Matthijs van Boxsel believes that no one is intelligent enough to understand their own stupidity. In The Encyclopædia of Stupidity he shows how stupidity manifests itself in all areas, in everyone, at all times, proposing that stupidity is the foundation of our civilization. In short sections with such titles as ‘The Blunderers’ Club’, ‘Fools in Hell’, ‘Genealogy of Idiots’, and ‘The Aesthetics of the Empty Gesture’, stupidity is analysed on the basis of fairy tales, cartoons, triumphal arches, garden (...) architecture, Baroque ceilings, jokes, flimsy excuses and science fiction. But Van Boxsel wants to do more than just assemble a ‘shadow cabinet’ of wisdom; he tries to fathom the logic of this opposite world. Where do understanding and intelligence begin and end? He examines mythic fools such as Cyclops and King Midas, cities such as Gotham, archetypes including the dumb blonde, and traditionally stupid animals such as the goose, the donkey and the headless chicken. Van Boxsel posits that stupidity is a condition for intelligence, that blunders stimulate progress, that failure is the basis for success. In this erudite and witty book he maintains that our culture is the product of a series of failed attempts to comprehend stupidity. (shrink)

Route memory is frequently assessed in virtual environments. These environments can be presented in a fully controlled manner and are easy to use. Yet they lack the physical involvement that participants have when navigating real environments. For some aspects of route memory this may result in reduced performance in virtual environments. We assessed route memory performance in four different environments: real, virtual, virtual with directional information (compass), and hybrid. In the hybrid environment, participants walked the route outside on an open (...) field, while all route information (i.e., path, landmarks) was shown simultaneously on a handheld tablet computer. Results indicate that performance in the real life environment was better than in the virtual conditions for tasks relying on survey knowledge, like pointing to start and end point, and map drawing. Performance in the hybrid condition however, hardly differed from real life performance. Performance in the virtual environment did not benefit from directional information. Given these findings, the hybrid condition may offer the best of both worlds: the performance level is comparable to that of real life for route memory, yet it offers full control of visual input during route learning. (shrink)

In psychological contract research, the side of the supervisor is strongly underexposed. However, supervisors are responsible for maintaining relationships with both their subordinates and senior management and are likely to be influenced by events unfolding in these relationships. In this study, we state that supervisor well-being may be affected by subordinates who fail to meet their obligations. This study adds to psychological contract research by developing an understanding of how and when subordinate psychological contract breach (PCB) is associated with supervisor (...) emotional exhaustion. Through a weekly diary survey among 56 Dutch supervisors, we test hypotheses about the relationships between subordinate PCB and the emotional exhaustion of the supervisor, the mediating role of perceptions of performance pressure by the supervisor in this relationship, and the moderating role of i-deals between the supervisor and senior management. Multilevel analyses support the first two hypotheses, but contradictory to our expectations show that the positive association between subordinate PCB and the emotional exhaustion of the supervisor is strengthened when the supervisor has high levels of i-deals with senior management. We discuss the findings in relation to their contribution to psychological contract theory. (shrink)

Research Objective: This study focuses on ADs in the Netherlands and introduces a cross-cultural perspective by comparing it with other countries. Methods: A questionnaire was sent to a panel comprising 1621 people representative of the Dutch population. The response was 86%. Results: 95% of the respondents didn't have an AD, and 24% of these were not familiar with the idea of drawing up an AD. Most of those familiar with ADs knew about the Advanced Euthanasia Directive (AED, 64%). Both low (...) education and the presence of a religious conviction that plays an important role in one's life increase the chance of not wanting to draw up an AD. Also not having experienced a request for euthanasia from someone else, and the inconceivability of asking for euthanasia yourself, increase the chance of not wanting to draw up an AD. Discussion: This study shows that the subjects of palliative care and end-of-life-decision-making were very much dominated by the issue of euthanasia in the Netherlands. The AED was the best known AD; and factors that can be linked to euthanasia play an important role in whether or not people choose to draw up an AD. This differentiates the Netherlands from other countries and, when it comes to ADs, the global differences between countries and cultures are still so large that the highest possible goals, at this moment in time, are observing and possibly learning from other cultural settings. (shrink)

ABSTRACTResearch Objective: This study focuses on ADs in the Netherlands and introduces a cross‐cultural perspective by comparing it with other countries.Methods: A questionnaire was sent to a panel comprising 1621 people representative of the Dutch population. The response was 86%.Results: 95% of the respondents didn't have an AD, and 24% of these were not familiar with the idea of drawing up an AD. Most of those familiar with ADs knew about the Advanced Euthanasia Directive . Both low education and the (...) presence of a religious conviction that plays an important role in one's life increase the chance of not wanting to draw up an AD. Also not having experienced a request for euthanasia from someone else, and the inconceivability of asking for euthanasia yourself, increase the chance of not wanting to draw up an AD.Discussion: This study shows that the subjects of palliative care and end‐of‐life‐decision‐making were very much dominated by the issue of euthanasia in the Netherlands. The AED was the best known AD; and factors that can be linked to euthanasia play an important role in whether or not people choose to draw up an AD. This differentiates the Netherlands from other countries and, when it comes to ADs, the global differences between countries and cultures are still so large that the highest possible goals, at this moment in time, are observing and possibly learning from other cultural settings. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors-in-chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialog around the theme Bringing Excitement to Empirical Business Ethics Research (inspired by the title of the commentary by Babalola and van Gils). These editors, considering the diversity of empirical approaches in business ethics, envisage a future in which quantitative (...) business ethics research is more bold and innovative, as well as reflexive about its techniques, and dialog between quantitative and qualitative research nourishes the enrichment of both. In their commentary, Babalola and van Gils argue that leadership research has stagnated with the use of too narrow a range of perspectives and methods and too many overlapping concepts. They propose that novel insights could be achieved by investigating the lived experience of leadership (through interviews, document analysis, archival data); by focusing on topics of concern to society; by employing different personal, philosophical, or cultural perspectives; and by turning the lens on the heroic leader (through “dark-side” and follower studies). Taking a provocative stance, Bal and Garcia-Lorenzo argue that we need radical voices in current times to enable a better understanding of the psychology underlying ethical transformations. Psychology can support business ethics by not shying away from grander ideas, going beyond the margins of “unethical behaviors harming the organization” and expanding the range of lenses used to studying behavior in context. In the arena of finance and business ethics, Guedhami, Liang, and Shailer emphasize novel data sets and innovative methods. Significantly, they stress that an understanding the intersection of finance and ethics is central to business ethics; financial equality and inclusion are persistent socio-economic and political concerns that are not always framed as ethics issues, yet relevant business policies and practices manifest ethical values. Finally, Charles Cho offers his opinion on the blurry line between the “ethical” versus “social” or “critical” aspects of accounting papers. The Journal of Business Ethics provides fertile ground for innovative, even radical, approaches to quantitative methods (see Zyphur and Pierides in J Bus Ethics 143(1):1–16, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3549-8, 2017), as part of a broad goal of ethically reflecting on empirical research. (shrink)

Coaching is a systematic and goal-oriented one-on-one intervention by a coach aimed to guide clients in their professional and personal development. Previous research on coaching has demonstrated effects on a number of positive outcomes, including well-being and performance, yet little is known about the processes that underlie these outcomes, such as the type of questions coaches use. Here, we focus on three different types of coaching questions, and aim to uncover their immediate and sustained effects for affect, self-efficacy, and goal-directed (...) outcomes, using a between-subjects experiment. One hundred and eighty-three medical residents and PhD students from various medical centers and healthcare organizations in the Netherlands were recruited to participate in a self-coaching writing exercise, where they followed written instructions rather than interacting with a real coach. All participants were randomly allocated to one of three conditions: either one of two solution-focused coaching conditions or a problem-focused coaching condition. Self-report questionnaires were used to measure key outcomes of coaching, that is positive and negative affect, self-efficacy, goal orientation, action planning and goal attainment. Two follow-up measurements assessed if the effects of the self-coaching exercise led to problem-solving actions within an initial follow-up period of 14 days and a subsequent follow-up period of 10 days. Findings showed that participants experienced more positive affect, less negative affect, and higher approach goal orientation after the solution-focused coaching exercise compared to the problem-focused coaching exercise. In all conditions, goal attainment increased as a consequence of the self-coaching intervention. We discuss the implications of our findings for the science and practice of contemporary coaching. (shrink)

In medical settings, machines are in close proximity with human beings: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old, and with medical professionals. Machines in these contexts are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity, and privacy. -/- As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What (...) theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? -/- The essays in this collection by researchers from both humanities and science describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine, what design features are necessary in order to achieve this, philosophical and practical questions concerning justice, rights, decision-making and responsibility, and accurately modeling essential physician-machine-patient relationships. -/- This collection is the first book to address these 21st-century concerns. (shrink)

Over the course of the twentieth century, hydraulic engineering has come to rely primarily on the use of computational models. Disco and van den Ende hint towards the reasons for widespread adoption of computational models by pointing out that such models fulfill a crucial role as management tools in Dutch water management, and meet a more general desire to quantify water-related phenomena. The successful application of computational models implies blackboxing : “[w]hen a machine runs efficiently … one need focus only (...) on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become”.. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly expected to disrupt the ordinary functioning of society. From how we fight wars or govern society, to how we work and play, and from how we create to how we teach and learn, there is almost no field of human activity which is believed to be entirely immune from the impact of this emerging technology. This poses a multifaceted problem when it comes to designing and understanding regulatory responses to AI. This article aims to: (i) (...) defend the need for a novel conceptual model for understanding the systemic legal disruption caused by new technologies such as AI; (ii) to situate this model in relation to preceding debates about the interaction of regulation with new technologies (particularly the ‘cyberlaw’ and ‘robolaw’ debates); and (iii) to set out a detailed model for understanding the legal disruption precipitated by AI, examining both pathways stemming from new affordances that can give rise to a regulatory ‘disruptive moment’, as well as the Legal Development, Displacement or Destruction that can ensue. The article proposes that this model of legal disruption can be broadly generalisable to understanding the legal effects and challenges of other emerging technologies. (shrink)

This study investigated Belgian and Dutch parental opinions on confidentiality and consent regarding medical decisions about adolescents. Through an online survey, we presented six cases (three on confidentiality, and three on consent) to 1,382 Belgian and Dutch parents. We studied patterns in parental confidentiality and consent preferences across and between cases through binomial logistic regressions and latent class analysis. Participants often grant the right to consent for a treatment to the adolescent, but the majority diverges from the adolescent’s preferences regarding (...) confidentiality. More educated participants would rather not be informed about cases regarding a sexually transmitted disease or depression than lower educated participants. Further analysis shows that participants’ preferences correspond to authoritative (47%), permissive (30%) and authoritarian (17%) parenting styles. Belgian and Dutch parents are willing to grant some degree of autonomy, but they want to be informed about specific health issues. Parental views on confidentiality and granting consent appear to mirror existing parenting styles. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Abstract:Work on stakeholder theory has proceeded on a variety of fronts; as Donaldson and Preston (1995) have noted, such work can be parsed into descriptive, instrumental, and normative research streams. In a normative vein, Phillips (1997) has made an argument for a principle of fairness as a means of identifying and adjudicating among stakeholders. In this essay, I propose that a reconstructed principle of fairness can be combined with the idea of consent as outlined in integrative social contract theory (ISCT) (...) to bring about a more normative stakeholder theory that also has ramifications for corporate governance. (shrink)

This article describes compassion as perceived within the relationship between nurses and older persons with a chronic disease. The aim of the study is to understand the benefit of compassion for nursing practice within the context of long-term care. The design of the study involves a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with nurses and patients in three different care-settings. Results show the nature of compassion in seven dimensions: attentiveness, listening, confronting, involvement, helping, presence and understanding. Analysis of the data also (...) shows in what way opinions of participants relate to issues raised in a previous literature study, for example the difference between pity and compassion. The conclusion states that compassion is a valuable process which motivates patients as well as nurses to cooperate in achieving relevant outcomes of care. The discussion involves some methodological issues. For one thing, further confirmation of the dimensions found is recommended. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one-shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Most foundationalists allow that relations of coherence among antecedently justified beliefs can enhance their overall level of justification or warrant. In light of this, some coherentists ask the following question: if coherence can elevate the epistemic status of a set of beliefs, what prevents it from generating warrant entirely on its own? Why do we need the foundationalist’s basic beliefs? I address that question here, drawing lessons from an instructive series of attempts to reconstruct within the probability calculus the classical (...) problem of independent witnesses who corroborate each other’s testimony. Starred section headings indicate sections omitted here, but available on the author’s USC website. (shrink)

Instances of explanatory reduction are often advocated on metaphysical grounds; given that the only real things in the world are subatomic particles and their interaction, we have to try to explain everything in terms of the laws of physics. In this paper, we show that explanatory reduction cannot be defended on metaphysical grounds. Nevertheless, indispensability arguments for reductive explanations can be developed, taking into account actual scientific practice and the role of epistemic interests. Reductive explanations might be indispensable to address (...) some epistemic interest answering a specific explanation-seeking question in the most accurate, adequate and efficient way. Just like explanatory pluralists often advocate the indispensability of higher levels of explanation pointing at the pragmatic value of the explanatory information obtained on these higher levels, we argue that explanatory reduction—traditionally understood as the contender of pluralism—can be defended in a similar way. The pragmatic value reductionist, lower level explanations might have in the biomedical sciences and the social sciences is illustrated by some case studies. (shrink)

According to qualified-agent virtue ethics, an action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances. I discuss two closely related objections to this view, both of which concern the actions of the non-virtuous. The first is that this criterion sometimes gives the wrong result, for in some cases a non-virtuous agent should not do what a virtuous person would characteristically do. A second objection is it altogether fails to apply whenever (...) the agent, through previous wrongdoing, finds herself in circumstances that a virtuous person cannot be in. I focus on Rosalind Hursthouse's account of right action, and argue that it can provide a satisfactory response to both these objections. I do so by drawing attention to the distinction between action guidance and action assessment, and arguing that while the above criterion is adequate as a means of action assessment, we should turn to the virtue- and vice-rules (v-rules) for action guidance. (shrink)

The experiments reported by Snodgrass, Shevrin, and Kopka appear to demonstrate that words are perceived even when overall forced-choice discrimination performance does not deviate from chance. We replicated their critical finding in two separate experiments; our results indicated that the subjects′ preferences for one of the two strategy conditions predicted significant deviations from chance performance in the pop condition, even though the overall performance in this condition did not differ from chance. In addition, we found that task preference had no (...) effect when blank cards rather than words were presented and that the words could not be detected when subjects were simply asked to decide on each trial whether a stimulus had been presented. These results suggest that it is possible to demonstrate perception below an objective threshold defined in terms of overall discrimination performance. As such, the results highlight the importance of considering individual differences in studies of perception without awareness. (shrink)

David Enoch recently defended the idea that there are valid inferences of the form ‘it would be good if p, therefore, p’. I argue that Enoch's proposal allows us to infer the absurd conclusion that ours is the best of all possible worlds.

In the following, I argue that L. E. J. Brouwer's notion of the construction of purely mathematical objects and Edmund Husserl's notion of their constitution coincide.

This article discusses how sequential sampling models can be integrated in a cognitive architecture. The new theory Retrieval by Accumulating Evidence in an Architecture (RACE/A) combines the level of detail typically provided by sequential sampling models with the level of task complexity typically provided by cognitive architectures. We will use RACE/A to model data from two variants of a picture–word interference task in a psychological refractory period design. These models will demonstrate how RACE/A enables interactions between sequential sampling and long-term (...) declarative learning, and between sequential sampling and task control. In a traditional sequential sampling model, the onset of the process within the task is unclear, as is the number of sampling processes. RACE/A provides a theoretical basis for estimating the onset of sequential sampling processes during task execution and allows for easy modeling of multiple sequential sampling processes within a task. (shrink)

This article deals with the question of whether an increased teaching of business ethics can/will have a positive effect on the fight against corruption in companies. It is written from a (South) African perspective. Statistics about the alarming state of corruption in South African businesses are provided in the beginning. A Hegelian approach to the problem, in terms of which theory can and does influence practice, is compared to a Marxist approach, in terms of which theory is only a reflection (...) of practice. The author chooses a position that mediates between these two extremes. In the end, he develops a model that relies heavily on the idea of an ethics of responsibility that draws on Aristotle's idea of phronesis (practical wisdom based on deliberation). The practical implications of these ideas for the utilization of business ethics teaching in companies are consequently spelt out. While more teaching of this discipline cannot guarantee better morals in a company, it can better equip all involved to deal with the ever-increasing moral problems that business people have to deal with. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(2) 2003: 128–138. (shrink)