Background: The intrauterine hearing experience differs from the extrauterine hearing exposure within a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) setting. Also, the listening experience of a neonate drastically differs from that of an adult. Several studies have documented that the sound level within a NICU exceeds the recommended threshold by far, possibly related to hearing loss thereafter. The aim of this study was, firstly, to precisely define the dynamics of sounds within an incubator and, secondly, to give clinicians and caregivers an (...) idea about what can be heard “inside the box.” Methods: Audio recordings within an incubator were conducted at the Pediatric Simulation Center of the Medical University Vienna. They contained recorded music, speech and synthesized sounds. To understand the dynamics of sounds around and within the incubator the following stimuli were used: broadband noise with decreasing sound level in ten steps of 6 dB, sine waves (62.5, 125, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000 and 16000 Hz), logarithmic sweep (Chirp) over the frequency band 20 Hz to 21 kHz, singing male voice, singing and whispering female voice. Results: Our results confirm a protective effect of the incubator from noises above 500 Hz in conditions of “no-flow” and show almost no protective effect of an incubator cover. We, furthermore, observed a strong boost of low frequencies below 125 Hz within the incubator, as well as a notable increase of higher frequency noises with open access doors, a significant resonant effect of the incubator, and a considerable masking effect of the respiratory support against any other source of noise or sound stimulation even for “low-flow” conditions. Conclusion: Our study reveals high noise levels of air supply at high flow rates and the boost of low frequencies within the incubator. Education of medical staff and family members as well as modifications of the physical environment should aim at reducing noise exposure of preterm infants in the incubator. Audiovisual material is provided as supplementary material. (shrink)

One major challenge of the 21st century is the increasingly rapid development of new technologies and their evaluation. In this article we argue for an interdisciplinary approach to meet this demand for evaluating new and specifically bioinspired technologies. We combine the consideration of normative principles in the field of ethics with psychological-empirical research on attitudes. In doing so, the paper has a twofold concern: first, we discuss how such an interdisciplinary collaboration can be implemented by using the method of Cognitive-Affective (...) Mapping. Cognitive-Affective Maps (CAMs) enable a graphical representation of attitudes, including cognitive and affective aspects. Second, we argue that CAMs can be helpful to remedy the deficits of traditional ethical approaches. We applied CAMs in the context of an ethics seminar in which students were instructed to create CAMs based on bioinspired technologies twice – prior to the seminar to assess their evaluation on bioinspired technologies per se (pre-assessment) and after the seminar to assess how their evaluation might have changed and especially which normative ethical principles might have been additionally considered (post-assessment). As could be shown, CAMs can visualize the students’ attitudes, including the valence of ethical principles. Further, comparing pre- and post-CAMs indicated students’ attitude change. (shrink)

In this article I ask whether elaborated and systematized delusions emerging in the context of schizophrenia have the potential for epistemic innocence. Cognitions are epistemically innocent if they have significant epistemic benefits that could not be attained otherwise. In particular, I propose that a cognition is epistemically innocent if it delivers some significant epistemic benefit to a given agent at a given time, and if alternative cognitions delivering the same epistemic benefit are unavailable to that agent at that time. Elaborated (...) and systematized delusions in schizophrenia are typically false and exemplify failures of rationality and self-knowledge. Empirical studies suggest that they may have psychological benefits by relieving anxiety and enhancing meaningfulness. Moreover, these delusions have been considered as adaptive in virtue of the fact that they enable automated learning to resume after a significant disruption caused by incorrect prediction-error signalling. I argue that such psychological benefits and adaptive features also have positive epistemic consequences. More precisely, delusions can be a means to restoring epistemic functionality in agents who are overwhelmed by hypersalient experiences in the prodromal stage of psychosis. The analysis leads to a more complex view of the epistemic status of delusions than is found in the contemporary philosophical literature and has some implications for clinical practice. 1 Introduction2 Types of Delusions3 What Is Wrong with Elaborated and Systematized Delusions?4 Finding Life Meaningful5 Learning Resumed6 Epistemic Innocence7 Epistemic Benefit8 No Alternatives9 Conclusions and Implications. (shrink)

In hard cases of comparison, people are faced with two options neither of which is conceived of as better, worse, or equally good compared to the other. Most philosophers claim that hard cases can indeed be distinguished from cases in which two options are equally good, and can be characterized by a failure of transitive reasoning. It is a much more controversial matter and at the heart of an ongoing debate, whether the options in hard cases of comparison should be (...) interpreted as incomparable, on par, or roughly equal. So far, however, none of these claims and interpretations have been tested. This paper presents the first empirical investigation on hard cases, intransitive reasoning, and incomparability. Our results reveal that hard cases present real-world dilemmas in which a significant majority of people violate transitivity. After suggesting a way of operationalizing the notion of incomparability, we provide empirical evidence that the options in some hard cases are not considered to be incomparable. Theories of rough equality or parity seem to provide better interpretations of our results. (shrink)

The concepts expressed by social role terms such as artist and scientist are unique in that they seem to allow two independent criteria for categorization, one of which is inherently normative. This study presents and tests an account of the content and structure of the normative dimension of these “dual character concepts.” Experiment 1 suggests that the normative dimension of a social role concept represents the commitment to fulfill the idealized basic function associated with the role. Background information can affect (...) which basic function is associated with each social role. However, Experiment 2 indicates that the normative dimension always represents the relevant commitment as an end in itself. We argue that social role concepts represent the commitments to basic functions because that information is crucial to predict the future social roles and role-dependent behavior of others. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider that (...) emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling the right way. (shrink)

This book provides a reading of Kant's theory of the construction of mathematical concepts through a fully contextualised analysis. In this work the author argues that it is only through an understanding of the relevant eighteenth century mathematics textbooks, and the related mathematical practice, that the material and context necessary for a successful interpretation of Kant's philosophy can be provided.

Conceptual engineering is the practice of revising concepts to improve how people talk and think. Its ability to improve talk and thought ultimately hinges on the successful dissemination of desired conceptual changes. Unfortunately, the field has been slow to develop methods to directly test what barriers stand in the way of propagation and what methods will most effectively propagate desired conceptual change. In order to test such questions, this paper introduces the masked time-lagged method. The masked time-lagged method tests people's (...) conceptual understanding at two different points in time without their knowledge of being tested, allowing us to measure conceptual revision in action. Using a masked time-lagged design on a content internalist framework, we attempted to revise PLANET and DINOSAUR in online participants to match experts' concepts. We successfully revised PLANET but not DINOSAUR, demonstrating some of the difficulties conceptual engineers face. Nonetheless, this paper provides conceptual engineers, regardless of framework, with the tools to tackle questions related to implementation empirically and head-on. (shrink)

The most common approach to understanding the semantics of the concept of pain is third-person thought experiments. By contrast, the most frequent and most relevant uses of the folk concept of pain are from a first-person perspective in conversational settings. In this paper, we use a set of linguistic tools to systematically explore the semantics of what people communicate when reporting pain from a first-person perspective. Our results suggest that only a pluralistic view can do justice to the way we (...) talk about pain from a first-person perspective: The semantic content of the folk concept of pain consists of information about both an unpleasant feeling and a disruptive bodily state. Pain linguistics thus provides new insights into ordinary pain language and poses an interesting challenge to the dominant unitary views of pain. (shrink)

Lange (2000) famously argues that although Jeffrey Conditionalization is non-commutative over evidence, it’s not defective in virtue of this feature. Since reversing the order of the evidence in a sequence of updates that don’t commute does not reverse the order of the experiences that underwrite these revisions, the conditions required to generate commutativity failure at the level of experience will fail to hold in cases where we get commutativity failure at the level of evidence. If our interest in commutativity is, (...) fundamentally, an interest in the order-invariance of information, an updating sequence that does not violate such a principle at the more fundamental level of experiential information should not be deemed defective. This paper claims that Lange’s argument fails as a general defense of the Jeffrey framework. Lange’s argument entails that the inputs to the Jeffrey framework differ from those of classical Bayesian Conditionalization in a way that makes them defective. Therefore, either the Jeffrey framework is defective in virtue of not commuting its inputs, or else it is defective in virtue of commuting the wrong kinds of ones. (shrink)

Is ecological democracy possible? If so, what would it entail? This chapter first reviews the literature based in deliberative democracy that proposes to extend communicative competence to non-humans, and then traces an alternative constructivist line of environmental political thinking from its beginnings in the strand of science and technology studies pioneered by Bruno Latour and others known as actor-network theory, through two actor-network theory-inspired approaches to political theory, “object-oriented democracy” and “material politics/participation.” Whereas this alternative approach solves some of the (...) conundrums to which the communicative model gives rise, it is neither as radical a departure from politics as it is “normally understood,” nor as political as its proponents claim. (shrink)

ArgumentThis essay considers the work of projection and the hand of the projectionist as important components of the social space of the cinema as it comes into being in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. I bring the concept of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the place of the body as an entity that applies itself to the world “like a hand to an instrument” into a discussion of the pre-cinematic projector as an instrument that we can interpret (...) as evidence of the experience of the work of the projectionist in the spirit of film theory and media archaeology, moving work on instrumentation in a different direction from the analysis of the work of the black box in laboratory studies. Projection is described as a psychological as well as a mechanical process. It is suggested that we interpret the projector not simply in its activity as it projects films, but in its movement from site to site and in the workings of the hand of its operator behind the scenes. This account suggests a different perspective on the cinematic turn of the nineteenth century, a concept typically approached through the study of the image, the look, the camera, and the screen. (shrink)

I briefly introduce Moral Failure as a book that brings together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology to examine moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that “ought implies can.” I respond to Rivera by arguing that the process of construction that imbues normative requirements with authority need not systematize or eliminate conflicts between normative requirements. My response to Schwartzman clarifies what is problematic about nonideal theorizing that limits itself to offering action-guidance. In response to Kittay, (...) I defend my rejection of “ought implies can,” and consider the implications of the concept of unfair moral requirements. (shrink)

This article discusses three important models of concept combination—Smith and colleagues' Selective Modification model, Hampton's Composite Prototype model, and Costello and Keane's C3 model. Smith and colleagues' famous model of concept combination combines a model for producing complex concepts out of simple concepts with a prototype model of concept representation and a metric for computing the typicality of objects with respect to those concepts. The model of concept combination proposed by Smith and colleagues applies only to modifier–head complex concepts. Hampton's (...) model of concept combination includes, along with a qualitative description of the process resulting in complex concepts, a model of concepts, a model of categorization, and a model of typicality judgement. For Hampton, concept combination consists in the inheritance of typical properties from the combined concepts by the complex concept. (shrink)

A survey was administered during fall 2013 to 163 self-identified adult ethical vegans and/or ethical vegetarians in the United States to determine whether the respondents+ beliefs meet the definition of religion according to U.S. federal law. The data demonstrate that a majority of the surveyed group possesses beliefs concordant with the definition of "religion" according to federal statutes, federal judicial tests, and regulatory law. Since religion is a protected characteristic in U.S. law, and ethical veganism meets various definitions for religion, (...) then ethical veganism should be recognized as a religion and a protected characteristic under U.S. law. (shrink)

Jonathan Weisberg has argued that Bayesianism’s rigid updating rules make Bayesian updating incompatible with undermining defeat. In this paper, I argue that when we attend to the higher-order beliefs we must ascribe to agents in the kinds of cases Weisberg considers, the problem he raises disappears. Once we acknowledge the importance of higher-order beliefs to the undermining story, we are led to a different understanding of how these cases arise. And on this different understanding of things, the rigid nature of (...) Bayesianism’s updating rules is no obstacle to its accommodating undermining defeat. (shrink)

An examination of human dietary choice as a unifying cause for both the environmental and animal-rights movements.

This introduction to the special issue on “Medicine, Health, and Publics” argues that a rhetorical understanding of publics offers conceptual, methodological, and practical benefits to health and medical humanities scholars.

Lisa Kemmerer | : This article explores whether or not animal activists who engage in violence might legitimately be labelled “terrorists.” To this end, I examine common assumptions concerning the use of pre-emptive counter-violence in order to defend the comparatively defenceless. Through the use of casuistry, this essay compares specific hypothetical instances of killing comparatively defenceless individuals, beginning with scenarios that offer a clear general consensus, moving to more controversial cases. This indicates that contemporary violence on behalf of animal (...) liberation, often assumed to be rash and radical, is actually quite restrained. The intent of this paper is not to make claims as to how liberationists ought to behave, but rather to highlight egregious inconsistencies in our attitudes toward violence on behalf of those who are comparatively defenceless. | : Cet article vise à déterminer si les activistes animaliers qui se livrent à des actes violents doivent légitimement ou non être taxés de « terroristes ». À cette fin, j’examine les idées courantes relatives à l’utilisation de la violence préventive dans le but de défendre des êtres qui sont relativement sans défense. À l’aide de la casuistique, cet essai compare des exemples hypothétiques spécifiques de meurtres d’individus relativement sans défense, en commençant avec des scénarios qui offrent un consensus général clair, pour passer ensuite à des cas plus controversés. Cette recherche montre que la violence contemporaine perpétrée au nom de la libération des animaux, que l’on considère souvent comme étant téméraire et radicale, est en fait assez retenue. L’objectif de cet article ne consiste pas à prendre position au sujet de la façon dont les libérationnistes devraient se comporter, mais plutôt à mettre en évidence les incohérences flagrantes de nos attitudes face à la violence perpétrée au nom des êtres qui sont relativement sans défense. (shrink)

This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people (based on their self-report) associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like syringe, wound, knife, and cactus, are considered to be more pain-related for those who are more pain-sensitive. We discuss our results in (...) the light of three theoretical frameworks – cognitive bias, prototype theory, embodied account. We argue that the latter is best suited to explain the results of this study in the sense in which it implies the principle of body specificity, according to which different bodily characteristics lead to corresponding differences in the way in which people construct concepts and word meanings. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction: How Brent Spar Changed the Rules The Brent Spar was not Alone: Two Sentinel Cases What is Going on? The Power Shift Third Sector, Global Civil Society Dealing with Attacks from CSOs Challenges for the CSOs The Ultimate Hope for the CSOs Case 7: Monsanto and the Genetically Modified Organisms Notes.

This paper asks how property rights in the financial system can be nor- matively justified. It argues that in the current financial system, we find property rights with very different normative bases, some of which are stronger than others. In fact, there is a systematic gap between the normative priorities (which property rights deserve protection?) and the de facto priorities (which property rights are in fact protected?). I draw on the three traditional approaches for justifying property rights, along Hegelian, Lockean (...) and consequentialist lines, and ask how relevant they are for the property rights that one finds in today’s financial system. As it will turn out, Hegelian and Lockean justifications are better suited for the “real economy” than for the financial system; whereas the most promising approach for justifying many property rights within the financial system (if they can be justified at all) is a consequentialist one. This implies that reform proposals, for example with regard to higher capital ratios for banks, cannot be countered by holding that they interfere with property rights, for the property rights that are interfered with cannot claim to have stronger normative bases than the normative principles involved in the reform proposals. (shrink)

This work contributes to the development of a theoretical context of the politics of truth about animals. By applying and extending Foucault's theory of power, this work uncovers dominant and subjugated discourses about animals and describes power-knowledge associated with statements about animals that are understood to convey true things.

Accountability is viewed as a civilizing element in society, with professional accountability formalized in most cases as duties dating to the Greeks and Socrates; journalists must find their own way, without formal professional or government regulation or licensing. Three scholars look at the process in a line from the formal professional discipline to suggesting problems the journalism fraternity faces without regulation to suggesting serious internal ethics conferences as 1 solution to the problem.

French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault is essential reading for students in departments of literature, history, sociology and cultural studies. His work on the institutions of mental health and medicine, the history of systems of knowledge, literature and literary theory, criminality and the prison system, and sexuality, has had a profound and enduring impact across the humanities and social sciences. This introductory book, written for students, offers in-depth critical and contextual perspectives on all of Foucault's major published works. It provides (...) ways in to understanding Foucault's key concepts of subjectivity, discourse, and power and explains the problems of translation encountered in reading Foucault in English. The book also explores the critical reception of Foucault's works and acquaints the reader with the afterlives of some of his theories, particularly his influence on feminist and queer studies. This book offers the ideal introduction to a famously complex, controversial and important thinker. (shrink)

Combining human embryonic stem cells with SCNT has been a gold standard of stem cell research. Adding a particular individual's genes to pluripotent stem cells might lead to the development of personalized tissue repair or replacement. Enthusiasm for human embryonic stem cell research had flagged in recent years due to controversy over the moral status of in vitro embryos, scientific misconduct by researcher Woo Suk Hwang, and the discovery that induced pluripotent stem cells could be produced from somatic cells. Energy (...) shifted to research on somatic cells, but three successes in the United States during 2013 and 2014 may reinvigorate embryonic stem cell research. (shrink)

In Environmental Skill: Motivation, Knowledge, and the Possibility of a Non-Romantic Environmental Ethics, Mark Coeckelbergh presents an expansive approach to rethinking the ontological, epistemic, and ethical relationships humans have with the environment. It is a book with a wide historical scope rooted in the Western tradition, and it seeks to address the gap between humans’ ecological ideals and environmental practices.The text begins with an exploration of the psychological conditions for environmental change. Coeckelbergh seeks to bridge the gap between what we (...) believe we should do and what we actually do. In other words, he is seeking to provide a solution to the theory-action gap. The theory-action gap with... (shrink)