Abduction, deduction and induction are different forms of inference in science. However, only a few attempts have been made to introduce the idea of abductive reasoning as an extended way of thinking about clinical practice in nursing research. The aim of this paper was to encourage critical reflections about abductive reasoning based on three empirical examples from nursing research and includes three research questions on what abductive reasoning is, how the process has taken place, and how knowledge about abductive reasoning (...) based on the examples can inform nursing research and clinical practice. The study has a descriptive and explorative approach using a convenience sample of three empirical studies from nursing research. The three studies illustrate different ways to enter the abductive reasoning process in steps. They represent new caring models, which offer visual and cognitive maps for expanding nursing research, education and thus informing care. Therefore, we suggest that abductive reasoning may be beneficial for different ways of knowing and demonstrates scientific innovation to shed new light on health phenomena, which can help researchers and practitioners to gain a broader and deeper understanding of nursing care inquiry. However, more studies are needed to broaden this scope. (shrink)

With a specific example from Norway and inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, this article demonstrates how today’s educational rhetoric lacks the language and will to recognise a key pedagogical dimension in education: what happens when the normative ambitions of education and students meet. At best, teaching students life skills to mitigate their mental health issues is naive. Inspired by Ahmed, such an initiative might actually work against its purpose. At a time when educational outcomes are emphasised in (...) local and international political contexts, I argue that the task of philosophy of education should be 1) to reclaim the significance of the pedagogical dimension in education and 2) to philosophise on what negative emotions such as unhappiness require of education. (shrink)

Natural language contains many expressions with underspecified emotive content. This paper proposes a way to resolve such underspecification. Nonmonotonic inference over a knowledge base is used to derive an expected interpretation for emotive expressions in a particular context. This ‘normal’ meaning is then taken to influence the hearer’s expectations about probable interpretations, and, because of these probable interpretations, the decisions of the speaker about when use of underspecified emotive terms is appropriate.

Aging populations have become a major concern in the developed world and are expected to require novel care strategies. Public policies, health-care regimes and technology developers alike stress the need for a more individualized care to meet the increased demand for care services in response to demographic change. Increasingly, care services are offered to individuals with diseases and or disabilities in their homes by means of Personalized Health-Monitoring (PHM) technologies. PHM-based home care is typically portrayed as the key to a (...) cost-effective future care that better can accommodate the needs of an aging population and promote care recipients’ independence. In light of the emerging technology-based home care, this article sets forth to investigate the significance and implications of a strong emphasis on independence in relation to this novel care form. Notions of independence as used by care planners, care providers and technology developers are examined in relation to ICT-based home care and the reasonableness of independence as an aim for future health-care is critically discussed. In conclusion, the need for a shift from a strong emphasis on independence to a right to healthy dependence is advocated. (shrink)

The introduction of non-invasive prenatal testing in healthcare systems around the world offers an opportunity to reconsider funding policies for prenatal screening. In some countries with universal access healthcare systems, pregnant women and their partners are asked to pay for NIPT. In this paper, we discuss two important rationales for charging women for NIPT: to prevent increased uptake of NIPT and to promote informed choice. First, given the aim of prenatal screening, high or low uptake rates are not intrinsically desirable (...) or undesirable. Using funding policies to negatively affect uptake, however, is at odds with the aim of screening. Furthermore, copayment disproportionally affects those of lower socioeconomic status, which conflicts with justice requirements and impedes equal access to prenatal screening. Second, we argue that although payment models may influence pregnant women’s choice behaviours and perceptions of the relevance of NIPT, the copayment requirement does not necessarily lead to better-informed choices. On the contrary, external influences on women’s personal choices for or against prenatal screening should ideally be avoided. To improve informed decision-making, healthcare systems should instead invest in adequate non-directive, value-focused pretest counselling. This paper concludes that requiring copayments for NIPT in universal access healthcare systems fails to promote reproductive autonomy and is unfair. (shrink)

This paper examines the support for diversity from a moral perspective. Combining business ethics theory with a lens of critical discourse analysis, it reconstructs the debates on the ethicality of three disability inclusion practices—positive discrimination, job adaptations, and voluntary disclosure—drawn from multi-stakeholder interviews in disability-friendly organizations. Discursive resistance to disability inclusion practices, otherwise known to work, arises out of moral beliefs characteristic of an ethic of justice, whereas support is more often informed by an ethic of care. This study contributes (...) to the literature by laying bare how ethics fuel ‘resistance to’ rather than ‘support for’ diversity and inclusion. Like prior studies, it links such resistance to the myth of individual merit, noting that some re-appropriation of an ethic of justice becomes possible when legal awareness around issues of disability is raised in the context of work. In addition, it identifies an ethic of care as holding the greatest potential for fostering workplace inclusion yet cautions for two adverse side effects that may arise when promoting corporate care: the potential of paternalism and the inclination to individualise inherent to wellbeing initiatives. (shrink)

Background: In recent years, operating theatre nurse students’ education focused on ethics, basic values and protecting and promoting the patients' dignity in perioperative practice. Health professionals are frequently confronted with ethical issues that can impact on patient’s care during surgery. Objective: The objective of this study was to present what operating theatre nursing students perceived and interpreted as undignified caring in perioperative practice. Research design: The study has a descriptive design with a hermeneutic approach. Data were collected using Flanagan’s critical (...) incident technique. Participants and research context: Operating theatre nurse students from Sweden and Norway participated and collected data in 2011, after education in ethics and dignity. Data consisting of 47 written stories and the text were analysed with hermeneutical text interpretation. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Karlstad University's Research Ethics Committee. Findings: The findings show careless behaviour and humiliating actions among health professionals. Health professionals commit careless acts by rendering the patient invisible, ignoring the patient’s worry and pain and treating the patient as an object. They also humiliate the patient when speaking in negative terms about the patient’s body, and certain health professionals blame the patients for the situation they are in. Health professionals lack the willingness and courage to protect the patient’s dignity in perioperative practice. Discussion: In the discussion, we have illuminated how professional ethics may be threatened by more pragmatic and utilitarian arguments contained in regulations and transplant act. Conclusion: The findings reveal that patients were exposed to unnecessary suffering; furthermore, the operating theatre nurse students suffered an inner ethical conflict due to the undignified caring situations they had witnessed. (shrink)

This article explores how paid domestic work is framed in state policies and discourses, drawing upon theoretical discussions on gender, welfare and global care chains. Based on a case study of the political debate on the `reconciliation of personal, family and work life' in Spain, the author argues that dominant policy frames relate gender inequality to women's unpaid domestic work and care, while domestic workers are essentially the invisible `other'. Empowering and disempowering frames are discussed; domestic workers are mainly constructed (...) as a solution to the care problem and only marginally as subjects and rights-holders. The overall aim is to examine how public policies legitimize and produce social inequalities related to gender, class and nationality. (shrink)

Swedish beef and dairy farmers are currently facing a challenging financial situation. Simultaneously, beef farming contributes significant environmental impacts. To support farmers, actors from the whole value chain are now promoting Swedish beef as particularly ‘sustainable’. The paper draws on critical discourse analysis of interviews with and documents from the largest Swedish supermarket chain ICA, Swedish farmer organisations and farmers to study how ICA and farmers articulate sustainability and their responsibility for the same. Articulations are subsequently discussed in the light (...) of actual environmental impacts of beef production and the distribution of power in the beef value chain. The findings suggest that negative environmental impacts and farmers’ struggles are largely hidden in the dominant articulation of sustainability. Furthermore, ICA does not use the power it has to steer consumers toward reduced beef consumption. We conclude with suggesting more open deliberation about current levels of beef sales and consumption and about what compromises to make when striving for ‘sustainable’ beef consumption. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to explore how nurses perceive patient participations of patients over 75 years old undergoing hemodialysis treatment in dialysis units, and of their next of kin. Ten nurses told stories about what happened in the dialysis units. These stories were analyzed with critical discourse analysis. Three discursive practices are found: (1) the nurses’ power and control; (2) sharing power with the patient; and (3) transferring power to the next of kin. The first and the predominant (...) discursive practice can be explained with an ideology of paternalism, in which the nurses used biomedical explanations and the ethical principle of benefice to justify their actions. The second can be explained with an ideology of participation, in which the nurses used ethical narratives as a way to let the patients participate in the treatment. The third seemed to involve autonomous decision-making and the ethical principle of autonomy for the next of kin in the difficult end-of-life decisions. (shrink)

Background: Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948, human rights as set out in government documents have gradually changed, with more and more power being transferred to individual. Objectives: The aim of this article is to analyze how the position of the patient in need of care is constructed in Norway’s renamed and revised Patients’ and Service Users’ Rights Act (originally Patients’ Rights Act, 1999) and published comments which accompanying this legislation (...) from the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Service. Research design: A constructivist design was used, and Fairclough’s critical discourse approach was adopted to analyze the text of the Patients’ and Service Users’ Rights Act and comments. Findings: The analysis identified three discourses: (a) political discourse, containing ethical discourses about priority and economy, in which patients are constructed as powerless individuals; (b) expert discourse, containing a theme about patients’ trust in the healthcare team and its knowledge, in which patients are constructed as helpless individuals lacking knowledge; and (c) patient participation and patient autonomy discourse, containing ethical discourses about decision-making, in which patients are constructed not only as individuals with needs and rights but also as “troublesome.” Conclusion: Dominant paternalistic discourses in the legal text validate the power of medicine, the healthcare system, and heath personnel over the needs, rights, participation, and autonomy of the patient. (shrink)

Based on conversation analysis, this study investigates central practices in what is defined as a caring interview, in the context of welfare administration. Caring refers to a helpful interviewing in reformulations of questions, taking interviewees’ difficulties to answer into consideration; a caring attitude in the framing of questions, showing understanding of clients’ circumstances and professional’s enactment of expertise in assessments of clients’ disabilities and care needs. Data include a corpus of 43 recorded interviews in which officials at the Swedish Social (...) Insurance Agency interview clients who have applied for benefits. The study adds to research on interactional sensitivity, polar questions and epistemic stance in institutional interaction. The study shows how the interviewer prioritizes confirming polar questions, takes responsibilities of knowing into account and reduces the epistemic gap to the interviewee in practices of a caring interview. This makes the interviewing markedly different from standardized and bureaucratic interviewing. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate the concept of care in contemporary medical practice and medical ethics. Although care has been hailed throughout the centuries as a crucial ideal in medical practice and as an honourable virtue to be observed in codes of medical ethics, I argue that contemporary medicine and medical ethics suffer from the lack of a theoretically sustainable concept of care and then discuss possible reasons that may help to explain this absence. I draw on (...) the empirical studies of Carol Gilligan on care and connectedness as ontologically situated realities in human life. Based on a philosophical elaboration of her findings on the ethics of care emphasizing relationality, I try to show how the notion of ‘relational ontology’ originating from this stream of thought may be of help in developing a medical ethics that acknowledges care as a perspective to be observed in all interactions between physicians and patients. (shrink)

This paper considers the meaning and use of the English particle man. It is shown that the particle does quite different things when it appears in sentence-initial and sentence-final position; the first use involves expression of an emotional attitude as well as, on a particular intonation, intensification; this use is analyzed using a semantics for degree predicates along with a separate dimension for the expressive aspect. Further restrictions on modification with the sentence-initial particle involving monotonicity and evidence are introduced and (...) analyzed. The sentence-final use can be viewed as strengthening the action performed by the sentence. A formal semantics is given by making use of dynamic techniques and, in a sense, dynamically simulating the modification of certain speech acts. Some empirical and theoretical extensions of the analyses are proposed and some consequences discussed. (shrink)

Background: According to Norwegian law, nurses are obligated to provide an acceptable level of health assistance to patients and their family members and to allow patients and their family members to participate in the planning of patient care and treatment. Aim: The aim of this study is to compare the perceptions of older patients undergoing haemodialysis treatment and of their next of kin and of nurses regarding patient participation in the context of haemodialysis treatment. Research design: The study adopts an (...) approach that is both comparative and explorative in nature by examining the narratives of patients, nurses and next of kin and by performing critical discourse analysis as outlined by Fairclough. Ethical considerations: Permission to carry out the research was granted by the Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics of Mid-Norway and by the participating hospitals. Informed consent and confidentiality were ensured. Findings: Two discourses were found: (a) the discourse of paternalism with the discursive practices of achieving physiological balance in patients, trusting the healthcare team and being excluded or included in the difficult end-of-life decision-making process, and (b) the discourse of patient participation, with the themes of maintaining patients’ quality of life and trusting patients. Conclusion: The participation of older patients and their next of kin was not as well integrated as social practice in dialysis units. The dominant discourse seemed to have an ideology and social practice of paternalism. However, there existed hegemonic struggles for an ideology of patient participation that involved (a) achieving physiological balance in patients versus maintaining patients’ quality of life, (b) trusting the healthcare team versus trusting the patient, and (c) being excluded versus included in the difficult end-of-life decision-making process. (shrink)

In this paper I introduce a theoretical framework on care developed by the Norwegian nurse and philosopher Kari Martinsen, and I argue that this approach has relevance not only within nursing, but also within clinical medicine. I try to substantiate this claim by analysing some of the key concepts in this approach, and I illustrate the potential clinical relevance of this approach by applying it in relation to two care scenarios. Finally, I discuss some of the concerns that have been (...) raised in relation to the aim of highlighting care in medicine. (shrink)

As thousands of healthy research participants are being included in small and large imaging studies, it is essential that dilemmas raised by the detection of incidental findings are adequately handled. Current ethical guidance indicates that pathways for dealing with incidental findings should be in place, but does not specify what such pathways should look like. Building on an interview study of researchers’ practices and perspectives, we identified key considerations for the set-up of pathways for the detection, management and communication of (...) incidental findings in imaging research. We conducted an interview study with a purposive sample of researchers at research facilities across the Netherlands. Based on a qualitative analysis of these interviews and on existing guidelines found in the literature, we developed a prototype ethical framework, which was critically assessed and fine-tuned during a two-day international expert meeting with bioethicists and representatives from large population-based imaging studies from the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and Belgium. Practices and policies for the handling of incidental findings vary strongly across the Netherlands, ranging from no review of research scans and limited feedback to research participants, to routine review of scans and the arrangement of clinical follow-up. Respondents felt that researchers do not have a duty to actively look for incidental findings, but they do have a duty to act on findings, when detected. The principle of reciprocity featured prominently in our interviews and expert meeting. We present an ethical framework that may guide researchers and research ethics committees in the design and/or evaluation of appropriate pathways for the handling of incidental findings in imaging studies. The framework consists of seven steps: anticipation of findings, information provision and informed consent, scan acquisition, review of scans, consultation on detected abnormalities, communication of the finding, and further clinical management and follow-up of the research participant. Each of these steps represents a key decision to be made by researchers, which should be justified not only with reference to costs and/or logistical considerations, but also with reference to researchers’ moral obligations and the principle of reciprocity. (shrink)

Background: Young next of kin to patients with mental health problems are faced with many challenges. It is important to focus on the special needs of children and adolescents as next of kin to ensure their welfare and prevent harm. Research questions: We aimed to investigate young next of kin’s need for information and involvement, to examine the ways they cope with situations involving coercion related to the treatment of their relative, and to identify ethical challenges. Research design: We conducted (...) a qualitative study based on semi-structured, individual interviews. Participants and research context: Seven young next of kin aged 14–22 years participated in the study. The informants were recruited from a regional hospital trust in Norway. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the National Data Protection Official for Research and based upon informed consent and confidentiality. Findings: The adolescents wanted more information and described a need for increased interaction with their sick relative at the hospital. They struggled to keep their relationship with their relative intact, and they described communication problems in the family. Coercive treatment was perceived in a negative way. Discussion: The study finds that there are ethical challenges at stake for young next of kin and their families other than those that are often emphasized by traditional healthcare, which often focuses on the individual patient’s rights. These challenges are related to the young next of kin’s needs for interconnectedness and for the preservation of relationships as well as challenges related to family communication and the need for information. Conclusion: The study finds a need for more family-oriented perspectives in both mental healthcare practices and healthcare ethics. (shrink)

Simple mindfulness practices to help your child (ages 5-12) deal with anxiety, improve concentration, and handle difficult emotions—with a 60-minute audio CD of guided exercises Mindfulness—the quality of attention that combines full awareness with acceptance of each moment, just as it is—is gaining broad acceptance among mental health professionals as an adjunct to treatment. This little book is a very appealing introduction to mindfulness meditation for children and their parents. In a simple and accessible way, it describes what mindfulness is (...) and how mindfulness-based practices can help children calm down, become more focused, fall asleep more easily, alleviate worry, manage anger, and generally become more patient and aware. The book contains eleven practices that focus on just these scenarios, along with short examples and anecdotes throughout. Included with purchase is an audio CD with guided meditations, voiced by Myla Kabat-Zinn, who along with her husband, Jon Kabat-Zinn, popularized mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) as a therapeutic approach. Continue your mindfulness practice with Eline Snel through her other mindfulness meditation titles, including Sitting Still Like a Frog Activity Book, which offers 75 fun mindfulness games and activities for children, and The Little Frog Awakes, which offers tools and advice for mindfully responding to younger children ages 18 months to 4 years. (shrink)

Parents of toddlers can find themselves overwhelmed and struggling with self-doubt when their child is willful, or is having trouble navigating difficult emotions and circumstances. Mindfulness can help! In The Little Frog Awakes, Eline Snel offers parents of children -ages 18 months--4 years--advice and tools for responding mindfully and effectively in the moment. These skills help us regain trust in ourselves and in the integral wholeness of our kids. And when we make mindfulness practice a part of daily life, it (...) gives our children a powerful message on how to recognize, name, and deal with emotions and situations. This practical guide will help you to connect with and respond mindfully to your own feelings as they arise; cultivate compassion for yourself as a parent; show you how to encourage serenity, self-confidence, and emotional regulation in your children; strengthen the bond with your kids and help all of you manage stress; be more fully present with your children, and more able to give them your undivided attention; embrace imperfection and focus on the things that really matter; and more The book and the accompanying audio include activities, practices, and stories for both you and for your toddler that cultivate mindful moments and action, and self-compassion. (shrink)

Todas las reflexiones acerca del signo –convencionalismo-naturalismo, realismo- nominalismo, empirismo-racionalismo, concepción diádica-concepción triádica- se articulan en torno a las relaciones entre signo, pensamiento y realidad. Aunque todos coinciden en que un signo es "aliquid stat pro aliquo", esta antigua definición de carácter muy general adquiere implicaciones muy distintas según los presupuestos de cada autor y, todavía hoy, carecemos de un consenso en la definición de "signo".

An aging population is often taken to require a profound reorganization of the prevailing health care system. In particular, a more cost-effective care system is warranted and ICT-based home care is often considered a promising alternative. Modern health care devices admit a transfer of patients with rather complex care needs from institutions to the home care setting. With care recipients set up with health monitoring technologies at home, spouses and children are likely to become involved in the caring process and (...) informal caregivers may have to assist kin-persons with advanced care needs by means of sophisticated technology. This paper investigates some of the ethical implications of a near-future shift from institutional care to technology-assisted home care and the subsequent impact on the care recipient and formal- and informal care providers. (shrink)

The care for older and disabled people has been described as a core area of the Nordic model. The Nordic countries’ welfare model has also been described as women friendly, as women are not forced to make harder choices than men between work and family. The Swedish eldercare system has, during the last several decades, undergone significant changes. Previously, eldercare could be described as universal, meaning a publicly provided, comprehensive, high-quality service available to all citizens according to need and not (...) based on the ability to pay. In later years transformation of eldercare has been influenced by neoliberal politics, which emphasize economic efficiency and cost reduction through competition. Eldercare has become a more diverse multidimensional system, and a private market for home-based eldercare has been created. The numbers of eldercare providers have increased considerably, and new ways of organizing eldercare have been established. In January 2009, the Act on System of Choice in the Public Sector was introduced. The Act was supposed to provide an opportunity for interested municipalities and county councils to expose their publicly provided services to market competition, and to enable users to choose their providers. This article aims to illustrate how neoliberal reasoning dominated the policy process leading to adoption of the Act on System of Choice in the Public Sector. With the use of a discursive policy analysis the authors specifically explore how neoliberal logic dominated, and also how choice and equality were understood and interpreted in the policy process. They conclude that the neoliberal turn in eldercare claiming to centre on the individual choice of persons in need of care runs the risk of creating unequal care that decentres the eldercare worker and creates precarious work situations. (shrink)

This article explores how female graduate engineers construct femininities in male-dominated organizations. By applying a dynamic relational understanding of gender it is argued that different versions of femininities are constructed through associations to sameness and difference. The graduate engineering profession is closely connected to hegemonic masculinity, not least by the strong representation of technology and a management system itself heavily connected to current hegemonic masculinity. The female engineers stand in a position which can be described as `the dilemma of difference' (...) that arises when women choose to construct themselves as more or less different from men, or more or less visible as women. They negotiate whether the meaning of gender should mean sameness or difference from men, and they negotiate how to relate to hegemonic masculinity. This inuences the different strategies they choose. (shrink)

Response-dependence theses are usually formulated in terms of a priori true biconditionals of roughly the form 'something, x, falls under the concept 'F' ↔ x would elicit response R from subjects S under conditions C'. Such formulations are vulnerable to conditional fallacy problems; counterexamples threaten whenever the C-conditions' coming to obtain might alter the object with respect to F. Crispin Wright has suggested that such problems can be avoided by placing the C-conditions in a proviso. This ensures that any changes (...) triggered by the C-conditions' coming to obtain will be irrelevant to the truth of the biconditional. I argue that this move leaves the equations vulnerable to counterexamples of a slightly different kind: Cases where the change is triggered, not by the C-conditions' coming to obtain, but by the response. I consider two ways to resist these counterexamples, and argue that both are insufficient. The upshot is a challenge that must be met if provisoed biconditionals are to serve their purpose. (shrink)

Background Coercion can cause harm to both the patient and the patient’s family. Few studies have examined how the coercive treatment of a close relative might affect young next-of-kin. Research questions We aimed to investigate the views and experiences of health professionals being responsible for supporting young next-of-kin to patients in mental health care (children-responsible staff) in relation to the needs of these young next-of-kin in coercive situations and to identify ethical challenges. Research design We conducted a qualitative study based (...) on semistructured, focus group interviews and an individual interview. Participants and research context We held three focus group interviews with six to seven children-responsible staff in each group (a total of 20 participants) and one individual interview with a family therapist. The participants were recruited from three hospital trusts in the eastern part of Norway. Ethical considerations The study was approved by the National Data Protection Official for Research and based on informed consent and confidentiality. Findings Coercion was not a theme among the participants in relation to their work with young next-of-kin, and there was much uncertainty related to whether these young people need special support to deal with the coercive treatment of their close relative. Despite the uncertainty, the study indicated a need for more information and emotional support among the youth. Discussion Few studies have addressed the potential impact of coercive treatment of a close family member on young next-of-kin. The findings were consistent with existing research but highlighted disagreement and uncertainty among the children-responsible staff about to what extent the young next-of-kin should visit and whether they should enter the ward unit or not. We identified ethical challenges for the children-responsible staff related to the principle of not inflicting harm ( nonmaleficence). Conclusion From the perspective of children-responsible staff, it appears that the coercive treatment of a close family member entails a need for extra support of young relatives both in relation to information and the facilitation of visits, but more systematic knowledge about these issues is needed. (shrink)

If our moral beliefs rest on a mistake, as moral error theorists claim, what should we do with them? According to Richard Joyce’s revolutionary moral fictionalism, error theorists should pretend to believe moral propositions in order to keep the benefits moral thinking has for their preference satisfaction. This, he claims, frees error theory from radical practical implications. In response, I argue that implementing fictionalism would not preserve our moral practices, but disrupt them. The change from moral belief to make-belief yields (...) an unintended second revolution: a revolution in the content of morality. I show that fictionalism necessarily relies on a similar justification of moral practices as David Gauthier’s contractarianism, and consequently has similar implications for moral content. Because fictionalists engage in moral thinking purely for its instrumental value, they should only accept moral obligations that are useful to them into their fiction. This restriction is important: the most useful moral fiction departs substantially from conventional moral views. Revolutionary moral fictionalism is therefore more radical than it is promised to be. (shrink)

This chapter considers the semantics and pragmatics of expressive content. It begins by exemplifying the class of expressives, in the process introducing the tests that have been proposed for expressivity, focusing on the expressive adjectives fucking and damn, and on pejorative terms. The chapter then turns to specific analyses of these and other expressive items, also discussing facts related to how the particular content of some expressives can be derived from context. The chapter concludes with a discussion and overview of (...) various approaches to semantic composition with expressives. (shrink)

Throughout the longstanding debate on privacy, the concept has been framed in various ways. Most often it has been discussed as an area within which individuals rightfully may expect to be left alone and in terms of certain data that they should be entitled to control. The sphere in which individuals should be granted freedom from intrusion has typically been equated with the indisputably private domestic sphere. Privacy claims in the semi-public area of work have not been sufficiently investigated. In (...) this article, the case is made that employees have reasonable expectations on privacy at work. Firstly, in a descriptive analysis, employees’ need for workspace privacy is spelt out. Secondly, a normative analysis explicates the reasons why privacy should be protected. The main thrust is to provide a more inclusive privacy concept and hence, a more adequate basis for privacy protection legislation and codes in the area of work. Contrary to prevailing workplace privacy protection, employees’ need for local privacy should be accommodated as well as informational privacy. (shrink)

Increasing the participation of women in top-level corporate boards is high on the agenda of policy-makers. Yet, we know little about director appointment dynamics and the drivers and impediments of women appointments. This study builds on organizational and group-level behavior theories and empirically investigates how ex-ante board structures and gender-specific board dynamics impact the representation of women on corporate boards. We study boards of listed firms in Europe between 2002 and 2019 and find a declining appointment probability for every additional (...) woman, i.e., the share of women already on the board negatively predicts the likelihood of additional women appointments. Further, we find evidence of a replacement effect, i.e., the likelihood of a woman being appointed as director is significantly larger when a woman, compared to when a man, leaves the board. We do not find spillover effects from non-executive to executive boards. These results are robust to econometric model specifications that address potential endogeneity concerns using matching and instrumental variables. Our results confirm that board director appointments are gender specific and suggest that demand-side factors such as explicit and implicit norms drive women appointments up to a certain threshold. (shrink)

The advent of new genetic and genomic technologies may cause friction with the principle of respect for autonomy and demands a rethinking of traditional interpretations of the concept of informed consent. Technologies such as whole-genome sequencing and micro-array based analysis enable genome-wide testing for many heterogeneous abnormalities and predispositions simultaneously. This may challenge the feasibility of providing adequate pre-test information and achieving autonomous decision-making. At a symposium held at the 11th World Congress of Bioethics in June 2012 (Rotterdam), organized by (...) the International Association of Bioethics, these challenges were presented for three different areas in which these so-called ‘new genetics’ technologies are increasingly being applied: newborn screening, prenatal screening strategies and commercial personal genome testing. In this article, we build upon the existing ethical framework for a responsible set-up of testing and screening offers and reinterpret some of its criteria in the light of the new genetics. As we will argue, the scope of a responsible testing or screening offer should align with the purpose(s) of testing and with the principle of respect for autonomy for all stakeholders involved, including (future) children. Informed consent is a prerequisite but requires a new approach. We present preliminary and general directions for an individualized or differentiated set-up of the testing offer and for the informed consent process. With this article we wish to contribute to the formation of new ideas on how to tackle the issues of autonomy and informed consent for (public) healthcare and direct-to-consumer applications of the new genetics. (shrink)

The authors outline a program for understanding the semantics and pragmatics of slur terms, proposing that slurs are mixed expressives that predicate membership in some social group G while simultaneously invoking a complex of historical facts and social attitudes about G. The authors then point to the importance of distinguishing between the potential offensive and derogatory effects of slur terms, with the former deriving from the impact on the listener of the invoked content itself, and the latter deriving from inferences (...) about speaker attitudes and intentions. The authors use the resulting framework to discuss several controversial cases of slurs and slurring: terms targeting political views such as ‘Nazi’ and ‘terf’, and cases in which non-slurs are used to derogate, as in cases of misgendering. The authors conclude that what counts as a slur is in part dependent on a background system of ideological assumptions, meaning that whether a particular term counts as a slur will depend in part on one’s ideological commitments and assumptions. (shrink)

Perception of music and speech is based on similar auditory skills, and it is often suggested that those with enhanced music perception skills may perceive and learn novel words more easily. The current study tested whether music perception abilities are associated with novel word learning in an ambiguous learning scenario. Using a cross-situational word learning (CSWL) task, nonmusician adults were exposed to word-object pairings between eight novel words and visual referents. Novel words were either non-minimal pairs differing in all sounds (...) or minimal pairs differing in their initial consonant or vowel. In order to be successful in this task, learners need to be able to correctly encode the phonological details of the novel words and have sufficient auditory working memory to remember the correct word-object pairings. Using the Mistuning Perception Test (MPT) and the Melodic Discrimination Test (MDT), we measured learners’ pitch perception and auditory working memory. We predicted that those with higher MPT and MDT values would perform better in the CSWL task and in particular for novel words with high phonological overlap (i.e., minimal pairs). We found that higher musical perception skills led to higher accuracy for non-minimal pairs and minimal pairs differing in their initial consonant. Interestingly, this was not the case for vowel minimal pairs. We discuss the results in relation to theories of second language word learning such as the Second Language Perception model (L2LP). (shrink)