This chapter explores the nature of dehumanizing speech. It begins by considering the nature of dehumanization simpliciter, building on the work of David Livingstone Smith. It argues that dehumanization can take multiple forms; it can be demonizing, enfeebling, mechanizing, or objectifying. It then argues, contra Smith, that dehumanization is not always a way of conceiving of someone. Instead, dehumanization can also be a linguistic phenomenon, whereby one asserts, implicates, or presupposes dehumanizing propositions or attitudes. The chapter then explores how one (...) might assert dehumanizing propositions, and suggests that one can do this with both literal and figurative language. It also explains why some uses of animalistic figurative language are dehumanizing and some are not. The chapter concludes by identifying a uniquely linguistic version of the paradox of dehumanization: dehumanizing speakers who directly address their targets often assert that these targets are subhuman, while, through the mechanism of second-personal address, presupposing that they are human after all. (shrink)

Whether “information” exists in biology, and in what sense, has been a topic of much recent discussion. I explore Shannon, Dretskean, and teleosemantic theories, and analyze whether or not they are able to give a successful naturalistic account of information—specifically accounts of meaning and error—in biological systems. I argue that the Shannon and Dretskean theories are unable to account for either, but that the teleosemantic theory is able to account for meaning. However, I argue that it is unable to account (...) for error. Thus I conclude that while talk of informational meaning is justifiable within a naturalistic framework, talk of informational error is not, and must be used in a metaphorical sense only. (shrink)

Differences in undergraduate students' perceptions of unequal status dating relationships in academia were investigated. Two hundred sixty college undergraduates from a private northeastern university evaluated three types of dating relationships: (a) professor-undergraduate student, (b) professor-graduate assistant, and (c) graduate assistant-undergraduate student. Fictional scenarios were used to assess participants' perceptions of the three types of dating relationships. Responses were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative results indicated the professor-undergraduate student dating relationship was labeled unethical whereas the qualitative results revealed a possible (...) gender effect. (shrink)

People remember disgusting stimuli better than fearful stimuli, but do disgust’s memory-enhancing effects extend to involuntary memory? This question is important because disgust reactions occur following trauma, and trauma-related involuntary memories are a hallmark of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms. In two experiments, we presented participants (n = 88 Experiment 1; n = 106 Experiment 2) with disgust, fear, and neutral images during an attention-monitoring task. Participants then completed an undemanding vigilance task, responding any time an image involuntarily came to (...) mind. We measured the frequency and characteristics of these involuntary memories (e.g. emotional intensity) immediately after encoding and over a 24-hour delay (Experiment 2 only). Our main findings were mixed: participants experienced similarly frequent (Experiment 2) – or more (Experiment 1) – disgust as fear involuntary memories. Therefore, when controlling for memory-enhancing confounds (e.g. distinctiveness), in-laboratory disgust memory enhancement does not extend to involuntary memory. Disgust memories were more emotionally intense than fear memories over the 24-hour delay– but not immediately after encoding – suggesting disgust elicits additional consolidation processes to fear. Participants paid more attention towards the disgust images, but the attention did not account for the memory of disgust. In sum, disgust and fear have both similar and distinct cognitive effects. (shrink)

Broad in scope and edited by two massive names in geography, this is a critical exploration of how the field has emerged and fared over the course of its modern institutionalization.

The importance of working memory in reading and mathematics performance has been widely studied, with recent research examining the components of WM and their roles in these educational outcomes. However, the differing relationships between these abilities and the foundational skills involved in the development of reading and mathematics have received less attention. Additionally, the separation of verbal, visual and spatial storage and processing and subsequent links with foundational skills and downstream reading and mathematics has not been widely examined. The current (...) study investigated the separate contributions of processing and storage from verbal, visual and spatial tasks to reading and mathematics, whilst considering influences on the underlying skills of verbal comprehension and counting, respectively. Ninety-two children aged 7- to 8-years were assessed. It was found that verbal comprehension was predicted by verbal storage and reading was predicted by verbal and spatial storage. Counting was predicted by visual processing and storage, whilst mathematics was related to verbal and spatial storage. We argue that resources for tasks relying on external representations of stimuli related mainly to storage, and were largely verbal and spatial in nature. When a task required internal representation, there was a draw on visual processing and storage abilities. Findings suggest a possible meaningful separability of types of processing. Further investigation of this could lead to the development of an enhanced WM model, which might better inform interventions and reasonable adjustments for children who struggle with reading and mathematics due to WM deficits. (shrink)

Growing evidence, as presented by Jaswal & Akhtar, indicates that social motivation is not universally reduced in autism. Here, we evaluate and extend this argument in light of recent evidence of “compensation” in autism. We thereby argue that autistic “compensators” – exhibiting neurotypical behaviour despite persistent difficulties in social cognition – indicate intact or potentially heightened social motivation in autism.

Suicidal Thoughts is a compilation of some of the most moving and insightful writing accomplished on the topic of suicide. It presents the thoughts and experiences of fifteen writers who have contemplated suicide-some on a professional level, others on a personal level, and a few, both personally and professionally. Through this collection, the reader is able to bear witness to the struggle between life and death and to the devastating aftermath of suicide. Suicidal Thoughts provides readers with a better understanding (...) of the reasons why some individuals give serious consideration to killing themselves. (shrink)

This work tests two conflicting views about double standards: whether they reflect evolved sex differences in behavior or a manipulative morality serving male interests. Two questionnaires on jealous reactions to mild (flirting) and serious (cheating) sexual transgressions were randomly assigned to 172 young women and men. One questionnaire assessed standards for appropriate behavior and perceptions of how young women and men usually react. The second asked people to report how they had reacted or, if naive, how they would react. The (...) questions concerned anger at and blame of partner and rival and the self-oriented responses of loss of self-esteem, feelings of hurt, and fear of losing the partner. As predicted by the idea of manipulative morality, both sexes advanced sets of double standards that serve the interests of their own sex at the expense of the opposite sex. Much of the data contradict the idea of a match between double standards and evolved sex differences. First, subjects who set self-serving double standards did not perceive gender differences in jealous reactions. Second, there were few gender differences in judgments regarding jealous responses. Third, in contrast with the familiar double standard, women were more aggressively reactive to a flirting rival than men. Fourth, self-reports of the strength of aggressive jealous reactions suggest that women’s behavior is stronger than the prescriptions for it. These data suggest that double standards represent a communication strategy which assists men’s control of women. The data on jealous reactions were interpreted in terms of the degree of threat to fitness posed by infidelity in different situations. (shrink)

In “A Virtue Ethics Critique of Ethical Dimensions of Behavioral Economics,” Professor Daryl Koehn criticizes the field of behavioral economics. She argues that behavioral economists ignore many important factors that affect how people make decisions, that their results are derived from experiments where subjects make choices in overly restrictive, artificial, and thin contexts that do not capture the richness of reality, and that the approach brings up psychological motivations that affect behavior in a piecemeal, ad hoc way that does not (...) capture the overall tapestry of the factors that influence the choices that we make. In this comment, I offer responses to many of these criticisms, and note where I think we have common ground. (shrink)

Food-specific inhibition training (FSIT) is a computerised task requiring response inhibition to energy-dense foods within a reaction-time game. Previous work indicates that FSIT can increase the number of healthy foods (relative to energy-dense foods) children choose, and decrease calories consumed from sweets and chocolate. Across two studies, we explored the impact of FSIT variations (e.g., different response signals, different delivery modes) on children’s food choices within a time-limited hypothetical food-choice task. In Study 1, we varied the FSIT Go/No-Go signals to (...) be emotive (happy vs. sad faces) or neutral (green vs. red signs). One-hundred-and-fifty-seven children were randomly allocated to emotive-FSIT, neutral-FSIT, or a non-food control task. Children participated in groups of 4–15. No significant FSIT effects were observed on food choices (all values ofp> 0.160). Healthy-food choices decreased over time regardless of condition (p 0.050). Healthy choices decreased over time in the control group (p= 0.001) but did not change in the two FSIT groups (bothp> 0.300) supporting previous evidence that FSIT may have a beneficial effect on children’s food choices. Ensuring that children perform FSIT with high accuracy (e.g., by using FSIT in quiet environments and avoiding group-testing) may be important for impacts on food choices though. Future research should continue to explore methods of optimising FSIT as a healthy-eating intervention for children. (shrink)

Progressive taxation has historically been discussed primarily in the context of developed, Western nations. This Article considers its application in two developing, nonwestern economies, emphasizing the differences in political, economic, and cultural contexts and their effect on the progressivity equation. In India these differences include long-standing attitudes, such as the Hindu tradition’s historic ambivalence towards utilitarian arguments, and shorter-term institutional arrangements, such as the division of power within India’s federal system and the tax exemption for agricultural income. In China they (...) include the legacy of Marxism as well as a more long-standing tendency to resolve legal and policy issues based on notions of communal rather than individual welfare. Both countries have limited administrative resources and a relatively small middle class, so that the income tax remains a relatively small albeit growing source of national revenues. In this Article I consider the impact of these factors, and conclude by asking whether a similar "tax life cycle" will apply to both countries or political and cultural differences will result in divergent tax patterns. Furthermore I also evaluate the progressivity problem as a case study in comparative taxation and assess the need to develop a more sophisticated methodology for dealing with institutional, attitudinal, and other cultural differences. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans B. Lindorfer & D. Naguschewski, Hegel. Zur Sprache. Beiträge zur europäischen Sprachreflexion, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 2002. Nous remercions Lucie Bourassa ainsi que les éditeurs de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. On a maintes fois relevé des affinités entre la poétique de Mallarmé et la philosophie de Hegel. Le poète a vraisemblablement lu des textes du philosophe, il a du moins pris connaissance de quelques-unes de ses propositions grâce à son ami - (...) Linguistique et théorie du langage – Nouvel article. (shrink)

. Powerful and uncompromising, Rogue Primate asks the disturbing question of what it really means to be a human living in a non-human world.

Etude des passions dans la philosophie et la littérature à l'âge classique, et de la façon dont Descartes, Hume, les matérialistes et les romanciers du XVIIe siècle pensaient cette notion.

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here (...) bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today. (shrink)

Historically, researchers divided over whether the diverse representations of reality across languages were natural or conventional, but all tacitly assumed an optimal fit between language and reality. Twentieth century anthropological linguists interested in linguistic relativity have questioned this assumption and sought to characterize "reality" without it by using domain- or structure-centered approaches.

Social support networks play a key role in human livelihood security, especially in vulnerable communities. Here we explore how evolutionary ideas of kin selection and intrahousehold resource competition can explain individual variation in daily support network size and composition in a south-central Ethiopian agricultural community. We consider both domestic and agricultural help across two generations with different wealth-transfer norms that yield different contexts for sibling competition. For farmers who inherited land rights from family, firstborns were more likely to report daily (...) support from parents and to have larger nonparental kin networks. Compared with other farmers, firstborns were also more likely to reciprocate their parents’ support, and to help nonparental kin without reciprocity. For farmers who received land rights from the government, middle-born farmers reported more nonparental kin in their support networks compared with other farmers; nonreciprocal interactions were particularly common in both directions. This suggests a diversification of adult support networks to nonparental kin, possibly in response to a long-term parental investment disadvantage of being middle-born sons. In all instances, regardless of inheritance, lastborn farmers were the most disadvantaged in terms of kin support. Overall, we found that nonreciprocal interactions among farmers followed kin selection predictions. Direct reciprocity explained a substantial part of the support received from kin, suggesting the importance of the combined effects of kin selection and reciprocity for investment from kin. (shrink)

This article looks at the positioning of the aesthetic in microscopy to understand how it can be both side-lined and deployed. It considers the boundary between the pictorial and the notational in current microscopy practice and speculates on a space of mutual relation. Microscopy’s dual threads of capture for data analysis and capture for publication reveal complicated relationships and conflicted stances, reflective of a broader iconoclastic tendency in microscopy where the image as enacted perception is erased while the notation generated (...) and carried by these images is preserved. This article seeks to suggest a space in which phenomena are situated, materially embedded and emergent through imaging practices. I ground my position on experimental imaging of bacterial iridescence to consider the entanglement of microscopy’s living image with its processes of making-seen. Microscopy is instrumental in supporting descriptive-explanatory claims on biological life yet is also implicated in the generation of novel, hybrid phenomena and sensibilities. Exploring both tendencies exposes a microscopy of permeable membranes and suggests alternative orientations through microscopy practice and its images. (shrink)

Like any discipline, bioethics is a developing field of academic inquiry; and recent trends in scholarship have been towards more engagement with empirical research. This ‘empirical turn’ has provoked extensive debate over how such ‘descriptive’ research carried out in the social sciences contributes to the distinctively normative aspect of bioethics. This paper will address this issue by developing a practical research methodology for the inclusion of data from social science studies into ethical deliberation. This methodology will be based on a (...) naturalistic conception of ethical theory that sees practice as informing theory just as theory informs practice – the two are symbiotically related. From this engagement with practice, the ways that such theories need to be extended and developed can be determined. This is a practical methodology for integrating theory and practice that can be used in empirical studies, one that uses ethical theory both to explore the data and to draw normative conclusions. (shrink)

This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient “personal story” within mental health organizations. The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having “lived experience” has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore how personal (...) stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from “agents of change” towards one of “disability tourism” or “patient porn.” We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption, and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change. (shrink)

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here (...) bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today. (shrink)