We were interested in exploring the associations and effects of experimental language (i.e., native – L1, or foreign – L2), dilemma type (i.e., personal – D1 or impersonal – D2), the digital device participants used (i.e., PC/laptop or smartphone), along with gender and age in sacrificial COVID-19 and non-COVID moral dilemmas. We performed two studies involving 522 participants aged 18 to 69 in April 2020. In Study 1, we found no significant associations between the dilemma type and the digital device. (...) However, most participants chose to sacrifice an older COVID-19 patient in a critical medical condition to prioritize rescuing similar, younger patients (i.e., 45-year-old males). Results also suggested that male and younger participants were more likely to choose the utilitarian option when the sacrificial dilemma was presented in French. In study 2 (i.e., non-COVID-19), participants made significantly more utilitarian choices in the personal dilemmas presented in French. Results are discussed concerning the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic context and its emotional impact on moral judgment. (shrink)

Agent-based models have played a prominent role in recent debates about the merits of democracy. In particular, the formal model of Lu Hong and Scott Page and the associated “diversity trumps ability” result has typically been seen to support the epistemic virtues of democracy over epistocracy (i.e., governance by experts). In this paper we first identify the modeling choices embodied in the original formal model and then critique the application of the Hong-Page results to philosophical debates on the relative merits (...) of democracy. In particular we argue that the “best-performing agents” in Hong-Page model should not be interpreted as experts. We next explore a closely related model in which best-performing agents are more plausibly seen as experts and show that the diversity trumps ability result fails to hold. However, with changes in other parameters (such as the deliberation dynamic) the diversity trumps ability result is restored. The sensitivity of this result to parameter choices illustrates the complexity of the link between formal modeling and more general philosophical claims; we use this debate as a platform for a more general discussion of when and how agent-based models can contribute to philosophical discussions. (shrink)

In the present exploratory study, our primary aim was to explore whether knowledge about the fast-fashion industry's harmful effects would significantly impact participants' shopping intentions. Using an experimental approach, we created a virtual clothing shop and allowed participants to win, through a raffle, the contents of their shopping carts. Participants in the experimental group watched a video about the adverse environmental consequences of the fast-fashion industry. In contrast, in the control group, we used a neutral video describing various technical marketing (...) strategies. In the experimental condition, participants chose more eco-friendly products) compared to the control. However, there were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of fast-fashion consumption behaviors, i.e., the choices of buying fast-fashion items. We also found several significant associations between participants' general concern for the environment, consideration of future consequences, civic moral disengagement, and consumption behaviors. Results are discussed concerning their practical implications for sustainable citizenship participation and sustainable education. (shrink)

Anyone who is a color eliminativist‐i.e., believes that the physical world is colorless‐must explain how our sense experience of color can be so systematically illusory. As it turns out, it is difficult to do this without committing oneself to dualism. In this paper I explore the options available to the color eliminativist in this regard, and argue that his/her prospects are more promising, though still far from certain, if s/he adopts the position that sense experience is strictly intentional.

It has been argued that naturalizing the mind will result in the elimination of the ontology of folk psychology (e.g. beliefs and desires). This paper draws from a wide range of empirical literature, including from developmental and cross-cultural psychology, in building an argument for a position dubbed restrictive materialism . The position holds that while the ontology of folk psychology is overextended, there is a restricted domain in which the application of the folk ontology remains secure. From the evidence of (...) developmental uniformity and cross-cultural ubiquity of beliefs and desires, it is argued that the ontology (but not the principles) of folk psychology may be incorrigible. Thus, even if radically false as a description of first-order brain processes, beliefs and desires might be an unavoidable second-order brain process. Given that the domain of psychology is how humans think, if the above argument is correct, then beliefs and desires will continue to earn their rightful place in the ontology of any future psychology, in just the same way as any other scientific entity. (shrink)

Thinking Radical Democracy is an introduction to nine key political thinkers who contributed to the emergence of radical democratic thought in post-war French political theory: Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Miguel Abensour. The essays in this collection connect these writers through their shared contribution to the idea that division and difference in politics can be perceived as productive, creative, and fundamentally democratic. The questions they raise regarding equality and (...) emancipation in a democratic society will be of interest to those studying social and political thought or democratic activist movements like the Occupy movements and Idle No More. --Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This paper describes one possible origin point for fraudulent behavior within the American pharmaceutical industry. We argue that during the late nineteenth century therapeutic reformers sought to promote both laboratory science and increasingly systematized forms of clinical experiment as a new basis for therapeutic knowledge. This process was intertwined with a transformation in the ethical framework in which medical science took place, one in which monopoly status was replaced by clinical utility as the primary arbiter of pharmaceutical legitimacy. This new (...) framework fundamentally altered the set of epistemic virtues—a phrase we draw from the philosophical field of virtue epistemology—considered necessary to conduct reliable scientific inquiry regarding drugs. In doing so, it also made possible new forms of fraud in which newly emergent epistemic virtues were violated. To make this argument, we focus on the efforts of Francis E. Stewart and George S. Davis of Parke, Davis & Company. Therapeutic reformers within the pharmaceutical industry, such as Stewart and Davis, were an important part of the broader normative and epistemic transformation we describe in that they sought to promote laboratory science and systematized clinical trials toward the twin goals of improving pharmaceutical science and promoting their own commercial interests. Yet, as we suggest, Parke, Davis & Company also serves as an example of a company that violated the very norms that Stewart and Davis helped introduce. We thus seek to describe one possible origin point for the widespread fraudulent practices that now characterize the pharmaceutical industry. We also seek to describe an origin point for why we conceptualize such practices as fraudulent in the first place. (shrink)

In a series of formal studies and less formal applications, Hong and Page offer a ‘diversity trumps ability’ result on the basis of a computational experiment accompanied by a mathematical theorem as explanatory background (Hong & Page 2004, 2009; Page 2007, 2011). “[W]e find that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set” (2004, p. 16386). The result has been extremely influential as (...) an epistemic justification for diversity policy initiatives. Here we show that the ‘diversity trumps ability’ result is tied to the particular random landscape used in Hong and Page’s simulation. We argue against interpreting results on that random landscape in terms of ‘ability’ or ‘expertise.’ These concepts are better modeled on smother and more realistic landscapes, but keeping other parameters the same those are landscapes on which it is groups of the best performing that do better. Smoother landscapes seem to vindicate both the concept and the value of expertise. Change in other parameters, however, also vindicates diversity. With an increase in the pool of available heuristics, diverse groups again do better. Group dynamics makes a difference as well; simultaneous ‘tournament’ deliberation in a group in place of the ‘relay’ deliberation in Hong and Page’s original model further emphasizes an advantage for diversity. ‘Tournament’ 2 dynamics particularly shows the advantage of mixed groups that include both experts and non-experts. As a whole, our modeling results suggest that relative to problem characteristics and conceptual resources, the wisdom of crowds and the wisdom of the few each have a place. We regard ours as a step toward attempting to calibrate their relative virtues in different modelled contexts of intellectual exploration. (shrink)

Background The consistency of codes governing disclosure of terminal illness to patients and families in Islamic countries has not been studied until now. Objectives To review available codes on disclosure of terminal illness in Islamic countries. Data source and extraction Data were extracted through searches on Google and PubMed. Codes related to disclosure of terminal illness to patients or families were abstracted, and then classified independently by the three authors. Data synthesis Codes for 14 Islamic countries were located. Five codes (...) were silent regarding informing the patient, seven allowed concealment, one mandated disclosure and one prohibited disclosure. Five codes were silent regarding informing the family, four allowed disclosure and five mandated/recommended disclosure. The Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences code was silent on both issues. Conclusion Codes regarding disclosure of terminal illness to patients and families differed markedly among Islamic countries. They were silent in one-third of the codes, and tended to favour a paternalistic/utilitarian, family-centred approach over an autonomous, patient-centred approach. (shrink)

В первую книгу сборника включены исследования и материалы, посвященные творчеству Сергея Николаевича Дурылина - писателя, поэта, философа и богослова, и творчеству представителей русского культурного ренессанса первой трети XX века.

I would like to stress Vadim Mikhailovich's [Mezhuev's] position and clarify our conversation about culturology. It is constantly repeated that culturology is a science. It is my profound conviction that culturology is not a science. Culturology is a distinctive phenomenon of Russian culture and represents a certain intellectual movement. If one briefly surveys the history of its emergence, its philosophical origin becomes obvious. This intellectual movement consists of three levels, if one takes into account the "-logy" ending. First, the philosophical (...) level, from which in the 1970s culture began to be conceived as a special field of knowledge in our country. Then, humanistic knowledge: a great many representatives of the humanities in Russia-historians, art specialists, art critics, essayists-studied culture. Finally, there is the socioscientific tendency, which is just beginning to form in Russia and carries the internationally accepted name of social and cultural anthropology. All of us are synergistically attracted to these three tendencies, which comprise what is called culturology. The question of how these three tendencies of knowledge are correlated in the framework of the given intellectual movement is, in my view, extremely important. For quite some time now, there has been no reflection in Russia on the foundations of scientific and philosophical knowledge, but such reflection is necessary. To advance along the road of rational knowledge it is important to reflect in what cognitive space we find ourselves, what we are doing within its boundaries, and for what reason. From this point of view, neither philosophers nor representatives of the humanities or the social sciences will renounce their positions of observer. Moreover, I agree with Mezhuev that there is no single philosophy, humanistic conception, or theory of culture. Anyone who is engaged professionally in the study of cultural phenomena can choose his initial foundations. As Vadim Mezhuev correctly notes, the significance of philosophy for other types of knowledge lies in the fact that there are borderline areas of man's existence in the world. However, they are identified in different ways by different philosophies: positivism, phenomenology, classical Platonism, Aristotelianism, Kantianism, and so forth. Representatives of humanistic and socioscientific knowledge are free to choose any metaphysics. Philosophers will continue to attend to their business in their subject area, and scientists in theirs. But it is important periodically to determine rationally when there must be close and complementary relations between the three components of this intellectual movement and when they must exist in parallel. Then questions such as who has priority and who is the guardian of truth will not arise. If the tendencies have diverged in parallel, then the representatives of each of them are occupied within their domains with questions which are irrelevant in other fields of knowledge or for other theoretical models. At the end of the twentieth century, to pose the question of scientism or antiscientism is senseless because today we know that there are different forms of rationality and that science is not the only, and is quite a narrow, form of rationality. Myth too is rational. It is expressed in categories and has a particular inner logic. We recognize myth as a rational cultural entity, because it is represented in symbolic form as an ordered sequence of judgments, as an artifact. But it differs from scientific theory. That is why it is fruitful to reflect on what forms of rationality are relevant to what levels of knowledge. I agree with Ogurtsov, who says that these forms penetrate in one way or another into every culturally institutionalized form of knowledge. Indeed, in philosophical knowledge there are elements of everyday, mythological, and scientific knowledge, but this does not negate the distinctive nature of the philosophical form of knowledge. In science there are elements of metaphysics, mythology, and everyday knowledge, but this does not cancel the particularities of the scientific form of knowledge. The same is true of the humanistic form, which is in principle irremovable from the framework of institutionalized knowledge, at least for now. I do not agree with Ogurtsov that I give the humanistic form of knowledge a negative evaluation. Humanistic knowledge begins to be significant in a period of a cognitive paradigm shift. This, we can say, is apparent today, at a time of transition from the grand style of modernism in its postmodern mode to the building of the foundations for a new whole. The point is that the humanistic form of knowledge enables us to isolate at the outset those areas of the unknown at which we arrive because of the limitations inherent in other forms of rationality. It is closest to everyday and empirical categories of knowledge and forms of ideas; hence, particularism, image syncretism, and mobility are its distinctive features. But without this humanistic level no further step is possible in either scientific or philosophical knowledge. The breakdown into these forms of knowledge- philosophical, humanistic, and scientific-may be primitive, but we have to start our reflection on the foundations of our cognitive relationship to our surroundings somewhere. The identification of the forms of knowledge makes it possible to draw the conclusion that, unlike philosophical and humanistic knowledge, socioscientific knowledge is modeled on the natural sciences. From this it becomes obvious that the distinctive features of the object of social sciences determine also the special nature of the categorial apparatus, operationalization, selection method, and information analysis. I do not insist that the model I suggest must be accepted. Other models can be constructed. But let us start with a simpler comparison of types of knowledge and later we shall differentiate them. I started from this level because in our culture such a division is apparent and generally accepted. There are the philosophical, humanistic, and scientific forms of knowledge. They are irreducible to one another, they perform entirely different functions in the knowledge of man's relationship to the environment, and express different views about how man lives in culture. I agree that philosophy is exactly existence in culture with a singling out of the limits of this existence. But representatives of humanistic and socioscientific knowledge also deal with existence in culture. What is important for the philosopher is the direction of knowledge from within to the outside; for the representative of humanistic knowledge it is the description of how he exists among a multitude of seemingly diverse and divergent artifacts and processes; and for the scientist it is the order of the philosophically and humanistically defined reality in order to control it the better. (shrink)

I think that to Lord Kelvin is attributed the saying that the scientific attitude to a thing, if you can't do anything else with it, is to measure it. This is the attitude I propose to adopt towards Time . The situation is to some extent analogous to the situation with regard to electricity . Science is unable to say what electricity is, and so it almost denies the word any entrance into a treatise on the subject. It replaces it (...) by the word charge , which is something that can be measured. It is important to avoid hypostatizing time into a thing-in-itself. Instead of trying to say what time is we try to find a way of measuring it. (shrink)