La réflexion sur la contrepartie que la télévision publique doit offrir au paiement de la redevance par l'ensemble des téléspectateurs relève d'un débat public orchestré par les représentants de l'Etat. La télévision publique ne peut se soustraire à une mesure de son audience, mais peut proposer des critères d'évaluation appropriés, comme les indicateurs d'audience cumulée qui expriment l'étendue du public touché. Plus fondamentalement, afin de développer le dialogue avec le public, France Télévisions a instauré un droit de chaque téléspectateur à (...) être écouté, à obtenir une réponse et à s'assurer que ses remarques seront considérées avec respect, à travers un dispositif de médiateurs et un service de relation avec les téléspectateurs.Any thought on what public television must offer to viewers in return for their licence fee is dependent on a public discussion orchestrated by State representatives. Public television cannot be excluded from audience ratings but can propose adapted criteria of evaluation, like the indicators of cumulated audience ratings which express the range of the audience covered. Basically, to develop a dialogue with the public France Télévisions adopted the policy that each viewer should have the right to be listened to, the right to obtain an answer and the right to have his or her remarks considered with respect through a system of mediators and a customer service department for viewers. (shrink)

Laws form counterfactually stable sets -- Natural necessity -- Three payoffs of my account -- A world of subjunctives.

The goal of this essay is to put forward an original theory of artifact function, which takes on board the results of the debate on the notion of biological function and also accommodates the distinctive aspects of artifacts. More precisely, the paper develops and defends the Dual-Aspect Theory, which is a monist account according to which an artifact’s function depends on intentional and reproductive aspects. It is argued that this approach meets a set of theoretical and meta-theoretical desiderata and is (...) superior to alternative views. (shrink)

Anthropologists have provided rich field descriptions of the norms and conventions governing behavior and interactions in small-scale societies. Here, we add a further dimension to this work by presenting hypothetical moral dilemmas involving harm, to a small-scale, agrarian Mayan population, with the specific goal of exploring the hypothesis that certain moral principles apply universally. We presented Mayan participants with moral dilemmas translated into their native language, Tseltal. Paralleling several studies carried out with educated subjects living in large-scale, developed nations, the (...) Mayan participants judged harms caused as the means to a greater good as more forbidden than harms caused as a side-effect (i.e., side-effect bias). However, unlike these other populations living in large-scale societies, as well as a more educated and less rural Mayan comparison group, the target rural Mayan participants did not judge actions causing harm as worse than omissions (i.e., omission bias). A series of probes targeting the action-omission distinction suggest that the absence of an omission bias among the rural Mayan participants was not due to difficulties comprehending the dilemmas, using the judgment scale, or in attributing a greater causal role for actions over omissions. Thus, while the moral distinction between means and side-effect may be more universal, the moral distinction between actions and omission appears to be open to greater cross-cultural variation. We discuss these results in light of issues concerning the role of biological constraints and cultural variation in moral decision-making, as well as the limitations of such experimental, cross-cultural research. (shrink)

Joseph Heath defends competitive markets and conceptualizes business ethics with reference to Pareto efficiency, which he takes to be the “implicit morality of the market.” His justification for markets is that they generate Pareto efficient outcomes, meaning that markets optimally satisfy consumer preferences. And, for Heath, business ethics is the set of normative constraints—regulation and beyond-compliance norms—needed to preserve that outcome. The present paper accepts Heath’s claim that the economic justification for markets is ethical, in that satisfying consumer preferences is (...) a good. But, contra Heath, the ethical consideration at work is a consequentialist one; and acknowledging this consequentialism exposes limitations of Heath’s “market failures” approach to business ethics. We suggest two limitations, and we expect many will accept our argument that Heath’s conception of business ethics is too narrow. The present paper outlines two broader implications. First, acknowledging that the justification for markets is ethical eliminates the apparent—and false—conflict between purportedly amoral economic activity on one hand and ethical considerations on the other; instead, business ethics is a matter of weighing the consequentialist ethical benefit of economic activity and markets against other moral arguments/other ethical considerations. Second, Heath restricts business ethics to the constraints needed to protect the market’s ability to efficiently satisfy consumer preferences, constraints he calls “efficiency imperatives”; this restriction supports the widespread tendency to think that all social problems are economic; and, a business ethics so-conceived diminishes the perceived importance of noneconomic values—this attitude is dangerous. (shrink)

This paper explores whether there is any relation between mathematical proofs that specify the grounds of the theorem being proved and mathematical proofs that explain why the theorem obtains. The paper argues that a mathematical fact’s grounds do not, simply by virtue of grounding it, thereby explain why that fact obtains. It argues that oftentimes, a proof specifying a mathematical fact’s grounds fails to explain why that fact obtains whereas any explanation of the fact does not specify its ground. The (...) paper offers several examples from mathematical practice to illustrate these points. These examples suggest several reasons why explaining and grounding tend to come apart, including that explanatory proofs need not exhibit purity, tend not to be brute force, and often unify separate cases by identifying common reasons behind them even when those cases have distinct grounds. The paper sketches an account of what makes a proof explanatory and uses that account to defend the morals drawn from the examples already given. (shrink)

In this article we analyze the methodological commitments of a radical embodied cognition (REC) approach to social interaction and social cognition, specifically with respect to the explanatory framework it adopts. According to many representatives of REC, such as enactivists and the proponents of dynamical and ecological psychology, sociality is to be explained by (1) focusing on the social unit rather than the individuals that comprise it and (2) establishing the regularities that hold on this level rather than modeling the sub-personal (...) mechanisms that could be said to underlie social phenomena. We point out that, despite explicit commitment, such a view implies an implicit rejection of the mechanistic explanation framework widely adopted in traditional cognitive science (TCS), which, in our view, hinders comparability between REC and these approaches. We further argue that such a position is unnecessary and that enactive mechanistic explanation of sociality is both possible and desirable. We examine three distinct objections from REC against mechanistic explanation, which we dub the decomposability, causality and extended cognition worries. In each case we show that these complaints can be alleviated by either appreciation of the full scope of the mechanistic account or adjustments on both mechanistic and REC sides of the debate. (shrink)

As a collective action problem, climate change is best tackled by coordination. Most moral philosophers therefore agree on our individual responsibility as political citizens to help establish such coordination. There is disagreement, however, on our individual responsibilities as consumers to reduce emissions before such coordination is established. In this article I argue that from a Kantian deontological perspective we have a perfect duty to refrain from activities that we would not perform if appropriate coordination were established. Moral autonomy means that (...) we do not need to wait for an external lawmaker to tell us what we ought to do. In practice, this means basing our decisions on a shadow price for carbon: if we would not go out for a drive on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle if gas prices were twice as high, we should not do it now. Moreover, we have imperfect duties to reduce emissions by more than our perfect duties require. (shrink)

Humean accounts of natural law have long been charged with being unable to account for the laws’ explanatory power in science. One form of this objection is to charge Humean accounts with explanatory circularity: a fact in the Humean mosaic helps to explain why some regularity is a law (first premise), but that law, in turn, helps to explain why that mosaic fact holds (second premise). To this objection, Humeans have replied that the explanation in the first premise is metaphysical (...) whereas the explanation in the second premise is scientific, so (since these two varieties of explanation operate very differently) the two explanations cannot be chained together to yield explanatory circularity. This paper presents a new circularity argument that avoids this objection because both explanations in the premises are metaphysical. The new circularity argument also avoids the objection that the contrasts at the point where the two explanations are chained together fail to line up properly. The upshot is to leave the Humean account of law with two unattractive options: to regard scientific explanation under natural law as not constituting genuine explanation at all or to regard the Humean account as involving a vicious explanatory circularity. (shrink)

Some mathematical proofs explain why the theorems they prove hold. This paper identifies several challenges for any counterfactual account of explanation in mathematics (that is, any account according to which an explanatory proof reveals how the explanandum would have been different, had facts in the explanans been different). The paper presumes that countermathematicals can be nontrivial. It argues that nevertheless, a counterfactual account portrays explanatory power as too easy to achieve, does not capture explanatory asymmetry, and fails to specify why (...) certain proofs are explanatory and others are not. Greater informativeness about counterfactual dependence can even yield less explanatory power. (shrink)

This paper argues that Rawls’ principles of justice provide a normative foundation for stakeholder theory. The principles articulate (at an abstract level) citizens’ rights; these rights create interests across all aspects of society, including in the space of economic activity; and therefore, stakeholders – as citizens – have legitimate interests in the space of economic activity. This approach to stakeholder theory suggests a political interpretation of Boatright’s Moral Market approach, one that emphasizes the rights/place of citizens. And this approach to (...) stakeholder theory – in terms of citizens – raises a further question, what rights and obligations do economic agents have, beyond those attached to their roles as citizens? Rawls would reject additional rights and obligations of this sort for two reasons, one tied to freedom and one tied to pluralism. Rawls’ work therefore presses us to re-conceptualize the place of ethical claims in the economic context. (shrink)

Recently, biologists and computer scientists who advocate the "strong thesis of artificial life" have argued that the distinction between life and nonlife is important and that certain computer software entities could be alive in the same sense as biological entities. These arguments have been challenged by Sober (1991). I address some of the questions about the rational reconstruction of biology that are suggested by these arguments: What is the relation between life and the "signs of life"? What work (if any) (...) might the concept of "life" (over and above the "signs of life") perform in biology? What turns on scientific disputes over the utility of this concept? To defend my answers to these questions, I compare "life" to certain other concepts used in science, and I examine historical episodes in which an entity's vitality was invoked to explain certain phenomena. I try to understand how these explanations could be illuminating even though they are not accompanied by any reductive definition of "life.". (shrink)

has offered a lovely example to motivate the intuition that a successful prediction has a kind of confirmatory significance that an accommodation lacks. This paper scrutinizes Maher's example. It argues that once the example is tweaked, the intuitive difference there between prediction and accommodation disappears. This suggests that the apparent superiority of prediction to accommodation is actually a side effect of an important difference between the hypotheses that tend to arise in each case.

The federal government indirectly subsidizes the pharmaceutical industry by funding basic research, various tax credits and deductions, patent rules, grants of market exclusivity, and other means, in order to spur drug development, promote public health, and improve medical care. But today, the pharmaceutical industry often neglects these goals and sometimes even undermines them, due to what Lawrence Lessig refers to as institutional corruption — that is, widespread or systemic practices, usually legal, that undermine an institution’s objectives or integrity. A key (...) source of institutional corruption is improper dependence by the institution or its key actors on the actions of third parties that have fundamentally different interests. It is the health care system’s improper dependency on pharmaceutical firms that allows them to displace some public policy goals and to compromise the attainment of others. (shrink)

Intentionality is a central feature of our understanding of the world. We daily attribute intentional states (like beliefs, desires or perceptual states) to explain the behavior of other agents, and many theories appeal to them to understand more complex notions. Nonetheless, intentional states are puzzling entities. This article explains what intentionality is and why it is so important and problematic at the same time. Secondly, it examines various naturalistic theories, which seek to show that intentionality is compatible with a scientific (...) worldview. Finally, given that all extant proposals face significant difficulties, it explores the available options in case no naturalistic theory can succeed. (shrink)

The Food and Drug Administration authorizes the marketing of a drug only for uses that the manufacturer has demonstrated to be safe and effective, based on evidence from at least two clinical trials. However, the FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine, so physicians may prescribe drugs in any manner they choose. Prescribing drugs in ways that deviate from the uses specified in the FDA-approved drug label, package insert, and marketing authorization is referred to as off-label prescribing. This occurs (...) when physicians prescribe a drug for a therapeutic purpose other than the one approved by the FDA; treat patients in a different age cohort or gender than the population on which it was tested; or prescribe a different dose, for a different duration of use, or a different mode of administration than indicated on the label. (shrink)

This article takes stock of the regularity theory of causation. It considers three challenges to the theory: the problem of joint effects, the problems of redundant causation, and omission‐involving causation. The former is often cited as a special, and especially challenging, problem for regularity theories. But the force of this problem has been greatly overstated. The threat to regularity theories instead comes from the latter two.

Psychology has penetrated many domains of society and its vocabulary and discourse has become part of our everyday conversations. It not only carries with it the promise that it will deliver insights into human behaviour, but it is also believed that it can address many of the problems human beings are confronted with. As a discipline it thrives in the present climate of performativity, where more attention is given to means than to ends. The article observes first that for education (...) and thus for educational research, though psychology's approach can be valuable, other theoretical stances are also necessary. It then analyses why psychology may be attractive nowadays in the educational field and identifies its prestige in academia, partly arising from its professionalization, but above all the use of a particular method and the focus on certain contents. This has historical antecedents, and so some illustrations are given of previous developments, paying attention as well to the controversies in which educational psychology has been involved in the past, as well as to the need of biographical research, which warns us to be careful with generalizations. It is argued that a more balanced approach (invoking the particularities of the situation as well as a broader concept of practical rationality) is required for the study of education and that educational researchers therefore should resist the tendency to see psychology as the default auxiliary science of education; instead they should reclaim their territory, do justice to the responsibility that is required and highlight the importance of understanding social practices to a large extent in terms of reasons and intentions. (shrink)

The most recent restatements of stakeholder theory formulate that approach in terms of the distribution of value: “A stakeholder approach to business is about creating as much value as possible for stakeholders, without resorting to tradeoffs” (Freeman et al. 2010: 28). This formulation marks a shift from earlier work, which included a procedural dimension—a requirement that stakeholders participate in organization decision making. The present paper pushes back against this shift: it argues that orienting the stakeholder approach around the participation requirement (...) provides for a different moral logic, one not available to (now) conventional stakeholder theorizing (without that requirement), and one that may be more compelling to many. This argument requires critical re-examination of the moral arguments offered in the most recent restatements of the stakeholder approach. (shrink)

In this paper, we present the methodology we used in the European Horizon 2020 AI-PROFICIENT project, to evaluate the implementation of the ethical component of the project. The project is a 3-year collaboration between a university partner and industrial and tech partners, which aims to research the integration of AI services in heavy industry work settings. An AI ethics approach developed for the project has involved embedded ethical analysis of work contexts and design solutions and the generation of specific and (...) evolving ethical recommendations for partners. We have performed an ongoing evaluation and monitoring of the implementation of recommendations. We describe the quantitative results of these implementations: overall, broken down by category, and broken down by category and responsible project partner (anonymized). In parallel, we discuss the results in light of our approach and offer insights for future research into the ground-level application of ethical recommendations for AI in heavy industry. (shrink)

The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, is emerging as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century, having published widely on philosophy, literature, language, psychoanalysis, art, politics, and cinema. However, because of the ‘experimental’ nature of certain works, combined with the manner in which he draws upon a variety of sources from various disciplines, his work can seem difficult, obscure, and even ‘willfully obstructive’. In an attempt to resist such impressions, this paper will seek to provide an (...) accessible introduction to Deleuze's work, and to begin to discuss how it can be employed to provide a significant critique and reconceptualization of the theoretical foundations and therapeutic practices of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing. In order to do this, the paper will focus upon Deleuze's masterwork, and the cornerstone to his philosophy as a whole, Difference and Repetition; in particular, it will discuss how his innovative and challenging account of time can be employed to provide a conception of human life as a ‘continuity’, rather than as a series of distinct ‘moments’ or ‘events’. As well as discussing the manner in which his work can provide us with an understanding of how life is different and significant for each human being, this paper will also highlight the potential importance of Deleuze's work for logotherapy, for the recent ‘turn’ to ‘narrative’ as a psychotherapeutic approach and for contemporary mental health care's growing interest in ‘social constructionism’. As such, this paper also seeks to stimulate further discussion and research into the importance and the relevance of Deleuze's work for the theory and practice of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing. (shrink)

AUTOUR DE LA RELIGION REFLEXIVE. Le concept de réflexivité chez Jean-Marc Ferry. Réflexions sur le point de vue moral. Dépasser l'ex-communication politique du religieux. AUTOUR DE LA REPUBLIQUE CREPUSCULAIRE. Prendre l'Europe au sérieux. Une éthique de la reconnaissance internationale. Pour une république européenne placée sous le signe de l'aurore.

Generative artificial intelligence systems based on transformers, including both text-generators like GPT-4 and image generators like DALL-E 3, have recently entered the popular consciousness. These tools, while impressive, are liable to reproduce, exacerbate, and reinforce extant human social biases, such as gender and racial biases. In this paper, we systematically review the extent to which DALL-E Mini suffers from this problem. In line with the Model Card published alongside DALL-E Mini by its creators, we find that the images it produces (...) tend to represent dozens of different occupations as populated either solely by men (e.g., pilot, builder, plumber) or solely by women (e.g., hairdresser, receptionist, dietitian). In addition, the images DALL-E Mini produces tend to represent most occupations as populated primarily or solely by White people (e.g., farmer, painter, prison officer, software engineer) and very few by non-White people (e.g., pastor, rapper). These findings suggest that exciting new AI technologies should be critically scrutinized and perhaps regulated before they are unleashed on society. (shrink)

Many of our ideological, political, moral, religious, aesthetic, scientific beliefs, as well as those concerning everyday life, are controversial; other people do not share them. As a rule, that does not bother us much: we tend to retain our contestable beliefs even if we ascribe no less skill and well-informedness to those who represent other points of view than to ourselves. But is that really reasonable? Shouldn't we often admit that we might be as wrong as others? And if we (...) do, shouldn't this consequently lead us to give up many of our beliefs in favor of agnostic attitudes? Marc Andree Weber argues that in the face of disagreement with equally competent and well-informed interlocutors we should almost always refrain from insisting on our controversial beliefs – with the few exceptions being all the more remarkable. (shrink)

Human vision raises a number of puzzles. Among them are the puzzles of visual experience: how to provide a scientific understanding of the phenomenal character of the visual experiences of the shapes, textures, colors, orientations and motion of perceived objects? How can a purely subjective visual experience be the basis of so much objective knowledge of the world? Visually guided actions raise a different puzzle: how can actions directed towards a target be so accurate in the absence of the agent’s (...) awareness of many of the target’s visual attributes? Ways of Seeing has three related goals, the first of which is to make the case for a broadly representational approach to the above set of puzzles. The second goal of WoS is to argue that the version of the ‘two-visual systems’ model of human vision best supported by the current empirical evidence has the resources to solve the puzzle of visually guided actions, which has been at the center of much recent work in the cognitive neuroscience of vision and action. The third goal of WoS is to draw attention to some of the tensions between acceptance of the two-visual systems model of human vision and some influential views about the nature and function of the content of visual experience espoused by philosophers in response to the puzzles raised by visual experience. (shrink)

Les réflexions présentées dans cet article portent sur la nature du rituel et de la symbolique politique dans nos sociétés. On se propose de confronter différentes approches de ces phénomènes : d'un côté un point de vue qui met en évidence les déterminants sociologiques des rituels politiques. Cette approche prend appui sur une conception où la représentation politique apparaît comme une forme aliénante et mystifiante. Un autre point de vue consiste à prendre comme objet le travail symbolique du rituel : (...) cette perspective anthropologique met Paccent sur Pefficacité des rites et des symboles et leur imbrication dans l'action politique. (shrink)

Cet article porte sur les femmes algériennes qui, migrant à travers la méditerranée après 1947, migrent également à travers la citoyenneté : en une vie, elles ont été “indigènes”, Françaises musulmanes, Françaises à part entière (c’est-à-dire aussi dotées du droit de vote) durant quatre années (1958-1962), puis Algériennes et donc étrangères, toujours immigrées. Il examine ces parcours de femmes passées du statut de sujet colonial à celui d’autres statuts (citoyennes, étrangères, binationales). Pour cela, il repose sur une enquête orale menée (...) dans la région lyonnaise et sur des archives préfectorales (dossiers de naturalisation notamment). Dans le flou des discours, il analyse comment les Algériennes contribuent à faire naître, empiriquement, une définition de la citoyenneté, laquelle les signale en retour comme d’éternelles immigrées. (shrink)

What has compelled Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while they deny the Armenian genocide and the existence of anti-Semitism in Turkey? The dominant historical narrative is that Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire, and then later, protected from the Nazis during WWII. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then it is hard for us to (...) accept that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians. In this article, the author confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. Baer delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to tease out the origin of these many tangled truths. He aims to bring about reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts, but to confront it and come to terms with it. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, the author sets out to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide. (shrink)

Aristotle, as well, places che species in che position of predícate, but he does so in Metaphysics Z4, in a search that, beyond the seizing of che quiddity, attains in Z 17 the substance as cause through the form of its model of being: in itself, separate and one. Failing to recognise chis approach, che substitution by Porphyre of the species and the difference for the definition, reinforce this misreading for centuries, thus impedíng the passage, wíth Met. H, from what (...) completes the definition: the difference, to what, beyond che form, constitutes che first completion of the substance: its act of being. (shrink)

If you would reflect that the part of the soul that in the former case, in our own misfortunes, was forcibly restrained, and that has hungered for tears and a good cry and satisfaction, because it is its nature to desire these things, is the element in us that the poets satisfy and delight, and that the best element in our nature, since it has never been properly educated by reason or even by habit, then relaxes its guard over the (...) plaintive part, inasmuch as this is contemplating the woes of others and it is no shame to it to praise and pity another who, claiming to be a good man, abandons himself to excess in his grief; but [he] thinks this vicarious pleasure is so much clear gain, and would not consent to forfeit it by disdaining the poem altogether. (shrink)

The Human Genome Project is an expensive, ambitious, and controversial attempt to locate and map every one of the approximately 100,000 genes in the human body. If it works, and we are able, for instance, to identify markers for genetic diseases long before they develop, who will have the right to obtain such information? What will be the consequences for health care, health insurance, employability, and research priorities? And, more broadly, how will attitudes toward human differences be affected, morally and (...) socially, by the setting of a genetic “standard”? The compatibility of individual rights and genetic fairness is challenged by the technological possibilities of the future, making it difficult to create an agenda for a “just genetics.” Beginning with an account of the utopian dreams and authoritarian tendencies of historical eugenics movements, this book’s nine essays probe the potential social uses and abuses of detailed genetic information. Lucid and wide-ranging, these contributions will interest bioethicists, legal scholars, and policy makers. Essays: “The Genome Project and the Meaning of Difference,” Timothy F. Murphy “Eugenics and the Human Genome Project: Is the Past Prologue?,” Daniel J. Kevles “Handle with Care: Race, Class, and Genetics,” Arthur L. Caplan “Public Choices and Private Choices: Legal Regulation of Genetic Testing,” Lori B. Andrews “Rules for Gene Banks: Protecting Privacy in the Genetics Age,” George J. Annas “Use of Genetic Information by Private Insurers,” Robert J. Pokorski “The Genome Project, Individual Differences, and Just Health Care,” Norman Daniels “Just Genetics: A Problem Agenda,” Leonard M. Fleck “Justice and the Limitations of Genetic Knowledge,” Marc A. Lappé. (shrink)

Wilson derives various broad philosophical morals from the scientific role played by the Principle of Virtual Work. He argues roughly that PVW conditionals cannot be understood in terms of things as large as possible worlds; that PVW conditionals are peculiar and so cannot be accommodated by general accounts of counterfactuals, thereby reflecting the piecemeal character of scientific practice and standing at odds with the one-size-fits-all approach of “analytic metaphysicians”; and that PVW counterfactuals are not made true partly by natural laws. (...) I distinguish, elaborate and critically examine various arguments for these morals suggested by the PVW and Wilson’s text, looking especially at what makes a displacement “virtual” and the operation of the conditionals that the PVW takes to express necessary and sufficient conditions for equilibrium. Ultimately, I do not find the PVW to be especially well suited to support Wilson’s morals; some of these arguments fail, whereas others arise from general considerations rather than having to appeal to anything like the PVW. (shrink)

Neurocognitive models (e.g., Schirmer & Kotz, 2006) have helped to characterize how listeners incrementally derive meaning from vocal expressions of emotion in spoken language, what neural mechanisms are involved at different processing stages, and their relative time course. But how can these insights be applied to communicative situations in which prosody serves a predominantly interpersonal function? This comment examines recent data highlighting the dynamic interplay of prosody and language, when vocal attributes serve the sociopragmatic goals of the speaker or reveal (...) interpersonal information that listeners use to construct a mental representation of what is being communicated. Our comment serves as a beacon to researchers interested in how the neurocognitive system “makes sense” of socioemotive aspects of prosody. (shrink)

The Area Activation Model (Pomplun, Reingold, Shen, & Williams, 2000) is a computational model predicting the statistical distribution of saccadic endpoints in visual search tasks. Its basic assumption is that saccades in visual search tend to foveate display areas that provide a maximum amount of task‐relevant information for processing during the subsequent fixation. In the present study, a counterintuitive prediction by the model is empirically tested, namely that saccadic selectivity towards stimulus features depends on the spatial arrangement of search items. (...) We find good correspondence between simulated and empirically observed selectivity patterns, providing strong support for the Area Activation Model. (shrink)

The present essay on the being of the sensible investigates the individuation of intensity differentials. This is Deleuze's theme in the fifth chapter of Difference and Repetition, where he places individuation in the context of his ‘transcendental empiricism’. The mechanisms of subjectivation are conceived as spatially-temporally determined actualisations (of the virtual) whose implicit intensity relations are neither accessible empirically nor are they governed by transcendental conditions (in the conventional sense). Central to the discussion is the distinction, stemming from Kant, between (...) intensive and extensive magnitudes. (shrink)

The Legal Services Act 2007 provided a framework for a liberalised marketplace for legal services. The most significant responses to this by the Bar appear in the Bar Standards Board Handbook, whic...

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

Post-industrial societies confront common problems in pharmaceutical industry-physician relations. In order to promote sales, drug firms create financial relationships that influence physicians' prescriptions and sometimes even reward physicians for prescribing drugs. Three main types exist: kickbacks, gifts, and financial support for professional activities. The prevalence of these practices has evolved over time in response to changes in professional codes, law, and markets. There are certainly differences among these types of ties, but all of them can compromise physicians' independent judgment and (...) rational prescribing.Drug firms have paid kickbacks for prescribing drugs, purchasing drugs, switching brands prescribed, adding a drug to a hospital formulary, enrolling patients in post-marketing clinical trials, and writing practice guidelines that encourage the use of certain drugs. (shrink)

This paper addresses the tactical question of how we ought to proceed in teachingbusiness ethics, taking as a starting point that business ethics should be concerned with cooperative,mutually beneficial outcomes, and in particular with fostering behavior that contributes to thoseoutcomes. This paper suggests that focus on moral reasoning as a tactical outcome—as a way ofachieving behavior in support of cooperative outcomes—is misplaced. Instead, we ought to focuson cultivating empathetic experiences. Intuitively, the problem we need to address in business ethicsis not (...) that our students (and that we ourselves) sometimes reason poorly, or that moral decisionmakingis subject to characteristic kinds of errors. The problem is that our students (and—again—we ourselves) do not always care enough, we do not modify our behavior consistently enough. (shrink)

Maimonides affirmed, not the superiority of the "moderns" (the scholars of his and subsequent generations) over the "ancients" (the Tannaim and Amoraim, the Rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud) but the inherent equality of the two. The equality presented here is not equality of halakhic authority, but equality of ability, of essential human characteristics.