Studies in marketing ethics often revealed that ethical gaps do exist between marketers and other groups in society. The existence of these ethical gaps could be extremely counterproductive for marketing management. In order to effectively narrow these gaps, a marketing manager must first have a better understanding of causes of these gaps. To this end, this study compares marketing professionals with consumers on some important determinants of the ethical decision-making process. In particular, the marketers and consumers were compared with respect (...) to their personal moral philosophies and ethical perceptions in marketing situations. The data were obtained from a national survey of the practitioner members of the American Marketing Association and members of a consumer panel of a major southern university in the United States. The results generally indicate that marketing professionals are different from consumers with respect to some of the determinants of ethical decisions investigated. Some important managerial implications based on these findings were discussed. (shrink)

There are several branches of ethics. Clinical ethics, the one closest to medical decisionmaking, can be seen as a branch of medicine itself. In this view, clinical ethics is a unitary hermeneutics. Its rule is a guideline for unifying other theories of ethics in conjunction with the clinical context. Put another way, clinical ethics interprets the clinical situation in light of a balance of other values that, while guiding the decisionmaking process, also contributes to the very weighting of those values. (...) The case itself originates ideas, not only about which value ought to predominate in its resolution, but also provides the origin of clinical rules that can be used in other cases. These are interpretive rules. Some examples of these rules are presented as well. (shrink)

In recent years, Bayesian probability theory has emerged not only as a powerful tool for building computational theories of vision, but also as a general paradigm for studying human visual perception. This book provides an introduction to and critical analysis of the Bayesian paradigm. Leading researchers in computer vision and experimental vision science describe general theoretical frameworks for modeling vision, detailed applications to specific problems and implications for experimental studies of human perception. The book provides a dialogue between different perspectives (...) both within chapters, which draw on insights from experimental and computational work, and between chapters, through commentaries written by the contributors on each other's work. Students and researchers in cognitive and visual science will find much to interest them in this thought-provoking collection. (shrink)

Relevance logic is ordinarily seen as a subsystem of classical logic under the translation that replaces arrows by horseshoes. If, however, we consider the arrow as an additional connective alongside the horseshoe and other classical connectives, another perspective emerges. Relevance logic, specifically the system R, may be seen as the output of a conservative extension of classical consequence into the language with arrow.

Like most other sciences, behavior analysis adopts an assumption of uniformity, namely that principles discovered under controlled conditions apply outside the laboratory as well. Since the boundary between public and private depends on the vantage point of the observer, observability is not an inherent property of behavior. From this perspective, private events are assumed to enter into the same orderly relations as public behavior, and the distinction between public and private events is merely a practical one. Private events play no (...) role in the experimental analysis of behavior, but they permit us to make sense of many commonplace phenomena where controlled observation is impossible but unsystematic data are available. Such interpretive exercises serve both to guide research and to displace occult explanations. (shrink)

We explore ways in which purely qualitative belief change in the AGM tradition throws light on options in the treatment of conditional probability. First, by helping see why it can be useful to go beyond the ratio rule defining conditional from one-place probability. Second, by clarifying what is at stake in different ways of doing that. Third, by suggesting novel forms of conditional probability corresponding to familiar variants of qualitative belief change, and conversely. Likewise, we explain how recent work on (...) the qualitative part of probabilistic inference leads to a very broad class of 'proto-probability' functions. (shrink)

Reads Presocratics such as Homer, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Empedocles from within the realm opened up by Heidegger's thinking.

In this paper dedicated to Carlos Alchourrón, we review an issue that emerged only after his death in 1996, but would have been of great interest to him: To what extent do the formal operations of AGM belief change respect criteria of relevance? A natural criterion was proposed in 1999 by Rohit Parikh, who observed that the AGM model does not always respect it. We discuss the pros and cons of this criterion, and explain how the AGM account may be (...) refined, if we so desire, so that it is always respected. En este trabajo dedicado a Carlos Alchourrón consideramos un problema que surgió recién después de su muerte en 1996 pero que seguramente habría sido de gran interés para él: ¿hasta dónde las operaciones formales sobre el cambio de creencias de AGM respetan el criterio de relevancia? Un criterio natural ha sido propuesto en 1999 por Rohit Parikh quien asimismo observó que el modelo AGM no siempre lo respeta. Nosotros discutimos los pros y los contras de este criterio y explicamos cómo podría refinarse AGM para que, si así lo deseáramos, lo respetara siempre. (shrink)

A discussion of the connections and differences between completeness and representation theorems in logic, with examples drawn from classical and modal logic, the logic of friendliness, and nonmonotonic reasoning.

Amor Dei, “love of God” raises three questions: How do we know God is love? How do we experience love of God? How free are we to love God? This book presents three kinds of love, worldly, spiritual, and divine to understand God’s love. The work begins with Augustine’s Confessions highlighting his Manichean and Neoplatonic periods before his conversion to Christianity. Augustine’s confrontation with Pelagius anticipates the unresolved disputes concerning God’s love and free will. In the sixteenth-century the Italian humanist, (...) Gasparo Contarini introduces the notion of “divine amplitude” to demonstrate how God’s goodness is manifested in the human agent. Pierre de Bérulle, Guillaume Gibieuf, and Nicolas Malebranche show connections with Contarini in the seventeenth-century controversies relating free will and divine love. In response to the free will dispute, the Scottish philosopher, William Chalmers, offers his solution. Cornelius Jansen relentlessly asserts his anti-Pelagian interpretation of Augustine stirring up more controversy. John Norris, Malebranche’s English disciple, exchanges his views with Mary Astell and Damaris Masham. In the tradition of Cambridge Platonism, Ralph Cudworth conveys a God who “sweetly governs.” The organization of sections represents the love of God in ascending-descending movements demonstrating that, “human love is inseparable from divine love.”. (shrink)

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes extended (...) discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

As an introduction to this issue, I argue that the concept of autonomy is clearly important for many of the freedoms we enjoy. The problem in medicine with its use lies in interpreting the concept with respect to the impact of disease on persons, the models of medicine we employ, and the settings in which the problems arise. A short statement about the major points of the authors collected in this issue concludes the editorial.

The organism is one of the fundamental concepts of biology and has been at the center of many discussions about biological individuality, yet what exactly it is can be confusing. The definition that we find generally useful is that an organism is a unit in which all the subunits have evolved to be highly cooperative, with very little conflict. We focus on how often organisms evolve from two or more formerly independent organisms. Two canonical transitions of this type—replicators clustered in (...) cells and endosymbiotic organelles within host cells—demonstrate the reality of this kind of evolutionary transition and suggest conditions that can favor it. These conditions include co-transmission of the partners across generations and rules that strongly regulate and limit conflict, such as a fair meiosis. Recently, much attention has been given to associations of animals with microbes involved in their nutrition. These range from tight endosymbiotic associations like those between aphids and Buchnera bacteria, to the complex communities in animal intestines. Here, starting with a reflection about identity through time, we consider the distinctions between these kinds of animal–bacteria interactions and describe the criteria by which a few can be considered jointly organismal but most cannot. (shrink)

Reviews the connections between different kinds of nonmonotonic logic and the general idea of varying degrees of belief.

Moral capacity is an important feature of what it means to be human. In this volume, the contributors have taken on the daunting task of trying to distinguish between legal and moral capacity. This distinction is difficult at times for clinicians, philosophers and legal scholars alike. Part of the challenge of defining moral capacity lies in the difficulty of adequately categorizing it. For this reason, the editors have chosen to divide the book into three parts. The first looks at the (...) concepts involved in the discussion of moral capacity; the second considers the role of moral capacity in the lives of professionals; and the final part reflects on case studies of moral capacity or incapacity illustrating the challenge that moral capacity presents - its definition lying between two seemingly incommensurable models, those of the threshold and continuum. This volume takes a multidisciplinary approach to the subject, and ties the disciplines of medicine, philosophy and law into the health context. It will be of interest to medical health professionals as well as researchers working in the areas of philosophy and law. (shrink)

William James is frequently considered one of America's most important philosophers, as well as a foundational thinker for the study of religion. Despite his reputation as the founder of pragmatism, he is rarely considered a serious philosopher or religious thinker. In this new interpretation David Lamberth argues that James's major contribution was to develop a systematic metaphysics of experience integrally related to his developing pluralistic and social religious ideas. Lamberth systematically interprets James's radically empiricist world-view and argues for an (...) early dating for his commitment to the metaphysics of radical empiricism. He offers a close reading of Varieties of Religious Experience; and concludes by connecting James's ideas about experience, pluralism and truth to current debates in philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology, suggesting James's functional, experiential metaphysics as a conceptual aid in bridging the social and interpretive with the immediate and concrete while avoiding naive realism. (shrink)

This is the story of the clattering of elevated subways and the cacophony of crowded neighborhoods, the heady optimism of industrial progress and the despair of economic recession, and the vibrancy of ethnic cultures and the resilience of ...

A connectionist approach to word reading, based on the principles of distributed representation, graded learning of statistical structure, and interactivity in processing, has led to the development of explicit computational models which account for a wide range of data on normal skilled reading and on patterns of reading impairment due to brain damage. There have, however, been recent empirical challenges to these models, and the approach in general, relating to the influence of orthographic length on the naming latencies of both (...) normal and dyslexic readers. The current work presents a simulation which generates sequential phonological output in response to written input, and which can refixate the input when encountering difficulty. The normal model reads both words and nonwords accurately, and exhibits an effect of orthographic length and a frequency‐by‐consistency interaction in its naming latencies. When subject to peripheral damage, the model exhibits an increased length effect that interacts with word frequency, characteristic of letter‐by‐letter reading in pure alexia. Although the model is far from a fully adequate account of all the relevant phenomena, it suggests how connectionist models may be extended to provide deeper insight into sequential processes in reading. (shrink)

While environmental claims are increasingly used by companies to appeal consumers, they also attract greater scrutiny from independent parties interested in consumer protection. Consumers are now able to compare corporate environmental claims against external, often disconfirming, information to form their brand attitudes and purchase intentions. What remains unclear is how the level of information specificity of both the environmental claims and external disconfirming information interact to influence consumer reactions. Two experiments address this gap in the CSR communication literature. When specific (...) claims are countered by specific external information, consumers report more negative brand attitudes and lower purchase intentions. The effect is serially mediated by skepticism toward the claims and lack of corporate credibility. We conclude by discussing strategies that firms can utilize to avoid information dilution and ensure that external disconfirming information percolates to consumers as specific. (shrink)