meglio come facilitare una buona esperienza di dottorato e una conclusione nei tempi.L’importanza di partecipare all’esperienza emotiva all’interno del complesso percorso di dottorato professionale ci ha portato al concetto di ‘nourished scholarship’ . Si definisce la nozione di ‘nourished scholarship’ come un percorso di apprendimento che lega i valori personali, significativi e attuali, allo sviluppo e al contributo professionale. Tale nutrimento emotivo è caratterizzato da una soddisfacente esperienza di scambio tra il sé, l’apprendimento e la comunità di pratica/studio. La nostra opinione è che tale nutrimento emotivo sia una risorsa fondamentale da cui gli studenti attingono al momento di negoziare le sfide complesse del percorso professionale di dottorato. Al fine di illustrare il significato di ‘nourished scholarship’ descriviamo alcune delle sue dimensioni emotive chiave. Queste dimensioni possono essere agevolate in vari modi, ma qui ne segnaliamo uno in particolare: il sostegno reciproco e la supervisione di gruppo facilitata. Al fine di illustrare le dimensioni della ‘nourished scholarship’ quindi noi riflettiamo su un caso specifico, quello di una coorte di studenti di dottorato professionale. Sono state estratte alcune loro esperienze per illustrare sette dimensioni che sono importanti per contribuire all’esperienza di ‘nourished scholarship’ come una risorsa di sostegno:- Sperimentare i benefici di appartenenza- Aiutarsi vicendevolmente a contenere l’ansia- Vivere la crescente fiducia- Accettare comunanza e unicità- Miglioramento personale, identità professionale e accademica attraverso la chiarificazione dei valori- Sperimentare i benefici di relazionarsi ad una più ampia comunità scientifica- Accettare i ritmi dei tempi in cui ricevere dei tempi attivi.Inoltre, in questo articolo si riflette su come la particolare struttura del programma di dottorato è stata in grado di sostenere lo sviluppo di queste risorse. Ci sono state tre caratteristiche chiave che crediamo siano state fondamentali nel modo in cui il programma è stato progettato e realizzato:a) ‘Cohortness’ in cui gli studenti si impegnano con il programma come un gruppo in viaggio.b) Supervisione di coorte: anche se tutti studiavano diversi argomenti, si è formato un gruppo insieme a due facilitatori accademici per discutere il processo, l’esperienza del percorso e il loro apprendimento.c) Una strategia di valutazione flessibile che permette agli studenti di progredire in modo personale e non lineare.Il valore potenziale di questo articolo per i programmi educativi è che fornisce un quadro per focalizzare l’attenzione sull’importanza del percorso emotivo e sui modi per sostenere la motivazione degli studenti e la resilienza. Noi crediamo che questo quadro abbia un potenziale trasferibile ad altre situazioni in cui tali risorse emotive possono essere importanti.During the past 20 years there has been a global expansion in doctoral education and in particular professional doctorates. Difficulties with progression and completion have increasingly become the focus of attention within both academic and professional contexts. It has been acknowledged that a range of factors, beyond demographics, could be influential in whether students are able to sustain their studies to completion. In this paper we stress the importance of conceptualising professional doctoral studies as a personal, professional and academic journey that is sustained by emotional factors that may need more explicit attention. As such, our contribution is the delineation of a phenomenon that we call ‘nourished scholarship’. We wish to illustrate how such ‘nourished scholarship’ functions as a resource for sustaining motivation and integration through the doctoral journey. We offer seven dimensions that a doctoral programme needs to embody in order to facilitate ‘nourished scholarship’: belonging, containing anxiety, growing confidence, commonality and uniqueness, values clarification, scholarly community, and negotiating the rhythms of receptive and active times. We illustrate these dimensions in the context of a professional doctorate programme that emphasises ‘cohort supervision’ as the primary resource for facilitating such nourished scholarship. We believe that this notion has transferable potential to other provisions where such emotional resources may be important. (shrink)

AI for social good is a thriving research topic and a frequently declared goal of AI strategies and regulation. This article investigates the requirements necessary in order for AI to actually serve a public interest, and hence be socially good. The authors propose shifting the focus of the discourse towards democratic governance processes when developing and deploying AI systems. The article draws from the rich history of public interest theory in political philosophy and law, and develops a framework for ‘public (...) interest AI’. The framework consists of (1) public justification for the AI system, (2) an emphasis on equality, (3) deliberation/ co-design process, (4) technical safeguards, and (5) openness to validation. This framework is then applied to two case studies, namely SyRI, the Dutch welfare fraud detection project, and UNICEF’s Project Connect, that maps schools worldwide. Through the analysis of these cases, the authors conclude that public interest is a helpful and practical guide for the development and governance of AI for the people. (shrink)

In our everyday moral deliberations, we attend to two central types of considerations – outcomes and moral rules. How these considerations interrelate is central to the long-standing debate between deontologists and utilitarians. Is the weight we attach to moral rules reducible to their conduciveness to good outcomes (as many utilitarians claim)? Or do we take moral rules to be absolute constraints on action that normatively trump outcomes (as many deontologists claim)? Arguments over these issues characteristically appeal to commonsense intuitions about (...) various cases. As a result, an important portion of the debate involves empirically tractable questions — questions that can be investigated by probing for people’s judgments in cases in which the two types of considerations come into conflict with one another. (shrink)

Introduction. Medical trainees fear disclosing psychological distress and rarely seek help. Social sharing of difficult experiences can reduce stress and burnout. Drawing comics is one way that has been used to help trainees express themselves. The authors explore reasons why some medical trainees chose to draw comics depicting stressful situations that they had never shared with anyone before. Methods. Trainees participated in a comic drawing session on stressors in medicine. Participants were asked if they had ever shared the drawn situation (...) with anyone. Participants who had not previously shared were asked what prevented them and why they shared it now. The authors performed content analysis of the responses. Results. Of two hundred forty participants, forty-six indicated sharing an experience for the first time. Analysis of the responses revealed dedicated time and space was essential to sharing, trainee insecurity was a barrier, and comics were perceived as a safe way to communicate. Discussion. Depicting a stressful situation may be beneficial for trainees who drew an experience they had never shared before. Providing trainees with the opportunity to externalize their experience and create a community for sharing tough experiences may be one way to reduce trainee stress and burnout. (shrink)

A population at the intersection between criminality and victimhood, sex workers1 have contact with myriad service providers in the fields of mental health, housing, child welfare, and criminal jus...

In the highly contentious abortion arena, the new oral abortifacient technology RU486 is one among many actors. This article offers an arena analysis of the heterogeneous constructions of RU486 by various actors, including scientists, pharmaceutical compa nies, medical groups, antiabortion groups, women's health movement groups, and others who have produced situated knowledges. Conceptually, we find not only that the identity of the nonhuman actor-RU486 -is unstable and multiple but also that, in practice, there are other implicated actors—the downstream users and (...) consumers of the technology. If we try to follow all the actors, we find a fuller and more historicized arena, and, ironically, we too can be construed as implicated actors in it. (shrink)

马忠林(1914~ ),东北师范大学数学系教授,中国数学会会员,吉林省数学会常务理事,日本三大学数学教育学研究会名誉会长.

Critical posthumanism is an invitation to think differently about knowledge and educational relationality between humans and the more-than-human. This philosophical and political shift in subjectivity builds on, and is entangled with, poststructuralism and phenomenology. In this paper we read diffractively through one another the theories of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and feminist posthumanists Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. We explore the implications of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ for early childhood education. With its emphasis on a moving away from the dominant (...) role of human vision in educational research we show how videoing and photographing works as an apparatus in an analysis of data from an inner-city school in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are struck by children’s seeing with the ‘eyes of their skin’ and ‘seeing’ with/in the world, as their obvious distress is felt when a small tree sapling has been mowed down in a nearby park. We analyse the event with the help of a variation on Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming-child’: ‘becoming-little’, and Anna Tsing’s ‘the arts of noticing’. ‘Becoming-little’ as a methodology disrupts the adult/child binary that positions ‘little’, younger humans as inferior to their ‘bigger’ fully human counterparts. We exemplify ‘becoming-little’ through 4 and 5 year-olds’ learning with the little tree and adopt Barad’s temporal diffraction to ‘see’ what is in/visible in the park: the extractive, exploitative, colonising mining practices of White settlers. These are still part of the land on which the park was created but are in/visible beneath the ‘skin’ of the earth. (shrink)

As políticas de privatização da educação e as formas pelas quais se materializam têm assumido contornos sem precedentes no tempo presente e são emblemas das mutações da face social do Estado no provimento e garantia do direito humano à educação, como consequência da ascensão e capilaridade dos princípios neoliberais no tecido social que se apoiam, por sua vez, na primazia do capital financeiro e na concentração da riqueza. No Brasil, o direito à educação é matéria do texto constitucional nos títulos (...) “II – Dos direitos e garantias fundamentais” e “VIII – Da ordem social” (BRASIL, 1988), além de outras disposições e tangencia, em maior ou menor medida, todas as legislações infraconstitucionais. Pelo fato de ser fundante e crucial para a garantia do direito humano à educação, a defesa da oferta, currículo e gestão da educação pela esfera pública constitui-se em uma pauta candente para as pesquisas acadêmicas e para o ativismo social, uma vez que se trata da defesa de direitos em risco e de contraposições às mecânicas de poder que contribuem para a corrosão da esfera pública. Balanços analíticos e interpretativos de evidências empíricas, realizadas por pesquisadores sobre o fenômeno da privatização da educação em diferentes países e territórios têm desvelado reconfigurações normativas, práticas gestoriais e desenhos curriculares elucidando a magnitude do alcance das políticas e práticas mercantis e privatistas no âmbito educacional, em escala mundial. As reformas educacionais de cariz privatista induzidas por atores privados têm sido orquestradas por regimes ou modelos de governança da educação denominados como “governo empresarial” por Dardot e Laval (2016), como gestão corporativa da educação (Croso e Magalhaes, 2016) ou ainda por parcerias público-privadas (Robertson e Verger, 2012). Em substância, os processos privatistas se concretizam mediante uma apropriação teórico-prática das políticas educacionais de forma orgânica e multiforme, incidindo sobre a gestão escolar; a formação de docentes e de gestores; assessorias pedagógicas; a oferta de tecnologias educacionais; os sistemas privados de ensino que padronizam projetos curriculares, dentre outros insumos pedagógicos, além do incentivo à programas de escolha parental que disputam os fundos públicos (Adrião, 2018). Essa miríade de formas de privatização da educação ocasiona efeitos nefastos à consolidação da educação como direito público e subjetivo, conquista consagrada em cartas constitucionais da grande maioria dos países do globo, dentre outros códigos legais. No Brasil, pesquisa financiada pela FAPESP e desenvolvida no âmbito da Rede Latino-Americana e Africana de Pesquisadores em Privatização da Educação (ReLAAPPe) sob coordenação geral de Theresa Adrião intitulada Mapeamento das Estratégias de Privatização da Educação Básica no Brasil e coordenada em nível estadual por pesquisadores/as de treze instituições públicas de pesquisa de diferentes regiões do país, mapeia e analisa tendências de privatização materializadas nas redes educacionais dos estados e do Distrito Federal, nas dimensões da oferta educativa, gestão educacional e do currículo (Adrião, 2018)[1]. A pesquisa elucidou a inserção de organizações privadas, fundamentalmente de natureza empresarial, na definição e ou operacionalização de programas educacionais sob a tutela dos entes subnacionais entre 2005 e 2018. Face ao avanço dos multifacetados formatos da privatização da educação, o presente dossiê revela elementos para a problematização do modus operandi do setor privado na escola pública em distintos contextos, de maneira a focalizar criticamente dimensões contíguas entre esta efeméride e a agenda globalmente estruturada para a educação (DALE, 2004). Trata-se de um esforço coletivo derivado de ações investigativas conectadas ao supracitado coletivo de pesquisa para dar visibilidade à teleologia empresarial que tem se reverberado na esfera pública, cuja aquiescência de governos ultraconservadores e determinações históricas da conjuntura atual têm encarregado de conformar. As análises aqui disponibilizadas constituem-se em importantes alternativas analíticas para dissipar narrativas hegemônicas que produzem colapsos na cidadania e nos Direitos Humanos dos estratos historicamente empobrecidos. (shrink)

Mathematical notation includes a vast array of signs. Most mathematical signs appear to be symbolic, in the sense that their meaning is arbitrarily related to their visual appearance. We explored the hypothesis that mathematical signs with iconic aspects—those which visually resemble in some way the concepts they represent—offer a cognitive advantage over those which are purely symbolic. An early formulation of this hypothesis was made by Christine Ladd in 1883 who suggested that symmetrical signs should be used to convey commutative (...) relations, because they visually resemble the mathematical concept they represent. Two controlled experiments provide the first empirical test of, and evidence for, Ladd's hypothesis. In Experiment 1 we find that participants are more likely to attribute commutativity to operations denoted by symmetric signs. In Experiment 2 we further show that using symmetric signs as notation for commutative operations can increase mathematical performance. (shrink)

School principals world-wide report high levels of strain and attrition resulting in a shortage of qualified principals. It is thus, crucial to identify psychosocial risk factors that reflect principals’ occupational wellbeing. For this purpose, we used the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ-II), a widely used self-report measure covering multiple psychosocial factors identified by leading occupational stress theories. We evaluated the COPSOQ-II regarding factor structure and longitudinal, discriminant, and convergent validity using latent structural equation modeling in a large sample of Australian school (...) principals (N = 2,049). Results reveal that confirmatory factor analysis produced marginally acceptable model fit. A novel approach we call set exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM-set), where cross-loadings were only allowed within a priori defined sets of factors, fit well, and was more parsimonious than a full ESEM. Further multitrait-multimethod models based on the set-ESEM confirm the importance of a principal’s psychosocial risk factors; Stressors and depression were related to demands and ill-being, while confidence and autonomy were related to wellbeing. We also show that working in the private sector was beneficial for showing a low psychosocial risk, while other demographics have little effects. Finally, we identify five latent risk profiles (high risk to no risk) of school principals based on all psychosocial factors. Overall the research presented here closes the theory application gap of a strong multi-dimensional measure of psychosocial risk-factors. (shrink)

This article describes a model for incorporating lesson study into the student teaching placement and reports on the success of the implementation of such a model with student teachers and their cooperating teachers (CTs). Student teachers had the opportunity to discuss many important ideas with each other and their CTs, including ?big ideas? of mathematics, and the anticipation of student questions and possible responses. Student teachers also had a built?in opportunity for peer observation on a regular basis and the opportunity (...) to collaborate with their peers. Certain important aspects of lesson study were not present in this implementation: the teachers involved did not discuss the gaps in their own knowledge with the goal of improving their own mathematical understanding, they did not refer outside sources for ideas for the lessons, and they did not have an overarching affective goal for students. Suggestions are made for teacher preparation in light of these findings. (shrink)

Little understood in early U.S. history, the Florida manatee suffered at the hands of people. After the manatees were listed as endangered, scientists began to study manatees and gained much knowledge about them. With education efforts, the species then went from inspiring acts of cruelty to inspiring dedication and admiration among scientists, policymakers, and the interested public. The image of the manatee underwent a transformation. The social and cultural reinvention of the Florida manatees improved their chances for protection.

In an increasingly globalized food economy, local agri-food initiatives are promoted as more sustainable alternatives, both for small-scale producers and ecologically conscious consumers. However, revitalizing local agri-food communities in rural agro-industrial regions is particularly challenging. This case study examines Grant and Chelan Counties, two industrial farming regions in rural Central Washington State, distant from the urban fringe. Farmers in these counties have tried diversifying large-scale processing into organics and marketing niche and organic produce at popular farmers markets in Seattle about (...) 200 miles away. Such strategies invoke the question, “How are ‘local’ agri-food networks socially and geographically defined?” The meaning of what constitutes “local” and/or “sustainable” systems merits consideration in the linking of these rural counties with distant urban farmers markets. Employing historical, in-depth interview and survey research, we analyze production and consumption networks and the non-market systems that residents in these counties access for self-provisioning and food security. (shrink)

The concerns regarding patient autonomy presented in August A. Culbert et al.’s “Navigating Informed Consent and Patient Safety in Surgery: Lessons for Medical Students and Junior Trainees” fall just short of addressing the main issue. Patient autonomy is not something that just one member of a team should consider, and it should not be something that any protocol should have the power to subvert, particularly in an environment as tenuous as the operating room. This article will take the concerns regarding (...) the ethics of removing a patient’s hearing aid prior to entering the operating room presented in the aforementioned article and show the necessity for a new standard operating procedure. (shrink)

Individuals with high levels of narcissism often ascend to leadership positions. Whereas there is evidence that narcissism is linked to unethical behavior and negative social outcomes, the effects of leader narcissism on an organization’s most important resource—its employees—have not yet been studied thoroughly. Using theoretical assumptions of the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept and social exchange theories, we examined how leaders’ narcissistic rivalry was related to follower outcomes in a sample of matched leaders and followers. Followers of leaders high in (...) narcissistic rivalry reported less perceived supervisor support, lower quality leader-member relationships, lower performance-based self-esteem, and lower job engagement. These effects were only found when follower-rated leaders’ narcissistic rivalry was used in the model but not when self-rated leaders’ narcissistic rivalry was used as a predictor. This implies that the negative effects of leaders’ narcissistic rivalry on followers are driven by the expression of narcissistic tendencies. Leader development should thus focus on changing destructive leader behavior. We propose that leaders high in narcissistic rivalry can be motivated to make such changes by showing them that by hurting their followers, they will eventually undermine their own reputation and status. Furthermore, selection and promotion practices should incorporate objective measures to weaken the effects of narcissists’ self-promotional tactics in these contexts and thus prevent people high in narcissistic rivalry from rising to leadership positions. (shrink)

The AAR-SBL Women’s Caucus session on ‘Beyond Down and Dirty: From Good to Great Sex’ revisited the Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World’s Religions project and book with the participation of two of its co-editors, Mary E. Hunt and Patricia Beattie Jung, and co-author and collaborator, Wanda Defeilt. Scholar colleagues, Brandy Daniels, Fitri Junoes, and Alicia Besa Panganiban, presented intriguing papers on feminist religious and ethical reflections on what constitutes great sex as they examined the issues discussed by feminist (...) scholars and activist authors of Good Sex. Moreover, the session was an exhilarating dialogue of international, interreligious, and intergenerational perspectives on what women think is great sex. It was an exciting starting ground for intergenerational discussion with senior scholars, associated with the Good Sex book, providing generous, constructive, and well-considered responses to the presentations of their colleagues. The diverse international audience of masters, doctoral and senior scholars – male and female – was included in the complex, fun, and challenging discussion of sex. Amidst various issues raised, there was a consensus that discussions on great sex must address issues of safety, justice, and pleasure. Overall the session was a success as the platform for the presentations modelled a feminist method that was intentionally designed to give more time for discussion, not only among panelists but also with the audience. (shrink)

This paper explores the pragmatic foundations of unreliable narration (UN), a narrative technique highly popular in western literary texts. It sets out by giving a critique of the competing theoretic frameworks of UN, namely the seminal Boothian concept and more recent constructivist approaches. It is argued that both frameworks neglect a pragmatic perspective as the most viable way for identifying and analysing UN. Such a pragmatic model is then developed on the basis of theories of cooperation, such as the Gricean (...) maxims, relevance theory, and politeness. The emerging definition of UN treats a narrator as unreliable if he or she violates the cooperative principle without intending an implicature. This model is tested against three prototypical UNs: Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. These sample analyses yield a typology of UN: while pragmatic deviation is shown to be the intrinsic feature of the phenomenon, unreliable narrators vary according to their degree of intentionality. Finally, two recurring issues in the UN debate are briefly discussed: the existence of textual clues of UN, and the role of the reader in constructing unreliability. (shrink)

Articulates the fundamental importance of ontology to Hans Jonas’s environmental ethics.

Research on mirror self-recognition where animals are observed for mirror-guided self-directed behaviour has predominated the empirical approach to self-awareness in nonhuman primates. The ability to direct behaviour to previously unseen parts of the body such as the inside of the mouth, or grooming the eye by aid of mirrors has been interpreted as recognition of self and evidence of a self-concept. Three decades of research has revealed that contrary to monkeys, most great apes have convincingly displayed the capacity to recognize (...) self by mirrors. The putative discontinuity in phylogeny of the ability suggests the existence of a so-called cognitive gap between great apes and the rest of the animal kingdom. However, methodological and theoretical inconsistencies regarding the empirical approach prevail. For instance, the observation of self-directed behaviour might not be as straightforward as it seems. In addition, the interpretation of mirror self-recognition as an index of self-awareness is challenged by alternative explanations, raising doubt about some assumptions behind mirror self-recognition. To evaluate the significance of the test in discussions of the concept of self this paper presents and analyses some major arguments raised on the mirror task. (shrink)

This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social power. The present article explains (...) how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a typology of auditors’ virtues through in-depth interviews with nine exemplars of the audit community.We compare this typology with prescribed auditors’ virtues as represented in the applicable Code of Professional Conduct. Ourcomparison shows that the Code places a primary emphasis on mandatory virtues including the virtues of “independent,” “objective,”and “principled.” While the non-mandatory virtues, which involve “going beyond the minimum” and “putting the public interest foremost,” were identified by our exemplars as essential to the auditor’s (...) role, they received little or no emphasis in the Rules of Professional Conduct. We find this particularly alarming, given that the exemplars interviewed for this study viewed these virtues are essential to the auditors’ role. If the audit profession wishes to uphold public confidence by encouraging the possession of non-mandatory auditors’ virtues, our research suggests that non-mandatory auditors’ virtues should be explicitly described and included in rules of professional conduct. (shrink)

This title considers whether any generalisations can be made about word order in language. The chapters, written by international scholars, draw on data from several 'disharmonic' and typologically distinct languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Basque, French, English, Hixkaryana (a Cariban language), Khalkha Mongolian, Uyghur Turkic, and Afrikaans.

Academic integrity is a complex problem that challenges how we view action, intentions, research, and knowledge production as human agents working with computers. This paper proposes that a productive approach to support AI is found at the nexus of behavioural ethics and a view of hybrid app-human agency. The proposal brings together AI research in behavioural ethics and Rest’s four stages of ethical decision-making which tracks the development of moral sensitivity, moral judgement, moral motivation and finally moral action combined with (...) insights taken from Actor-Network Theory. This framework, bluntly named the Academic Integrity Model, positions AI as an effect of an entangled hybrid of human-technology actors moving through distinct but related steps towards ultimately mobilising ethical learning behaviours. This model highlights the importance of developing socio-techno responsibility in students and suggests that approaches to address academic integrity performances such as contract cheating, collusion and plagiarism should include considerations of the complex nature of app-centric students. (shrink)

Little understood in early U.S. history, the Florida manatee suffered at the hands of people. After the manatees were listed as endangered, scientists began to study manatees and gained much knowledge about them. With education efforts, the species then went from inspiring acts of cruelty to inspiring dedication and admiration among scientists, policymakers, and the interested public. The image of the manatee underwent a transformation. The social and cultural reinvention of the Florida manatees improved their chances for protection.

Architect and Conservationist; born, July 29, 1926, died, July 18, 2010.

In disciplines traditionally studying expertise such as sociology, philosophy, and pedagogy, discussions of demarcation criteria typically centre on how and why human expertise differs from the expertise of artificial expert systems. Therefore, the demarcation criteria has been drawn between robots as formalized logical architectures and humans as creative, social subjects, creating a bipartite division that leaves out animals. However, by downsizing the discussion of animal cognition and implicitly intuiting assimilation of living organisms to robots, key features to explain why human (...) expertise is crucially different from robot expertise are neglected. In the absence of clarification of fundamental cognitive principles of LOs, cognitively robots may appear persuasively closer to humans when they are in fact not. In this paper, I will discuss essential features of organic cognition to emphasise why animals are not like robots at all. The purpose is to add a third category when comparing humans and robots to make a tripartite division that consists of humans LOs, and machines. I will argue that LOs, adapted to ever-changing circumstances, are qualitatively different from robots. Humans, in the sense of belonging to the biological class of LOs, also share this central feature. In addition, however, humans alone possess and use language in a way that turns cognition from a predominantly online to off-line activity, 625–635 2002) that introduces truly abstract thinking. In the end I introduce the concept of ‘Linguification’ to dissect the particular mechanisms sustaining abstract thinking in the explanation of what makes humans distinct from robots and LOs. (shrink)

This is a qualitative study of the role of gender and emotion in a political setting. The data are from interviews of activists and legislators, as well as from archival accounts of the debates in state legislatures about breast cancer informed consent legislation. I found that proponents for and against the legislation shared the belief that women are more emotional than men. This social belief shaped the political strategies the activists adopted and initially contributed to their effectiveness; however, their opponents (...) claimed that the women activists should be dismissed because their emotionalism made them irrational. I close by discussing Western cultural beliefs about emotions, social stereotypes regarding women, and their consequences for women activists in political arenas. (shrink)

The authors examine the experiences and ideals of African American working-class mothers through 20 intensive interviews. They focus on the women's negotiations with racialized norms of motherhood, represented in the assumptions that legal marriage and an exclusively bonded dyadic relationship with one's children are requisite to good mothering. The authors find, as did earlier phenomenological studies, that the mothers draw from distinct ideals of community-based independence to resist each of these assumptions and carve out alternative scripts based on nonmarital relationships (...) with male partners and shared care of children. (shrink)