How people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend reference, and how children acquire an understanding of and an ability to use reference.

The Adaptive Toolbox framework specifies heuristics for choice and categorisation that search through cues in previously learned orders (Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999). We examined the learning of three cue parameters defining different orders: discrimination rate (DR) (the probability that a cue points to a unique choice), validity (the probability of correct choice given that a cue discriminates), and success (the probability of correct choice). Success orderings are identical to those by expected information gain (Klayman & Ha, 1987). In two experiments, (...) participants made choices in real-world environments with objective outcome criteria. Participant ratings indicated some appropriate parameter learning when the relevant cue parameter values were highly dispersed. Rated orders of cue validity and DR were less distinct than the objective orders—learning one parameter may be biased towards success by variation in the other. Success ratings capture the variation in validity and DR as well as participants' perception of these parameters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Style: A Queer Cosmology by S. Taylor BlackJoe Edward HatfieldStyle: A Queer Cosmology. By Taylor Black. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 304 pp. Hardcover $99.00, paper $35.00. ISBN- 10: 147982500X.Style is a perennial concern within rhetorical studies. As one of Aristotle's five canons, style has inspired a great deal of rhetorical theory over the past two millennia and counting. Hence, it would be reasonable to (...) presume that there is not much, if anything, else original to contribute to the well-trodden domain of the stylistic. However, Taylor Black's Style: A Queer Cosmology challenges this assumption by offering a fresh take on its titular concept. The book's grounding in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies allows its author to speak to multiple audiences at once, including those invested in queer theory, race and ethnicity, popular culture, new materialism, and literary criticism. To this inventory, I would add anyone interested in the art of rhetoric, particularly those committed to incorporating new, diverse perspectives into the field's existing analytical tool chest. Tonally whimsical but nonetheless boldly argued, Style dramatically reframes a timeworn concept in the rhetorical lexicon that many of us have likely—and mistakenly—come to take for granted.Readers of this journal will be immediately seduced by Black's provocative rethinking of style as elemental. Here, the term "elemental" directs attention toward style as "the rudimentary source of difference that distinguishes one thing from another, something perhaps, more closely aligned with myth than fact: an immaterial force or energy, perhaps supernatural in essence, that imbues everything under the sun" (5). As Black infers throughout the book's introduction, style is the expression of difference available to all human and nonhuman beings. More than aesthetic ornamentation, or the mere ability to make oneself appear outwardly beautiful, style is a mysterious yet universal condition of possibility underlying the cultivation [End Page 226] of a personality. Style names the intertwined processes of self-fashioning and self-discovery that produce individuation as its outcome. And though everyone "has" a style, Black asserts, "not everyone is a stylist" (15). Black posits the figure of the stylist to denote a minoritarian subject who transmutes the experience of oppression into a purposeful performance of self. Upon realizing their exclusion from a majoritarian social order organized by deeply embedded attachments to a hierarchy of difference that discriminates on bases of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other intersecting codes of identification, stylists turn their failure to conform into an opportunity for opening possibilities for alternative futures.In other words, from the limitations that accompany experiences of structural oppression, style authorizes potential. Referencing Zora Neale Hurston's 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Black suggests stylists tend to dwell in cosmology, a form of storytelling or narrative fabulation about the universe's origins and one's place in its ongoing unfolding. "Stylists," Black poetically avers, are "naturally drawn to understanding the universe better by virtue of developing a more and more acute consciousness of who and what they are and how they came to be" (20). Black highlights style's fundamental elementality as emerging from cosmic renderings of marginalized experience and the pursuit of a future otherwise. To further illustrate this elemental notion of the stylistic, Black assembles an eclectic corpus of texts by those he calls "subterranean American stylists" (5), namely Quentin Crisp, Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, whose lives and work he examines over seven chapters divided into three main parts. Each chapter supplies unique insights on the elementals of style, as well as its subject matter, thus allowing Black to support the thesis constructed in the introduction without ever seeming overly redundant.The first part of Style, "The Mystery of Personality: Queerness as Style," consists of a preface and two chapters oriented around the specific ways stylizations of queer selfhood may function as a survival strategy and, relatedly, a means for exploring elemental mysteries of personality and being. In the initial chapter, Black analyzes texts authored by openly gay memoirist and cultural commentor Quentin Crisp, who became famous for his humorous and often brash... (shrink)

PYRRHONIAN BUDDHISM: AN IMAGINATIVE RECONSTRUCTION -/- Author: -/- Adrian Kuzminski 279 Donlon Road Fly Creek, NY 13337 USA -/- Description of Pyrrhonian Buddhism: -/- The ancient Greek sceptic philosopher, Pyrrho of Elis, accompanied Alexander the Great to India, where he had contacts with Indian sages, so-called naked philosophers (gymnosophists), among whom were very probably Buddhist mendicants, or sramanas. My work, entitled Pyrrhonian Buddhism, takes seriously the hypothesis that Pyrrho’s contact with early Buddhists was the occasion of his rethinking, in a (...) Greek philosophical idiom, of what he experienced in those encounters. This has major implications for our understanding of both Buddhism and Pyrrhonism. -/- Pyrrho’s rethinking of Buddhism, I argue, enabled him to introduce into Greek philosophy and culture several key Buddhist notions. These include the primacy and interdependence of immediate phenomenal experience (which the Buddhists called dependent origination), the suspension of judgment about beliefs lacking phenomenal verification (reflecting the scepticism of the Buddha about ‘unanswered’ or ‘metaphysical’ questions), and the promise of personal enlightenment said to follow such suspension, which Pyrrho called ataraxia, and the Buddhists called bodhi. -/- Pyrrho, like Socrates, wrote nothing, but the movement he founded—Pyrrhonism--became an important tradition in Western philosophy. When the texts of later Pyrrhonian philosophers, particularly Sextus Empiricus, were redicovered during the Renaissance, they sparked a reexamination of the foundations of knowledge, thereby helping to prompt the modern scientific revolution. -/- The notion that early Buddhism played a pivotal role in the birth of ancient Greek Pyrrhonian philosophy remains provocative, but has found increasing support in recent years. An earlier work of mine, Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism (Lexington Books, 2008), was, as far as I know, the first book-length comparison of the common features of the two traditions. My current work, Pyrrhonian Buddhism, seeks to broaden and deepen this comparison. It argues that ancient Greek Pyrrhonism is best understood as a fully developed but hitherto largely unrecognized Western version of Buddhism. -/- The Introduction reviews our current understanding of Pyrrhonism in light of recent scholarship on ancient Greek-Indian cultural exchanges, and outlines the methodology I employ. -/- Part I of the book offers re-readings of the classic Pyrrhonian texts, with parallels to Buddhism in mind, including Diogenes Laertius (Chapter One), Sextus Empiricus (Chapter Two) and Timon and Aulus Gellius (Chapter Three). -/- Part II enlists the rubric of the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma to illuminate the fundamental points of comparison between early Buddhism and ancient Pyrrhonism. -/- The First Turning (Chapter Four) centers on the Buddhist insistence on the dependent origination of the objects of immediate consciousness, which can also be found in the understanding of immediate experience expressed in the phenomenalistic atomism of the Pyrrhonists. The Second Turning (Chapter Five), as posed by the ‘unanswered questions’ of the Buddha and the ‘emptiness’ of the Madhyamaka, finds its Pyrrhonian correlation in the suspension of judgment over ‘indeterminate’ beliefs. And the Third Turning (Chapter Six), reported as bodhi in Buddhism and ataraxia in Pyrrhonism, is shown in both traditions to follow liberation from suffering and existential angst, caused by what the Buddhists call our attachments and the Pyrrhonists call our beliefs. -/- Other Writers/Commentators: -/- Aspects of the Pyrrhonian/Buddhism question have been addressed by Edward Conze, Everard Flintoff, Thomas McEvilley, Jay Garfield, Mathew Neale, Ethan Mills, Christopher Beckwith, and Robin Brons, among other recent writers. The book-length studies on the issue (since my earlier work) are by Beckwith (Greek Buddha) and Neal (Madhyamaka and Pyrrhonism). Other writers/scholars with relevant expertise include C. W. Huntington, Jr., Charles Goodman, Stephen Batchelor, Dan Lusthaus, Rupert Gethin, and Mark Siderits. -/- . (shrink)

Sales professionals have been frequent targets of ethical criticism. This paper reports on a survey on ethics of sales professionals in South Africa. The results revealed salespeoples views on controversial sales practices that involve direct monetary consequences; on practices that adversely affect customers, employers and competitors; and on sales peoples sensitization of ethical issues. Stealing from a competitor at a trade show was viewed as the most unethical of the scenarios, while phone sabotage and lying to a customer were held (...) to be the next most unethical scenarios. Analysis of the results lead to a discussion of the implications for sales management. Ethical perceptions were affected by financial considerations. Marketing and Sales Managers will have to review their approach to training in sales ethics as well as how sales professionals implement the market driven approach. (shrink)

The topic of moral repair in the aftermath of breaches of trust and harmdoing has grown in importance within the past few years. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study that offers insight into a series of key issues related to offender efforts to repair interpersonal harm in the workplace: What factors motivate offenders to make amends with those they have harmed? In what ways do offenders attempt to make amends? What outcomes emerge from attempts to (...) make amends? Drawing from the findings, we build an inductive model intended to guide future business ethics and management inquiry and research in this area. (shrink)

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, _The Fate of Place_ is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of (...) space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray. (shrink)

Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy (...) and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality - the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on - and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowedge - in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized. from the reviews: 'Stein has done a great service in bringing together all of the important arguments in the human rationality debate and providing a measured critical assessment of them.... This will be an important book and is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind, and cognitive and evolutionary psychologists.' Choice 'very considerable value... for professionals' Times Higher Education Supplement. (shrink)

New foreword written by HeritageMom, Amber O'Neal Johnston. "During a time when the United States needed to be reminded of the contributions Black people have made to its democracy, freedom, music, literature, and more, W.E.B. Du Bois took on the task of enumerating the gifts that we've provided to our country. "When I began reading The Gift of Black Folk...the story that unfolded was one that I had never anticipated. We the People of the United States, all of us, have (...) left our indelible mark on America the Beautiful." -Amber O'Neal Johnston In 1924, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868-1963) penned The Gift of Black Folk in response to systemic racism in the United States, showing that "...the American spirit is a new and interesting result of diverse threads of thought and feeling coming not only from America but from Europe and Asia and indeed from Africa." Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and later became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. In 1909 he co-founded the NAACP. Du Bois was a lifelong leader and proponent of civil rights. Amber O'Neal Johnston is a writer, speaker, and home educator who blends life-giving books with a culturally-rich environment for her four children and others. She's the author of A Place to Belong, a guide for families of all backgrounds to celebrate cultural heritage and embrace inclusivity in the home and beyond, and she's known for sharing literary "mirrors and windows" on HeritageMom.com. (shrink)

Seeking to rediscover the connection between philosophy as studied in universities and those general views of man and reality which are 'philosophy' to the educated layman, Edward Craig here offers a view of philosophy and its history since the early seventeenth century. He presents this period as concerned primarily with just two visions of the essential nature of man. One portrays human beings as made in the image of God, required to resemble him as far as lies in our (...) power; the other sees us as autonomous creators of our own environment and values. The author writes with a broad sweep not encouraged by recent fashion, yet shows how textual detail which previous commentators have found opaque becomes transparent when viewed against such a background. In the final chapter he treats passages from recent work in the same way. The general conceptions which philosophical thought embodies can equally well be embodied in other media, especially literary. The author illustrates this point with German and English examples and thereby draws together disciplines often felt to be far apart. He also reveals striking similarities between Anglo-American and certain twentieth-century continental European lines of thought. (shrink)

In the middle decades of the twentieth century phenomenology grew from a local philosophy in a few German towns into a movement that spanned Europe. In Converts to the Real, Edward Baring uncovers an unexpected force behind this prodigious growth: Catholicism. Participating in a tightly-knit transnational community, Catholics helped shuttle ideas between national traditions that were otherwise inward-looking and parochial. In the first half of the twentieth century, they wrote many of the first articles and books introducing phenomenological ideas (...) to new contexts. They even organized the rescue of Edmund Husserl's manuscripts out of Nazi Germany in 1938. But the Catholic fascination with phenomenology was intermixed with a profound anxiety. Catholics worried that phenomenological ideas might prove dangerous to the faith, a possibility exemplified by the intellectual trajectory of Martin Heidegger, whose movement away from the Church was facilitated by his reading of Husserl. Converts to the Real uncovers a surprising genealogy for post-war European thought, with important implications for our understanding of the process of secularization and for the set of schools and ideas we now call "continental philosophy."--. (shrink)

Edward Craig; XII*—The Practical Explication of Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, Pages 211–226, https://doi.

Originally published in 1962. This book discusses and interprets the main themes of Buddhist thought in India and is divided into three parts: Archaic Buddhism: Tacit assumptions, the problem of "original Buddhism", the three marks and the perverted views, the five cardinal virtues, the cultivation of the social emotions, Dharma and dharmas, Skandhas, sense-fields and elements. The Sthaviras: the eighteen schools, doctrinal disputes, the unconditioned and the process of salvation, some Abhidharma problems. The Mahayana: doctrines common to all Mahayanists, the (...) Madhyamikas, the Yogacarins, Buddhist logic, the Tantras. (shrink)

Is the purpose of political philosophy to articulate the moral values that political regimes would realize in a virtually perfect world and show what that implies for the way we should behave toward one another? That model of political philosophy, driven by an effort to draw a picture of an ideal political society, is familiar from the approach of John Rawls and others. Or is political philosophy more useful if it takes the world as it is, acknowledging the existence of (...) various morally non-ideal political realities, and asks how people can live together nonetheless? The latter approach is advocated by “realist” thinkers in contemporary political philosophy. In Value, Conflict, and Order, Edward Hall builds on the work of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams in order to establish a political realist’s theory of politics for the twenty-first century. The realist approach, Hall argues, helps us make sense of the nature of moral and political conflict, the ethics of compromising with adversaries and opponents, and the character of political legitimacy. In an era when democratic political systems all over the world are riven by conflict over values and interests, Hall’s conception is bracing and timely. (shrink)

What Science Offers the Humanities examines some of the deep problems facing the study of culture. It focuses on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledges serious problems with postmodernism's harshest critics. In short, Edward Slingerland argues that in order for the humanities to progress, its scholars need to take seriously contributions from the natural sciences - and particular research on human cognition - which demonstrate that any separation of the mind and the body is entirely untenable. The author (...) provides suggestions for how humanists might begin to utilize these scientific discoveries without conceding that science has the last word on morality, religion, art, and literature. Calling into question such deeply entrenched dogmas as the 'blank slate' theory of nature, strong social constructivism, and the ideal of disembodied reason, What Science Offers the Humanities replaces the human-sciences divide with a more integrated approach to the study of culture. (shrink)

Business ethics is once again a hot topic as examples of improper business practices that violate commonly accepted ethical norms are brought to our attention. With the increasing number of scandals business schools find themselves on the defensive in explaining what they are doing to help respond to the call to teach ‘‘more’’ business ethics. This paper focuses on two issues germane to business ethics teaching efforts: the ‘‘targeted output’’ goals of teaching business ethics and when in the curriculum business (...) ethics should be taught. (shrink)

Universities have long played an important role in preparing thinkers and leaders who go on to have significant impact around the world. But if the world needs wise thinkers and good leaders, then how might modern universities educate leaders of character, particularly in a pluralistic context where many educators are reluctant to see the university as a site of moral formation? This article shares insights from one specific program, the Oxford Global Leadership Initiative, an extra-curricular program that seeks to help (...) diverse cohorts of graduate students develop the ethical qualities of character needed for leaders to serve the common good. Drawing upon qualitative data collected over three years of program activity to illuminate and illustrate our argument, we address three questions: Can virtues of character necessary for good leadership be cultivated in a university setting among a culturally diverse group of students? How can a character-based leadership program meet the particular developmental needs of “emerging adults”? and How might the program’s impact translate into society and culture? We conclude that a program integrating character and leadership can make valuable contributions to the ethical and professional development of postgraduate students. (shrink)

The purpose of cognitive models is to make predictive simulations of human behaviour, but this is often done at the aggregate level. Cranford, Gonzalez, Aggarwal, Cooney, Tambe, and Lebiere show that they can automatically customize a model to a particular individual on‐the‐fly, and use it to make specific predictions about their next actions, in the context of a particular cybersecurity game.

Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as a radical "holistic" other, which saw no qualitative difference between mind and body. Drawing on knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Edward Slingerland demonstrates that seeing a difference between mind and body is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. This book has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities (...) integration. (shrink)

This paper identifies three positions on the relationship between language and experience, the third of which I was not acquainted with before from my reading. It seems absurd.

The ethical value—and to some scholars, necessity—of providing trial patients with post-trial access (PTA) to an investigational drug has been subject to significant attention in the field of research ethics. Although no consensus has emerged, it seems clear that, in some trial contexts, various factors make PTA particularly appropriate. We outline the atypical aspects of psychedelic clinical trials that support the case for introducing the provision of PTA within research in this field, including the broader legal status of psychedelics, the (...) nature of the researcher-therapist/participant relationship, and the extended time-frame of the full therapeutic process. As is increasingly understood, the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is driven as much by extrapharmacological elements and the cultural therapeutic container as by the drug itself. As such, we also advocate for a refocusing of attention from post-trial access to a broader concept encompassing other elements of post-trial care. We provide an overview of some of the potential post-trial care provisions that may be appropriate in psychedelic clinical trials. Although the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki calls on researchers, sponsors, and governments to make provisions for post-trial access, such provision may feel impracticable or out-of-reach within psychedelic trials that are already constrained by a high resource demand and significant bureaucratic burden. We show how conceiving of post-trial provision as an integral site of the research process, and an appropriate destination for research funding, will serve to develop the infrastructure necessary for the post-legalisation psychedelic medicine ecosystem. (shrink)

Decision-theoretic representation theorems have been developed and appealed to in the service of two important philosophical projects: in attempts to characterise credences in terms of preferences, and in arguments for probabilism. Theorems developed within the formal framework that Savage developed have played an especially prominent role here. I argue that the use of these ‘Savagean’ theorems create significant difficulties for both projects, but particularly the latter. The origin of the problem directly relates to the question of whether we can have (...) credences regarding acts currently under consideration and the consequences which depend on those acts; I argue that such credences are possible. Furthermore, I argue that attempts to use Jeffrey’s non-Savagean theorem in the service of these two projects may not fare much better. (shrink)

Until the time of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, philosophers generally held economics to be an integral element of moral philosophy. These days, the language of values—moral, aesthetic, and cognitive—dominates philosophic discourse, even though contemporary philosophers rarely hold economics to be integral to moral philosophy. Examining the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and the art of Marcel Proust, Edward Andrew provides the first sustained critical analysis of values discourse, an analysis that deconstructs its content and its form.

An eloquent and passionate examination of the opposition between Protestant conscience and Enlightenment reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

What happens when we glance around a room? How do we trust what we see in fleeting moments? In The World at a Glance, Edward S. Casey describes how glancing counts for more of human perception than previously imagined. An entire universe is perceived in a glance, but our quick and uncommitted attention prevents examination of these rapid acts and processes. While breaking down this paradox, Casey surveys the glance as an essential way by which we acquaint ourselves with (...) the world. This experiential tour-de-force reveals what happens in a blink of an eye. It will become a landmark study in phenomenology, philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In the majority of academic institutions nursing and medical students receive a traditional education, the content of which tends to be specific to their future roles as health care professionals. In essence, each curriculum design is independent of each course. Over the last decade, however, interest has been accumulating in relation to interprofessional and multiprofessional learning at student level. With the view that learning together during their student training would not only encourage and strengthen future collaboration in practice settings but (...) also enhance patient care, the University of Dundee decided to run a pilot study to explore shared teaching in ethics between medical and nursing students. This article presents a report on the reasons for selecting health care ethics as a precursor for shared teaching, the educational tool used for the sessions, and the results of student and facilitator evaluation of the short course. Overall, despite problems such as poor attendance by some students, and facilitation and timetable difficulties, most of the feedback from students and facilitators has been positive. In essence the ‘idea’ has gone from strength to strength and there are now three levels of shared teaching in ethics between nursing and medical students, with plans to include further sessions with students from other disciplines. Within the text, ‘health care ethics’ will be referred to as ‘ethics’; nursing students/nurses encompasses midwifery students/midwives. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an account of the conceptual shift that occurs between the work completed by Gilles Deleuze prior to 1969 and his later work with Félix Guattari, beginning in 1972 with Anti-Oedipus. Against previous interpretations, which have concentrated on the developments initiated by Deleuze, I argue for the primary importance of Guattari's influence, especially his insistence on a theory of “machinic processes.” The importance of these processes is made manifest in Deleuze and Guattari's move away from theories (...) of structuralism. In order to carry out this task, I offer a close reading of Guattari's essay “Machine and Structure.” This essay was first written as a review of Deleuze's acclaimed work in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense and formed the basis for Deleuze and Guattari's first meeting. In the concluding sections of the paper, I show how the integration of the concept of the machine allows Deleuze and Guattari to develop a theory of the unconscious that operates outside of the boundaries traditionally set by structuralist analysis. (shrink)