Hunt and Vitell''s General Theory (1992) is used in a cross-cultural comparison of U.S. and Taiwanese business practitioners. Results indicate that Taiwanese practitioners exhibit lower perceptions of an ethical issue in a scenario based on bribery, as well as milder deontological evaluations and ethical judgments relative to their U.S. counterparts. In addition, Taiwan respondents showed higher likelihood of making the payment. Several of the paths between variables in the theory are confirmed in both U.S. and Taiwan samples, with summary data (...) suggesting the Hunt and Vitell theory performs well in both U.S. and Taiwan. Some unanticipated linkages within the model were uncovered in the samples. Results and implications are discussed. (shrink)

Although there is a significant number of books and essays in which Aquinas's thought is examined in some detail, there are still many aspects of his writings that remain unknown to those outside the field of Thomistic studies; or which are generally misunderstood. An example is Aquinas's account of the origins of individual human life. This is the subject of a chapter in a recent book by Robert Pasnau on Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). Since there will (...) be readers whose only knowledge of the issues in question will come from Pasnau's account, and since that account is contentious in substance, and advanced in advocacy of a particular moral interest, it is necessary to provide another, and, we believe, more credible account of the issue of when human life begins, as this may be determined on the basis of known empirical facts and Aquinas's metaphysics, and a more accurate representation of how (and how extensively) this matter has been treated hitherto. The morality of abortion turns on two important sets of issues: the first metaphysical, concerning the beginnings of human life and the specific status of the embryo; the second, ethical, having to do with the nature and scope of value and associated moral requirements. Besides engaging in exegesis we address both issues in philosophical terms. (shrink)

The present essay takes up matters discussed by Robert Pasnau in his response to our previous criticism of his account of Aquinas's view of when a foetus acquires a human soul. We are mainly concerned with metaphysical and biological issues and argue that the kind of organization required for ensoulment is that sufficient for the full development of a human being, and that this is present from conception. We contend that in his criticisms of our account Pasnau fails clearly to (...) distinguish first, between a passive potentiality and an active capacity; second, between having a power intrinsically and being an instrumental agent of that which has it intrinsically; third, between per accidens and per se causal series; and fourth, between sense cognition and conceptual thought. We conclude that philosophy and embryology support the position that human beings exist from the point of conception. (shrink)

Globally, performative spaces and venues of artistic creativity are governed by sets of conventions which impact the creative process. In this article, we discuss the experiences of four different creatives, operating in four different creative spaces. A poet and football player, a theatre producer and script writer, a gallery curator, and a ballet dancer have all shared their experiences of how traditionally white and heteronormative discourses regulate their respective creative spaces, the ways they conform to or transgress these norms, and (...) the ways their interactions with their chosen creative spaces affect their creativity. These creatives have identities which are somehow ‘marked’, somehow ‘different’ from the ‘norms’ Wales and South-West England. Whether members of the LGBTQ+ community, migrants to Wales from European and Caribbean countries, or being a different race to many around them, the creatives all have complicated interactions with the norms of their creative spaces within Wales and South-West England. These creative’s identities often clash with an entrenched lack of diversity and the broader expectations of British society. Despite, or perhaps, because of, these conflicts and tensions, each of the creatives discussed here found immense joy in the relationship between their identity/ies and their creative spaces and discovered how their own identity/ies are a central driving force for their creativity. Regardless of the differences of their mediums, each creative interviewed sought to centre their identity, to help them create art which can challenge dominant white and heteronormative discourses in wider British society. (shrink)

Learning from experiences is key towards the discovery of enterprising knowledge for mumpreneurs in emerging economies such as Indonesia, where most of the entrepreneurship literature is still relatively scant. In discussing entrepreneurial learning of entrepreneurs who are in motherhood, also known as mumpreneurs, these studies require the consideration of gender distinction of women. The term “mumpreneurs” refers to women who embrace the identity of a mother and an entrepreneur, and these two identities engender role conflicts for them. Thus, this phenomenology (...) study explored seven mumpreneurs' experiences of their struggles and strategies to survive the pandemic. The findings shed light on the pandemic impacts and perseverance experiences that mumpreneurs must withstand to maneuver the encountered challenges. This study presents an entrepreneurial learning framework for mumpreneurs by providing pedagogical guidance and inspiration to enable them cruise past future crisis environments. This framework is ultimately crucial in contributing to the ongoing discussions at the academics, practitioners, and policymakers' levels to advise and support mumpreneurial activities that are substantial to the country's economy. (shrink)

Organizational ethics programs often are created to address tensions in organizational values that have been identified through repeated clinical ethics consultation requests. Clinical ethicists possess some core competencies that are suitable for the leadership of high-quality organizational ethics programs, but they may need to develop new skills to build these programs, such as familiarity with healthcare delivery science, healthcare financing, and quality improvement methodology. To this end, we suggest that clinical ethicists build organizational ethics programs incrementally and via quality improvement (...) projects undertaken in collaboration with senior clinical leaders. Organizational ethics programs often differ from clinical ethics programs in their membership and processes, and likely will require ethicists to forge new partnerships with a wide array of organizational leaders. With attention to the ways that organizational ethics programs differ from clinical ethics programs, and investment in quality improvement methodology and formal institutional needs assessments, clinical ethics leaders can position an organizational ethics program to advocate effectively for visible and compelling alignment of leadership decision making with the values of the organization. (shrink)

Progressive supranuclear palsy is a movement disorder with prominent tau neuropathology. Brain diseases with abnormal tau deposits are called tauopathies, the most common of which is Alzheimer's disease. Environmental causes of tauopathies include repetitive head trauma associated with some sports. To identify common genetic variation contributing to risk for tauopathies, we carried out a genome-wide association study of 1,114 individuals with PSP and 3,247 controls followed by a second stage in which we genotyped 1,051 cases and 3,560 controls for the (...) stage 1 SNPs that yielded P ≤ 10-3. We found significant previously unidentified signals associated with PSP risk at STX6, EIF2AK3 and MOBP. We confirmed two independent variants in MAPT affecting risk for PSP, one of which influences MAPT brain expression. The genes implicated encode proteins for vesicle-membrane fusion at the Golgi-endosomal interface, for the endoplasmic reticulum unfolded protein response and for a myelin structural component. © 2011 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

John F. Henry is an eminent economist who has made important contributions to heterodox economics drawing on Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and John Maynard Keynes. His historical approach offers radical insights into the evolution of ideas (ideologies and theories) giving rise to and/or induced by the changes in capitalist society. Essays collected in this festschrift not only evaluate John Henry's contributions in connection to Marx's and Veblen's theories, but also apply them to the socio-economic issues (...) in the 21st century. In Part I leading heterodox economists in the traditions of Marxism, Post Keynesianism, and Institutionalism critically examine Marx's and Veblen's theoretical frameworks (and their connections to each other) that have become the foundations of heterodox economics. Chapters in Part II showcase alternative theoretical explanations inspired by Marx, Veblen, and Henry. Topics in this Part include financial crisis, financialization, capital accumulation, economics teaching, and the historical relationship between money and class society. Part III is devoted to John Henry's heterodox economics encapsulated in his "farewell" lecture, interview, and bibliography. Essays in this book, individually and collectively, make an important point that the history of economic thought (or historical analysis of economic theory and policy) is an integral part of developing heterodox economics as an alternative theoretical framework. Anyone who is troubled by the recurring failure of capitalism as well as mainstream economics will find this book well worth reading. (shrink)

Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ 08903.

This article investigates the potential of fMRI to test assumptions about different components in models of complex cognitive tasks. If the components of a model can be associated with specific brain regions, one can make predictions for the temporal course of the BOLD response in these regions. An event‐locked procedure is described for dealing with temporal variability and bringing model runs and individual data trials into alignment. Statistical methods for testing the model are described that deal with the scan‐to‐scan correlations (...) in the errors of measurement of the BOLD signal. This approach is illustrated using a “sacrificial” ACT‐R model that involves mapping 6 modules onto 6 brain regions in an experiment from concerned with equation solving. The model's visual encoding predicted the BOLD response in the fusiform gyrus, its controlled retrieval predicted the BOLD response in the lateral inferior prefrontal cortex, and its subgoal setting predicted the BOLD response in the anterior cingulate cortex. On the other hand, its motor programming failed to predict anticipatory activation in the motor cortex, its representational changes failed to predicted the pattern of activity in the posterior parietal cortex, and its procedural component failed to predict an initial spike in caudate. The results illustrate the power of such data to direct the development of a theory of complex problem solving, both at the level of a specific task model as well as at the level of the cognitive architecture. (shrink)

In this paper I have investigated the claim that egoism is incapable of being a moral action-guide. Egoism is that normative view in ethics which claims that a person has an obligation to perform or refrain from performing some act, if and only if so doing is in that person's (the agent's) own best interest. William Baumer and W.D. Glasgow have both presented arguments which purportedly show that egoism leads to contradictions and inconsistencies which prevent it from being a moral (...) action-guide. In my refutation of these charges I argue that Baumer's agrument begs the question against egoism by employing a non-egoistic definition of 'right', and that Glasgow's arguments involve various ambiguities and equivocations. I conclude, then, that at least from a logical point of view, egoism is as acceptable a moral action-guide as any non-egoistic view. (shrink)

Medicalization has been a process articulated primarily by social scientists, historians, and cultural critics. Comparatively little is written about the role of bioethics in appraising medicalization as a social process. The authors consider what medicalization means, its definition, functions, and criteria for assessment. A series of brief case sketches illustrate how bioethics can contribute to the analysis and public policy discussion of medicalization.

One hundred years ago, in his lecture Science as a Vocation, Max Weber prefigured a transition from science as a calling to science as bureaucratically organized work. He argued that a calling for science is critical for sustaining scientific work. Using Weber’s arguments for science as a vocation as a lens, in this paper, we discuss whether a calling for science may become difficult to maintain in increasingly bureaucratized scientific work—and also whether such a calling is necessary for the advance (...) of science. We present empirical evidence for this bureaucratization of scientific work and further develop Weber’s discussion of science by contrasting it with the views of other theorists of science and innovation. Finally, we discuss the implications of these theories, develop a set of policy recommendations, and outline a research agenda designed to develop science policies and a sociology of science that match this shift from vocation to bureaucracy in scientific work. (shrink)

This volume explores the role of some of the most prominent twentieth-century philosophers and political thinkers as teachers. It examines what obstacles they confronted as teachers and how they overcame them in conveying truth to their students in an age dominated by ideological thinking.

Given that the benefits of Corporate Political Activity (CPA) are usually granted in the form of favorable industry regulation that benefits all industry participants rather than a single firm, small politically inactive firms are often able to take advantage of the benefits from CPA without investing in them. We argue that the free‐riding problem is context specific. Situations of extreme uncertainty create institutional voids that enable individual firms to more fully appropriate the returns from their CPA. In this paper, we (...) examine the influence that CPA had on the U.S. government’s disbursements of TARP funding in 2008. We find that politically active firms were able to avoid the free‐rider problem by obtaining more instances of TARP funding when compared to firms that were not politically active. In addition to being more likely to receive TARP funds, politically active firms received larger amounts of TARP funding than those firms who were not politically active. (shrink)

While across the animal kingdom offspring are born smaller than their parents, notable exceptions exist. Several dipteran species belonging to the Hippoboscoidea superfamily can produce offspring larger than themselves. In this essay, the blood‐feeding tsetse is focused on. It is suggested that the extreme reproductive strategy of this fly is enabled by feeding solely on highly nutritious blood, and producing larval offspring that are soft and malleable. This immense reproductive expenditure may have evolved to avoid competition with other biting flies. (...) Tsetse also transmit blood‐borne parasites that cause the fatal diseases called African trypanosomiases. It is discussed how tsetse life history and reproductive strategy profoundly influence the type of vector control interventions used to reduce fly populations. In closing, it is argued that the unusual life history of tsetse warrants their preservation in the areas where human and animal health is not threatened. (shrink)

“Would you like another EXTRA BIG ASS FRIES?”.

Health has been called the first wealth, and global health justice and governance call us to consider how justly and ethically to share this wealth. In formulating a proper political theory for glo...

In a recent set of publications Ballantyne :485–503, 2011, Synthese 185:319–334, 2012, Synthese 91:1391–1407, 2013) argues that luck does not have a significant role in understanding the concept of knowledge. The problem, Ballantyne argues, lies in what is commonly thought to be a necessary condition for luck—a significance or value condition :385–398, 2007; Lackey, in Austral J Philos 86:255–267, 2008, Ballantyne, in Can J Philos 41:485–503, 2011). For an event, like forming a true belief, to be lucky then it must (...) be of some significance or value to an agent. Yet, if significance, as it has also been commonly thought, plays a role in determining the degree of luck :485–503, 2011), then this leads to a result similar to an absurd form of pragmatic encroachment. If this problem cannot be avoided, then anti-luck epistemology should be abandoned. However, this paper will argue that with proper considerations about the nature of luck according to at least one theory, no such problem arises. (shrink)

Clare, the titular character of The Time Traveller's Wife, reflects that "Everything seems simple until you think about it." This might well be a mantra for the whole of philosophy, but a fair few terms tend to stick out. "Knowledge", "goodness" and "happiness" for example, are all pervasive everyday terms that undergo significant philosophical analysis. "Luck", I think, is another one of these terms. Wishing someone good luck in their projects, and cursing our bad luck when success seems so close (...) to our reach or failure could have so easily been otherwise, happens so often that we rarely stop to reflect on what we really mean. Philosophical reflection on the nature of luck has a rich tradition, that is by no stretch confined to the Western philosophical canon. However, it has only very recently become one of the goals of philosophy to provide a clear account of what luck actually amounts to. This, in part, is the goal of this thesis. The thesis has two primary motivations. The first is to offer and defend a general account of luck that overcomes the problems faced by the current accounts of luck that are available in the current philosophical literature. The second is to apply this general account of luck to the areas of metaethics and epistemology where luck has been a pervasive and problematic concept, and demonstrate how this account of luck may resolve or further illuminate some of the problems that the notion has generated. The thesis is roughly split into two parts. The first half of the thesis focuses on the former objective of offering an account of luck. Chapter 1 offers a selected history of the philosophy of luck that spans from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, so that we might properly situate the current work on luck as part of the broader historical importance of the concept. Chapter 2 will set out the major rival to the theory of luck that I will offer - the lack of control account of luck. LCAL has various iterations across the literature, but is most clearly articulated by Wayne Riggs and E.J. Coffman. Both Coffman and Riggs add and adapt their own conditions to LCAL specifically so that the account may overcome several problems that have been levied against it. These further conditions are not incompatible so, to provide the strongest lack of control account possible, I have combined them to form a lack of control account I have called Combined LCAL - LCAL. The latter part of the chapter pits LCAL against some of the problems that have been raised against LCAL. However, despite the efforts of both Riggs and Coffman, even LCAL fails to counter some of these objections. For these reasons I have rejected LCAL has a viable candidate for an account of luck. Chapter 3 sets out a modal account of luck, as argued for by Pritchard, where an event is lucky only if it occurs in the actual world, but not in a relevant set of nearby possible worlds. Here I further elaborate on how we should understand the modal distances using Lewisian possible world semantics, and what worlds should be taken into consideration when fixing the relevant set of nearby possible worlds. I argue that these relevant sets of worlds should be fixed according to the domain of inquiry of which the luck is being applied - this I call the type of luck. Examples of this is the current literature are resultant luck - the type of luck concerned with the results of our actions, and veritic luck - the type of luck concerned with the modal safety of our belief formation. Due to the multitude of types of luck across disciplinary areas, a general modal account of luck requires flexibility in what factors should fix the relevant sets of possible worlds. I achieve this by providing a [TYPE] function for the general modal account of luck, which is used as a mean of inserting the relevant fixing conditions for any domain of inquiry. Chapter 3, in a similar vein to Chapter 2, pits the general modal account of luck against some of the problems that have been levied against MAL, specifically the Buried Treasure problem raised by Lackey and the agent causation problem as raised by Levy. More successfully, the modal account offered stands up against these criticisms. For these reasons, the modal condition understood with the [TYPE] function and Lewisian semantics concerning modal distances, will be adopted to make up one half of the conditions for my account of luck. Chapter 4 will look at the second condition for an account of luck - the significance condition. The chapter will set out the reasons for adopting a significance condition at all, and some of the ways in which the condition has been articulated by Rescher, Pritchard and Ballantyne. All of these current views of the significance condition will be found wanting due to their inability to make sense of certain kinds of luck in specific normative domains. For example, Ballantyne's account of significance focuses on the interests of an agent, yet for certain types of moral luck, the interests of the agent are irrelevant. Instead, I propose a relativised significance condition, where the value of the event is relative to the value of the normative domain in which the luck is being ascribed. Epistemic luck requires a focus on the epistemic significance of the event for the agent, moral luck requires a focus on the moral or ethical significance of the event for the agent, and so on. This I call the kind of luck. Similar to the [TYPE] function for the modal condition for luck, the significance condition requires a [NORMATIVE DOMAIN] function where the relevant normative domain can be inserted depending on the kind of luck. This version of the significance condition will be conjoined with the modal condition as set out in Chapter 3 to form the correct general account of luck. Chapter 5 is the first chapter of the second half of the thesis that concerns applying the account of luck set out in part 1 to more specific domains of inquiry. Chapter 5 concerns moral luck, more specifically, resultant moral luck. Moral luck has traditionally been understood in terms of lack of control. This chapter looks at how Pritchard and Driver have attempted to understand moral luck using modal conditions. However, it is argued that these attempts would be more successful if we adopted the account of luck that I have offered in previous chapters. The chapter will go on to look at two possible problems that may be faced by this modal account of luck, and how it may resolve these problems. Chapter 6, the final chapter, looks at epistemic luck, specifically how the adoption of the modal account I have offered resolves a particular problem targeted at anti-luck epistemology by Ballantyne. The problem, Ballantyne argues, is that given that luck requires a significance condition, the degree of significance affects the degree of luck and that the degree of luck involved in our belief formation affects whether we are in a position to know the target proposition, that the result is that degree of significance affects our ability to know. For at least some instances of this - such as the aesthetic significance that we assign to the target proposition - the result will be that non-epistemic factors that have no relevance at all whether an agent is in a position to know will affect that agent's position to know. The resolution to this problem can be found in a two part solution. The first part is to demonstrate that any degree of veritic epistemic luck results in the agent failing to know. The second is that through the relativisation of the significance condition, any type of value will not affect an agent's position to know, only the epistemic value. With these two considerations in mind, the latter of which that can only be held through the adoption of the modal account of luck I have offered, the problem may be resolved. (shrink)

It has been suggested that iconic graphical signs evolve into symbolic graphical signs through repeated usage. This article reports a series of interactive graphical communication experiments using a ‘pictionary’ task to establish the conditions under which the evolution might occur. Experiment 1 rules out a simple repetition based account in favor of an account that requires feedback and interaction between communicators. Experiment 2 shows how the degree of interaction affects the evolution of signs according to a process of grounding. Experiment (...) 3 confirms the prediction that those not involved directly in the interaction have trouble interpreting the graphical signs produced in Experiment 1. On the basis of these results, this article argues that icons evolve into symbols as a consequence of the systematic shift in the locus of information from the sign to the users' memory of the sign's usage supported by an interactive grounding process. (shrink)

We consider the varieties and directions of influence that the source and target domains involved in a conceptual metaphor can have on each other during the course of understanding metaphorical utterances based on the metaphor. Previous studies have been restricted both as to direction of influence and as to type of influence. They have been largely confined to the “forward” (source to target) direction of influence, and they have concentrated on the transfer of features or propositions and (to some extent) (...) the highlighting of aspects of a domain. By contrast, this article stresses the importance both of other varieties of influence (e.g., transfer of queries and uncertainty effects) and of “reverse” influence (target to source). We seek to curb the natural tendency to think that, because metaphor involves an overall move from source to target, therefore all inter-domain influences in the course of understanding go in that direction. The bulk of the article explores the theoretical issues involved. These issues have arisen out of a reasoning-based approach to metaphor, seeking to make best use of information from metaphorical utterance, context, source and target domains, and known metaphorical mappings, by applying a complex overall reasoning process. The article briefly explains the thorough implementation of reverse influence in a computer program for metaphorical reasoning called ATT-Meta, although the theoretical considerations are relevant to all disciplines concerned with metaphor. We make some suggestions for further computational and psychological research on metaphor. (shrink)

Given that social studies pedagogy often runs in direct opposition to how students best learn, social studies teacher preparation must intervene by providing teachers robust experiences for inquiry, interpretation, creation, and personal meaning making. Digital history represents an area of innovation in social studies that can be a useful context for providing such interventions. This research applies a design-based methodology to develop a teacher education activity that reflects research on digital history and how students learn best by constructing and extending (...) prior knowledge, processing information into knowledge, and scaffolding. Design-based research has proven to be suitable as an intervention for classroom settings in that it can be rapidly refined in response to ongoing research on an intervention. The research asked what methods and tools can teacher educators use to promote digital history in their classrooms. Through the project, 200 teacher education students, over four iterative design phases, learned to process historical information into knowledge using technology to communicate refined versions of their knowledge to outside audiences. Seven design factors and six commonalities and differences were identified as influencing the design process. The results of this design-based research informed the development of generalizations and guidelines for designing similar digital history projects. (shrink)

John Wyclif has too frequently been described as "Morning Star of the Reformation" and only recently begun to be studied as a fourteenth-century English philosopher and theologian. This work draws on recent scholarship situating Wyclif in his fourteenth-century milieu to present a survey of his thought and writings as a coherent theological position arising from Oxford's "Golden Age" of theology. Lahey argues that many of Wyclif's best known critiques of the fourteenth-century Church arise from his philosophical commitment to (...) an Augustinian realism evocative of the thought of Robert Grosseteste and Anselm of Canterbury. This realism is comprehensible in terms of Wyclif's sustained focus on semantics and the properties of terms and propositions, a "linguistic turn" characterizing post-Ockham philosophical theology. Arising from this propositional realism is a strong emphasis on the place of Scripture in both formal and applied theology, which was the starting point for many of Wyclif's quarrels with the ecclesiastical status quo in late fourteenth-century England. This survey takes into account both Wyclif's earlier, philosophical works and his later works, including sermons and Scripture commentary. Wyclif's belief that Scripture is the eternal and perfect divine word, the paradigm of human discourse and the definitive embodiment of truth in creation is central to an understanding of the ties he believes relate theoretical and practical philosophy to theology. This connection links Wyclif's interest in the propositional structure of reality to his realism, his hermeneutic program, and to his agenda for reform of the Church. Lahey's survey also highlights Wyclif's rejection of Bradwardine's determinism in favor of a model of human freedom in light of God's perfect foreknowledge, and also explores the relation of Wyclif's spatiotemporal atomism to his rejection of transubstantiation. This is the first book-length, comprehensive survey of Wyclif's thought, and will be of interest to students of later medieval theology, philosophy, history, and literature. (shrink)

Moral luck, until recently, has been understood either explicitly or implicitly through using a lack of control account of luck. For example, a case of resultant moral luck is a case where an agent is morally blameworthy or more morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for an outcome despite that outcome being significantly beyond that agent's control . Due to a shift in understanding the concept of luck itself in terms of modal robustness, however, other accounts of moral luck have surfaced. Both (...) Duncan Pritchard and Julia Driver have offered an alternative way of understanding moral luck by employing versions of a modal account of luck. This essay considers some problems with these accounts and attempts to resolve them. (shrink)

Life‐threatening illness is associated with financial burden among families. During this time, care‐related expenses often increase. The concept of financial burden has not fully been explored nor conceptually described in the literature. Our study coalesces the empirical literature on financial burden into a more comprehensive multidimensional theoretical framework to understand financial burden among patients and families dealing with serious illness. Using Jabareen's phased approach for building conceptual frameworks, we synthesized the existing scientific literature (including existing measures of financial burden) to (...) construct an empirically derived model. Definitions of financial burden are overlapping with similarities, but also inconsistencies. Many studies have focused more on objective and operational definitions, than subjective and conceptual aspects. Regarding measures for financial burden, many studies have only used a few items. The financial burden is dependent on the illness trajectories and duration. By considering multidimensionality, we illustrate potential financial burden factors (objective, coping, and subjective). Although anticipation and expectations about future financial issues are important, patients and caregivers generally experience objective aspects of burden, followed by subjective impressions of burden. Coping skills likely reduce subjective burden. Based on the results, we redefine the financial burden among patients with life‐threatening illness and caregivers. (shrink)

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess strong (...) innate predispositions that are critical for success in this task. (shrink)

Our topic is the ontology and persistence conditions of material objects. One widely held doctrine is that identity-over-time has causal commitments. Another is that identity-over-time is just identity as it relates one object that exists at two times. We believe that a tension exists between these two apparently sensible positions: very roughly, if identity is the primary conceptual component of identity-over-time and—as is plausible—identity is noncausal, then the conceptual origins of the causal commitments of identity-over-time become a mystery. We will (...) begin by formulating the two widely held doctrines and our puzzle more fully and more carefully. Then, the remainder of the paper will be devoted to analyzing views one might adopt that could minimize the tension. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay examines the experiences of three 19th-century African American travelers to Greece—David Dorr (1852), Frederick Douglass (1887), and John Wesley Gilbert (1890–1)—using evidence from their letters, diaries, and published writings. The essay shows that although each traveler's unique personal perspective shaped his response to seeing the ancient sites and monuments of Greece, all three men responded most deeply to a site connected with Greece's Christian heritage: the Areopagus or Mars Hill, where according to 19th-century understanding the Apostle Paul (...) had spoken the words recorded in the Book of Acts. (shrink)

A festschrift for Dorothy Edgington, containing contributions from Cleo Condoravdi, Dorothy Edgington, Kit Fine, Alan Hájek, John Hawthorne, Sabine Iatridou, Nick Jones, Rosanna Keefe, Angelika Kratzer, David Over, Daniel Rothschild, Robert Stalnaker, Scott Sturgeon, and Timothy Williamson.

Learning to solve a class of problems can be characterized as a search through a space of hypotheses about the rules for solving these problems. A series of four experiments studied how different learning conditions affected the search among hypotheses about the solution rule for a simple computational problem. Experiment 1 showed that a problem property such as computational difficulty of the rules biased the search process and so affected learning. Experiment 2 examined the impact of examples as instructional tools (...) and found that their effectiveness was determined by whether they uniquely pointed to the correct rule. Experiment 3 compared verbal directions with examples and found that both could guide search. The final experiment tried to improve learning by using more explicit verbal directions or by adding scaffolding to the example. While both manipulations improved learning, learning still took the form of a search through a hypothesis space of possible rules. We describe a model that embodies two assumptions: the instruction can bias the rules participants hypothesize rather than directly be encoded into a rule; participants do not have memory for past wrong hypotheses and are likely to retry them. These assumptions are realized in a Markov model that fits all the data by estimating two sets of probabilities. First, the learning condition induced one set of Start probabilities of trying various rules. Second, should this first hypothesis prove wrong, the learning condition induced a second set of Choice probabilities of considering various rules. These findings broaden our understanding of effective instruction and provide implications for instructional design. (shrink)

Quantum interference, manifest in the two slit experiment, lies at the heart of several quantum computational speed-ups and provides a striking example of a quantum phenomenon with no classical counterpart. An intriguing feature of quantum interference arises in a variant of the standard two slit experiment, in which there are three, rather than two, slits. The interference pattern in this set-up can be written in terms of the two and one slit patterns obtained by blocking one, or more, of the (...) slits. This is in stark contrast with the standard two slit experiment, where the interference pattern cannot be written as a sum of the one slit patterns. This was first noted by Rafael Sorkin, who raised the question of why quantum theory only exhibits irreducible interference in the two slit experiment. One approach to this problem is to compare the predictions of quantum theory to those of operationally-defined ‘foil’ theories, in the hope of determining whether theories that do exhibit higher-order interference suffer from pathological—or at least undesirable—features. In this paper two proposed extensions of quantum theory are considered: the theory of Density Cubes proposed by Dakić, Paterek and Brukner, which has been shown to exhibit irreducible interference in the three slit set-up, and the Quartic Quantum Theory of Życzkowski. The theory of Density Cubes will be shown to provide an advantage over quantum theory in a certain computational task and to posses a well-defined mechanism which leads to the emergence of quantum theory—analogous to the emergence of classical physics from quantum theory via decoherence. Despite this, the axioms used to define Density Cubes will be shown to be insufficient to uniquely characterise the theory. In comparison, Quartic Quantum Theory is a well-defined theory and we demonstrate that it exhibits irreducible interference to all orders. This feature of Życzkowski’s theory is argued not to be a genuine phenomenon, but to arise from an ambiguity in the current definition of higher-order interference in operationally-defined theories. Thus, to begin to understand why quantum theory is limited to a certain kind of interference, a new definition of higher-order interference is needed that is applicable to, and makes good operational sense in, arbitrary operationally-defined theories. (shrink)

Teacher behaviors are one of the most significant factors influencing student learning. Students from different cultures may have different interpretations of their teachers’ behaviors. This study compared the associations between teacher strictness, teacher feedback, and students’ motivational beliefs using data from six Western countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand) and six East Asian regions (Japan, Korea, mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015. A total (...) of 89,869 15-year-old students were included in data analysis. The findings indicate that (i) teacher strictness was negatively associated with Western students’ motivation, but positively related to that of East Asian students; (ii) teacher feedback had significant positive associations with the motivational beliefs of both Western and East Asian students; and (iii) there was a positive relationship between teacher strictness and teacher feedback in East Asian context. These results highlight the need to consider cultural factors when interpreting students’ reactions to teacher behaviors. (shrink)

Forenames serve as proxies for gender labels that activate gender stereotypes and gender socialization. Unlike rigid binary gender categories, they differ in the degree to which they are perceived as “masculine” or “feminine.” We examined the novel hypothesis that the ability of a forename to signal gender is associated with gender role behavior in women and men as part of a larger study evaluating forenames used in resume research. Compared to individuals endorsing a “gender-strong” forename, those perceiving their forename as (...) relatively “gender-weak” reported less gender-typical childhood social behavior and a weaker expression of gender-linked personality traits. Our findings suggest that forenames strengthen or weaken gender socialization, gender identification, and so contribute to the variable expression of gender role behavior within binary gender groups. (shrink)