In spite of the wide variety of approaches to ethics training it is still debatable which approach has the highest potential to enhance professionals’ integrity. The current effort assesses a novel curriculum that focuses on metacognitive reasoning strategies researchers use when making sense of day-to-day professional practices that have ethical implications. The evaluated trainings effectiveness was assessed by examining five key sensemaking processes, such as framing, emotion regulation, forecasting, self-reflection, and information integration that experts and novices apply in ethical decision-making. (...) Mental models of trained and untrained graduate students, as well as faculty, working in the field of physical sciences were compared using a think-aloud protocol 6 months following the ethics training. Evaluation and comparison of the mental models of participants provided further validation evidence for sensemaking training. Specifically, it was found that trained students applied metacognitive reasoning strategies learned during training in their ethical decision-making that resulted in complex mental models focused on the objective assessment of the situation. Mental models of faculty and untrained students were externally-driven with a heavy focus on autobiographical processes. The study shows that sensemaking training has a potential to induce shifts in researchers’ mental models by making them more cognitively complex via the use of metacognitive reasoning strategies. Furthermore, field experts may benefit from sensemaking training to improve their ethical decision-making framework in highly complex, novel, and ambiguous situations. (shrink)

Although Responsible Conduct of Research training is common in the sciences, the effectiveness of RCR training is open to question. Three key factors appear to be particularly important in ensuring the effectiveness of ethics education programs: educational efforts should be tied to day-to-day practices in the field, educational efforts should provide strategies for working through the ethical problems people are likely to encounter in day-to-day practice, and educational efforts should be embedded in a broader program of on-going career development efforts. (...) This article discusses a complex qualitative approach to RCR training development, based on a sensemaking model, which strives to address the afore-mentioned training concerns. Ethnographic observations and prior RCR training served the purpose of collecting information specific to a multi-disciplinary and multi-university research center with the goal of identifying metacognitive reasoning strategies that would facilitate ethical decision-making. The extensive qualitative analyses resulted in the identification of nine metacognitive reasoning strategies on which future RCR training will be developed. The implications of the findings for RCR training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Integrity is a critical determinant of the effectiveness of research organizations in terms of producing high quality research and educating the new generation of scientists. A number of responsible conduct of research (RCR) training programs have been developed to address this growing organizational concern. However, in spite of a significant body of research in ethics training, it is still unknown which approach has the highest potential to enhance researchers’ integrity. One of the approaches showing some promise in improving researchers’ integrity (...) has focused on the development of ethical decision-making skills. The current effort proposes a novel curriculum that focuses on broad metacognitive reasoning strategies researchers use when making sense of day-to-day social and professional practices that have ethical implications for the physical sciences and engineering. This sensemaking training has been implemented in a professional sample of scientists conducting research in electrical engineering, atmospheric and computer sciences at a large multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary, and multi-university research center. A pre-post design was used to assess training effectiveness using scenario-based ethical decision-making measures. The training resulted in enhanced ethical decision-making of researchers in relation to four ethical conduct areas, namely data management, study conduct, professional practices, and business practices. In addition, sensemaking training led to researchers’ preference for decisions involving the application of the broad metacognitive reasoning strategies. Individual trainee and training characteristics were used to explain the study findings. Broad implications of the findings for ethics training development, implementation, and evaluation in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Although Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training is common in the sciences, the effectiveness of RCR training is open to question. Three key factors appear to be particularly important in ensuring the effectiveness of ethics education programs: (1) educational efforts should be tied to day-to-day practices in the field, (2) educational efforts should provide strategies for working through the ethical problems people are likely to encounter in day-to-day practice, and (3) educational efforts should be embedded in a broader program of (...) on-going career development efforts. This article discusses a complex qualitative approach to RCR training development, based on a sensemaking model, which strives to address the afore-mentioned training concerns. Ethnographic observations and prior RCR training served the purpose of collecting information specific to a multi-disciplinary and multi-university research center with the goal of identifying metacognitive reasoning strategies that would facilitate ethical decision-making. The extensive qualitative analyses resulted in the identification of nine metacognitive reasoning strategies on which future RCR training will be developed. The implications of the findings for RCR training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Although Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training is common in the sciences, the effectiveness of RCR training is open to question. Three key factors appear to be particularly important in ensuring the effectiveness of ethics education programs: (1) educational efforts should be tied to day-to-day practices in the field, (2) educational efforts should provide strategies for working through the ethical problems people are likely to encounter in day-to-day practice, and (3) educational efforts should be embedded in a broader program of (...) on-going career development efforts. This article discusses a complex qualitative approach to RCR training development, based on a sensemaking model, which strives to address the afore-mentioned training concerns. Ethnographic observations and prior RCR training served the purpose of collecting information specific to a multi-disciplinary and multi-university research center with the goal of identifying metacognitive reasoning strategies that would facilitate ethical decision-making. The extensive qualitative analyses resulted in the identification of nine metacognitive reasoning strategies on which future RCR training will be developed. The implications of the findings for RCR training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

A common conception of what it is for one property to “realize” another suggests that it is the realizer property that does the causal work, and that the realized property is epiphenomenal. The same conception underlies George Bealer’s argument that functionalism leads to the absurd conclusion that what we take to be self-ascriptions of a mental state are really self-ascriptions of “first-order” properties that realize that state. This paper argues for a different concept of realization. A property realizes another if (...) its “forward looking” causal features are a subset of those of the property realized. The instantiation of the realizer property will include the instantiation of the property realized; and when the effects produced are due to the causal features of the latter, it is the instantiation of it that is appropriately regarded as their cause. Epiphenomenalism is avoided, and so is Bealer’s absurd conclusion. (shrink)

A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should (contrary to the view) share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in the properties ascribed by (...) these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. (shrink)

This book comprehensively examines the aesthetic views of Thomas Aquinas, treating both the objective nature and the subjective human experience of beauty. It locates Aquinas’s views in their historical context and illustrates their relations to other popular aesthetic views.

Dr Sydney Brenner has played a major, and unique, role in biology during the past 40 years. His contributions have ranged from key work on the structure of the genetic code and the existence of mRNA through the development of Caenorhabditis elegans as a key model system in developmental biology to genomic analysis and function in vertebrates. BioEssays went to interview Dr Brenner at his home in the cathedral city of Ely, England, on the significance of the genome projects (...) for human biology, in particular, and for biology, in general. (shrink)

Since the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity, Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation between (...) the two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigourous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker is one of the most influential philosophers currently writing on philosophy of mind and metaphysics. The essays in this collection deal with the way in which we know our own minds, and with the nature of those mental states of which we have our most direct conscious awareness. Professor Shoemaker opposes the 'inner sense' conception of introspective self-knowledge. He defends the view that perceptual and sensory states have non-representational features - 'qualia' - that determine what it is (...) like to have them. Amongst the other topics covered are the unity of consciousness, and the idea that the 'first-person perspective' gives a privileged route to philosophical understanding of the nature of mind. This major collection is sure to prove invaluable to all advanced students of the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

In Physical Realization, Sydney Shoemaker considers the question of how physicalism can be true: how can all facts about the world, including mental ones, be constituted by facts about the distribution in the world of physical properties? Physicalism requires that the mental properties of a person are 'realized in' the physical properties of that person, and that all instantiations of properties in macroscopic objects are realized in microphysical states of affairs. Shoemaker offers an account of both these sorts of (...) realization, one which allows the realized properties to be causally efficacious. He also explores the implications of this account for a wide range of metaphysical issues, including the nature of persistence through time, the problem of material constitution, the possibility of emergent properties, and the nature of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that this person at this time is 'the same' as that person at an earlier time? If the brain is damaged or the memory lost, how far does a person's identity continue? In this book two eminent philosophers develop very different approaches to the problem.

This early work by Sydney Smith was originally published in 1854 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy' is a collection of lectures delivered by Smith at the Royal Institution in the years 1804, 1805, and 1806. Sydney Smith was born on 3rd June 1771 in Woodford, Essex, England. Smith's first book 'Six Sermons, preached in Charlotte Street Chapel, Edinburgh' was published in 1800. He married Catharine Amelia Pybus (...) in the same year and the couple settled in Edinburgh. While there, he helped set up the 'Edinburgh Review' and became its first editor in 1802. He continued to write articles for the review for the next quarter of the century which were a key element to the publication's success. (shrink)

Covering nearly 300 years of American religious writing, this anthology compiles selections from thirteen notable thinkers--including Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josiah Royce, William James and H. Richard Niebuhr--to reveal the vital and creative history of Protestant theology in America. In his substantial Introduction, Sydney Ahlstrom relates the history of American theology in broad and accessible terms, tackling his subject with characteristic clarity, passion, and intellectual rectitude.

In his paper, “Mersenne’s Principles of Song Creation,” Eric Wilkinson (2023) lists several aims he intends to establish. I will confine my comments to two areas only: First, on the reasons given for preferring Aquinas’s theory of the passions as the major influence on Mersenne to those of either Aristotle or Cicero, and Second, on its representation of Aquinas’s theory of the passions.

* Argument from authoritative self-knowledge 1. We have a "privileged access" to our own mental states in the sense we have the authority on what mental states we are in. 2. Through introspection, we are aware of our mental states but not aware of them as physical states of any sort or as functional states. 3. Therefore, our mental states cannot be physical states.

For most pre‐modern philosophers, questions about the good life and the happy life were inseparable. Happiness is primarily a subjective notion. The Good Place suggests that relationships are key to the good life. It is a laboratory for testing moral theories, providing the show's writers opportunities to see which theories help the protagonists become better persons. An ethics of virtue is difficult and messy because it does not reduce morality to a simple formula. Instead, it involves an inner transformation of (...) character that leads to virtuous actions. In Aristotle's ethical system, true moral progress toward the good life is within reach. In spite of the verbal commitments made to Kant's ethics, the show ultimately proves to be a vindication of virtue ethics. A universe governed by Aristotelian morality is one in which moral development is possible. (shrink)

These lectures have been organized around the question of whether there is any good sense in which our introspective access to our own mental states is a kind of perception, something that can appropriately be called "inner sense." In my first lecture I distinguished two versions of the perception model of introspection, based on two different stereotypes of sense perception. One of these, based primarily on the case of vision, is what I called the object perceptual model -- it takes (...) perception to be in the first instance a relation to objects and only secondarily a relation to facts. I argued in my first lecture that introspection does not have non factual objects of the sort required to make this model applicable. The other, which does not require perception to have non factual objects, I called the broad perceptual model; its key tenet is that the existence of the objects of perception, whether they be factual or non factual, is independent both of their being perceived and of there being the possibility of their being perceived. The view that introspection conforms to this was my target in my second lecture, where I argued that it is of the essence of various kinds of mental states that they are introspectively accessible. (shrink)

These lectures have been organized around the question of whether there is any good sense in which our introspective access to our own mental states is a kind of perception, something that can appropriately be called "inner sense." In my first lecture I distinguished two versions of the perception model of introspection, based on two different stereotypes of sense- perception. One of these, based primarily on the case of vision, is what I called the object-perceptual model -- it takes perception (...) to be in the first instance a relation to objects and only secondarily a relation to facts. I argued in my first lecture that introspection does not have non-factual objects of the sort required to make this model applicable. The other, which does not require perception to have non-factual objects, I called the broad perceptual model; its key tenet is that the existence of the objects of perception, whether they be factual or non-factual, is independent both of their being perceived and of there being the possibility of their being perceived. The view that introspection conforms to this was my target in my second lecture, where I argued that it is of the essence of various kinds of mental states that they are introspectively accessible. (shrink)

From now on I will assume that it is possible in principle for there to be cases of spectrum inversion in which the invertees are equally good perceivers of the colors. What I want to show next is that while allowing this possibility is incompatible with standard representationalism, it requires acceptance of a different version of representationalism. Consider the standard way of describing a case of spectrum inversion. Returning to Jack and Jill, we say that red things look to Jack (...) the way green things look to Jill, blue things look to Jack the way yellow things look to Jill, and so on. Of course, we might also express this by saying that the phenomenal character of Jack’s experience of red things is like the phenomenal character of Jill’s experience of green things, and so on. Or by saying that “what it is like” for Jack to see red things is “what it is like” for Jill to see green things, and so on. But “phenomenal character” is philosophical jargon, and “what it is like” is on its way to being that. We need to be able cash these locutions in terms that we are sure we understand. And I think that the best way of doing that is in terms of how things look. Now the sense in which red things look different to Jack and Jill cannot be that they look to have different colors in the epistemic sense. We can suppose that both perceive red things as being red, and therefore that to both red things look red in the epistemic sense. Nor can it be the comparative sense – to each, we can suppose, red things look like standard red things under standard conditions. The remaining sense of “looks” is supposed to be the phenomenal sense. Now those who employ this notion typically speak of things as looking red, blue, yellow, etc., in the phenomenal sense. But if Jack and Jill are both accurate perceivers of the colors of things, it can’t be that the difference in how things look to them is a difference in what colors things look to them, even if “looks” is used in the phenomenal sense.. (shrink)

Background Diversity in Institutional Review Board (IRB) membership is important for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons, including fairness, promoting trust, improving decision quality, and responding to systemic racism. Yet U.S. IRBs remain racially and ethnically homogeneous, even as gender diversity has improved. Little is known about IRB chairpersons’ perspectives on membership diversity and barriers to increasing it, as well as current institutional efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within IRB membership.Methods We surveyed IRB chairpersons leading U.S. boards registered (...) with the Office for Human Research Protections. Here, we focus exclusively on responses from a subset of 388 chairpersons of IRBs at universities and academic medical centers (AMCs).Results Board chairs were predominantly white and evenly split between men and women. Only about half reported that their boards had at least one member who is Black or African American (51%), Asian (56%), or Hispanic (48%), with 85% of university/AMC boards comprised entirely (15%) or mostly (70%) of white members. Most IRB chairpersons (64%) reported satisfaction with the current diversity of their membership. Participants largely agreed that considering diversity in the selection of IRB members is important (91%), including to improve the quality of IRB deliberation (80%), with an emphasis on racial/ethnic (85%) and gender diversity (74%). Most participants (80%) reported some type of active DEI effort regarding board membership at their university/AMC and just over half (57%) expressed satisfaction with these efforts.Conclusions Our national survey found that although university/AMC IRB chairpersons report valuing diversity in board membership, it may be lacking in key areas. Going forward, it will be important to specify clear reasons for diversity in the IRB context, as well to establish targets for acceptable levels of board diversity and to match DEI efforts to those targets. (shrink)

Place was the theme of the 11th East-West Philosophers’ Conference, held in the urban heart of the Islands, Honolulu, from May 24-31, 2016.