This book develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality. It is argued that collective mentality should be only be posited where specialized subroutines are integrated in a way that yields skillful, goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to concerns that are relevant to a group as such.

In short, he is known in a discipline in which he did not teach for a book he did not write. In Becoming Mead, Daniel R. Huebner traces the ways in which knowledge has been produced by and about the famed American philosopher.

Thought experimental methods play a central role in empirical moral psychology. Against the increasingly common interpretation of recent experimental data, I argue that such methods cannot demonstrate that moral intuitions are produced by reflexive computations that are implicit, fast, and largely automatic. I demonstrate, in contrast, that evaluating thought experiments occurs at a near-glacial pace relative to the speed at which reflexive information processing occurs in a human brain. So, these methods allow for more reflective and deliberative processing than has (...) commonly been assumed. However, these methods may still provide insight into some human strategies for navigating unfamiliar moral dilemmas. (shrink)

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but also (...) shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system. (shrink)

This exciting collection offers a range of perspectives from some of the most prominent feminist voices of our time, including Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, and Jack Halberstam. Employing experimental modes of thinking and writing, the contributors remain faithful to the feminist tradition of subversion and resistance, while refusing to submit to its political tradition of a loving sisterhood or dutiful daughterhood. Through productive disagreement and cognitive dissonance, the essays presented here reflect the specific circumstances of our (...) present, and attempt to dream and envision possible alternatives for the future. The volume thus invites us to think of the becoming of feminism itself, and the possibilities of future feminisms-to-come. (shrink)

An ethics reflection group is one of a range of ethics support services developed to better handle ethical challenges in healthcare. The aim of this article is to evaluate the implementation process of interdisciplinary ERGs in psychiatric and general hospital departments in Denmark. To our knowledge, this is the first study of ERG implementation to include both psychiatric and general hospital departments. The implementation and evaluation strategies are inspired by action research, using a qualitative approach and systematic text condensation of (...) 28 individual interviews and 4 focus groups with clinicians, ethics facilitators and ward managers. The implementation process was influenced by both structural factors and factors related to clinicians having different values, interests and experiences. Structural barriers and promotors in the process to implement ERG included the following sub-categories: Organizational factors, recruitment and training of ethics facilitators, the deliberation model, planning and recruitment of participants to the ERGs, the support of the ward managers and the project group. Barriers and promotors found among clinicians included the following sub-categories: Expectations and pre-understandings of ERGs, understandings of a physician’s job, challenges experienced by ethics facilitators. At the end of the study, when it was decided that the ERGs should be continued, the implementation strategies were remodeled by the participants to meet new challenges. The study of ERG implementation identified important structural and professional barriers and promotors that are likely to be relevant to anyone wanting to implement ethics support services across various types of healthcare services. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett explores the intellectual significance of Daniel C. Dennett's 45 years of philosophical research, while providing a critical and constructive overview of Dennett's stance-based methodology and his claims about metal representation, consciousness, cultural evolution, and religion.

The author traces the ways in which various patients and collective associations of patients come to regard themselves as the users of future stem cell technologies. The author uses Althusser’s notion of interpellation, whereby an identity is the result of the situated encounter of a subject and an authority, to analyze the ways in which patient associations’ current involvement with basic research is related to the enactment of science as a series of technology development projects. The author argues that this (...) ‘‘project-ness’’ forms a certain privileged logic that interpellates patients and their associations in specific ways. Through the listings of illnesses circulated in the mass media, which are hoped to be treatable or curable with stem cell therapies, patients come to recognize themselves as the projected users of stem cell technologies. The author fleshes out the process of this userfication and the various responses made by patients and their associations when hailed by the entrepreneurial projects of stem cell research. (shrink)

To reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C, individuals and households play a key role. Behavior change interventions to promote pro-environmental behavior in individuals are needed to reduce emissions globally. This systematic literature review aims to assess the a) evidence-based effectiveness of such interventions and b) the content of very successful interventions without limiting the results to specific emitting sectors or countries. Based on the “PICOS” mnemonic and PRISMA statement, a search strategy was developed, (...) and eligibility criteria were defined. Three databases were searched to retrieve and review potential literature. As a result, 54 publications from 2010 to 2021 were included in the analysis. The results show that most interventions only have small positive effects or none at all. A total of 15 very successful interventions focused on the sectors of mobility, energy, and waste and incorporated improved structures, education, feedback, enablement or made the sustainable option the default. Six evidence-based recommendations for content, timing, and setting are deducted and given for interventions on enhancing pro-environmental behavior. In summary, although the various interventions and intervention types to promote PEB differ in their effectiveness, very successful interventions have common elements. Future research should focus on high-/low-impact and high-/low-cost behavior to develop interventions that aim at high-impact but low-cost behavior changes, or avoid low-impact but high-cost behavior. (shrink)

This chapter examines the recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy that has targeted the commonsense understanding of group minds. It begins by setting up the conceptual and empirical terrain on which claims about the group mind in commonsense psychology have been constructed. The chapter explains an analysis of the cross‐cultural data, which suggest a greater willingness to ascribe collective mentality in East Asian cultures. It addresses that the different strands of data together support the claim that commonsense psychology is (...) committed to a form of methodological holism, which allows for properties of individuals that critically depend on group membership. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this does not cut against philosophical and scientific attempts to defend the existence of collective intentions and group minds; it merely suggests that such projects must move beyond commonsense strategies for predicting and explaining individual behavior. (shrink)

Background Ethical challenges constitute an inseparable part of daily decision-making processes in all areas of healthcare. Ethical challenges are associated with moral distress that can lead to burnout. Clinical ethics support has proven useful to address and manage such challenges. This paper explores how prehospital emergency personnel manage ethical challenges. The study is part of a larger action research project to develop and test an approach to clinical ethics support that is sensitive to the context of emergency medicine. Methods We (...) explored ethical challenges and management strategies in three focus groups, with 15 participants in total, each attended by emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and prehospital anaesthesiologists. Focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The approach to data analysis was systematic text condensation approach. Results We stratified the management of ethical challenges into actions before, during, and after incidents. Before incidents, participants stressed the importance of mutual understandings, shared worldviews, and a supportive approach to managing emotions. During an incident, the participants employed moral perception, moral judgments, and moral actions. After an incident, the participants described sharing ethical challenges only to a limited extent as sharing was emotionally challenging, and not actively supported by workplace culture, or organisational procedures. The participants primarily managed ethical challenges informally, often using humour to cope. Conclusion Our analysis supports and clarifies that confidence, trust, and safety in relation to colleagues, management, and the wider organisation are essential for prehospital emergency personnel to share ethical challenges and preventing moral distress turning into burnout. (shrink)

When the Radical Reformers demanded the separation of church and state, it was not to privatize their convictions or depoliticize the church, but rather an attempt to recognize Jesus as Lord over all. The theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy is currently rethinking theology's influence by secular modernity, thereby making a bold critique of contemporary Christianity. It should not be surprising that Anabaptist theologians have found theological kinship with Radical Orthodoxy. Taking their cuesfrom John Howard Yoder, Henri de Lubac, Jacques (...) Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Stanley Hauerwas, and others, writers in this volume engage Radical Orthodoxy on topics such as ecclesiology, martyrdom, worship, oath-taking, peace and violence. (Amazon). (shrink)

Ever decreasing numbers of applicants arrive in language departments at UK universities. In the face of this decline, and against the backdrop of higher education languages departments being reduced across the UK, it is important to investigate the supply chain of languages undergraduates in the pre-entry sector. This article reports on a collaborative action research project between Language Networks for Excellence, University of Wolverhampton, and King Edward VI College, Stourbridge. The objective was to investigate how the HE sector can effectively (...) influence and support linguists and post-16 establishments in enhancing progression to studying languages at university and how the post-16 sector can ensure they meet language students’ needs in progression to HE. The research presents a number of conclusions and recommendations, not least that, whilst support from HE for 17—18-year-old school students and their institutions is welcome and contributes to students’ confidence and skills, there may be merit in targeting students much further down the supply chain, encouraging progression to HE through tailored linguistic and motivational support strategies. (shrink)

There are many ways to advance our understanding of the human mind by studying different kinds of sociality. Our aim in this introduction is to situate claims about extended cognition within a broader framework of research on human sociality. We briefly discuss the existing landscape, focusing on ways of defending socially extended cognition. We then draw on resources from the recent literature on the socially extended mind, as well as the literature on collective intentionality, to provide a framework for thinking (...) about the social dimension of individual minds. We then turn to a brief overview of the individualistic approaches advanced by Ludwig and Spaulding in this volume. And we close with a discussion of the transformative role of the social mind in individual life presented by Kern and Moll, as well as the distributed approach to interacting systems defended by Goldstone and Theiner. (shrink)

Research on moral psychology has frequently appealed to three, apparently consistent patterns: Males are more likely to engage in transgressions involving harm than females; educated people are likely to be more thorough in their moral deliberations because they have better resources for rationally navigating and evaluating complex information; political affiliations and religious ideologies are an important source of our moral principles. Here, we provide a test of how four factors ‐ gender, education, politics and religion ‐ affect intuitive moral judgments (...) in unfamiliar situations. Using a large-scale sample of participants who voluntarily logged on to the internet-based Moral Sense Test, we analyzed responses to 145 unique moral and conventional scenarios that varied widely in content. Although each demographic or cultural factor sometimes yielded a statistically significant difference in the predicted direction, these differences were consistently associated with extremely small effect sizes. We conclude that gender, education, politics and religion are likely to be relatively insignificant for moral judgments of unfamiliar scenarios. We discuss these results in light of current debates concerning the mechanisms underlying our moral judgments and, especially, the idea that we share a universal moral sense that constrains the range of cross-cultural variation. (shrink)

A study of the rhetorical and political strategy adopted by the Roman orator and statesman Cicero as a newcomer in Roman republican politics. Henriette van der Blom argues that Cicero advertised himself as a follower of chosen models of behaviour from the past - his role models - and in turn presented himself as a role model to others.

Buddhist philosophers provide several toolkits for exploring the relationship between meditation and introspection. Drawing on some of their tools, we explore three models of mind, which offer different ways of thinking about the possibility of introspection: an entirely mindful observer, who introspectively experiences 'pure consciousness'; a thin mind, which avoids appealing to a witness or observer of mental episodes by positing a form of reflexive selfawareness; and a thicker mind, which is active, historically situated, and dependent upon an ecological and (...) social context. We then explore practical and theoretical models of a thicker mind, which suggest that meditation is not simply a matter of representing mental episodes and then using these representations for online behavioural control. Drawing upon these models, we close by proposing that meditation should be understood as a practice of mental cultivation, which requires a more radical reconceptualization of knowing a mind. (shrink)

Recent behavioral experiments, along with imaging experiments and neuropsychological studies appear to support the hypothesis that emotions play a causal or constitutive role in moral judgment. Those who resist this hypothesis tend to suggest that affective mechanisms are better suited to play a modulatory role in moral cognition. But I argue that claims about the role of emotion in moral cognition frame the debate in ways that divert attention away from other plausible hypotheses. I suggest that the available data may (...) be more plausibly explained by appeal to predictive and evaluative mechanisms, which are neither wholly affective nor straightforwardly cognitive. By recognizing this fact, we can begin to see why questions about the role of emotion in moral psychology are likely to be empirically misguided. (shrink)

Dynamic Consent is both a model and a specific web-based tool that enables clear, granular communication and recording of participant consent choices over time. The DC model enables individuals to know and to decide how personal research information is being used and provides a way in which to exercise legal rights provided in privacy and data protection law. The DC tool is flexible and responsive, enabling legal and ethical requirements in research data sharing to be met and for online health (...) information to be maintained. DC has been used in rare diseases and genomics, to enable people to control and express their preferences regarding their own data. However, DC has never been explored in relationship to historical collections of bioscientific and genetic heritage or to contexts involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.In response to the growing interest by First Peoples throughout Australia in genetic and genomic research, and the increasing number of invitations from researchers to participate in community health and wellbeing projects, this article examines the legal and ethical attributes and challenges of DC in these contexts. It also explores opportunities for including First Peoples' cultural perspectives, governance, and leadership as a method for defining DC on cultural terms that engage best practice research and data analysis as well as respect for meaningful and longitudinal individual and family participation. (shrink)

Abordagem do protagonismo social, analisando sua relação com a informação, concluindo pela compreensão deste como objetivo do trabalho informacional, situando a mediação da informação como sua ação central. Parte da apresentação das origens conceituais em torno do protagonismo, buscando, à medida que debate as referências acerca do tema, demonstrar a relação do desenvolvimento do protagonismo social com o trabalho informacional, assim como sua posição de meta da atividade da mediação da informação, executada nas suas cinco dimensões e na condição de (...) elemento central desse trabalho. As assertivas apresentadas são resultado do estudo crítico da bibliografia da área da Ciência da Informação que aborda o protagonismo e a mediação da informação, assim como de estudos de filósofos e pensadores que abordam os aspectos sociais e políticos da comunicação e da formação de sujeitos socialmente ativos, permitindo a identificação das relações entre protagonismo e mediação da informação, como também que a mediação consciente favorece o primeiro, concluindo que o apoio ao seu desenvolvimento representa a principal responsabilidade social do trabalho com a informação. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn der Erfahrung, Kommunikation und Bewältigung von Krankheit spielen Metaphern eine wichtige Rolle: Als Denkkonzepte spiegeln sie zugrundeliegende Haltungen gegenüber den durch sie beschriebenen Vorgängen wider. Susan Sontag hat mit ihrem Essay „Illness as Metaphor“ nachhaltig die moralisch kritischen Implikationen einer unreflektierten Metaphernverwendung im Umgang mit Erkrankung aufgezeigt, indem sie deren stigmatisierende und hierin zusätzlich belastende Wirkung für Erkrankte reflektiert.In der gegenwärtigen Situation der Covid-19-Pandemie trifft ein bisher unbekanntes Virus mit der Macht und Dynamik der Globalisierung auf die hierauf nicht (...) vorbereiteten spätmodernen Gegenwartsgesellschaften, die nun nach Erklärung und Sinnzuschreibung suchen. Auch hier fungieren Metaphern als Denkkonzepte und Vehikel von Interpretation. Im Rückgriff auf die Perspektive Susan Sontags und ihren Appell für einen entmystifizierten Umgang mit Krankheit geht dieser Beitrag folgenden Fragen nach: Welche Bilder werden in der Berichterstattung über CoV‑2 vermittelt? Welche Einstellung gegenüber Gesundheit und Krankheit wird mit den Metaphern transportiert, und welche Lebenshaltung liegt dieser zugrunde? Welche Einsichten für einen gesunden Umgang mit Covid-19 und Krankheit generell ergeben sich, wenn man die Pandemie aus ihren Metaphern und zugrundliegenden Denkkonzepten herausschält? (shrink)

Critics of functionalism about the mind often rely on the intuition that collectivities cannot be conscious in motivating their positions. In this paper, we consider the merits of appealing to the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity. We demonstrate that collective mentality is not an affront to commonsense, and we report evidence that demonstrates that the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity is, to some extent, culturally specific rather (...) than universally held. This being the case, we argue that mere appeal to the intuitive implausibility of collective consciousness does not offer any genuine insight into the nature of mentality in general, nor the nature of consciousness in particular. (shrink)

This paper discusses a crisis of accountability that arises when scientific collaborations are massively epistemically distributed. We argue that social models of epistemic collaboration, which are social analogs to what Patrick Suppes called a “model of the experiment,” must play a role in creating accountability in these contexts. We also argue that these social models must accommodate the fact that the various agents in a collaborative project often have ineliminable, messy, and conflicting interests and values; any story about accountability in (...) a massively distributed collaboration must therefore involve models of such interests and values and their methodological and epistemic effects. (shrink)

Given the importance of scientific research in shaping our perception of the world, and our senses of what policies will and won’t succeed in altering that world, it is of great practical, political, and moral importance that we carry out scientific research with integrity. The phenomenon of scientific fraud stands in the way of that, as scientists may knowingly enter claims they take to be false into the scientific literature, often knowingly doing so in defiance of norms they profess allegiance (...) to. In this chapter we take a look at some of the causes of scientific fraud, and how it might be manifested in large-scale research teams and situations of anonymous authorship. We find that such cases make trouble for what might seem like intuitive answers to the question “who should be held responsible for this fraud?”, and we argue that in such cases it would be better to hold the entire community responsible for seeing to it that there is less fraud. (shrink)

It is received wisdom in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that individuals can be in emotional states but groups cannot. But why should we accept this view? In this paper, I argue that there is substantial philosophical and empirical support for the existence of collective emotions. Thus, while there is good reason to be skeptical about many ascriptions of collective emotion, I argue that some groups exhibit the computational complexity and informational integration required for being in genuinely emotional states.

George Herbert Mead is widely considered one of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work remains vibrant and relevant to many areas of scholarly inquiry today. The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead brings together a range of scholars who provide detailed analyses of Mead’s importance to innovative fields of scholarship, including cognitive science, environmental studies, democratic epistemology, and social ethics, non-teleological historiography, and the history of the natural and social sciences. Edited by well-respected Mead scholars (...) Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner, the volume as a whole makes a coherent statement that places Mead in dialogue with current research, pushing these domains of scholarship forward while also revitalizing the growing literature on an author who has an ongoing and major influence on sociology, psychology, and philosophy. (shrink)

Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus requires a rich description of the computational structures that underlie mature moral judgments, an account of the acquisition and development of these structures, and an (...) analysis of those components of the moral system that are uniquely human and uniquely moral. In this paper we present the theoretical motivations for adopting LA in the study of moral cognition: (a) the distinction between competence and performance, (b) poverty of stimulus considerations, and (c) adopting the computational level as the proper level of analysis for the empirical study of moral judgment. With these motivations in hand, we review recent empirical findings that have been inspired by LA and which provide evidence for at least two predictions of LA: (a) the computational processes responsible for folk-moral judgment operate over structured representations of actions and events, as well as coding for features of agency and outcomes; and (b) folk-moral judgments are the output of a dedicated moral faculty and are largely immune to the effects of context. In addition, we highlight the complexity of the interfaces between the moral faculty and other cognitive systems external to it (e.g., number systems). We conclude by reviewing the potential utility of the theoretical and empirical tools of LA for future research in moral psychology. (shrink)

Nous avons cherché à identifier un aspect du refoulement du cosmopolitismel'des Lumières, complémentaire de la fabrique des identités nationales enl'Europe au XIXe siècle et dans l'entre-deux-guerres. L'idée de civilisation communel'serait maintenue par la capacité réciproque de traduction des langues nationales, dul'fait de leurs origines communes indo-européennes. L'utopie de la langue remplaceraitl'le parcours matériel des Lumières. C'est l'échec de la construction du mythe indianistel'européen et non pas son succès qui explique le dévoiement idéologique des relationsl'entre langue et nation. La promotion manquée (...) de la langue tsigane dans le mondel'académique illustre bien cet échec. Après la Première Guerre mondiale, la transformationl'du principe des nationalités en ethnopolitique fit disparaître jusqu'au souvenirl'de cette ambition commune. (shrink)