Suicide has long been the subject of philosophical, literary, theological and cultural–historical inquiry. But despite the diversity of disciplinary and methodological approaches that have been brought to bear in the study of suicide, we argue that the formal study of suicide, that is, suicidology, is characterized by intellectual, organizational and professional values that distinguish it from other ways of thinking and knowing. Further, we suggest that considering suicidology as a “social practice” offers ways to usefully conceptualize its epistemological, philosophical and (...) practical norms. This study develops the idea of suicidology as a social practice and considers the implications for research, practice and public discourse. (shrink)

In this book, Scott Soames illuminates the notion of truth and the role it plays in our ordinary thought as well as in our logical, philosophical, and scientific theories. Soames aims to integrate and deepen the most significant insights on truth from a variety of sources. He powerfully brings together the best technical work and the most important philosophical reflection on truth and shows how each can illuminate the other. Investigating such questions as whether we need a truth predicate (...) at all, what theoretical tasks it allows us to accomplish, and how we are to understand the content of any predicate capable of accomplishing these tasks, Soames organizes his discussion into three parts. Part I addresses crucial foundational issues as it identifies the bearers of truth, provides a basis for distinguishing truth from other notions, and formulates positive responses to well-known forms of truth-skepticism. Part II explicates the formal theories of Alfred Tarski and Saul Kripke and evaluates the philosophical significance of their work. It discusses their treatments of the Liar paradox, the relationship between truth and proof, the notion of a partially defined predicate, the concepts of logical truth and logical consequence, and the connection between truth and meaning. Part III extends important lessons drawn from Tarski and Kripke into new domains: vague predicates, the Sorites paradox, and the development of a larger, deflationary perspective on truth. Throughout the book, Soames examines a wide range of deflationary theories of truth, and attempts to separate what is correct and worth preserving in them from what is not. In doing so, he seeks to clear up many of the most significant philosophical doubts about truth. Written for a general audience while offering engaging material to the specialist, this rich study will be profitably read by both. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in business ethics has revealed the importance of privacy expectations as they relate to implicit privacy norms and the business practices that may violate these expectations. Yet, it is unclear how and when businesses may violate these expectations, factors that form or influence privacy expectations, or whether or not expectations have in fact been violated by company actions. This article reports the findings of three studies exploring how and when the corporate dissemination of consumer data violates privacy expectations. (...) The results indicate that consumer sentiment is more negative following intentional releases of sensitive consumer data, but the effect of data dissemination is more complex than that of company intentionality and data sensitivity alone. Companies can effectively set, and re-affirm, privacy expectations via consent procedures preceding and succeeding data dissemination notifications. Although implied consent has become more widely used in practice, we show how explicit consent outperforms implied consent in these regards. Importantly, this research provides process evidence that identifies perceived violation of privacy expectations as the underlying mechanism to explain the deleterious effects, on consumer sentiment, when company actions are misaligned with consumers’ privacy expectations. Ethical implications for companies collecting and disseminating consumer information are offered. (shrink)

Parents resemble trustees, conservators, and other fiduciaries; they exercise broad discretion while making choices for vulnerable people. Like other fiduciaries, parents can be tempted to neglect their duties or pursue self-interest at the expense of those they should protect. This article argues against treating parents as fiduciaries for three reasons. First, the scope of parental fiduciary duties cannot be narrowed enough to make them tolerable. Arguments limiting fiduciary duties to cases where parents exercise delegated powers or act within parenting roles (...) fail. Most parental decisions involve dual powers or roles. Efforts to address these dual-role cases produce principles that are unduly demanding, complex, arbitrary, and morally unappealing. Second, we could limit parental fiduciary duties by designing parental roles to benefit children. Since children need devoted, happy, well-rounded parents, the principle of designing parental roles to benefit children would produce rules that leave room for parents to flourish. However, this principle does not justify specific legal or moral fiduciary norms. Third, we could redefine fiduciary duties so parents can balance their interests against children’s interests, making fiduciary duties less burdensome. However, expanding the definition of fiduciary threatens to encompass many duties within the fiduciary category, rendering the description almost meaningless. (shrink)

Edmund Wall's criticism of the author's earlier analysis of Hare's consequentialism and Kantian ethics claims that the author overlooked Hare's commitment to preference satisfaction as an “ultimate good.” This rejoinder points out that Hare never uses the phrase in question, nor any equivalent phrase or concept, in presenting his own arguments and refers only to the standard of “universalizability” as ultimate, in contexts that support the author's original argument. Hence Wall has only given us yet another example of how Hare's (...) views can be misunderstood by philosophers who fail to attend to the details of Hare's approach. (shrink)

Do we have free will and moral responsibility? Is free will compatible with determinism? Scott Sehon argues that we can make progress on these questions by focusing on an underlying issue: the nature of action explanation. When a person acts, or does something on purpose, we explain the behavior by citing the agent's reasons. The dominant view in philosophy of mind has been to construe such explanations as a species of causal explanation. Sehon proposes and defends a non-causal account (...) of action and agency, according to which reason explanation of human behavior is teleological rather than causal, before applying the teleological account of action to free will and responsibility. He argues that the non-causal compatibilist account works well in practice: it is in accord with our clear intuitions about cases, and it both explains and provides guidance in the cases where our intuitions are murkier. (shrink)

Dominic Scott compares the Republic and Nicomachean Ethics from a methodological perspective. He argues that Plato and Aristotle distinguish similar levels of argument in the defence of justice, and that they both follow the same approach: Plato because he thinks it will suffice, Aristotle because he thinks there is no need to go beyond it.

Many philosophers have argued against Singer’s claim that all animals are equal. However, none of these responses have demonstrated an appreciation of the complexity of his position. The result is that all of these responses focus on one of his arguments in a way that falls victim to another. This paper is a critical examination of a possible response to the full complexity of Singer’s position that derives from the work of Carl Cohen, Kathleen Wilkes, and F. Ramsey. On this (...) response, a being’s moral status depends not on the capacities and abilities she does in fact have, but instead on the capacities and abilities normal for the members of her species. However, this response is ultimately unacceptable, for it depends on a faulty conception of loss and misfortune and its underlying moral principle is irrational at best and morally objectionable at worst. The failure of even this response to Singer gives us good reason to conclude with Singer that all animals are equal. (shrink)

The target article contains a number of distinct but interrelated claims about the cognitive nature of folk biology based in part on cross-cultural work with urbanized Americans and forest-dwelling Maya Indians. Folk biology consists universally of a ranked taxonomy centered on essence-based generic species. This taxonomy is domain-specific, perhaps an innately determined evolutionary adaptation. Folk biology also plays a special role in cultural evolution in general, and in the development of Western biological science in particular. Even in our culture, however, (...) it retains an autonomy from other domains of thought and from science. These claims are questioned and clarified. (shrink)

This article takes its point of departure from late Lacan's meditations on the incompatibility of psychoanalysis with Japanese culture due to its non-European linguistic basis. The article argues that this emphasis on language narrowly conceived fails to keep pace with the interconnected, multi-media, all-encompassing nature of the unconscious today. Illustrating this point, the article focuses on the figure of the hikikomori: middle-class Japanese youths who have withdrawn from all conventional social contact to indulge exclusively computer-based interactions. Thanks to the overlap (...) with the related figure of the ‘Bedroom DJ’, the analysis then moves on to the ambient music of Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin. It argues for the validity of the concept of an ‘audio unconscious’ distinct from Lacan's unconscious ‘structured like a language’. The final part of the article, however, examines one of James's music videos and discerns in it modes of jouissance that psychoanalysis can still describe. (shrink)

Ethical sensitivity triggers the entire ethical decision-making process (i.e., recognition of ethical content in work situations). In this article, five factors are examined that affect tax practitioners' professional ethical sensitivity. The five factors that were examined include role conflict, role ambiguity, job satisfaction, professional commitment, and ethical orientation. Ethical content in work situations is examined in relation to professional ethics as enumerated by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountant's (AICPA) Statements on Responsibilities in Tax Practice (SRTP). Utilizing Hunt and (...) Vitell's (1986, 1993) General Theory of Ethics, a model of ethical sensitivity was constructed and empirically tested. Role conflict negatively and job satisfaction positively influenced tax practitioners' ethical sensitivity. Also, the covariates of the tax practitioner's professional risk level and type of employer were found to be significant. The significant factors are job specific. The tax firm may have the best opportunity to positively change a tax practitioner's ethical recognition abilities. Professional accounting organizations may need to evaluate if resources should be used to formulate, maintain, and publicize codes of conduct because of the lack of significance of professional commitment. (shrink)

while many have explored the international reception of Dewey’s thought—for instance, by Hu Shih in the Chinese context—little has been said about the fate of pragmatism in India. Yet there is a line of discernable influence to Indian politics and civil rights movements in the person of Bhimrao Ambedkar. Ambedkar was a famous Indian statesman and anti-caste activist, but he was also a formidable intellectual and philosopher whose collected works span over twenty volumes. He also was highly educated in the (...) West, earning degrees from universities in America and England. Importantly for the fate of pragmatism in India, one of the academic mentors that made a significant impact on Ambedkar during his... (shrink)

This paper describes a cross-cultural research project on the relation between how people conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among and within populations living in the same area and engaged in more or less the same activities. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including dealing with commons problems. Our research also offers a distinct perspective on models of culture, and a unified approach to the study of culture and (...) cognition. We argue that cultural transmission and formation does not consist primarily in shared rules or norms, but in complex distributions of causally-connected representations across minds in interaction with the environment. The cultural stability and diversity of these representations often derives from rich, biologically-prepared mental mechanisms that limit variation to readily transmissible psychological forms. This framework addresses a series of methodological issues, such as the limitations of conceiving culture to be a well-defined system or bounded entity, an independent variable, or an internalized component of minds. (shrink)

Orbell and Dawes develop a non-game theoretic heuristic that yields a ‘cooperator's advantage’ by allowing players to project their own ‘cooperate-defect’ choices onto potential partners (1991, p. 515). With appropriate parameter values their heuristic yields a cooperative environment, but the cooperation depends, simply, on optimism about others' behavior (1991, p. 526). In earlier work, Dawes (1989) established a statistical foundation for such optimism. In this paper, I adapt some of the concerns of Dawes (1989) and develop a game theoretic model (...) based on a modification of the Harsanyi structure of games with incomplete information (1967–1968). I show that the commonly made conjecture that strategic play is incompatible with cooperation and the cooperator's advantage is false. (shrink)

Ever since the end of the Second World War, Rational Actor models have dominated strategic thinking at all levels of government policy and military planning. In the confrontation between states, and especially during the Cold War, these models were insightful and useful in anticipating a wide array of challenges and in stabilizing the world peace enough to prevent nuclear war. But now our society faces a whole new range of challenges from non-state actors who are committed to die in order (...) to kill and terrorize enough of our citizens to change the course of history. The darkest fear in the current struggle with terrorism is a nuclear bomb exploding in a major city. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the issue of methodological usefulness of a strong versus weak adaptationist position in attempting to gain significant insight and to make scientifically important advances and discoveries in human cognition. Strong adaptationism holds that complex design is best explained by task-specific adaptations to particular ancestral environments; whereas weak adaptationism claims that we should not assume that complex design is the result of such narrowly determined task- or niche-specific evolutionary pressures in the absence of substantial corroborating evidence. It (...) argues that in cases of certain domain-specific cognitive competencies strong adaptationism has proven useful but not necessary to recent progress in the field. In other cases, a weak adaptationist strategy has been arguably most productive in advancing scientific understanding, without precluding that the structures uncovered by other means are actually adaptations. (shrink)

Subjects enrolled in studies testing high risk interventions for incurable or progressive brain diseases may be vulnerable to deficiencies in informed consent, such as the therapeutic misconception. However, the definition and measurement of the therapeutic misconception is a subject of continuing debate. Our qualitative pilot study of persons enrolled in a phase I trial of gene transfer for Parkinson disease suggests potential avenues for both measuring and preventing the therapeutic misconception. Building on earlier literature on the topic, we developed and (...) tested an interview guide that focuses on how the subjects decided to participate, emphasizing the integration of subjects’ various statements that are relevant to assessing the therapeutic misconception, rather than evaluating them as isolated statements. The results indicate that a subject’s understanding of the purpose of research is best explored in juxtaposition to the subject’s motivation for participating. (shrink)

Resolution of quarrels arising from conflicting sacred values, as in the Middle East, may require concessions that acknowledge the opposition's core concerns.

Scott Soames; XI*—Pronouns and Propositional Attitudes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 90, Issue 1, 1 June 1990, Pages 191–212, https://doi.org.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Simulation, Subjective Knowledge, and the Cognitive Value of Literary NarrativeScott R. Stroud (bio)IntroductionLiterary narrative holds the power to move individuals to thought, reflection, action, and belief. According to a longstanding view of literature, it is this impact on the reader that leads to literary narrative being valued so highly in our culture and in others. What exactly is the value of literature? Humanists such as Peter Lamarque and Stein (...) Olsen1 argue for this value in terms of perennial themes that literature allows one to "grapple with," as opposed to cognitivist accounts that discuss the value of literary narrative in terms of conveyed truths or knowledge. One particularly important position that explains the cognitive value of literature can be labeled the "Subjective Knowledge Theory" (SKT). Such an account of literature places its value in the subjective perspectives or experiences the narrative opens up to the reader. Thus, one can gain knowledge of "what it is like" to be caught in the throes of jealousy, endangered by an opposing army, or captivated by the lure of magical prowess. Lamarque and Olsen, however, argue that SKT is fundamentally flawed in its analysis of knowledge derivable from the literary narrative and in terms of its account of literary practice.I wish to defend a version of SKT in this article. In order to do so, I make and defend the following claims. First, Lamarque and Olsen's critique of SKT relies on a conflation of two distinct types of knowledge—the knowledge provided by the simulated subjective experience and its appropriation/ generalization to forms useful for the reader's real life activities. I will argue that the former of these outcomes is due strictly to the aesthetic features of the literary narrative, whereas the second involves a non-necessary psychological reaction to the text (that is, judgments of the veracity or usefulness of the text for one's own purposes). By conflating both of these into the cognitive knowledge derivable from the text, Lamarque and Olsen's critique can [End Page 19] gain its purchase against SKT. If these two processes and the resultant sorts of knowledge are separated, then the SKT account does seem to show how literature holds value in itself and in relation to the reader's moral activities/ judgments. Second, the process of simulation is the primary means by which one can gain any type of subjective knowledge from a literary narrative. This type of knowledge will be gained by virtue of the literary narrative's aesthetic qualities, which result in a certain type of activity in the reader. Third, I will argue that the second sort of knowledge—that derived from the simulated subjective experience—results from the process of reader identification with the values, beliefs, and/or behaviors of the simulated agent. This sense of identification involves selective appropriation and generalization and will be shown not to be subject to the critiques of simple identification offered by Noël Carroll.2 It is at this stage that individuals learn what they believe they ought to value, how they ought to act, and what they should believe from their experience of simulation in reading the literary narrative. Notice that this knowledge is separate from the first sort of knowledge, which is knowledge of what it is like to experience x through y's eyes.As I elucidate and defend these claims, I hope it will become clear that this is an account that does justice to the value resident in literature and in the activities readers do after they partake in the aesthetic object of the literary narrative. Thus, I will conclude by showing how this account does not fall prey to the conflation that both critics and supporters of SKT commit in muddling the different types of knowledge available from and in relation to a literary narrative.Before I proceed, it is important that some basic concepts are clearly set forth. A narrative can be defined as any representation of two or more events over time. The number of events and the relationship among them can be as simple or complex as one likes, but the crucial aspect is that the representation supplies the... (shrink)

With the addition of Kit Fine’s Semantic Relationism to the mix, there are now two main versions of Millianism on offer.1 Both maintain (i) that the semantic contents of names, indexicals, and variables (appropriately relativized) are their referents.

In this article, I argue that speech act theory can be altered to accommodate art objects as evocative illocutionary speech acts that areaimed toward reaching understanding. To do this, I discuss the example of Zen Buddhism’s use of the koan, an aesthetic object that can be seen as evoking a given experience from its auditors for the purpose of reaching understanding on a point that the teacher wishes to make. I argue that such a reading of art as evocative can (...) be merged with hypothetical intentionalism insofar as it recognizes a certain orientation on the part of the auditor to approach art in a certain way. In the case of koans and other artworks, the approach is one of considering what claim an author may want to convey through the auditor’s experience of the artwork. (shrink)