Metaphors are found all throughout science: in published papers, working hypotheses, policy documents, lecture slides, grant proposals, and press releases. They serve different functions, but perhaps most striking is the way they enable understanding, of a theory, phenomenon, or idea. In this paper, we leverage recent advances on the nature of metaphor and the nature of understanding to explore how they accomplish this feat. We attempt to shift the focus away from the epistemic value of the content of metaphors, to (...) the epistemic value of the metaphor’s consequences. Many famous scientific metaphors are epistemically good, not primarily because of what they say about the world, but because of how they cause us to think. Specifically, metaphors increase understanding either by improving our sets of representations, or by making it easier for us to encode and process data about complex subjects by changing how we are disposed to conceptualize those subjects. This view hints towards new positions concerning testimonial understanding, factivity, abilities, discovery via metaphor, and the relation between metaphors and models. (shrink)

Background: The Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 passed into law in Victoria, Australia, on the 29 November 2017. Internationally, nurses have been shown to be intimately involved in patient care throughout the voluntary assisted dying process. However, there is a paucity of research exploring Australian nurses’ perspectives on voluntary assisted dying and, in particular, how Victorian nurses anticipate the implementation of this ethically controversial legislation will impact their professional lives. Objectives: To explore Victorian nurses’ expectations of the ethical and practical (...) impacts the voluntary assisted dying legislation will have on their professional lives. Research design: This qualitative study analysed nurses’ free text responses collected as part of a larger mixed methods online survey investigating staff views on the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act. Data were collected during the period between the passing of the voluntary assisted dying legislation and the start date and were analysed using inductive content analysis. Participants and research context: Free text survey responses were analysed from 1873 nurses employed across seven Victorian health services located in both metropolitan and regional areas of the state. Ethical considerations: The study obtained research ethics approval and all participants were informed of the voluntary and anonymous nature of their participation. Findings: This study identified three broad areas of Victorian nurses’ professional lives that they expected to be impacted by the implementation of voluntary assisted dying: professional identity, career development and workplace relationships. Conclusion: Participants anticipate diverse and nursing-specific impacts of the implementation of voluntary assisted dying in Victoria. Their insights can inform health services in jurisdictions considering or already implementing voluntary assisted dying, to develop policies, procedures and staff training programmes that safeguard the well-being and legal rights of their nursing staff. (shrink)

Most views of agency take acting for reasons (whether explanatory or justifying) to be an important hallmark of the capacity for agency. The problem, however, is that the standard analysis of what it is to act in light of reasons is not sufficiently fine grained to accommodate what we will argue are the myriad types of ways that agents can do so. We suggest that a full account of acting for reasons must also recognize the relationship that agents have with (...) their reasons. We focus on two types of relationships. The first is the traditional case, where agents act in light of reasons that they take to be their own and that they endorse. We describe this as possessing an Endorsement Relationship with one's reasons. A second way of relating to reasons is what we will describe as possessing a Directed Relationship with one's reasons. This includes cases in which agents' actions are the product of reasons but toward which agents do not have an Endorsement Relationship. The Endorsement Relationship is uncontroversial. In this paper, we defend the existence and importance of the Directed Relationship. We show that it is a genuine but overlooked way of relating to, and thereby acting for, reasons. (shrink)

As the median age of practicing physicians increases, ethical dilemmas due to age-related cognitive decline among clinicians will become ever more pressing. Compelling data show that despite acknowledgement of their duty to protect the public, physicians often fail to report themselves, their colleagues, or their physician-patients when cognitive decline appears to impact medical practice adversely. As such, efforts to educate physicians about ethical obligations and various tactful methodologies to report themselves or others seem ineffective. Illustrated by a case report of (...) age-related cognitive decline in a practicing physician, practical recommendations are made both to develop and validate cognitive screening in middle-aged physicians, presumably before the onset of age-related cognitive decline. (shrink)

This work presents an approach to the study of comparative politics that builds on the assumption that political actors and institutions operate within constructed communities of meaning, which in turn interface with other such communities.

The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression presents the current state of knowledge related to the study of violent behaviors and aggression. An important extension of the first Handbook published ten years ago, the second edition maintains a distinctly cross-disciplinary focus by representing the newest scholarship and insights from behavior genetics, cross-cultural comparative psychology/criminology, evolutionary psychology, criminal justice, criminology, human development, molecular genetics, neurosciences, psychology, prevention and intervention sciences, psychiatry, psychopharmacology, public health, and sociology. The Handbook is divided into (...) introductory and overview chapters on the study of violent behavior and aggression, followed by chapters on biosocial bases, individual and interpersonal factors, contextual factors, and prevention and intervention work and policy implications. It is an essential resource for researchers, scholars, and graduate students across social and behavioral science disciplines interested in the etiology, intervention, and prevention of violent behavior and aggression. (shrink)

We provide an account of chimpanzee-specific agency within the context of philosophy of action. We do so by showing that chimpanzees are capable of what we call reason-directed action, even though they may be incapable of more full-blown action, which we call reason-considered action. Although chimpanzee agency does not possess all the features of typical adult human agency, chimpanzee agency is evolutionarily responsive to their environment and overlaps considerably with our own. As such, it is an evolved set of capacities (...) for goal-directed behavior, which solves problems that chimpanzees naturally encounter. Thus, it ought not be understood as a deficient instance of human agency. (shrink)

The authors examine the scientific possibility and the legal and ethical implications of using DNA forensic technology, through partial matches to DNA from crime scenes, to turn into suspects the relatives of people whose DNA profiles are in forensic databases.

There are kinds of dialogue that support social justice and others that do the reverse. The kinds of dialogue that support social justice require that anger be bracketed and that hiding in safe spaces be eschewed. All illegitimate ad hominem/ad feminem attacks are ruled out from the get-go. No dialogical contribution can be down-graded on account of the communicator’s gender, race, or religion. As well, this communicative approach unapologetically privileges reason in full view of theories and strategies that might seek (...) to undermine reasoning as just another illegitimate form of power. On the more positive side, it is argued in this paper that social justice dialogue will be enhanced by a kind of “communicative upgrading,” which amplifies “person perception,” foregrounds the impersonal forces within our common social spaces rather than the “baddies” within, and orients the dialogical trajectory toward the future rather than the past. Finally, it is argued in this paper that educators have a pressing responsibility to guide their students through social justice dialogue so that their speech contributes to the amelioration of injustice, rather than rendering the terrain more treacherous. (shrink)

That the world is awash with resentment poses a genuine question for educators. Here, we will suggest that resentment can be better harnessed for good if we stop focusing on people and tribes and, instead, focus on systems: those invisible norms that often produce locked-in structures of social interaction. A “systems lens” is vast, so fixes will have to be an iterative process of reflection, and revision toward a more just system. Nonetheless, resentment toward the status quo may be an (...) important element in keeping that otherwise tedious process going, with the caveat that resentment is only productive when it is combined with reason, and that, therefore, educators, rather than privileging participant reactive attitudes, ought, instead, to promote participant reactive reasoning, as the latter can be a genuine force for both personal and interpersonal growth, while the former might very well do the reverse. (shrink)

McKay & Dennett (M&D) suggest that some positive illusions are adaptive. But there is a bidirectional link between memory and positive illusions: Biased autobiographical memories filter incoming information, and self-enhancing information is preferentially attended and used to update memory. Extending M&D's approach, I ask if certain false memories might be adaptive, defending a broad view of the psychosocial functions of remembering.

A large amount of research in cognitive psychology is focused on memory distortions, understood as deviations from various (largely implicit) standards. Many alleged distortions actually suggest a highly functional system that balances the cost of acquiring new information with the benefit of relevant, contextually appropriate decision-making. In this sense many memories may be examples of functionally adaptive misbelief.

Inducing religious thoughts increases prosocial behavior among strangers in anonymous contexts. These effects can be explained both by behavioral priming processes as well as by reputational mechanisms. We examine whether belief in moralizing supernatural agents supplies a case for what McKay & Dennett (M&D) call evolved misbelief, concluding that they might be more persuasively seen as an example of culturally evolved misbelief.

ObjectiveTo further delineate risk and resilience factors contributing to trajectories of mental health symptoms experienced by college students through the pandemic.Participantsn = 183 college students.MethodsLinear mixed models examined time effects on depression and anxiety. Propensity-matched subgroups exhibiting “increased” versus “low and stable” depression symptoms from before to after the pandemic-onset were compared on pre-pandemic demographic and psychological factors and COVID-related experiences and coping strategies.ResultsStudents experienced worsening of mental health symptoms throughout the pandemic, particularly during Fall 2020 compared with Fall 2019. (...) The propensity-matched subgroup exhibiting relative resilience reported less alcohol use prior to the pandemic, greater use of active coping strategies, and less of an impact on their college progress.ConclusionsResults point to several potential targets of screening and intervention to decrease residual impacts of the pandemic. (shrink)

Background: Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve high diagnostic accuracy for detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, they are not yet applied in clinical routine. One important reason for this is a lack of model comprehensibility. Recently developed visualization methods for deriving CNN relevance maps may help to fill this gap as they allow the visualization of key input image features that drive the decision of the model. We investigated whether models with higher accuracy (...) also rely more on discriminative brain regions predefined by prior knowledge. Methods: We trained a CNN for the detection of AD in N = 663 T1-weighted MRI scans of patients with dementia and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and verified the accuracy of the models via cross-validation and in three independent samples including in total N = 1655 cases. We evaluated the association of relevance scores and hippocampus volume to validate the clinical utility of this approach. To improve model comprehensibility, we implemented an interactive visualization of 3D CNN relevance maps, thereby allowing intuitive model inspection. Results: Across the three independent datasets, group separation showed high accuracy for AD dementia versus controls (AUC ≥ 0.91) and moderate accuracy for amnestic MCI versus controls (AUC ≈ 0.74). Relevance maps indicated that hippocampal atrophy was considered the most informative factor for AD detection, with additional contributions from atrophy in other cortical and subcortical regions. Relevance scores within the hippocampus were highly correlated with hippocampal volumes (Pearson’s r ≈ −0.86, p < 0.001). Conclusion: The relevance maps highlighted atrophy in regions that we had hypothesized a priori. This strengthens the comprehensibility of the CNN models, which were trained in a purely data-driven manner based on the scans and diagnosis labels. The high hippocampus relevance scores as well as the high performance achieved in independent samples support the validity of the CNN models in the detection of AD-related MRI abnormalities. The presented data-driven and hypothesis-free CNN modeling approach might provide a useful tool to automatically derive discriminative features for complex diagnostic tasks where clear clinical criteria are still missing, for instance for the differential diagnosis between various types of dementia. (shrink)

Background: Limited evidence exists comprehensively assessing physical fitness attributes, physical activity behaviors, nutritional habits, and nutritional knowledge according to sex in basketball players during early adolescence. Insight of this nature could be used to optimize the training process and lifestyles in young basketball players.Objective: To compare physical fitness attributes, physical activity levels, nutritional habits, and nutritional knowledge between elite male and female basketball players under 14 years of age.Methods: Twenty-three U-14 basketball players from the same elite basketball academy participated in (...) this study. Physical fitness attributes were assessed using a basketball-specific test battery, while physical activity levels, nutritional habits, and nutritional knowledge were assessed using questionnaires.Results: Male players exhibited better physical fitness in all tests. Of note, a high proportion of players declared never or only sometimes eating fruit and vegetables. In addition, relatively poor nutritional knowledge was evident in all players with the group correctly answering <50% of nutritional questions overall and according to sex.Conclusion: These findings emphasize the necessity to perform individualized prescription of training stimuli across sexes to optimize the physical preparedness and development of youth basketball players. Additionally, strategies such as nutrition-focused education interventions may be necessary in this population given the low consumption of fruits and vegetables, as well as the poor nutritional knowledge observed in players. (shrink)

Most human beliefs are acquired through communication, and so are most misbeliefs. Just like the misbeliefs discussed by McKay & Dennett (M&D), culturally transmitted misbeliefs tend to result from limitations rather than malfunctions of the mechanisms that produce them, and few if any can be argued to be adaptations. However, the mechanisms involved, the contents, and the hypothetical adaptive value tend to be specific to the cultural case.

Esports are a rapidly growing phenomenon and understanding of factors underlying game performance are therefore of great interest. The present study investigated the influence of satisfaction of basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy, and relatedness), type of motivation (amotivation, external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, integrated regulation, and intrinsic motivation), and number of matches played (time on task) on individuals’ performance on a matchmaking rating (MMR) in the video game Defence of the Ancients 2 (Dota 2). Collected data from 315 participants (...) was included in the analyses. A web-based questionnaire was used to collect data and structural equation modelling (SEM) was performed to analyze the data. The results show that perceived competence and autonomy were the only significant predictors of MMR performance beyond matches played. Fulfillment of relatedness, as well as motivational factors, were not found to be predictors of MMR scores. The strong effect of matches played, used as proxy of time on task, emphasize the effect of time and practice as a critical aspect of video-game expertise. (shrink)

The radical evolutionary step that divides human decision-making from that of nonhumans is the ability to excite the reward process for its own sake, in imagination. Combined with hyperbolic over-valuation of the present, this ability is a potential threat to both the individual's long term survival and the natural selection of high intelligence. Human belief is intrinsically or under-founded, which may or may not be adaptive.

I take up the challenge of whyfalsebeliefs are better than “cautious actionpolicies” (target article, sect. 9) in navigating adaptive problems with asymmetric errors. I then suggest that there areinteractionsbetween supernatural beliefs, self-deception, and positive illusions, rendering elements of all such misbeliefs adaptive. Finally, I argue that supernatural beliefs cannot be rejected as adaptive simply because recent experiments are inconclusive. The great costs of religion betray its even greater adaptive benefits – we just have not yet nailed down exactly what they (...) are. (shrink)

Aristotle on the Perfect Life may be viewed as part of such a detailed study. In this book, Kenny discusses a series of topics relating to the central Aristotelian concept of the supreme good, and compares the treatment of these topics in the two treatises. He devotes separate discussions to the notions of finality, perfection, and self-sufficiency as attributes of the supreme good. He also considers the way in which friendship and good fortune relate to happiness. A theme which recurs (...) throughout the book is the divergent ways in which the EE and the NE conceive the relationship between moral excellence, contemplation and happiness. In some cases Kenny suggests that the EE offers a subtler treatment than the NE; in other cases he argues that the EE presents a more coherent, more plausible, position. Are we in a position, then, to conclude with confidence that the EE is the later, more authoritative, treatise? Kenny does not draw such a conclusion. One comes away with the impression that although he leans towards this conclusion, he also believes that still more work, especially on the EE, is needed. (shrink)

McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) description of beliefs, and misbeliefs in particular, is a commendable contribution to the literature; but we argue that referring to beliefs as adaptive or maladaptive can cause conceptual confusion. “Adaptive” is inconsistently defined in the article, which adds to confusion and renders it difficult to evaluate the claims, particularly the possibility of “adaptive misbelief.”.

Many experiments have demonstrated that people fail to detect seemingly large visual changes in their environment. Despite these failures, most people confidently predict that they would see changes that are actually almost impossible to see. Therefore, in at least some situations visual experience is demonstrably not what people think it is. This paper describes a line of research suggesting that overconfidence about change detection reflects a deeper metacognitive error founded on beliefs about attention and the role of meaning as a (...) support for a coherent perceptual experience. Accordingly, CBB does not occur in all situations , while the scope of the phenomenon remains broad enough to suggest more than a misunderstanding of a small niche of visual experience. I finish by arguing that despite the very small amount of research on visual metacognition, these beliefs are critical to understand. (shrink)

Recently, a number of experiments have emphasized the degree to which subjects fail to detect large changes in visual scenes. This finding, referred to as “change blindness,” is often considered surprising because many people have the intuition that such changes should be easy to detect. Levin, Momen, Drivdahl, and Simons documented this intuition by showing that the majority of subjects believe they would notice changes that are actually very rarely detected. Thus subjects exhibit a metacognitive error we refer to as (...) “change blindness blindness.” Here, we test whether CBB is caused by a misestimation of the perceptual experience associated with visual changes and show that it persists even when the pre- and postchange views are separated by long delays. In addition, subjects overestimate their change detection ability both when the relevant changes are illustrated by still pictures, and when they are illustrated using videos showing the changes occurring in real time. We conclude that CBB is a robust phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by failure to understand the specific perceptual experience associated with a change. (shrink)

This article explores the motives underlying corporate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis begins with Thomas Dunfee’s Statement of Minimum Moral Obligation (SMMO), which specifies, more precisely than any other contribution to the business ethics canon, the level of corporate beneficence required during a pandemic. The analysis then turns to Milton Friedman’s neoliberal understanding of human nature, critically contrasting it with the notion of stoic virtue that informs the works of Adam Smith. Friedman contends that beneficence should play no (...) role in corporate settings. Smith, by contrast, emphasizes the need for prudence, beneficence and self-command in all human endeavours. The article then uses these competing frameworks to reflect on a published survey of 145 corporate responses to COVID-19. In many of these responses, the benefit to a non-financial stakeholder is clear, while the financial consequence to the firm remains nebulous. This supports the contention that during a pandemic, beneficence provides a more complete explanation of many corporate actions than the profit motive alone. The article contests Friedman’s Chicago School profit imperative and goes beyond Dunfee’s SMMO by endorsing the more full-throated embrace of beneficence and stoic virtue found in the works of Smith. (shrink)

Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable (...) if they occur in other places or times, or if local authorities deem them acceptable. These predictions contrast markedly with those derived from prevailing non-evolutionary perspectives on moral judgement. Both classes of theories predict purportedly species-typical patterns, yet to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated moral judgement across a diverse set of societies, including a range of small-scale communities that differ substantially from large highly urbanized nations. We tested these predictions in five small-scale societies and two large-scale societies, finding substantial evidence of moral parochialism and contextual contingency in adults' moral judgements. Results reveal an overarching pattern in which moral condemnation reflects a concern with immediate local considerations, a pattern consistent with a variety of evolutionary accounts of moral judgement. (shrink)