Trust is an essential factor in online and offline transactions. However, the role of customer trust has received limited attention in the home-sharing economy. Drawing on the revised stimulus organism response model and trust transfer theory, this paper examines how customer trust in home-sharing hosts and platforms affects customer relationships, manifested in customer engagement and loyalty. As artificial intelligence is extensively utilized within home-sharing platforms to facilitate business operations and enhance the customer experience, this study also examines the influence of (...) AI on customer trust and other related outcomes. The research was undertaken in China, with respondents who had used home-sharing platforms. Results from structural equation modeling show that customer trust had a significant positive relationship with customer engagement and loyalty. Customer engagement mediates the relationship between trust and loyalty, while AI may have a negative moderating effect between host trust and customer engagement and customer engagement and loyalty. The paper contributes to marketing, sharing economy and AI research. The work has implications for practitioners offering suggestions to develop marketing strategies for business growth and sustainability. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers advocate expansion of philosophical methods to include empirical investigation into the concepts used by ordinary people in reasoning and action. We propose also including methods of qualitative social science, which we argue serve both moral and epistemic goals. Philosophical analytical tools applied to interdisciplinary research designs can provide ways to extract rich contextual information from subjects. We argue that this approach has important implications for bioethics; it provides both epistemic and moral reasons to use the experiences and perspectives (...) of diverse populations to better identify underlying concepts as well as to develop effective interventions within particular communities. (shrink)

This article describes and evaluates the application of an explicitly critical realist methodology to a quantitative doctoral research project on the causes of family homelessness in Australia. It...

In this paper I discuss the largely obsolete notion of ‘metaphysical foundations for science’ and the problems of representation, truth, and embodiment in Descartes identified by Adrian Moore. I explain why rather than enaging in a project of pure inquiry Descartes needed to fit the pursuit and findings of the physical and life sciences into a theological framework. His much misunderstood scientifc image of the human being as a psychosomatic unity is defended as coherent and influential, as is his rejection (...) of the correspondence theory of veridical perception. (shrink)

The need for psychological services to limited English proficient clients is increasing. Psychologists who provide clinical services to limited English proficient clients are frequently required to use the services of spoken language interpreters. Research has shown that the quality and consistency of interpretation services are often in question. Interpreters are generally not required to hold any certifications or to meet training requirements prior to providing interpretation services. This lack of oversight leaves the psychologist responsible for the quality of the interpretation (...) when adhering to the American Psychological Association’s 2010 Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. This article includes a discussion of the ethical and clinical issues inherent in providing psychological services through an interpreter, how those issues affect a psychologist’s adherence to the APA Ethics Code, and recommendations for meeting the ethical standards while providing sound clinical services through the use of spoken language interpreters. (shrink)

As doctoral students from New Zealand and Australia, advised by supervision teams with a diversity of critical realist experience from limited to none, we came independently to the 2018 Critical Re...

Issues of balancing data accessibility with ethical considerations and governance of a genomics research biobank, Generation Scotland, are explored within the evolving policy landscape of the past ten years. During this time data sharing and open data access have become increasingly important topics in biomedical research. Decisions around data access are influenced by local arrangements for governance and practices such as linkage to health records, and the global through policies for biobanking and the sharing of data with large-scale biomedical research (...) data resources and consortia. We use a literature review of policy relevant documents which apply to the conduct of biobanks in two areas: support for open access and the protection of data subjects and researchers managing a bioresource. We present examples of decision making within a biobank based upon observations of the Generation Scotland Access Committee. We reflect upon how the drive towards open access raises ethical dilemmas for established biorepositories containing data and samples from human subjects. Despite much discussion in science policy literature about standardisation, the contextual aspects of biobanking are often overlooked. Using our engagement with GS we demonstrate the importance of local arrangements in the creation of a responsive ethical approach to biorepository governance. We argue that governance decisions regarding access to the biobank are intertwined with considerations about maintenance and viability at the local level. We show that in addition to the focus upon ever more universal and standardised practices, the local expertise gained in the management of such repositories must be supported. A commitment to open access in genomics research has found almost universal backing in science and health policy circles, but repositories of data and samples from human subjects may have to operate under managed access, to protect privacy, align with participant consent and ensure that the resource can be managed in a sustainable way. Data access committees need to be reflexive and flexible, to cope with changing technology and opportunities and threats from the wider data sharing environment. To understand these interactions also involves nurturing what is particular about the biobank in its local context. (shrink)

Book review of Richard A. Richards' The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis.

An understanding of the nature and development of nursing intuition can help nurse educators foster it in young nurses and give clinicians more confidence in this aspect of their knowledge, allowing them to respond with greater assurance to their intuitions. In this paper, accounts from philosophy and neurophysiology are used to argue that intuition, specifically nursing intuition, is a valid form of knowledge. The paper argues that nursing intuition, a kind of practical intuition, is composed of four distinct aspects that (...) include: embodied knowledge rather like that knowledge we have when we have learned to ride a bicycle; well‐trained sensory perceptions attentive to subtle details of complex, often rapidly changing situations; a significant store of pertinent conceptual knowledge; and a history of habitual actions intentionally directed towards achieving the best outcomes for our patients. Contemporary neurophysiology research strongly suggests that human persons experience other persons such that they directly understand the meaning of a variety of different human actions, intentions, emotions, and sensations in immediate, non‐reflective, and non‐conceptual perceptions. This research is supported by the philosophical theories of Jacques Maritain and Yves R. Simon found in their accounts of practical knowledge. Together, these accounts offer us a rich view of the reality of nursing intuition that helps us understand why we find intuitive actions in some but not all nurses and gives us some specific information about how to develop intuition in young nurses. Finally, this research shows us a path for further research. (shrink)

This study draws on interviews with forty-nine members of a biomedical research community in the UK that is involved in negotiating data sharing and access. During an interview, an interviewee used the words “ethical moment” to describe a confrontation between collaborators in relation to data sharing. In this article, I use this as a lens for thinking about relations between “the conceptual and the empirical” in a way that allows both analyst and actor to challenge the status quo and consider (...) other ethical possibilities. Drawing on actor network theory, I approach “the empirical” using the concepts of controversy and ontological uncertainty as methodological tools to tackle the problem of ethics. I suggest that these concepts also provide a bridge for understanding the ontological structure of the virtual and the actual, as described in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. While other science and technology studies scholars have sought to draw on Deleuze, this article addresses the integration of ethics and empirical research. It arises as a critical reaction to existing treatments of this problem as found in empirical ethics, especially in the sociology of bioethics, and indirectly in ANT texts. (shrink)

Leibniz entertained the idea that, as a set of “striving possibles” competes for existence, the largest and most perfect world comes into being. The paper proposes 8 criteria for a Leibniz-world. It argues that a) there is no algorithm e.g., one involving pairwise compossibility-testing that can produce even possible Leibniz-worlds; b) individual substances presuppose completed worlds; c) the uniqueness of the actual world is a matter of theological preference, not an outcome of the assembly-process; and d) Goedel’s theorem implies that (...) there can be no algorithm for producing optimal worlds, assuming an optimal world contains truth-discerning creatures, though this is not to say that such worlds cannot arise naturally. (shrink)

I argue that philosophy was naturally conceived and written in verse, not prose, in the early years of philosophy, and that prose writing would be the exception not the norm. I argue that philosophers developed their ideas in verse and did not repackage ideas and thoughts first formulated in non-poetic genres, so there is no adaptation or modification involved in "putting it into poetry". This also means that the content and the form are interdependent, and the poetic details are part (...) of the message, and integral to understanding the philosophy. In both Parmenides and Empedocles there are interesting patterns of linearity and circularity in the composition which mimic and reinforce the message in the poem, which is a philosophical message about, respectively, linear journeys and cosmic cycles. (shrink)

Relevance Theory is a cognitively oriented theory of pragmatics, i.e., a theory of language use. It builds on the seminal work of H.P. Grice1 to develop a pragmatic theory which is at once philosophically sensitive and empirically plausible (in both psychological and evolutionary terms). This entry reviews the central commitments and chief contributions of Relevance Theory, including its Gricean commitment to the centrality of intention-reading and inference in communication; the cognitively grounded notion of relevance which provides the mechanism for explaining (...) pragmatic interpretation as an intention-driven, inferential process; and several key applications of the theory (lexical pragmatics, metaphor and irony, procedural meaning). Relevance Theory is an important contribution to our understanding of the pragmatics of communication. (shrink)

The claim that the level of well-beingeach enjoys ought to be to some extent afunction of individuals'' talents, efforts,accomplishments, and other meritoriousattributes faces serious challenge from bothegalitarians and libertarians, but also fromskeptics, who point to the poor historicalrecord of attempted merit assays and theubiquity of attribution biases arising fromlimited sweep, misattribution, custom andconvention, and mimicry. Yet merit-principlesare connected with reactive attitudes andinnate expectations, giving them some claim torecognition and there is a widespread beliefthat their use indirectly promotes thewell-being of all. (...) After critically evaluatingarguments for and against assigning a prominentrole to merit in a distributive protocol, it isargued that an entitlement to the ``doubtful andspeculative'''' but not the ``known andpresumptive'''' components of well-being can flowfrom perceived relative merit. However,statistical equality of outcome with respect togroups is mandatory. Semi-meritocracies aredefensible institutions, but existing rewardschemes by and large do not meet the conditionsof social justice. (shrink)

MANY READERS HAVE TAKEN THE ELEATIC STRANGER to represent a later stage of Plato’s philosophical development because the arguments or doctrines the Stranger presents in the Sophist appear to be better than those Socrates articulates in earlier dialogues. In particular, in the Sophist Plato shows the Stranger answering two questions Socrates proved unable to resolve in two of his conversations the day before. In the Theaetetus Socrates admitted that he had long been perplexed by the fact of false opinion; he (...) was not able to explain how it was possible. Likewise, in the Cratylus Socrates and his interlocutors were not able to determine satisfactorily the relation between names and the things to which they refer. Through his teaching about the idea of the other, the Stranger shows not only how false opinion is possible but also why names do not always correspond to the kinds or ideas of things. More generally, in the course of his account of previous thought the Stranger presents a fundamental critique of the teaching of “friends of the forms” like Socrates. When we examine the definition of the sophist to which the Stranger comes at the end of the dialogue, however, we find reasons to question the adequacy of his teaching and, consequently, his superiority to Socrates. If philosophy consists in knowledge—of the whole or merely of self— we are forced to conclude, neither the Stranger nor Socrates is a philosopher. Each or even both might appear, therefore, to be a pretender—or sophist. If, on the other hand, philosophy consists in the search for knowledge by means of a dialectical sorting of things according to kinds, Socrates and the Stranger represent two different, although related types. (shrink)

Early in the Phaedrus, Socrates tells his interlocutor that he does not have time to formulate naturalistic reinterpretations of old stories, because he is not yet able, according to the Delphic inscription, to know myself. Indeed, it appears laughable to me for one who is still ignorant of this to examine alien things. … [So] I examine not them but myself: whether I happen to be some wild animal more multiply twisted and filled with desire than Typhon, or a gentler, (...) simpler animal having by nature a share in a divine fate. (shrink)

H. S. Sullivan's approach to the study of psychiatry reflects the fact that his conception of scientific method was derived from work in physics rather than in the biological sciences. His definition of psychiatry as the study of “interpersonal process” appears to have been influenced partly by his previous training in physics, and also by his conclusion that the most significant aspects of personality could be revealed only through an understanding of the person's actual behavior in relation to others.

Plato’s discourse on beauty in the Hippias Major and the Symposium is distinctly apophatic in nature. Plato describes beauty in terms of what it is not (an approach sometimes referred to apophasis, or the via negativa). In this paper, I argue that Platonic apophatic practise in the Hippias Major and the Symposium depicts beauty as an ally to certain aspirations of philosophical discourse. In the first section, I offer some brief prefatory remarks on the nature of apophasis and its presence (...) in Plato’s thinking. In the second section, I provide some background to the dialogue of the Hippias Major and highlight the apophatic nature of the descriptions of beauty offered therein. In the third and final section, I discuss the Symposium, a dialogue within which, in addition to representing beauty apophatically, Plato illustrates how we may become able to achieve some positive, or cataphatic, insights into the nature of beauty. I conclude that the purpose of the Platonic apophatic portrayal of beauty in the Hippias Major and the Symposium is to show that, while beauty cannot be reduced to a series of assertive truth statements, it can nevertheless function as an accessory to other dimensions of philosophical thinking. (shrink)

In “Social Media, e‐Health, and Medical Ethics,” in this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Mélanie Terrasse, Moti Gorin, and Dominic Sisti address and suggest recommendations for several ethical issues central to the systematic ethical analysis of the effects of social media on clinical practice, health services research, and public health. The topic is as timely as it is important: social media data collected by device and web applications are constantly increasing and might have both individual and public health benefits. (...) The authors focus their analysis primarily on the health care context. Yet the implications of the intersection of social media data and research warrant focused consideration, as even the most thorough ethical analysis in the clinical context is not necessarily directly applicable in the research context. While many ethical issues are present in both settings, the research context poses new challenges and calls for consideration of distinct factors. In particular, because the legal framework is less protective in research, critical ethical analysis of the research‐specific issues and considerations is essential to the ethical conduct of research using social media data as well as to the design and operation of social media device and web applications themselves. (shrink)

How do abstract doctrinal ideas become visible and meaningful in the lives of religious practitioners? This article approaches this question by examining the diary of the Tibetan pilgrim Khatag Zamyak (kha stag 'dzam yag) (1896–1961) to explore how he engages with the idea of karma. Scholars of Buddhism often define karma as a law of cause and effect that is fundamental to Buddhist ethics, but this third‐person approach to understanding karma can lead scholars to overlook what it feels like to (...) live in a world structured by karma. This article explores how Khatag Zamyak confronts the fact that he does not know his own karma and how he undertakes specific practices to be able to see and tell stories about his own karma. It further argues that Khatag Zamyak's process of engaging with karma is integral to his formation as an ethical subject. (shrink)

Several studies have reported impairment in the recognition of facial expressions of disgust in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and preclinical carriers of the HD gene. The aim of this study was to establish whether impairment for disgust in HD patients extended to include the ability to express the emotion on their own faces. Eleven patients with HD, and 11 age and education matched healthy controls participated in three tasks concerned with the expression of emotions. One task assessed the spontaneous (...) production of disgust-like facial expressions during the smelling of offensive odorants. A second assessed the production of posed facial expressions during deliberate attempts to communicate emotion. The third task evaluated HD patients’ ability to imitate the specific facial configurations associated with each emotion. Foul odours induced fewer disgust-like facial reactions in HD patients than in controls, and patients’ posed facial expressions of disgust were less accurate than the posed disgust expressions of controls. The effect was selective to disgust; patients had no difficulty posing expressions of other emotions. These impairments were not explained by compromised muscle control: HD patients had no difficulty imitating the facial movements required to display disgust. Viewed together with evidence of difficulty in other aspects of disgust in HD, the findings suggest that a common substrate might participate in both the processing and the expression of this emotion. (shrink)

I start by asking what Aristotle knew (or thought) about Heraclitus: what were the key features of Heraclitus's philosophy as far as Aristotle was concerned? In this section of the paper I suggest that there are some patterns to Aristotle's references to Heraclitus: besides the classic doctrines (flux, ekpyrosis and the unity of opposites) on the one hand, and the opening of Heraclitus's book on the other, Aristotle knows and reports a few slightly less obvious sayings, one of which is (...) in my title. Secondly, I ask some further questions. Is there any systematic connection between the bits that Aristotle reports? Do they hang together? Ought we to see here some relic of an Aristotelian understanding of what made Heraclitus tick? If we juxtapose these themes and Aristotle's comments on them, I suggest, we can generate some suggestive motifs, in particular a rather curious fascination with smoking, and the pleasures of inhaling. Finally, I suggest that smells (and the way the world would be if smells were the only differences to be discerned) are important in understanding what Heraclitus was doing. (shrink)

This article reports results from a program that produces high‐quality animation of facial expressions and head movements as automatically as possible in conjunction with meaning‐based speech synthesis, including spoken intonation. The goal of the research is as much to test and define our theories of the formal semantics for such gestures, as to produce convincing animation. Towards this end, we have produced a high‐level programming language for three‐dimensional (3‐D) animation of facial expressions. We have been concerned primarily with expressions conveying (...) information correlated with the intonation of the voice: This includes the differences of timing, pitch, and emphasis that are related to such semantic distinctions of discourse as “focus,”“topic,” and “comment,”“theme” and “rheme,” or “given” and “new” information. We are also interested in the relation of affect or emotion to facial expression. Until now, systems have not embodied such rule‐governed translation from spoken utterance meaning to facial expressions. Our system embodies rules that describe and coordinate these relations: intonation/information, intonation/affect, and facial expressions/affect. A meaning representation includes discourse information: What is contrastive/background information in the given context, and what is the “topic” or “theme” of the discourse? The system maps the meaning representation into how accents and their placement are chosen, how they are conveyed over facial expression, and how speech and facial expressions are coordinated. This determines a sequence of functional groups: lip shapes, conversational signals, punctuators, regulators, and manipulators. Our algorithms then impose synchrony, create coarticulation effects, and determine affectual signals, eye and head movements. The lowest level representation is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which makes the generation system portable to other facial models. (shrink)

Calorie labeling on menus is one of the more recent public health responses to calls for increased access to nutrition information. The goal is to encourage consumers to make more healthy food choices. In this commentary on ‘Equity in Public Health Ethics: The Case of Menu Labelling Policy at the Local Level’, I focus first on research supporting health equity-directed goals for menu labeling policies; then I turn to the issue of challenges and opportunities for menu labeling as a part (...) of local food policy and food activism. I argue that, while there is some evidence that changes in menu labeling may help to promote health equity, other moves are needed at all levels of political organization. In particular, effecting shifts in attitudes and consumption will require changing our relationships with the food sources in our neighborhoods, and changing those food sources themselves. Leveraging our knowledge of behavioral economics and social marketing, using social networks and developing programs to transform eating patterns; all of these require participation and coordination among many stakeholders. Menu labeling is one tool, but many others are needed to effect change in communities. (shrink)

Commentators on Machiavelli's Discourses have disagreed about whether he seeks to establish a new, more democratic form of republic, revive an imperial republic like Rome, or educate a new political elite, because they have not seen the logic that connects the three books. Machiavelli first argues that the internal liberty of Rome depended on arming her people. He then shows how a modern republic can avoid the destructive effects of Roman imperialism. Finally, he teaches his readers how to preserve a (...) republic better than the Romans. (shrink)