In the spring of 1985, 272 upper?class and graduate students from four large journalism schools completed a questionnaire indicating their beliefs on issues relevant to media ethics. Respondents indicated a strong tendency to follow their audiences rather than their personal beliefs, when the two conflict, in making editorial judgments. They also placed high emphasis on audience research rather than on audience needs not fully appreciated by audience members. Contrary to what recent research literature suggests, those inclined to stress audience research (...) most tended to subscribe to a least common denominator mode, rather than an audience segmentation approach, when taking their audiences into account as prospective professional communicators. Results are considered in light of four postulates derived from recent literature on ethics. (shrink)

Critics have argued that behaviorism must necessarily be inadequate to account for complex human behavior whereas cognitive psychology is adequate to account for such behavior. Recently, Fodor has focused this criticism on certain situations in which humans choose among a set of alternatives. We argue that this criticism applies to forms of behaviorism that are reductionistic but not to non-reductionistic behaviorisms like that of Skinner. Non-reductionistic behaviorism can be used to interpret human choice situations of varying degrees of complexity. Such (...) interpretations run into difficulty in accounting for certain aspects of verbal behavior, but so do cognitive theories. Although nothing, in principle, prohibits either type of theory from accounting for complex human behavior, neither current behavioral theory nor current cognitive theory is developed enough at the present time to do so. (shrink)

I defend my logic against the trenchant critique offered by Ellen Meiksins Wood and I take up the pertinent question, which she raises, of Locke's general attitude to the traditional constitution. I assume in this section, but will argue further in the next, that the mass of people were taxpayers in Locke's time. I begin, as ever, from Second Treatise ?158 and with Locke's preference for �just and lasting . . . just and undeniably equal measures�. Wood entertains the idea (...) that Locke thought that equal measures between taxpayers of different locality are of much greater importance than equal measures between taxpayers in all other respects. But this idea is surely mistaken, since Locke says nothing about rights which people have simply because of their locality and says much about the rights which all people have simply because they pay tax: it is these taxpayer rights which he depends upon even in his argument about localities. On the other hand, I think it is true that just measures for localities formed, in practical terms, the essential first step towards democratic changes: they still formed the essential first step in 1832, a fact which democrats of that time had to recognize, sometimes reluctantly. (shrink)

On the day before Christmas, 1170, Robert de Broc, member of a family of royal servants that had taken up King Henry II's fierce opposition to Thomas Becket, seized a horse bringing goods to the archbishop and cut off its tail. The next day, Archbishop Thomas noted this incident after his Christmas sermon when renewing his excommunication of Robert and several others, and he discussed it again four days later in his initial meeting with the men who would shortly murder (...) him. The excision of the horse's tail appears in five of the biographies of the martyr and subsequently in the national chronicles of Roger of Howden and Ralph of Diceto. Why did a minor act of cruelty inflicted on a horse seem so noteworthy to contemporaries? The sources recording it resound with the rich Latin vocabulary of shame: “dedecus, contemptus, ignominia, dehonestatio, opprobrium.” Robert's highly symbolic act, part of a pattern of harassment by the Brocs, was designed not just to threaten Becket but also to humiliate him. (shrink)

Berkeley was a bishop and a defender of orthodox Christianity in an age when science was beginning to be claimed as an ally by those who called themselves “freethinkers": people who wanted to modify religion and to discard awkward dogmas, or who might even be drawn towards atheism.

After precisely specifying the thesis of the causal theory of time, Grünbaum's program developed to support this thesis is examined. Four objections to his definition of temporal order in terms of a more primitive causal relation are put and held to be conclusive. Finally, the philosophical arguments that Grünbaum has proposed supporting the desirability of establishing a causal theory of time are shown to be either invalid or inconclusive.

What holds together the various fields that are supposed to consititute the general intellectual discipline that people now call cognitive science? In this book, Erneling and Johnson identify two problems with defining this discipline. First, some theorists identify the common subject matter as the mind, but scientists and philosophers have not been able to agree on any single, satisfactory answer to the question of what the mind is. Second, those who speculate about the general characteristics that belong to cognitive (...) science tend to assume that all the particular fields falling under the rubric--psychology, linguistics, biology, and son on--are of roughly equal value in their ability to shed light on the nature of mind. This book argues that all the cognitive science disciplines are not equally able to provide answers to ontological questions about the mind, but rather that only neurophysiology and cultural psychology are suited to answer these questions. However, since the cultural account of mind has long been ignored in favor of the neurophysiological account, Erneling and Johnson bring together contributions that focus especially on different versions of the cultural account of the mind. (shrink)

Their initial assumption, however, is mistaken. Augustine's worries were not linguistic ones, although to be fair to the recent critics his worries were exacerbated by some linguistic muddles. He knew perfectly well that he had no trouble talking about time. This he accepted as a fact. His problem was that, although he used temporal terms correctly very easily, he did not know to what they referred. He wanted to know whether time is a feature of the objective physical world, or (...) whether time is a subjective phenomenon; whether temporal relations are relations among physical events, or relations among private, mental events. Ordinary usage did not supply answers to these questions. Indeed, correct ordinary usage is compatible with temporal terms sometimes referring to features of the physical world, sometimes to subjective phenomena. He also wanted to know whether temporal discourse requires reference to specifically temporal entities, i.e., entities or moments which exist independently of things, or whether time is adequately accounted for in terms of the temporal relations among events; whether the measurement of time depends upon the measurement of specifically temporal objects, or whether it is accounted for in terms of features of physical processes. In the course of his inquiry Augustine repeatedly expressed bewilderment. This bewilderment is due not to his being unable to find other words to do the job of "time," but to the fact that the answers do not readily emerge from ordinary ways of talking about "time.". (shrink)

Most relational theories assert both that spatial discourse is reducible to talk about physical objects and their spatial relations, and that the relation of congruence derives from a non-metrical relation which intervals bear or possibly bear to measuring instruments. We have shown that there are serious logical difficulties involved in maintaining both these positions and the thesis of the continuity of space. We have also shown that Grünbaum's motivating argument for the reduction of congruence is unsound, and, moreover, that the (...) prospects of formulating the kind of definition which this reduction requires seem to rest upon a wholly vague notion of physical possibility. Alternatively, if congruence is taken as primitive, it seems plausible that spatial discourse can be reconstructed so that there is no ontological commitment to spatial objects other than physical objects. Whether or not this relational thesis is ultimately defensible requires more elaboration of the relational theory, and investigation of its role in the formalizations of current physical theories. It is odd, considering the wide currency of relational theories, that this work has never been done. (shrink)

The theory of personal identity should illuminate and be illuminated by the theory of personality, of which it is a part. I believe that Locke's theory succeeds in this more than that of any other great philosopher, and the modifications which it may need are not fundamental ones. The problems raised by Butler and Flew can be made to disappear.

A reasonable choice between Skinner's and Chomsky's theories requires reference to a conception of human nature. It is explained in detail why this is so, in the context of an analysis of what it is to ‘choose’ a theory. This account helps to explain the unity and coherence of the science, methodology, conception of science, object of scientific inquiry and views towards control of each of Skinner and Chomsky, and thereby explains the chasm which separates the parties to their respective (...) programs. The analysis given implies that, in a precise sense, the theory-choice is implicated in value-judgments. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 685-687, August 2012.

Laurie Johnson Bagby examines the loss of the appreciation for honor in modern Western society through an examination of the political philosophy of English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. She finds in Hobbes's thought a 'turning point for honor,' in which honor is rejected as too dangerous, and fear and self-interest are put in its place as the chief means of peace and good order.

Book reviewed in this article: Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry. By James Turner Johnson.

A number of criticisms of a recent paper byare made. (1) In attempting to assess the observational adequacy of story grammars, they state that a context‐free grammar cannot handle discontinuous elements; however, they do not show that such elements occur in the domain to which the grammars apply. Further, they do not present adequate evidence for their claim that there are acceptable stories not accounted for by existing grammars and that the grammars will accept nonstories such as procedures. (2) They (...) state that it has been proven that under natural conditions children cannot learn transformational grammars, which is a misrepresentation of the learnability proofs which have been offered. (3) Most important, they take an unduly narrow approach to story understanding by claiming that people only understand story content and do not have knowledge of story structure which is useful in comprehension or memory. Counterevidence from the literature is cited which indicates that such knowledge is both useful and used, and a number of methods for assessing the psychological adequacy of structural models are discussed. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 6, June 2019, Page 76-78.

Research has consistently revealed gender differences in attitudes toward science and technology. One explanation is that women are more personally affected by particular technologies, so they consider them differently. However, not all women universally experience biomedical technologies. We use the concept of technological salience to address how differences in subjective implications of a technology might explain differences in women’s attitudes toward biotechnology. In a sample of U.S. women from the National Survey of Fertility Barriers, we examine how women with and (...) without a biomedical barrier to fertility evaluate biotechnology for infertility, which, we argue, reflects differences in technological salience. For women with a biomedical barrier, various experiences, beliefs, and values impacted their attitudes; yet, most of these did not affect attitudes if women had not experienced a fertility barrier. Results suggest that technological salience contextualizes women’s attitudes toward these biotechnologies and may also have broader implications for other biotechnologies. (shrink)

Management plays an important role in reinforcing ethics in organizations. To support this aim, managers must use incentive and goal programs in ethical ways. This study examines experimentally the potential ethical costs associated with incentive-driven and goal-induced employee behavior from a managerial perspective. In a quasi-experimental setting, 243 MBA students with significant professional work experience evaluated a hypothetical employee’s ethical behavior under incentive pay systems modeled on a business case. In the role of the employee’s manager, participants evaluated the ethicality (...) of the employee’s incentive-driven and goal-induced ethical/unethical behavior and the outcomes of behavior, with consequences that were either favorable or unfavorable to the organization. The results indicated that participants discounted the ethical considerations of incentive-driven and goal-induced behavior when consequences were favorable to the organization. Participants’ morals and outcome orientations were also significantly related to their ethical judgments and intentions to intervene. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)