In this paper, we present a new semantic challenge to the moral error theory. Its first component calls upon moral error theorists to deliver a deontic semantics that is consistent with the error-theoretic denial of moral truths by returning the truth-value false to all moral deontic sentences. We call this the ‘consistency challenge’ to the moral error theory. Its second component demands that error theorists explain in which way moral deontic assertions can be seen to differ in meaning despite necessarily (...) sharing the same intension. We call this the ‘triviality challenge’ to the moral error theory. Error theorists can either meet the consistency challenge or the triviality challenge, we argue, but are hard pressed to meet both. (shrink)

In reply to Geach's objection against expressivism, some have claimed that there is a plurality of truth predicates. I raise a difficulty for this claim: valid inferences can involve sentences assessable by any truth predicate, corresponding to 'lightweight' truth as well as to 'heavyweight' truth. To account for this, some unique truth predicate must apply to all sentences that can appear in inferences. Mixed inferences remind us of a central platitude about truth: truth is what is preserved in valid inferences. (...) The question is why we should postulate truth predicates that do not satisfy this platitude. (shrink)

Mixed inferences are a problem for those who want to combine truth-assessability and antirealism with respect to allegedly nondescriptive sentences: the classical account of validity has apparently to be given up. J.C. Beall's response is that validity can be defined as the conservation of designated valued (Beall 2000). I argue that since it presupposes a truth predicate that can be applied to all sentences, this suggestion is not helpful. I also consider problems arising from mixed conjunctions and discuss the deeper (...) worry that the distinction between truth which does and truth which does not entail realism is inferentially irrelevant. (shrink)

This paper replies to an argument due to Greenspan (1980) and to Morton (2002) against the view that emotions are perceptions of values. The argument holds that this view cannot make room for ambivalent emotions both of which are appropriate, such as when it is appropriate to feel fear and attraction towards something. This would make for a contradiction, for appropriate emotions are supposed to present things as they are. The problem, I argue, is that this line of thoughts forgets (...) that things can have positive and negative aspects: something can both be dangerous and attractive, for instance. (shrink)

This study seeks to understand women's use of makeup in the workplace. The authors analyze 20 in-depth interviews with a diverse group of women who work in a variety of settings to examine the appearance rules that women confront at work and how these rules reproduce assumptions about sexuality and gender. The authors found that appropriate makeup use is strongly associated with assumptions about health, heterosexuality, and credibility in the workplace. They describe how these norms shape women's personal choices to (...) wear makeup. Next, they examine how some women transform the meanings of wearing makeup and, in rare instances, attempt to subvert the institutionalized norms. Although many women find pleasure in wearing makeup, the authors conclude that the institutional constraints imposed by the workplace effectively limit the possibilities for resistance. (shrink)

Cognitive Theories of emotions have enjoyed great popularity in recent times. Allegedly, the so-called Perceptual Theory constitutes the most attractive version of this approach. However, the Perceptual Theory has come under increasing pressure. There are at least two ways to deal with the barrage of objections, which have been mounted against the Perceptual Theory. One is to argue that the objections work only if one assumes an overly narrow conception of what perception consists in. On a better and more liberal (...) understanding of perception, the objections lose their force. The other is to stress that the differences between emotions and sensory perceptions can be explained by focusing on a new analogy. As I will argue, emotions have interesting similarities with magnitude representations, such as the representation of distance. Such representations are plausibly thought to be analog and non-conceptual, but by contrast to sensory perceptions, such as colour perceptions, they do not lie at the sensory periphery. This new analogy makes room for a novel and attractive theory of emotions, the Receptive Theory, which allows for a positive and epistemologically fruitful characterization of emotions. (shrink)

In the Editorial for the previous issue of Journal of Global Ethics, we selected to discuss COVID-19, a global issue affecting very nearly all of us in unprecedented ways. The disease continues as...

Lynch and colleagues describe positive and cautionary lessons learned from recent extraordinary research efforts to develop COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics and consider whether some of th...

In recent years educational policy on gender and achievement has concentrated on boys' underachievement, frequently comparing it with the academic success of girls. This has encouraged a perception of girls as the ?winners? of the educational stakes and assumes that they no longer experience the kinds of gender inequalities identified in earlier studies. However, trying to balance academic achievement with being seen as a ?proper girl? presents girls with difficult challenges, particularly in terms of being accepted and approved of by (...) classmates and securing the attention of teachers. This paper explores the views of a group of high achieving 12? to 13?year?old girls who indicate that being regarded as ?clever? continues to be negotiated within acceptable frameworks of femininity. (shrink)

When women work in male-dominated professions, they encounter a “glass ceiling” that prevents their ascension into the top jobs. Twenty years ago, I introduced the concept of the “glass escalator,” my term for the advantages that men receive in the so-called women’s professions, including the assumption that they are better suited than women for leadership positions. In this article, I revisit my original analysis and identify two major limitations of the concept: it fails to adequately address intersectionality; in particular, it (...) fails to theorize race, sexuality, and class; and it was based on the assumptions of traditional work organizations, which are undergoing rapid transformation in our neoliberal era. The glass escalator assumes stable employment, career ladders, and widespread support for public institutions —which no longer characterize the job market today. Drawing on my studies of the oil and gas industry and the retail industry, I argue that new concepts are needed to understand workplace gender inequality in the 21st century. (shrink)

Einstellung effects designate the phenomenon where established routines can prevent people from finding other, possibly more efficient solutions. Here we investigate the mechanism behi...

Some concepts, such as colour concepts or value concepts, seem to bear traces of the mind's own make-up. For instance, the character of perceptually-determined colour concepts seems in some sense derivative from the character of the visual system. Thus, it has seemed plausible to claim that the corresponding colour properties are dispositions to elicit certain visual experiences in normal observers under suitable conditions. Much the same has been suggested for value concepts. An extreme position would be that colours and values (...) therefore are not in the world at all, they instead are mere projections that tell us more about the users of response-dependent concepts than about the world they inhabit. But even setting aside such extreme views, a number of important philosophical and psychological questions remain open. What exactly is response-dependence, and does any concept have this feature? What is the appropriate metaphysics for properties represented by response-dependent concepts, and for these concepts themselves? What determines the extension of such properties? How are we to account for knowledge expressed in terms of response-dependent concepts? What mechanisms correctly explain the origins of response-dependent concepts, and their role in representation? This volume brings together a wide range of views on these questions. (shrink)

Das Nachdenken über Beziehungen zwischen Bildern ist ein kunsthistorisches Kerngeschäft. Zugleich ist es jedoch auch eine Herausforderung für die Theorien und Methoden des Faches. Was bedeutet es daher, im Rückgriff auf die Literaturtheorie von der Intertextualität der Bilder zu sprechen? Worin besteht der Unterschied zur Rede von Bildzitaten, vom Bezug auf Quellen oder die ikonografische Tradition? Seit den 1960er Jahren wird dies lebhaft diskutiert. Elisabeth-Christine Gamer zeichnet in ihrem Buch die Geschichte des Diskurses über fünf Dekaden nach und berücksichtigt (...) dabei unterschiedliche Fächer und Sprachen. Zugleich arbeitet sie seine Merkmale heraus und liefert damit eine Basis für die weitere kunsthistorische Beschäftigung mit dem Modell Intertextualität"--Back cover. (shrink)

Metaethics is traditionally understood as a non-moral discipline that examines moral judgements from a standpoint outside of ethics. This orthodox understanding has recently come under pressure from anti-Archimedeans, such as Ronald Dworkin and Matthew Kramer, who proclaim that rather than assessing morality from an external perspective, metaethical theses are themselves substantive moral claims. In this paper, I scrutinise this anti-Archimedean challenge as applied to the metaethical position of expressivism. More precisely, I examine the claim that expressivists do not avoid moral (...) commitments when accounting for moral thought, but instead presuppose them; they do not look at ethics from the outside, but operate from within ethics. This paper defends the non-moral status of expressivism against anti-Archimedeanism by rejecting a new anti-Archimedean challenge which, on the basis of Hume’s Law, aims to exploit expressivist explanations of supervenience in order to show that expressivism is a substantive moral position. (shrink)

In matters such as affirmative action or home schooling, rights of ethnic and other minority groups often come into conflict with those of society in a culturally diverse population such as ours. But before considering the dilemmas posed by these issues, we must first ask such basic but important questions as what group rights are and how they intersect with the principles of democracy. This new collection brings together some of today's leading thinkers from the cutting edge of these debates, (...) taking in a broad range of issues confronting philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists. Contributors such as Carl Wellman, Carol Gould, and Rex Martin examine the nature of groups and the conflict between group rights and democracy and also consider case studies depicting current issues in cultural, ethnic, and religious rights. The first section, on the nature of groups, examines some of the perplexing alternatives in the formulation of a theory of group rights. These articles investigate the kinds of rights minorities might claim and ask when groups can be held responsible for the acts of some of their members. The second section addresses the treatment of groups in a democracy and the precarious balance between indifference toward minorities and capitulation to their demands. Here the contributors examine five principles for the sensitive treatment of minority and disadvantaged groups in a democratic society. A final section explores specific conflicts between subgroup and societal claims through case studies dealing with affirmative action, religious practice and the education of children, and the land rights of indigenous peoples. By drawing on the legal and political dilemmas related to these cases, the authors confront issues of core versus peripheral interests, of individual member versus subgroup rights, and of the possibilities for social openness raised in the preceding sections Written from varied perspectives, Groups and Group Rights offers stimulating reading for both students and professionals as it takes on some of the most pressing dilemmas confronting our society. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Early in Plato’s Euthydemus, sophistical arguments threaten the intelligibility of the process of learning. According to M. M. McCabe, Socrates resists the sophists’ arguments by resisting their problematic replacement model of change. The replacement model proposes that one item (e.g., an unlearned one) is simply replaced with a nonidentical item (e.g., a learned one). Socrates is said to endorse a rival metaphysics of temporally extended, teleologically structured activities. The rival model allows an enduring subject to survive ‘aspect changes’ by (...) occupying distinct stages in a continuous, unified process. McCabe may be right that Socrates presupposes or favors a metaphysics of continuous, end-oriented activities. If so, there are independent reasons to strive to understand the teleological structure of the activity of learning. Nevertheless, I am not convinced that Socrates relies on such a metaphysics to resist the learning arguments at 275d—278d. I argue that Socrates appeals, instead, to the complexity of the learning process to recognize two distinct, yet related, uses of the term ‘learning.’ In order to resist the sophists’ arguments, Socrates recommends attending to ‘the correctness of names’. Socrates’s disambiguating response is sufficient to dissolve the sophistical arguments while remaining compatible with a variety of metaphysics of individuals and activities. (shrink)

International migration has a female face in the beginning of the twenty-first century; since at least 1990, a total of 49 percent of international migrants have been women (UN 2008).1 Many women relocate in pursuit of goals that they can’t realize in their countries of origin, and many women move on their own to developed countries as caregivers to the very old or the very young, as nurses to attend to the sick in hospitals, and as domestic workers.2 How should (...) we regard their decisions to do so? One way of thinking about such moves is to deplore the fact that women have to move in order to attain certain goals in their lives; it would be more desirable to live in a world that would not make such moves necessary... (shrink)

This article describes developments in the use of information technology in the biological discipline of taxonomy, using both a historical overview and a detailed case study of a particular information systems project. Taxonomy has experienced problems with both its scientific legitimacy and its utility to other biologists. IT has been introduced into the discipline m response to these perceived problems. The information systems project described here served as a means of managing the tensions between scientific legitimacy and utility. It is (...) argued that this project represents an example of the use of a technological development m an attempt to re-engineer a discipline. The development of the information system is analyzed as an attempt to develop a scientific instrument that will embody a particular model of the discipline. The concerns of taxonomy with status and legitimacy make it appropriate that this new technology should be introduced at the interface between the discipline and the rest of biology as a means of disseminating results, and thus come to represent the discipline and the plants described to outsiders, just as the system represents outsiders to taxonomists. (shrink)

Health care professionals use strategies during the physical examination to stay in control of their feelings, the behaviors of their patients, and to avoid allegations of sexual misconduct. To investigate how health care practitioners desexualize physical exams, the authors conducted 70 in-depth interviews with physicians and nurses. Three desexualizing strategies were general ones, used by both male and female health care providers, and were employed regardless of the characteristics of the patients: engaging in conversation and nonsexual joking, meeting the patient (...) clothed before the exam, and using medical rather than colloquial terms. Six strategies were used only in specific contexts or were used primarily by men or women. These gendered strategies include using a chaperone, objectifying the patient, empathizing with the patient, joking about sex, threatening the patient, and looking professional. The authors conclude that desexualizing the exam is gendered and, in some contexts, sexualized. Using certain strategies bolsters stereotypes about gender and heterosexual relationships in the hospital. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What is cognition? Despite the existence of a science of cognition there is no clear agreement on what makes certain phenomena cognitive, and others not. Within cognitivism the issue was neglected. Human intelligence was used as a standard, and any process—natural or artificial—that fitted this standard sufficiently could be considered ‘cognitive’. For post-cognitivist psychology the situation is different. It cannot rely on the ‘human standard’ in the same way. One might even say that the need for a post-cognitivist psychology arose (...) because cognitivism began with this most complex of all cognitive systems without a good understanding and appreciation of more basic, biological cases. Embodied cognition approaches remedy this anthropocentric bias by addressing a more varied set of processes that are not strictly limited to humans. Under these circumstances the question what we take cognition to be is more urgent. Are phenomena like insect walking (Brooks) and goal-seeking missiles (O’Regan and Noë) examples of cognition or not? What criteria do we use to answer such questions? Given this problem, the notion of perception-action coupling (or sensorimotor contingencies) becomes an important and fairly obvious option to provide a foundation for the notion of cognition. However, and intriguingly, the same problem occurs again: What are perception-action couplings? What would make something an example of perception-action coupling? Where are we to draw a line, if anywhere? It is self-evident that O’Regan and Noë’s (2001) example of a goal-seeking missile is controversial, but why exactly? What is missing? Can we ever do more than making intuitive judgments here? A way out of this dilemma may be found by developing the claim that perception-action coupling must be grounded in a biological context (Keijzer, 2001), and following what Lyon (2005) calls a biogenic approach. This option raises a whole new field of issues and topics that is of central concern for a postcognitivist psychology. (shrink)

This article argues that the condition of women in Third World societies cannot be separated from the colonial experience since the power relationships that were established during the colonial era between Europe and its territories, and between women and men, have not varied significantly and are still recreated through contemporary mechanisms. For example, development projects promoted by Western countries to modernize the Third World have, in the long run, better served their own interests than those of their intended beneficiaries. As (...) a result and contrary to expectations, growth and prosperity still elude the Third World. We also show that during the current international economic crisis, women's unpaid or underpaid labor has become the basis of new development programs and policies and is crucial to the recent phase of capitalist development. We discuss how the structural position and status of women and colonies closely resemble each other and have served as the foundations of the capital accumulation process and the development of industrial nations. The concept of women as a last colony thus becomes a compelling metaphor of liberation and leads us to stress the need for a worldwide process of gender decolonization, entailing the reformulation of power relations between women and men. (shrink)

On admet en général qu’il y a deux sortes de concepts normatifs : les concepts évaluatifs, comme bon, et les concepts déontiques, comme devoir. La question que soulève cette distinction est celle de savoir comment il est possible d’affirmer que les concepts évaluatifs sont normatifs. En effet, comme les concepts déontiques semblent constituer le coeur du domaine normatif, plus le fossé entre les deux sortes de concepts est grand, moins il paraîtra plausible d’affirmer que les concepts évaluatifs sont normatifs. Après (...) avoir présenté les différences principales entre les concepts évaluatifs et les concepts déontiques, et montré qu’il y a plus qu’une différence superficielle entre les deux sortes de concepts, j’examinerai la question de la normativité des concepts évaluatifs. Il deviendra apparent que même s’il s’agit de concepts ayant des fonctions différentes, il existe un grand nombre de relations entre les concepts évaluatifs, d’une part, et les concepts de devoir et de raison, d’autre part.It is generally accepted that there are two sorts of normative concepts : evaluative concepts, such as good, and deontic concepts, such as ought. The question that is raised by this distinction is how it is possible to claim that evaluative concepts are normative. As deontic concepts appear to be at the heart of normativity, the more there is a gap between evaluative and deontic concepts, the less it appears plausible to say that evaluative concepts are normative. After having presented the main differences between evaluative and deontic concepts, and shown that there is more than a superficial difference between the two sorts of concepts, the paper turns to the question of the normativitity of evaluative concepts. It will become clear that even if these concepts have different functions, there are a great many ties between evaluative concepts, on the one hand, and the concepts of ought and of reason, on the other hand. (shrink)

In his recent book The Human Predicament, David Benatar describes the human condition as a tragic predicament, and the upshot is that we ought to refrain from having children and adopt an attitude...

This article explores the reasons some pregnant women enter maternity homes with the plan to place their babies for adoption. The authors discuss changes in maternity homes over the twentieth century and report on findings from a survey of currently licensed homes in Texas. Next, the authors discuss the findings from fieldwork and in-depth interviews with residents of two maternity homes. They identify three major reasons why birth mothers enter maternity homes: the desire to escape abusive or stressful family lives, (...) the desire to avoid the stigma of placing a child for adoption, and the desire to provide their children, and in some cases themselves, with a stable and loving family life. The authors contend that entering a maternity home with the intention of placing their babies for adoption represents an effort on the part of birth mothers to reconfigure their own, often impoverished family lives. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.