Dog whistling—speech that seems ordinary but sends a hidden, often derogatory message to a subset of the audience—is troubling not just for our political ideals, but also for our theories of communication. On the one hand, it seems possible to dog whistle unintentionally, merely by uttering certain expressions. On the other hand, the intention is typically assumed or even inferred from the act, and perhaps for good reason, for dog whistles seem misleading by design, not just by chance. In this (...) paper, I argue that, to understand when and why it’s possible to dog-whistle unintentionally (and indeed, intentionally), we’ll need to recognize the structure of our linguistic practices. For dog whistles and for covertly coded speech more generally, this structure is a pair of practices, one shared by all competent speakers and the other known only to some, but deployable in the same contexts. In trying to identify these enabling conditions, we’ll discover what existing theories of communicated content overlook by focusing on particular utterances in isolation, or on individual speakers’ mental states. The remedy, I argue, lies in attending to the ways in which what is said is shaped by the temporally extended, socio-politically structured linguistic practices that utterances instantiate. (shrink)

This chapter provides a high-level introduction to the topic of propaganda. We survey a number of the most influential accounts of propaganda, from the earliest institutional studies in the 1920s to contemporary academic work. We propose that these accounts, as well as the various examples of propaganda which we discuss, all converge around a key feature: persuasion which bypasses audiences’ rational faculties. In practice, propaganda can take different forms, serve various interests, and produce a variety of effects. Propaganda can aim (...) to affect not only audiences’ beliefs and attitudes, but also their emotions and moods, and in turn how audiences subsequently reason or act. While propaganda is often thought of as false or misinformation, it can instead involve framing effects (“The war on drugs”), covert messaging (“There are Muslims among us”), emotionally charged slogans (“Make America Great Again”), or myths (“The American dream”). These forms of propaganda mislead audiences, not by introducing false information, but by making some beliefs and values, rather than others, salient. In fact, propaganda can even employ straightforwardly true claims (again, as in “There are Muslims among us”) and seemingly objective bureaucratic reports (“Crime has risen 4.2%”). To understand how these and other mechanisms enable propaganda to persuade by arational means, further study is needed. To that end, throughout the chapter we identify a number of places where the study of meaning and communication can help elucidate propaganda, as well as the places where propaganda issues challenges for the study of meaning. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore artificial moral agency by reflecting upon the possibility of a Moral Turing Test and whether its lack of focus on interiority, i.e. its behaviouristic foundation, counts as an obstacle to establishing such a test to judge the performance of an Artificial Moral Agent. Subsequently, to investigate whether an MTT could serve as a useful framework for the understanding, designing and engineering of AMAs, we set out to address fundamental challenges within (...) the field of robot ethics regarding the formal representation of moral theories and standards. Here, typically three design approaches to AMAs are available: top-down theory-driven models and bottom-up approaches which set out to model moral behaviour by means of models for adaptive learning, such as neural networks, and finally, hybrid models, which involve components from both top-down and bottom-up approaches to the modelling of moral agency. With inspiration from Allen and Wallace as well as Prior, we elaborate on theoretically driven approaches to machine ethics by introducing deontic tense logic. Finally, within this framework, we explore the character of human interaction with a robot which has successfully passed an MTT. Design/methodology/approach – The ideas in this paper reflect preliminary theoretical considerations regarding the possibility of establishing a MTT based on the evaluation of moral behaviour, which focusses on moral reasoning regarding possible actions. The thoughts reflected fall within the field of normative ethics and apply deontic tense logic to discuss the possibilities and limitations of artificial moral agency. Findings – The authors stipulate a formalisation of logic of obligation, time and modality, which may serve as a candidate for implementing a system corresponding to an MTT in a restricted sense. Hence, the authors argue that to establish a present moral obligation, we need to be able to make a description of the actual situation and the relevant general moral rules. Such a description can never be complete, as the combination of exhaustive knowledge about both situations and rules would involve a God eye’s view, enabling one to know all there is to know and take everything relevant into consideration before making a perfect moral decision to act upon. Consequently, due to this frame problem, from an engineering point of view, we can only strive for designing a robot supposed to operate within a restricted domain and within a limited space-time region. Given such a setup, the robot has to be able to perform moral reasoning based on a formal description of the situation and any possible future developments. Although a system of this kind may be useful, it is clearly also limited to a particular context. It seems that it will always be possible to find special cases in which a given system does not pass the MTT. This calls for a new design of moral systems with trust-related components which will make it possible for the system to learn from experience. Originality/value – It is without doubt that in the near future we are going to be faced with advanced social robots with increasing autonomy, and our growing engagement with these robots calls for the exploration of ethical issues and stresses the importance of informing the process of engineering ethical robots. Our contribution can be seen as an early step in this direction. (shrink)

This survey set out to explore occupational health professionals' courses of action with respect to privacy in a situation of dual loyalty between employees and employers. A postal questionnaire was sent to randomly selected potential respondents. The overall response rate was 64%: 140 nurses and 94 physicians returned the questionnaire. Eight imaginary cases involving an ethical dilemma of privacy were presented to the respondents. Six different courses of action were constructed within the set alternatives proposed. The study indicated that privacy (...) as an absolute value is not in the interest of either employees or employers. It also showed that, where dual loyalty is concerned, the most valid course of action in dealing with sensitive subjects such as drug and work community problems, sexual harassment and sick leave is to rely on tripartite co-operation. If they maintain their professional independence and impartiality, health professionals are well placed to succeed in this challenging task; if not, there are bound to be severe violations of privacy. (shrink)

In the course of our daily lives we make lots of evaluations of actions. We think that driving above the speed limit is dangerous, that giving up one’s bus seat to the elderly is polite, that stirring eggs with a plastic spoon is neither good nor bad. We understand too that we may be praised or blamed for actions performed on the basis of these evaluations. The same is true in the case of certain beliefs. Sometimes we blame people for (...) what they believe falsely or irrationally. On occasion, we praise them for their intellectual discoveries. The goal of the present study is to describe the foundations which allow for these kinds of judgments. If you think that people are not always forgivable for what they believe, you will find in this book the resources to defend this thought. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Although sexual difference is widely regarded as the concept that lies at the center of Luce Irigaray's thought, its meaning and significance is highly contested. This dissensus, however, attests to more than merely the existence of a recalcitrant conceptual ambiguity. That is, Irigaray's discussion of sexual difference remains fraught not because she leaves this concept undefined but because the centrality of sexual difference in fact marks a complex and unstable nexus of phenomena that shift throughout her work. Consequently, if Irigaray (...) is indeed the preeminent thinker of sexual difference, this is not in virtue of her recurrent appeal to a monolithic, readily digestible concept but rather somehow despite the absence of precisely this gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference in Irigaray's work by identifying her persistent, though largely unexamined, commitment to transcendental phenomenology. Indeed, I attempt to show that the complex of phenomena of sexual difference emerges in L'oubli de l'air and The Way of Love as a modulation of Heidegger's own revision of transcendental phenomenology. In this sense, the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference does not mark the centrality of a concept but Irigaray's amplification of this Heideggerian gesture. (shrink)

Associé à la banalisation du quotidien, l’espace domestique constitue néanmoins pour de nombreux architectes un lieu privilégié dans ses potentialités scénographiques. Au-delà du langage architectural employé, la production contemporaine nipponne ravive une dynamique expérimentale et plastique, lancée par les acteurs du courant moderne des années 1920. À travers la mise en valeur des jeux de perceptions, l’implication du corps dans la fabrique de sensations, les stratégies de fusion entre matière et espace, l’enjeu de la lumière, la place du rythme, le (...) décloisonnement des usages ou la transposition de procédés mécaniques à la maison, l’article s’emploie à révéler différentes approches scénographiques dans les processus de conception de l’architecture domestique et leur évolution entre le début du xx e siècle et celui du xxi e. (shrink)

A strength of Jablonka & Lamb's (J&L's) book lies in its accessible as well as thorough treatment of genetic and epigenetic inheritance. The authors also provide a stimulating framework integrating evolutionary research across disciplines. A weakness is its unsystematic treatment of the interaction between behavioral and symbolic inheritance, particularly in their discussion of language.

This article criticizes recent suggestions that the current ELSI research field should accommodate a new direction towards a ‘post-ELSI’ agenda. Post-ELSI research seeks to avoid the modernist division of responsibility for technical and social issues said to characterize ELSI research. Collaboration and integration are consequently the key terms of post-ELSI strategies that are to distinguish it from ELSI strategies. We argue that this call for a new direction relies on an inadequate generalized analysis of ELSI research as modern that will (...) affect the construal of post-ELSI strategies. We are concerned that the call for post-ELSI shift will exclude imaginative proposals and intellectual freedom by narrowing down the scope and methodologies of ELSI and thereby missing opportunities to play a critical and constructive normative role. Instead of framing current trends in ELSI research as a radical and progressive shift from ELSI to post-ELSI, we suggest an alternative story of expansion and diversification described in terms of a drift from ELSA 1 to ELSA 2, pertaining to acronyms in use in Europe. ELSI research has never been modern. It has been experimenting from the very start on ways to mesh the works of humanist, social and natural scientist in order to bridge and build alignments of emerging scientific and societal goals and matters of concern. The development from ELSA 1 to ELSA 2 expands in our account the range of intellectual and methodological capacities of analysis and engagement of complex and dynamic science-society relationships. We present three areas of ELSA expertise to illustrate that the expertise within the field builds on scholarly achievements within the humanities, social sciences as well as the natural sciences. The plurality of disciplinary background of ELSA researchers represents a valuable diversity that enables mutual criticism and formulations of complementary approaches that together constitute a viable ELSA field. (shrink)

In this article I take a poem by Lisa Bellear as a starting point for theorizing the possibility of a renovated feminism. I argue that the rhetorical questioning of the poem performs a mode of intersubjectivity in which the addressee/reader reflects upon their whiteness. The poem drives directly into the dense affect that saturates the troubled zone of cross-racial relations in contemporary Australia. If this zone is characterized by white anger and anxiety, it is also a zone of intense `feeling' (...) for the indigenous poet. Jean-Luc Nancy defines literature as the act of the `opening [of] community to itself', that is, of communicating our being-in-common. The cross-racial encounter that Bellear brokers between an indigenous and a white woman through the performance of address in this poem is not entirely comfortable or governable. I discuss how my students find this poem so confronting, and the fact that this discomfort underlines the necessity for a pedagogy that accommodates what Spivak refers to as `moments of bafflement'. (shrink)

Dans un contexte de renouveau des publications féministes, paraît en 2020 Ne nous libérez pas, on s’en charge : une histoire des féminismes de 1789 à nos jours, un opus à six mains produit par les historiennes Bibia Pavard, Florence Rochefort et Michelle Zancarini-Fournel. Le titre du livre reprend un slogan féministe des années 1970, qui au-delà de la pointe d’humour, exprime la nécessité d’autonomie des femmes dans leur effort collectif pour être actrices de leur destin, des sujets et non (...) d... (shrink)

Stimuli that resemble humans, but are not perfectly human-like, are disliked compared to distinctly human and nonhuman stimuli. Accounts of this “Uncanny Valley” effect often focus on how changes in human resemblance can evoke different emotional responses. We present an alternate account based on the novel hypothesis that the Uncanny Valley is not directly related to ‘human-likeness’ per se, but instead reflects a more general form of stimulus devaluation that occurs when inhibition is triggered to resolve conflict between competing stimulus-related (...) representations. We consider existing support for this inhibitory-devaluation hypothesis and further assess its feasibility through tests of two corresponding predictions that arise from the link between conflict-resolving inhibition and aversive response: 1) that the pronounced disliking of Uncanny-type stimuli will occur for any image that strongly activates multiple competing stimulus representations, even in the absence of any human-likeness, and 2) that the negative peak of an ‘Uncanny Valley’ should occur at the point of greatest stimulus-related conflict and not (in the presence of human-likeness) always closer to the ‘human’ end of a perceptual continuum. We measured affective responses to a set of line drawings representing nonhuman animal-animal morphs, in which each continuum midpoint was a bistable image (Exp. 1), as well as to sets of human-robot and human-animal computer-generated morphs (Exp. 2). Affective trends depicting classic Uncanny Valley functions occurred for all continua, including the nonhuman stimuli. Images at continua midpoints elicited significantly more negative affect than images at endpoints, even when the continua included a human endpoint. This illustrates the feasibility of the inhibitory-devaluation hypothesis and the need for further research into the possibility that the strong dislike of Uncanny-type stimuli reflects the negative affective consequences of cognitive inhibition. (shrink)

Introduction: Aristotle's phantasia and the ancient concept of imagination -- Visualization, vividness (enargeia) and realism -- Mathematical projection, copying and analogy -- Prophecy, inspiration and allegory -- Conclusion: ancient and modern imagination.

William Reddy, professeur d’histoire et d’anthropologie culturelle à l’université Duke, auteur du livre The Navigation of Feeling, est un pionnier de l’histoire des émotions. Son dernier ouvrage, The Making of Romantic Love, est le résultat de dix années de recherche. Il y traite des origines de l’amour courtois dans une perspective comparatiste, ayant trait à l’histoire globale. Son ouvrage ambitieux s’adresse à la fois aux étudiants et aux chercheurs qui s’intéressent au genre, à l’amour, a...

The digital shift leads to increasing changes. Employees can deal with changes through informal learning that enables needs-based development. For successful informal learning, self-regulated learning is crucial, i.e., to set goals, plan, apply strategies, monitor, and regulate learning for example by applying resource strategies. However, existing SRL models all refer to formal learning settings. Because informal learning differs from formal learning, this study investigates whether SRL models can be transferred from formal learning environments into informal work settings. More precisely, are (...) all facets relevant, and what are the relational patterns? Because informal workplace learning occurs through interaction with the context, this study investigates the influence of context, i.e., organizational learning culture and job characteristics on SRL. Structural equation modeling of N = 170 employees in various industries showed the relevance of the self-reported metacognitive strategies planning, monitoring, and regulation; the resource strategies help-seeking and effort regulation; and deep processing strategy elaboration. However, there was no evidence for organization strategies. The learning strategies were associated with self-efficacy and mastery-approach goal orientation. Regarding context, results supported indirect effects over self-motivational beliefs of learning strategies. Organizational learning culture was connected with mastery-approach goal orientation, whereas job characteristics autonomy and feedback were related to self-efficacy, which were again related to SRL strategies. Therefore, context can empower employees not only to accomplish their tasks but to develop themselves by applying SRL strategies. The results are discussed, and practical implications are outlined. (shrink)

Numerous researchers have investigated accounting students’ levels of moral reasoning, ethical choice and judgment employing the Defining Issues Test and using its P score as an indicator of moral reasoning. Not surprisingly, a number of DIT studies report conflicting results. Moreover, despite widespread use of the DIT, there is concern that it may not adequately measure all facets of ethical judgment :1–26, 2010). Thus, we endeavor to provide insight not only into the contradictory results but also about the applicability of (...) the DIT for studying accounting students. To do so, we collect published and unpublished DIT studies employing accounting students as subjects and use meta-analysis to aggregate findings across these studies to quantify their results, examining commonly employed variables. We show significant relationships between P scores and some variables but not others. Further, our findings demonstrate that the DIT provides added insights when exploring questions of ethical choice, and ethics instruction, particularly when the instruction is embedded in an accounting course. Finally, we find that the level of DIT P scores reported in the studies relates to whether the study was published. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research. (shrink)

It is postulated from different philosophical traditions, and explicitly in recent literature, that there is no further need for doing philosophy of religion – it has become an impossible task. I argue, however, that there remains a philosophical space for this practice and that this space determines greatly how philosophy of religion can be done. The starting point of my argument is the current discussion in the SAJP between De Wet and Giddy and the significance of my article is that (...) it puts this debate within the broader international philosophical context by engaging the work of Trakakis and Desmond to resolve some of the apparently intractable issues raised. Trakakis discusses the divide between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions in which De Wet and Giddy’s work is further contextualized and clarified. Desmond’s work is seminal in its search for a metaxology wherein he advocates a new ‘in between’ position for doing philosophy of religion. I take this view of Desmond further by applying it to the current debate in South Africa and also using it to indicate some possibilities of speaking about the impossible. (shrink)

In this article, three new concepts of dehumanization are proposed in order to distinguish clearly between three different kinds of phenomena that are frequently conflated and misrepresented in current research: subjective dehumanization, detrimental conditions, and objective dehumanization. The article offers (i) a more fine-grained understanding of these three kinds of dehumanization phenomena, which in turn (ii) illuminates new strategies for conflict prevention. This is achieved through a process of conceptual engineering, where the boundaries of our concepts are redrawn, so they (...) are better suited for the dealing with the phenomena in question. (shrink)

In Holism: A Shopper's Guide Fodor and LePore contend that there could be punctate minds; minds capable of being in only a single type of representational state. The Kantian idea that the construction of perceptual representations requires the synthesizing activity of the mind is invoked to argue against the possibility of punctate minds. Fodor's commitment to an inferential theory of perception is shown to share crucial assumptions with the Kantian view and hence to lead to the same conclusion. The argument (...) from the need for synthesis is then extended beyond the perceptual case to mental representation in general. (shrink)

This article seeks to explain and debunk some of the most common ways citizens in developed countries rationalize their failure to reduce carbon emissions by showing how our culturally inherited conception of individual responsibility conspires with certain ordinary moral intuitions to preclude judgments of complicitous accountability. I argue that accountability for climate change can be made intelligible by understanding each individual’s responsibility to be rooted in our shared capacity for collective action.