Historians of political thought tend to emphasize the continuous flow and transmission of concepts from one generation to the next, and from one place to another. Historians of Indian ideas suggest that India was governed with concepts imported from Europe. This article argues instead that the sense of rupture that British officials experienced, from both the intellectual history of Britain and Indian society, played a significant role in forming colonial political culture. It examines the practice of property law in late (...) eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal. It suggests that the attempt to textualize and codify law in the 1810s and 1820s emerged from British doubts about their ability to construct viable forms of rule on the basis of existing intellectual and institutional traditions. The abstract and seemingly tone of colonial political discourse was a practical response to British anxieties about their distance from Indian society. It was not a result of the of a particular school of British thinkers. (shrink)

An estimated 14 million children are parented by gay or lesbian couples. Research indicates that children of same-sex parents are as well adjusted as their peers of opposite-sex parents. However, previous research has yet to examine how these youth negotiate their own process of coming out about their families to others. We sought to identify the patterns, issues and themes that recur in the coming out process of these youth. Recommendations for school personnel are described.

As science educators, we must view the changing nature of society brought on by technology and the global nature of society as an impetus to reexamine the nature of science instruction. We have been bestowed with the responsibility to educate students on a variety of topics that less than two decades ago did not exist. Many of these social issues are controversial in nature and are directly linked to the local, regional, national, and global communities in which we exist. However, (...) including these social issues in the extant curriculum of science has, at best, been limited. This is true even though the National Science Education Standards specifically indicate that science and technology, as well as science in personal and social perspectives, are integral to science education. The following study examines a group of science teachers’ beliefs about the implementation of controversial social/technological issues in the extant science curriculum. Indications are that teachers believe that social issues are important to study, yet lack the support from their communities to teach social issues. (shrink)

Questions have been raised on what role the knowledge provided by sustainability science actually plays in the transition to sustainability and what role it may play in the future. In this paper we investigate different approaches to sustainability transformation of food systems by analyzing the rationale behind transformative acts-the ground that the direct agents of change act upon- and how the type of rationale is connected to the role of research and how the agents of change are involved. To do (...) this we employ Max Weber’s distinction between instrumental rationality and value-rationality in social action. In particular, we compare two different approaches to the role of research in sustainability transformation: (1) Performance-based approaches that measure performance and set up sustainability indicator targets and benchmarks to motivate the agents in the food system to change; (2) Values-based approaches that aim at communicating and mediating sustainability values to enable coordinated and cooperative action to transform the food system. We identify their respective strengths and weaknesses based on a cross-case analysis of four cases, and propose that the two approaches, like Weber’s two types of rationality, are complementary-because they are based on complementary observer stances—and that an optimal in-between approach therefore cannot be found. However, there are options for reflexive learning by observing one perspective-and its possible blind spots-from the vantage point of the other, so we suggest that new strategies for sustainability transformation can be found based on reflexive rationality as a third and distinct type of rationality. (shrink)

The multiple realizability thesis (MRT) is an important philosophical and psychological concept. It says any mental state can be constructed by multiple realizability (MR), meaning in many distinct ways from different physical parts. The goal of our study is to find if the MRT applies to the mental state of consciousness among animals. Many things have been written about MRT but the ones most applicable to animal consciousness are by Shapiro in a 2004 book called The Mind Incarnate and by (...) Polger and Shapiro in their 2016 work, The Multiple Realization Book. Standard, classical MRT has been around since 1967 and it says that a mental state can havevery manydifferent physical realizations, in a nearly unlimited manner. To the contrary, Shapiro’s book reasoned that physical, physiological, and historical constraints force mental traits to evolve in just a few, limited directions, which is seen as convergent evolution of the associated neural traits in different animal lineages. This is his mental constraint thesis (MCT). We examined the evolution of consciousness in animals and found that it arose independently in just three animal clades—vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod mollusks—all of which share many consciousness-associated traits: elaborate sensory organs and brains, high capacity for memory, directed mobility, etc. These three constrained, convergently evolved routes to consciousness fit Shapiro’s original MCT. More recently, Polger and Shapiro’s book presented much the same thesis but changed its name from MCT to a “modest identity thesis.” Furthermore, they argued against almost all the classically offered instances of MR in animal evolution, especially against the evidence of neural plasticity and the differently expanded cerebrums of mammals and birds. In contrast, we argue that some of these classical examples of MR are indeed valid and that Shapiro’s original MCT correction of MRT is the better account of the evolution of consciousness in animal clades. And we still agree that constraints and convergence refute the standard, nearly unconstrained, MRT. (shrink)

Victor and Cullen (1988) identified several dimensions of ethical climate that exist in organizations and organizational subunits. We tested the relationship between these dimensions of ethical climate and ethical behavior at different levels of analysis. Using Within and Between Analysis (WABA) (cf. Dansereau, Alutto and Yammarino, 1984), partial support was found for a relationship between dimensions of ethical climate and ethical behavior.

If we are to ensure the persistence of species in an increasingly warm world, of interest is the identification of drivers that affect the ability of an organism to resist thermal stress. Underpinning any organism's capacity for resistance is a complex interplay between biological and physical factors occurring over multiple scales. Tropical coral reefs are a unique system, in that their function is dependent upon the maintenance of a coral–algal symbiosis that is directly disrupted by increases in water temperature. A (...) number of physical factors have been identified as affecting the biological responses of the coral organism under broadscale thermal anomalies. One such factor is water flow, which is capable of modulating both organismal metabolic functioning and thermal environments. Understanding the physiological and hydrodynamic drivers of organism response to thermal stress improves predictive capabilities and informs targeted management responses, thereby increasing the resilience of reefs into the future. (shrink)

Brain parts can scale independently of the whole brain, and an example is given to point out that the authors underestimate variation that can exist in brains of equal size.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Rationale Argumentation" verfügbar.

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 76-78.

Following the tragic shootings in Newtown, Aurora, Isla Vista and others, increased national attention has focused on the relationship between mental illness and gun violence. While some have called for enhanced regulation of firearm possession by persons with mental illness, others have argued that such actions would be ineffective and enhance stigma associated with mental illness while discouraging treatment seeking.

While life in general can be explained by the mechanisms of physics, chemistry and biology, to many scientists and philosophers it appears that when it comes to explaining consciousness, there is what the philosopher Joseph Levine called an “explanatory gap” between the physical brain and subjective experiences. Here we deduce the living and neural features behind primary consciousness within a naturalistic biological framework, identify which animal taxa have these features (the vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod molluscs), then reconstruct when consciousness first (...) evolved and consider its adaptive value. We theorize that consciousness is based on all the complex system features of life, plus the even more complex features of elaborate brains. We argue that the main reason why the explanatory gap between the brain and experience has been so refractory to scientific explanation is that it arises from both life and from varied and diverse brains and brain regions, so bridging the gap requires a complex, multifactorial account that includes the great diversity of consciousness, its personal nature that stems from embodied life, and the special neural features that make consciousness unique in nature. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the ethical climate dimensions identified by Victor and Cullen (1987, 1988) could be replicated in the subunits of a multi-unit organization and if so, were the dimensions associated with particular types of operating units. We identified three of the dimensions of ethical climate found by Victor and Cullen and also found a new dimension of ethical climate related to service. Partial support was found for Victor and Cullen's hypothesis that certain ethical (...) climate dimensions are associated with particular forms of organizational governance and control. (shrink)

The role of emergence in the creation of consciousness has been debated for over a century, but it remains unresolved. In particular there is controversy over the claim that a “strong” or radical form of emergence is required to explain phenomenal consciousness. In this paper we use some ideas of complex system theory to trace the emergent features of life and then of complex brains through three progressive stages or levels: Level 1 (life), Level 2 (nervous systems), and Level 3 (...) (special neurobiological features), each representing increasing biological and neurobiological complexity and ultimately leading to the emergence of phenomenal consciousness, all in physical systems. Along the way we show that consciousness fits the criteria of an emergent property—albeit one with extreme complexity. The formulation Life + Special neurobiological features → Phenomenal consciousness expresses these relationships. Then we consider the implications of our findings for some of the philosophical conundrums entailed by the apparent “explanatory gap” between the brain and phenomenal consciousness. We conclude that consciousness stems from the personal life of an organism with the addition of a complex nervous system that is ideally suited to maximize emergent neurobiological features and that it is an example of standard (“weak”) emergence without a scientific explanatory gap. An “experiential” or epistemic gap remains, although this is ontologically untroubling. (shrink)

This book explores the key motif of the religious Other in devotional (bhakti) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent. The primary aim of this book is to reconsider and challenge inherited notions of the bhakta's or devotee's Other and unmask processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different social and religious agents. The book considers the ways in which bhakti might be conceived as having an inter-regional impact--as a force, discourse, network, mythology, ethic--while critically engaging (...) with extant scholarly narratives about what bhakti is and tracing when and how those narratives have been used. The sheer diversity of South Asia's devotional traditions renders them an especially rich resource for examining social and religious fault lines, thereby furthering scholarly understanding of how communalism and sectarianism originate and develop on local or regional levels, with wider geographic implications. Bringing together studies from a subcontinent-wide variety of linguistic, geographical, and historical frames for the first time, this book will be an important contribution to the literature on bhakti, and it will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Religion and Asian Religion. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractDriving patterns of coral bleaching over reefs are a suite of biophysical interactions where the physical environment modulates organism response through an interplay with intrinsic biological functioning. Flow conditions over reefs can mitigate the physiological impacts of thermal stress across multiple spatial scales. More details can be found in article number 1800226 by Charlotte E. Page et al., Seeking Resistance in Coral Reef Ecosystems: The Interplay of Biophysical Factors and Bleaching Resistance under a Changing Climate, DOI: 10.1002/bies.201800226.

We usually mean what we say, but sometimes we do not. When I ironically utter ‘What lovely weather’ on a rainy day, or mistakenly utter ‘Jim is a barn door’ instead of ‘Jim is a darn bore’, I say one thing and mean another. However, although utterances like these are not uncommon, they are greatly overshadowed by the volume of humdrum utterances of ‘There is wine in the fridge’ or ‘I really like nachos’ where we mean what we say. And (...) since we usually mean what we say, the following simple thesis will usually be correct. (N) S meant that _p_ by uttering _e_ iff S said that _p_ by uttering _e_. The simplicity of (N) raises the question of whether it can be refined in order to also cover situations where we do not mean what we say. In this paper we defend a modal version of (N): an analysis where speaker meaning in most situations is identified with what is actually said, and in other situations with what the speaker _would have said_ in certain counterfactual situations. The analysis constitutes a radical, but welcome, break with Gricean orthodoxy, where linguistic meaning, rather than speaker meaning, is ultimately used to explain other semantic notions. (shrink)

In recruitment, promotion, admission, and other forms of wealth and power apportion, an evaluator typically ranks a set of candidates in terms of their competence. If the evaluator is prejudiced, the resulting ranking will misrepresent the candidates’ actual rankings. This constitutes not only a moral and a practical problem, but also an epistemological one, which begs the question of what we should do—epistemologically—to mitigate it. In a recent paper, Jönsson and Sjödahl in [Episteme 14:499–517, 2017], argue that the epistemic problem (...) can be fruitfully addressed by way of a novel statistical method that changes the products of biased behaviour, i.e. the rankings themselves, rather than the biased persons. Jönsson and Sjödahl’s pioneering proposal is a both a welcome addition to the literature on implicit bias, due the problems with existing implicit bias interventions [see e.g. Lai et al. in J Exp Psychol Gen 143:1765–1785; J Exp Psychol Gen 145:1001–1016, 2014; 2016; Forscher et al. in J Person Soc Psychol 117:522–559, 2019] but also to the literature on prejudice more generally, where many proposed prejudice-reduction strategies enjoy less than adequate empirical support [Paluck and Green in Ann Rev Psychol 60:339–367, 2009]. Their proposal, however, needs supplementation in two ways: the circumstances that must hold in order for it to work needs to be refined, and their claim that it works as intended in these circumstances needs to be validated. We argue that four of Jönsson and Sjödahl’s method’s presumed presuppositions can be weakened, but needs to be supplemented by two additional assumptions, overlooked by Jönsson and Sjödahl. Moreover, we demonstrate that the method does work as intended by way of a statistical simulation. (shrink)

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

Partly motivated by description logics, poor man's logics have been proposed as an interesting fragment of modal logics. A poor man's logic is a propositional modal logic where only literals and the connectives ∧, □, and ◊ are allowed. It is known that the complexity of the satisfiability problem may drop dramatically when going from a full modal logic to the corresponding poor man's logic, e.g., in the case of modal logic K one goes from PSPACE-complete to coNP-complete. We prove (...) that it is sometimes possible to extend poor man's logics with restricted disjunctions (i.e., clauses) without increasing the computational complexity. For Horn and Krom clauses, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for when the resulting logic is polynomial-time. Such extensions correspond to allowing a restricted use of the union operator in description logics. (shrink)

Esports are a rapidly growing phenomenon and understanding of factors underlying game performance are therefore of great interest. The present study investigated the influence of satisfaction of basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy, and relatedness), type of motivation (amotivation, external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, integrated regulation, and intrinsic motivation), and number of matches played (time on task) on individuals’ performance on a matchmaking rating (MMR) in the video game Defence of the Ancients 2 (Dota 2). Collected data from 315 participants (...) was included in the analyses. A web-based questionnaire was used to collect data and structural equation modelling (SEM) was performed to analyze the data. The results show that perceived competence and autonomy were the only significant predictors of MMR performance beyond matches played. Fulfillment of relatedness, as well as motivational factors, were not found to be predictors of MMR scores. The strong effect of matches played, used as proxy of time on task, emphasize the effect of time and practice as a critical aspect of video-game expertise. (shrink)

In spite of our good intentions and explicit egalitarian convictions, we habitually disfavor the underprivileged. The rapidly growing literature on implicit bias – unconscious, automatic tendencies to associate negative traits with members of particular social groups – points towards explanations of this dissonance, although rarely towards generalizable solutions. In a recent paper, Jennifer Saul draws attention to the alarming epistemological problems that implicit bias carries with it; since our judgments about each other are likely influenced by implicit bias, we have (...) good reason to doubt their veracity. In this paper we explore a novel way to come to terms with the epistemological problem as it manifests itself in ranking situations, i.e. how we can know that the way in which we have ranked a group of people for a certain position, reflects their actual competence. On our approach, rather than attempting to make people less biased, we suggest that biased behavior can sometimes be corrected after the fact. In particular, the veracity of rankings can sometimes be improved by modifying the rankings directly. We investigate three methods that modify biased rankings, and argue that the last of these solves the epistemological problem that we are concerned with. (shrink)

This book highlights some of the most pressing safety, ethical, legal and societal issues related to the diverse contexts in which robotic technologies apply. Focusing on the essential concept of well-being, it addresses topics that are fundamental not only for research, but also for industry and end-users, discussing the challenges in a wide variety of applications, including domestic robots, autonomous manufacturing, personal care robots and drones.