In this paper we highlight the racialized effects of agricultural labor laws on Southeast Asian family farmers in California’s Central Valley. We show how agricultural labor laws intended to protect farmworkers on industrial farms discriminate against and challenge small Southeast Asian refugee farmers. Hmong, Iu-Mien and Lao family farmers rely on cultural practices of labor reciprocity and unpaid help from extended family and clan networks to sustain the economic viability of their farms. This kind of labor sharing, a central tenet (...) of their customary farming practices, and a cornerstone of the American family farm ideal, is illegal in California agriculture. We examine the historical context that gave rise to agricultural labor regulations in California and the ways in which these regulations are both under-enforced and unevenly enforced, differentially impacting immigrant family farms, while failing to protect those for whom the laws were originally intended. In highlighting how employment and labor laws and their enforcement or lack thereof discriminate against Southeast Asia farms, this study illustrates how other “small family farms” reliant on volunteerism or labor-sharing arrangements, part of the emergent “sharing economy,” may be confronting similar legal conundrums to those faced by Southeast Asian farms. (shrink)

Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry has recently been bolstered by empirical research suggesting that people’s concrete-case intuitions are vulnerable to irrational biases (e.g., the order effect). What is more, skeptics argue that we have no way to ‘‘calibrate” our intuitions against these biases and no way of anticipating intuitional instability. This paper challenges the skeptical position, introducing data from two studies that suggest not only that people’s concrete-case intuitions are often stable, but also (...) that people have introspective awareness of this stability, providing a promising means by which to assess the epistemic value of our intuitions. (shrink)

Recent scholarship (Goodwin & Darley, 2008) on the meta-ethical debate between objectivism and relativism has found people to be mixed: they are objectivists about some issues, but relativists about others. The studies discussed here sought to explore this further. Study 1 explored whether giving people the ability to identify moral issues for themselves would reveal them to be more globally objectivist. Study 2 explored people's meta-ethical commitments more deeply, asking them to provide verbal explanations for their judgments. This revealed that (...) while people think they are relativists, this may not always be the case. The explanations people gave were sometimes rated by outside (blind) coders as being objective, even when given a relativist response. Nonetheless, people remained meta-ethical pluralists. Why this might be is discussed. (shrink)

Advances in our understanding of appraisal processes and emotion regulation have been two of the most important contributions of research on cognition and emotion in recent decades. Interestingly, however, progress in these two areas has been less mutually informative than one might expect or desire. To help remedy this situation, we provide an integration of appraisal theory and the process model of emotion regulation by describing parallel, interacting and iterative systems for emotion generation and emotion regulation. Outputs of the emotion (...) generation system are perceived by the emotion regulation system, and emotion regulation strategies then modulate emotion by intervening at specific stages of the emotion generation system, ultimately changing appraisal dimensions. We hope that our unified perspective will encourage and guide future research at the interface of cognition and emotion. (shrink)

We used a retrospective survey to model the patterns of appraisal, motivation, and coping that uniquely correspond with 12 positive emotions (affection/love, amusement, awe, challenge/det...

There is growing interest in the processes by which entrepreneurial opportunities are cocreated between entrepreneurs and their stakeholders. The longitudinal case study of de novo firm Wakefield Seafoods seeks to understand the underlying dynamics of phenomena that play out over time as stakeholders emerge and their contributions become essential to the opportunity formation process. The king crab data show that under conditions of uncertainty, characterized by incomplete or missing knowledge, entrepreneurial processes of experimentation, failure, and learning were effective in forming (...) and exploiting an opportunity. Moreover, contrary to existing literature that either emphasizes heroic entrepreneurs or downplays their value, this article shows that both the vision of the entrepreneur and the stakeholder contributions are critical. This detailed examination of process data shows that the cumulative actions made by entrepreneurs in concert with their stakeholders formed an opportunity that coalesced into a new market. (shrink)

Saul_Jennifer, Scepticism and Implicit Bias.

Anglophone attention to issues of race and racism, with particular attention to Kant and other members of the German Enlightenment, has long been hampered by a lack of critical editions in English. While this is no longer significantly true for Kant studies, it continues to be the case for many of the most relevant works by Georg Forster and Christoph Meiners. This is a problem for philosophers working exclusively in English, and it is one that is only exacerbated by the (...) field’s general lack of interest in not just the intellectual history of philosophy and its figures, but in analyses published in languages other than English today. Ahistorical, monolinguistic approaches become especially problematic, however, when it comes to the philosophical analysis of race and racism, given the need to approach such topics from multiple angles at once—historical, political, cultural, economic, and legal—a fact that is no less true for scholarship on the figures of the eighteenth century than it is for the study of the present one. My aim in what follows therefore is to fill in a bit of the bigger picture, the specific context within which a writer like Georg Forster and his cohort were working, in order to better frame the kinds of specialised discussions of Kant’s philosophy of race that we find today. (shrink)

What is common knowledge? According to the dominant iterative model, a group of people commonly knows that p if and only if they each individually know that p, and they furthermore each know that they each know that p, and so on to infinity. According to the integrative model proposed in this paper, a group commonly knows that p when its members are united in a state of mind of the type whose contents must be true. Epistemic integration within a (...) group is enabled by symmetrical signalling processes such as eye contact. In conversational dyads, symmetrical processing operates on pairs of signals produced by the two sides in a familiar format: speakers generate content for joint attention in main channel communication, and addressees evaluate that content in backchannel communication. Processes of reinforcement learning shape our pairwise signalling, driving the accumulation of common knowledge, both in response to extrinsic reward for coordinated action, and in response to the intrinsic reward of curiosity. Where the iterative model caps the epistemic performance of the group at the level of its weakest member, the integrative model of common knowledge shows how groups working together can outperform their strongest member working alone. (shrink)

Though pain scientists now understand pain to be a complex experience typically composed of sensation, emotion, cognition, and motivational responses, many philosophers maintain that pain is adequately characterized by one privileged aspect of this complexity. Philosophically dominant unitary accounts of pain as a sensation or perception are here evaluated by their ability to explain actual cases—and found wanting. Further, it is argued that no forthcoming unitary characterization of pain is likely to succeed. Instead, I contend that both the motivating intuitions (...) behind unitary accounts and the wide range of pain phenomena are best accommodated by a componential view of pain that does not privilege any single component as necessary or sufficient. (shrink)

The focus of this paper will be to examine the implications that a “practical” approach to conceptual engineering might have for the “traditional” conception of philosophy as uncovering truths about phenomena of philosophical interest. In doing so, I will be building on the ideas of a figure that many take to be the first major philosopher to write on conceptual engineering: Rudolf Carnap. Though the current wave of interest in conceptual engineering goes back less than a decade, many conceptual engineers (...) have found precedent for their views in Carnap’s characterization of what he called “explication.” Interestingly, however, not nearly as much attention has been paid to another Carnapian thesis which seems to me to have deep relevance to methodological questions about conceptual engineering. I have in mind here the distinction between internal and external questions proposed in “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (1950b) and the accompanying claim that external questions lack cognitive content and can be cogently approached only as a matter of pragmatic decision-making. This is the aspect of Carnap’s views upon which I propose to build. I'll first make the case that there is a suggestive similarity between Carnap’s claim that external questions are matters of pragmatic choice and the practical conceptual engineer’s claim that engineering success should be characterized in terms of suitability to a function or purpose. After that, I'll look at potential worries about the Carnapian distinction—including, e.g., the concern that it relies on the analytic/synthetic distinction. Finally, I will propose a somewhat modified and expanded version of the distinction and examine its consequences for the thesis that philosophy aims at discovering truths about phenomena of philosophical interest. (shrink)

Experiments in psychology and experimental philosophy suggest that judgments about actual causation are partially governed by norms: norm violations are more likely to be singled out as causes, while structurally analogous factors that obey the norms are unlikely to be singled out. The norm-sensitivity of causal judgment has, in turn, lent support to a normative analysis of causation itself. In this paper, I question whether the support stands. I articulate and examine two principal reasons support might be so derived. For (...) each, I argue that, in fact, a non-normative analysis is better supported. (shrink)

Meta-ethical pluralism gives us additional insight into how moral communities become cohesive and why this can be problematic (even dangerous) – and in this way provides support for the worries raised by the target article. At the same time, it offers several reasons to be concerned about the proposed initiative, the most important of which is that it could seriously backfire.

This study examines the relation between firms’ corporate philanthropic giving and their performance in three other social domains – employee relations, environmental issues, and product safety. Based on a sample of 384 U.S. companies and using data pooled from 1998 through 2000, we find that worse performers in the other social areas are both more likely to make charitable contributions and that the extent of their giving is larger than for better performers. Analyses of each separate area of social performance, (...) however, indicate that the relation between giving and negative social performance (cited concerns) only holds for the environmental issues and product safety areas. We find no significant association between corporate philanthropy and employee relations concerns. In general, these findings suggest that corporate philanthropy may be more a tool of legitimization than a measure of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

A promising development in the philosophy of causation analyzes actual causation using structural equation models, i.e., “causal models”. This paper carefully considers what it means for an interpreted model to be accurate of its target situation. These considerations show, first, that our existing understanding of accuracy is inadequate. Further, and more controversially, they show that any causal model analysis is committed to a kind of relativism – a view whereby causation is a three-part relation holding between a cause, an effect, (...) and something else. In particular, insofar as a causal model analysis construes causation mind-and-language independently, it must treat causation as relative to a specification of background possibilities – i.e., a ‘modal profile.’ Or, so I argue. (shrink)

In this paper, I write about nurses of colour who have made significant contributions to nursing, yet are actively ignored in traditional nursing textbooks related to colonized thinking. One consequence of this is that when we think about comparing the disparities of the past to the present day, we see that we have not made much of a difference. The disparity is still huge. I call on all of us as nurses to challenge ourselves to think beyond the box of (...) colonized thought to what we know is true. (shrink)

An instructor's decision to drop an exam score and to assign a penalty to all class members because no one was willing to identify students who allegedly cheated is described, including how the class members felt about the incident. For the most part, students held the cheaters responsible for their penalties. The instructor received only slightly lower student evaluations, as compared to the 2 other courses she taught that year.

Stories are an important indicator of our vision of the future. In the case of artificial intelligence (AI), dominant stories are polarized between notions of threat and myopic solutionism. The central storytellers—big tech, popular media, and authors of science fiction—represent particular demographics and motivations. Many stories, and storytellers, are missing. This paper details the accounts of missing AI narratives by leading scholars from a range of disciplines interested in AI Futures. Participants focused on the gaps between dominant narratives and the (...) untold stories of the capabilities, issues, and everyday realities of the technology. One participant proposed a “story crisis” in which these narratives compete to shape the public discourse on AI. Our findings indicate that dominant narratives distract and mislead public understandings and conceptions of AI. This suggests a need to pay closer attention to missing AI narratives. It is not simply about telling new stories, it is about listening to existing stories and asking what is wanted from AI. We call for realistic, nuanced, and inclusive stories, working with and for diverse voices, which consider (1) story-teller; (2) genre, and (3) communicative purpose. Such stories can then inspire the next generation of thinkers, technologists, and storytellers. (shrink)

In this study we analyze the overlapping perspectives of legitimacy theory, institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and stakeholder theory. Our purpose is to explore how these theories can inform and be built upon by one another. Through our analysis we provide a broader theoretical understanding of these theories that may support and promote social and environmental accounting research. This article starts with a detailed analysis of legitimacy theory by bringing some recent critical discussions on legitimacy and corporations in the management (...) literature into accounting research. The notion forwarded by legitimacy theory then serves as an overarching concept to examine the relationship between and among theories. We conclude that two theoretical considerations are important for future social and environmental accounting research. First, it must be acknowledged that some business entities initiate social activities based on direct interactions with stakeholders, whereas others may also undertake similar activities to manage their societal level of legitimacy. Second, from analyzing the perspectives of legitimacy theory, institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and stakeholder theory, it is possible to reach compatible interpretations of business social phenomena, and the selection and application of these theories should depend upon the focus of study. (shrink)

Humans have distinctive powers of reflection: no other animal seems to have anything like our capacity for self-examination. Many philosophers hold that this capacity has a uniquely important guiding role in our cognition; others, notably Hilary Kornblith, draw attention to its weaknesses. Kornblith chiefly aims to dispel the sense that there is anything ‘magical’ about second-order mental states, situating them in the same causal net as ordinary first-order mental states. But elsewhere he goes further, suggesting that there is something deeply (...) misleading about reflection’s first-person view of cognition. This chapter takes a closer look at the conditions under which reflection is misleading. Even if humans are the only reflective animals, we are no longer the only creatures that can be questioned about their claims. Chatbots can also be asked to explain themselves, and by studying the conditions under which they produce clarification as opposed to confabulation, we can develop a non-skeptical account of the epistemic value of reflection. I argue that this capacity naturally supports the distribution of complex problem solving among multiple agents. (shrink)

Over the last decade, empirical research on compassion has burgeoned in the biomedical, clinical, translational, and foundational sciences. Increasingly sophisticated understandings and measures of compassion continue to emerge from the abundance of multi- and cross-disciplinary studies. Naturally, the diversity of research methods and theoretical frameworks employed presents a significant challenge to consensus and synthesis of this knowledge. To bring the empirical findings of separate and sometimes siloed disciplines into conversation with one another requires an examination of their disparate assumptions about (...) what compassion is and how it can be known. Here, we present an integrated theoretical review of methodologies used in the empirical study of compassion. Our goal is to highlight the distinguishing features of each of these ways of knowing compassion, as well as the strengths and limitations of applying them to specific research questions. We hope this will provide useful tools for selecting methods that are tailored to explicit objectives (methods matching), taking advantage of methodological complementarity across disciplines (methods-mixing), and incorporating the empirical study of compassion into fields in which it may be missing. (shrink)

This investigation applies a social cognition framework to examine moral awareness in business situations. Using a vignette-based instrument, the investigation compares the recall, recognition, and ascription of importance to moral-versus strategy-related issues in business managers (n = 86) and academic professors (n = 61). Results demonstrate that managers recall strategy-related issues more than moral-related issues and recognize and ascribe importance to moral-related issues less than academics. It also finds an inverse relationship between socialization in the business context and moral awareness. (...) Future directions for moral awareness research and the practical implications for these findings are discussed. (shrink)

According to classical arguments, language learning is both facilitated and constrained by cognitive biases. These biases are reflected in linguistic typology—the distribution of linguistic patterns across the world's languages—and can be probed with artificial grammar experiments on child and adult learners. Beginning with a widely successful approach to typology (Optimality Theory), and adapting techniques from computational approaches to statistical learning, we develop a Bayesian model of cognitive biases and show that it accounts for the detailed pattern of results of artificial (...) grammar experiments on noun-phrase word order (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012). Our proposal has several novel properties that distinguish it from prior work in the domains of linguistic theory, computational cognitive science, and machine learning. This study illustrates how ideas from these domains can be synthesized into a model of language learning in which biases range in strength from hard (absolute) to soft (statistical), and in which language-specific and domain-general biases combine to account for data from the macro-level scale of typological distribution to the micro-level scale of learning by individuals. (shrink)

Interpreting Shakespeare’s seminal work ‘Hamlet’ through the lens of biocentrism offers an illuminating paradigm shift from traditional analyses. Biocentrism, a philosophical standpoint positing the intrinsic value of all living beings and the fundamental interconnectedness of life, contrasts sharply with the anthropocentric viewpoint that places humans at the centre of the universe’s hierarchy. This re-evaluation not only enriches our understanding of the play’s enduring themes, characters, and narrative arcs but also aligns Shakespeare’s work with contemporary environmental and ethical discussions. At the (...) heart of ‘Hamlet’ lie profound contemplations of existence, morality, and the human condition—themes that resonate deeply with biocentric philosophy. (shrink)

In 1786 Georg Forster published a widely read critique of Immanuel Kant’s theory of race. Since then, the dispute between Forster and Kant on the unity of mankind has been widely discussed in light of both Forster’s essay and Kant’s decision to write a lengthy response to Forster in 1788. In this discussion I widen the frame for considering the two positions by focusing on Kant’s lectures on Physical Geography. In these notes Kant emerges as an ethnographer asking many of (...) the same questions posed by Forster himself, a man who had become famous since his time spent onboard James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific (1772-1775). Placing Kant’s ethnography in closer conversation with Forster reveals the many similarities (and some well-known differences) between the two. By including some of Forster’s other writings from the 1780s in an assessment of their debate, a much fuller picture can be had regarding natural historical investigations into the unity and difference of mankind at the time. (shrink)

This paper provides a general introduction to the use of causal models in the metaphysics of causation, specifically structural equation models and directed acyclic graphs. It reviews the formal framework, lays out a method of interpretation capable of representing different underlying metaphysical relations, and describes the use of these models in analyzing causation.

Poverty has traditionally been conceived of as a state of deprivation. To be poor is to lack something essential to human flourishing. How that something is understood—in terms of welfare, resources, or capabilities—and how it is measured—in absolute terms or relative to a social standard—has been the subject of much debate within the development literature. In this paper, I put forward an account of poverty rooted in the philosophy of action. I argue that poverty essentially involves being in a context (...) in which a reasonable agent’s future-directed agency is systemically undermined. Centering this dimension of poverty allows us to attend to aspects of poverty that are easily overlooked on existing accounts. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what constitutes an apt interpreted model for the purpose of analyzing causation. I first collect universally adopted aptness principles into a basic account, flagging open questions and choice points along the way. I then explore various additional aptness principles that have been proposed in the literature but have not been widely adopted, the motivations behind their proposals, and the concerns with each that stand in the way of universal adoption. I conclude that the remaining (...) work of articulating aptness for a SEM analysis of causation is tied up with issues to do with modality, ontology, and mereology. Continuing this work is therefore likely to shed light on the relationship between these areas and causation more generally. (shrink)

In this article, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian model of learning in a general type of artificial language‐learning experiment in which learners are exposed to a mixture of grammars representing the variation present in real learners’ input, particularly at times of language change. The modeling goal is to formalize and quantify hypothesized learning biases. The test case is an experiment (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012) targeting the learning of word‐order patterns in the nominal domain. The model identifies internal biases of (...) the experimental participants, providing evidence that learners impose (possibly arbitrary) properties on the grammars they learn, potentially resulting in the cross‐linguistic regularities known as typological universals. Learners exposed to mixtures of artificial grammars tended to shift those mixtures in certain ways rather than others; the model reveals how learners’ inferences are systematically affected by specific prior biases. These biases are in line with a typological generalization—Greenberg's Universal 18—which bans a particular word‐order pattern relating nouns, adjectives, and numerals. (shrink)

My thanks to Anik Waldow and Charles Wolfe for their work in producing a volume celebrating our late dear friend Stephen Gaukroger (1950-2023): The Shaping of the Sciences: Essays in Honour of Stephen Gaukroger, edited by Charles Wolfe and Anik Waldow (Springer, 2024). This is my contribution, pp. 187-195 / ISBN: 978-3-031-76036-5 / eBook ISBN 978-3-031-76037-2.

Eighteenth-century German writers with broad interests in natural history, and in particular, in the kind of ethnographic reports typically included in travel and expedition narratives, had to be able to access and read the original reports or they had to work with translations. The translators of these reports were, moreover, typically forced more than usual into the role of interpreter. This was especially the case when it came to accounts wherein vocabulary did not exist or was at least not settled, (...) and more importantly where scientific understanding was uncertain or altogether lacking, a situation that could only make the creation of semantic categories all the more significant. With this state of affairs in mind, this essay concentrates on Immanuel Kant’s work to develop a specialised racial vocabulary, and does so in a manner that reveals the importance of Buffon’s account of variation as a resource for Kant, even as Kant sought to position the new vocabulary as an improved template for transforming taxonomy or Naturbeschreibung into a genuine historical science or Naturgeschichte. (shrink)

This article offers a new theory of suffering as significantly disrupted agency. In presenting it, I here make three significant contributions. First, I subject the leading account of suffering as undesired unpleasant experience (Brady, 2018) to its first dose of sustained scrutiny. Second and drawing on this discussion, I identify and liberate eight desiderata for any account of suffering. Third, I present the novel account of suffering as significantly disrupted agency and argue that it satisfies these desiderata. Moreover, I argue (...) that elaborating this proposal with a minimal model of agency allows us to capture both the suffering of a wide range of organisms and the complex dynamics of suffering as it is endured. I conclude by briefly highlighting some of the potential implications of the theory for further theoretical and practical inquiries. (shrink)

Proponents of “the affective appeal” :787–812, 2014; Zagzebski in Philos Phenomenol Res 66:104–124, 2003) argue that we can make progress in the longstanding debate about the nature of moral motivation by appealing to the affective dimension of affective episodes such as emotions, which allegedly play either a causal or constitutive role in moral judgements. Specifically, they claim that appealing to affect vindicates a version of Motivational Internalism—roughly, the view that there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation—that is (...) both more empirically respectable and less theoretically controversial than non-affective versions. We here argue that the affective appeal fails: versions of Internalism which appeal to affect are neither more empirically supported, nor clearly less controversial, than versions of Internalism which make no such appeal. Although affect doubtless has an important role to play in explaining moral motivation, we are sceptical that establishing any such role advances the debate. (shrink)

We examine the reverse mathematics and computability theory of a form of Ramsey's theorem in which the linear n-tuples of a binary tree are colored.

Promiscuous realism is the thesis that there are many equally legitimate ways of classifying the world’s entities. Advocates of promiscuous realism are typically taken to hold the further the- sis, often undistinguished, that kind terms usefully deployed in scientific generalisations are no more natural than those deployed for any other purposes. Call this further thesis promiscuous nat- uralism. I here defend a version of promiscuous realism which denies promiscuous naturalism. To do so, I introduce the notion of a promiscuous kind: (...) a kind that is maximally usefully referenced in predictive and explanatory generalisations, none of which are scientific generalisations. I first defend the claim that pain is a promiscuous kind before extending these considerations to everyday mental kinds more generally. I draw on further reflections from both everyday life and contem- porary psychology to make credible the novel suggestion that our everyday theory of our minds is for the explanation and prediction of individuals. Combined with the complex idiosyncrasy of individual minds, this suggested aim of everyday theory gives us reason to think that promiscuity is prevalent among everyday mental kinds. (shrink)

One of the ethical issues that has been raised recently regarding emerging neurotherapies is that people will be coerced explicitly or implicitly in the workplace or in schools to take cognitive enhancing drugs. This article builds on this discussion by showing how the law may pressure people to adopt emerging neurotherapies. It focuses on a range of private law doctrines that, unlike the criminal law, do not come up very often in neuroethical discussions. Three doctrines—the doctrine of mitigation, the standard (...) of care in negligence, and child custody determinations in family law—are addressed to show how the law may pressure people to consent to treatment by offering a choice between accepting medical treatment and suffering a legal disadvantage. The doctrines considered in this article apply indirect pressure to submit to treatment, unlike court-ordered medical treatment, which applies direct pressure and is not addressed here. The outcome of this discussion is to show that there is a greater range of social pressures that may encourage the uptake of novel neurotherapies than one might initially think. Once treatments that were developed and offered with therapeutic benefits in mind become available, their existence gives rise to unintended legal consequences. This certainly does not mean we should cease developing new therapies that may be of tremendous benefit to patients, but it does raise some questions for physicians and for legal policy-makers. How should physicians, who are required by medical ethical principles to obtain valid consent to treatment, react to a patient’s reluctant consent that is driven by legal pressure? From the legal policy perspective, are our legal doctrines satisfactory or should they be changed because, for example, they unduly promote the collective interest over individual freedom to reject medical treatment or because they channel us toward economically efficient treatments to the detriment of more costly but potentially superior approaches of dealing with behavioural problems? (shrink)

Previous research reveals that when leaders enact environmentally specific transformational leadership, they positively affect corporate environmental responsibility. While this research provides important insights into how leaders create and shape corporate environmental responsibility, confidence in the validity of these findings is limited because the psychometric properties of the measurement of environmentally specific transformational leadership has not yet been assessed. The goal of the current research was to develop and validate a measure of environmentally specific transformational leadership. To this end, four studies (...) were conducted, which together produced a reliable and valid scale from which future research can stem. Theoretical and practical limitations are discussed. (shrink)

Tool use research has suffered from a lack of consistent theoretical frameworks. There is a plethora of tool use definitions and the most widespread ones are so inclusive that the behaviors that fall under them arguably do not have much in common. The situation is aggravated by the prevalence of anecdotes, which have played an undue role in the literature. In order to provide a more rigorous foundation for research and to advance our understanding of the interrelation between tool use (...) and cognition, we suggest the adoption of Fragaszy and Mangalam's (2018) tooling framework, which is characterized by the creation of a body-plus-object system that manages a mechanical interface between tool and surface. Tooling is limited to a narrower suite of behaviors than tool use, which might facilitate its neurocognitive investigation. Indeed, evidence in the literature indicates that tooling has distinct neurocognitive underpinnings not shared by other activities typically classified as tool use, at least in primates. In order to understand the extent of tooling incidences in previous research, we systematically surveyed the comprehensive tool use catalog by Shumaker et al. (2011). We identified 201 tool use submodes, of which only 81 could be classified as tooling, and the majority of the tool use examples across species were poorly supported by evidence. Furthermore, tooling appears to be phylogenetically less widespread than tool use, with the greatest variability found in the primate order. However, in order to confirm these findings and to understand the evolution and neurocognitive mechanisms of tooling, more systematic research will be required in the future, particularly with currently underrepresented taxa. (shrink)

Background: The public domain of midwifery practice, represented by the educational and hospital institutions could be blamed for a subconscious ethical dilemma for midwifery practitioners. The result of such tension can be seen in complaints from maternity service users of dehumanised care. When expectations are not met, women report dehumanising experiences that carry long term consequences to both them and their child. Objectives: To revisit the ethical foundation of midwifery practice to reflect the feminist Ethic of Care and reframe what (...) is valuable to women and midwives during the childbirth experience. Research Design: A comprehensive literature review is presented from the midwifery and feminist ethics discourse. Ethical Considerations: Nil to report. Findings: Women are vulnerable during childbirth as they need care, yet they prioritise elements of relationship in their experience. The Ethic of Care approach equalises the relationship between the midwife and the woman, providing the space for relationship building and allowing midwives to meet the expectations of their accepted responsibility. Discussion: Some midwives manage to balance the demands of the institution with the needs of the woman. This is described as both an emotional and professionally challenging balancing act. Conclusion: Until there is a formal acknowledgement of the different ethical approach to midwifery practice from within the profession and the Institution, midwifery identity and practice will continue to be compromised. (shrink)