In this paper, I develop the concept ofaffective milieusby building on the recently established notion ofaffective arrangements. Affective arrangements bring together the more analytical research of situated affectivity with affect studies informed by cultural theory. As such, this concept takes a step past the usual synchronic understanding of situatedness toward an understanding of the social, dynamic, historical, and cultural situatedness of individuals in relation to situated affectivity. However, I argue that affective arrangements remain too narrow in their scope of analysis (...) since their focus mainly lies on local, marked-off, and unique constellations of affect relations. They neglect the more mundane and day-to-day affect dynamics of social life. Hence, I introduce the notion of affective milieus, which brings to light the everyday, ubiquitous affective engagements of individuals with their socio-material surroundings. Affective milieus specifically call attention to how commonplace affect relations create territories in the social universe which form and mold individuals all the time. In that way, this paper apprehends and advances recent developments in the research on situated affectivity. (shrink)

In the highly contentious abortion arena, the new oral abortifacient technology RU486 is one among many actors. This article offers an arena analysis of the heterogeneous constructions of RU486 by various actors, including scientists, pharmaceutical compa nies, medical groups, antiabortion groups, women's health movement groups, and others who have produced situated knowledges. Conceptually, we find not only that the identity of the nonhuman actor-RU486 -is unstable and multiple but also that, in practice, there are other implicated actors—the downstream users and (...) consumers of the technology. If we try to follow all the actors, we find a fuller and more historicized arena, and, ironically, we too can be construed as implicated actors in it. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore a rationalistic orientation in Western society. We suggest that this orientation is one of the predominant ways in which Western society tends to frame, understand and deal with a majority of problems and questions – namely in terms of mathematical analysis, calculation and quantification, relying on logic, numbers, and statistics. Our main goal in this paper is to uncover the affective structure of this rationalistic orientation. In doing so, we illustrate how this orientation structures the (...) way not only individuals but society as a whole frames and solves problems. We firstly point towards some exemplary instances of the rationalistic orientation, specifically regarding science, society, and lifeworld practice. Crucially, we argue that the rationalistic orientation is not merely based on a set of beliefs we could easily correct; but rather, that it is an affective condition tacitly shaping our engagement with the world in an encompassing way. Relating to the work of Martin Heidegger, we argue that what we have called an orientation in the beginning is in fact a rationalistic attunement. This attunement fundamentally shapes the pre-reflective level of how individuals approach the world. We elaborate this claim by showing how the rationalistic attunement concretely manifests in tangible socio-material affect dynamics. In the end, we motivate a critical stance towards this attunement, providing the ability to reflect upon and question instances where this way of framing and solving problems is counterproductive. (shrink)

Introduction. Medical trainees fear disclosing psychological distress and rarely seek help. Social sharing of difficult experiences can reduce stress and burnout. Drawing comics is one way that has been used to help trainees express themselves. The authors explore reasons why some medical trainees chose to draw comics depicting stressful situations that they had never shared with anyone before. Methods. Trainees participated in a comic drawing session on stressors in medicine. Participants were asked if they had ever shared the drawn situation (...) with anyone. Participants who had not previously shared were asked what prevented them and why they shared it now. The authors performed content analysis of the responses. Results. Of two hundred forty participants, forty-six indicated sharing an experience for the first time. Analysis of the responses revealed dedicated time and space was essential to sharing, trainee insecurity was a barrier, and comics were perceived as a safe way to communicate. Discussion. Depicting a stressful situation may be beneficial for trainees who drew an experience they had never shared before. Providing trainees with the opportunity to externalize their experience and create a community for sharing tough experiences may be one way to reduce trainee stress and burnout. (shrink)

Though we see the potential for benefits from the development of process-oriented approaches, we argue that it falls prey to many of the same critiques raised about the existing construct level of analysis. The construct-level approach will likely dominate motivation research until we develop computational models that are not only accurate, but also broadly usable.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into critical domains such as healthcare holds immense promise. Nevertheless, significant challenges must be addressed to avoid harm, promote the well-being of individuals and societies, and ensure ethically sound and socially just technology development. Innovative approaches like Embedded Ethics, which refers to integrating ethics and social science into technology development based on interdisciplinary collaboration, are emerging to address issues of bias, transparency, misrepresentation, and more. This paper aims to develop this approach further to enable future projects (...) to effectively deploy it. Based on the practical experience of using ethics and social science methodology in interdisciplinary AI-related healthcare consortia, this paper presents several methods that have proven helpful for embedding ethical and social science analysis and inquiry. They include (1) stakeholder analyses, (2) literature reviews, (3) ethnographic approaches, (4) peer-to-peer interviews, (5) focus groups, (6) interviews with affected groups and external stakeholders, (7) bias analyses, (8) workshops, and (9) interdisciplinary results dissemination. We believe that applying Embedded Ethics offers a pathway to stimulate reflexivity, proactively anticipate social and ethical concerns, and foster interdisciplinary inquiry into such concerns at every stage of technology development. This approach can help shape responsible, inclusive, and ethically aware technology innovation in healthcare and beyond. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a typology of auditors’ virtues through in-depth interviews with nine exemplars of the audit community.We compare this typology with prescribed auditors’ virtues as represented in the applicable Code of Professional Conduct. Ourcomparison shows that the Code places a primary emphasis on mandatory virtues including the virtues of “independent,” “objective,”and “principled.” While the non-mandatory virtues, which involve “going beyond the minimum” and “putting the public interest foremost,” were identified by our exemplars as essential to the auditor’s (...) role, they received little or no emphasis in the Rules of Professional Conduct. We find this particularly alarming, given that the exemplars interviewed for this study viewed these virtues are essential to the auditors’ role. If the audit profession wishes to uphold public confidence by encouraging the possession of non-mandatory auditors’ virtues, our research suggests that non-mandatory auditors’ virtues should be explicitly described and included in rules of professional conduct. (shrink)

Mathematical notation includes a vast array of signs. Most mathematical signs appear to be symbolic, in the sense that their meaning is arbitrarily related to their visual appearance. We explored the hypothesis that mathematical signs with iconic aspects—those which visually resemble in some way the concepts they represent—offer a cognitive advantage over those which are purely symbolic. An early formulation of this hypothesis was made by Christine Ladd in 1883 who suggested that symmetrical signs should be used to convey commutative (...) relations, because they visually resemble the mathematical concept they represent. Two controlled experiments provide the first empirical test of, and evidence for, Ladd's hypothesis. In Experiment 1 we find that participants are more likely to attribute commutativity to operations denoted by symmetric signs. In Experiment 2 we further show that using symmetric signs as notation for commutative operations can increase mathematical performance. (shrink)

In our everyday moral deliberations, we attend to two central types of considerations – outcomes and moral rules. How these considerations interrelate is central to the long-standing debate between deontologists and utilitarians. Is the weight we attach to moral rules reducible to their conduciveness to good outcomes (as many utilitarians claim)? Or do we take moral rules to be absolute constraints on action that normatively trump outcomes (as many deontologists claim)? Arguments over these issues characteristically appeal to commonsense intuitions about (...) various cases. As a result, an important portion of the debate involves empirically tractable questions — questions that can be investigated by probing for people’s judgments in cases in which the two types of considerations come into conflict with one another. (shrink)

AI for social good is a thriving research topic and a frequently declared goal of AI strategies and regulation. This article investigates the requirements necessary in order for AI to actually serve a public interest, and hence be socially good. The authors propose shifting the focus of the discourse towards democratic governance processes when developing and deploying AI systems. The article draws from the rich history of public interest theory in political philosophy and law, and develops a framework for ‘public (...) interest AI’. The framework consists of (1) public justification for the AI system, (2) an emphasis on equality, (3) deliberation/ co-design process, (4) technical safeguards, and (5) openness to validation. This framework is then applied to two case studies, namely SyRI, the Dutch welfare fraud detection project, and UNICEF’s Project Connect, that maps schools worldwide. Through the analysis of these cases, the authors conclude that public interest is a helpful and practical guide for the development and governance of AI for the people. (shrink)

This paper explores the pragmatic foundations of unreliable narration (UN), a narrative technique highly popular in western literary texts. It sets out by giving a critique of the competing theoretic frameworks of UN, namely the seminal Boothian concept and more recent constructivist approaches. It is argued that both frameworks neglect a pragmatic perspective as the most viable way for identifying and analysing UN. Such a pragmatic model is then developed on the basis of theories of cooperation, such as the Gricean (...) maxims, relevance theory, and politeness. The emerging definition of UN treats a narrator as unreliable if he or she violates the cooperative principle without intending an implicature. This model is tested against three prototypical UNs: Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. These sample analyses yield a typology of UN: while pragmatic deviation is shown to be the intrinsic feature of the phenomenon, unreliable narrators vary according to their degree of intentionality. Finally, two recurring issues in the UN debate are briefly discussed: the existence of textual clues of UN, and the role of the reader in constructing unreliability. (shrink)

The 1911 eruption of Taal Volcano in the Philippine province of Batangas took an estimated 1,700–2,000 lives and rocked the foundations of the American colonial state in the archipelago. Since 1898, Americans colonized the Philippine future by shifting the benchmarks for a promised but perpetually delayed independence. Central to this strategy was the contention that colonial Bureaus of Agriculture, Forestry, Lands, and Science would attract investment in tropical commodities on the promise of great future returns by managing territory and discipling (...) so-called tribal peoples into a modern labor force. Forecasting was built into the logic and projects of colonial capitalism. Anticolonial critics, in turn, argued that the American failure to react to seismographic readings—to forecast for disaster—exposed the weakness of American claims to the future while the immediate sale of photographs of the dead and tours of the “volcano zone” hindered the relief. Ensuing contests over settlement on volcanoes, the purpose of monitoring, and the visual importance of Taal shows the centrality of volcanoes to colonial science and technocratic nationalism, and of volcanology to the development of humanitarian science and governance. (shrink)

A prominent argument in the climate ethical literature is that individual polluters are responsible for paying the costs of climate change.1 By contrast, I argue that we have reason to excuse individual agents morally for their contributions to climate change. This paper explores some of the possible constraints agents may face when they try to avoid harming the climate, constraints that might be acceptable reasons for excusing people’s contributions to climate change. Two lines of arguments are discussed. The first concerns (...) the soft internal constraint: that democratic citizens do not experience their individual failures as failures per se. In other words, they do not psychologically ‘feel’ they are doing anything wrong.2 The second argument concerns the soft external constraint: a number of studies have shown that many consumers report that while they are concerned about environmental issues, they struggle to translate their concern into green acts.3 Put differently, while individual citizens may think they are morally obliged to avoid harming the climate, they struggle to fulfill these obligations. I argue that these constraints do not constitute reasons for not blaming individual agents. Instead, individual agents can be morally excused for contributing to climate change because external constraints on agency make climate change a case of imperfect duty, that is, a duty that is hard to fulfill. (shrink)

This title considers whether any generalisations can be made about word order in language. The chapters, written by international scholars, draw on data from several 'disharmonic' and typologically distinct languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Basque, French, English, Hixkaryana (a Cariban language), Khalkha Mongolian, Uyghur Turkic, and Afrikaans.

Theodor W. Adorno's innovative understanding of nature and the historical constitutes the core of the two contributions that follow. This chapter illuminates the understanding of nature in Adorno by excavating the manifold relations between him and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's concepts of nature. The chapter's argument in this essay concerns Adorno's surprising critique of Negative Dialectics, surprising because for a brief interval Adorno appears to side with nature against Hegel. This is not precisely the move one might have expected of (...) Adorno, for whom nature ought to have been aligned with the material and experimental culture of knowledge that he, like Hegel, opposed to the work of what Hegel called Spirit and the work of dialectic. However, Adorno charges Hegel with a “rage against nature,” and, in the course of a long section of Negative Dialectics, he makes that charge stick. (shrink)

In an increasingly globalized food economy, local agri-food initiatives are promoted as more sustainable alternatives, both for small-scale producers and ecologically conscious consumers. However, revitalizing local agri-food communities in rural agro-industrial regions is particularly challenging. This case study examines Grant and Chelan Counties, two industrial farming regions in rural Central Washington State, distant from the urban fringe. Farmers in these counties have tried diversifying large-scale processing into organics and marketing niche and organic produce at popular farmers markets in Seattle about (...) 200 miles away. Such strategies invoke the question, “How are ‘local’ agri-food networks socially and geographically defined?” The meaning of what constitutes “local” and/or “sustainable” systems merits consideration in the linking of these rural counties with distant urban farmers markets. Employing historical, in-depth interview and survey research, we analyze production and consumption networks and the non-market systems that residents in these counties access for self-provisioning and food security. (shrink)

Interactional expertise is here to stay. Undoubtedly, in some sense of the word, one can attain a linguistic expert level within a field without full scale practical immersion. In the context of the idea of embodied cognition, the claim is provocative. How can an interactional expert acquire full linguistic competence without the simultaneous bodily engagement and real life interaction needed to get the language right? How can one understand the concept of hammering if one has never seen a hammer or (...) felt the weight of the iron head on a fragile thumb? Here I will explore a strange and second-hand way in which bodily engagement could have an impact on our linguistic abilities; this is via the so called mirror neuron system. Since the mirror neuron system blurs the distinction between first and third person activity it can help us understand some of the enigmatic aspects of interactional expertise and pose further questions for research.Keywords: Mirror neurons; Interactional expertise; Contributory expertise; Embodied knowledge; Evolution. (shrink)

This paper recognises the many contributions to work on environmental values while arguing that some reconsideration of elicitation practices is warranted. It argues that speaking and thinking about certain environmental values, particularly ethical expressions, are ill-matched with the affectively neutral, direct question-answer formats standard to willingness-to-pay and survey methods. Several indirect, narrated, and affectively resonant elicitation tasks were used to provide study participants with new opportunities to express their values. Coded results demonstrate that morally resonant, image- based, and narrative-style elicitation (...) tasks help respondents articulate a broader range of noncost and nonutilitarian environmental values. However, it was found that elicitations of this kind are most useful when presented in a affectively subtle and noncontroversial form. Several suggestions for synthesising these methods with more structured forms are offered. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism is an invitation to think differently about knowledge and educational relationality between humans and the more-than-human. This philosophical and political shift in subjectivity builds on, and is entangled with, poststructuralism and phenomenology. In this paper we read diffractively through one another the theories of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and feminist posthumanists Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. We explore the implications of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ for early childhood education. With its emphasis on a moving away from the dominant (...) role of human vision in educational research we show how videoing and photographing works as an apparatus in an analysis of data from an inner-city school in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are struck by children’s seeing with the ‘eyes of their skin’ and ‘seeing’ with/in the world, as their obvious distress is felt when a small tree sapling has been mowed down in a nearby park. We analyse the event with the help of a variation on Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming-child’: ‘becoming-little’, and Anna Tsing’s ‘the arts of noticing’. ‘Becoming-little’ as a methodology disrupts the adult/child binary that positions ‘little’, younger humans as inferior to their ‘bigger’ fully human counterparts. We exemplify ‘becoming-little’ through 4 and 5 year-olds’ learning with the little tree and adopt Barad’s temporal diffraction to ‘see’ what is in/visible in the park: the extractive, exploitative, colonising mining practices of White settlers. These are still part of the land on which the park was created but are in/visible beneath the ‘skin’ of the earth. (shrink)

Clergy sexual abuse is both sexual and psychological violence, but it is also a paradigmatic case of spiritual violence that rises to the level of religious trauma. In this paper I argue that the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse diminishes, and in some cases may even destroy, a survivor’s capacities for religious faith or other forms of spiritual engagement. I use and illustrate the value of feminist methodology, as developed and advanced by Alison Jaggar, for generating and pursuing philosophical (...) questions about religious experience. Feminist methodology’s sensitivity to theorizing situated subjects who stand to each other in relations of racialized male dominance helps us see the ways in which clergy sexual abuse is gender-based violence in both its causes and effects. It also helps us both ask and answer questions about religious faith in the unjust meantime from the perspective of those who endure spiritually violent faith communities. (shrink)

This is a qualitative study of the role of gender and emotion in a political setting. The data are from interviews of activists and legislators, as well as from archival accounts of the debates in state legislatures about breast cancer informed consent legislation. I found that proponents for and against the legislation shared the belief that women are more emotional than men. This social belief shaped the political strategies the activists adopted and initially contributed to their effectiveness; however, their opponents (...) claimed that the women activists should be dismissed because their emotionalism made them irrational. I close by discussing Western cultural beliefs about emotions, social stereotypes regarding women, and their consequences for women activists in political arenas. (shrink)

From pets to strays to wildlife, sometimes animals need our help! Who keeps animals safe from human harm and other dangers? Community heroes do! Community heroes may work in humane societies, rescue groups, law enforcement, or many other settings. In this book, readers learn all about these real-life heroes and the important work they do. Readers also learn age-appropriate ways that they can help animals too! The high-interest material is paired with brightly colored photographs that bring the text to life, (...) communicating educational information in an appealing, easy-to-understand way. (shrink)

In this article, I present a philosophy-of-language assignment which emerges as the hero in a fable with the following trio of villains:ness, Parroting, and Boredom. Building on Penny Weiss’s “Making History of Ideas Classes Relevant”, and serving students taking an introductory course which covers Western theories of meaning, the “You are there” essay conquers Abstractness by requiring students to make a connection between the material and their lives, rendering theories relevant. It conquers Parroting by requiring them to apply theories to (...) new examples. And it conquers Boredom by producing papers whose originality can not only surprise but also remind the instructor reading them how meaningful the original theories are. In addition, I present a way to adapt the Weiss framework such that it’s inclusive, and discuss my experience piloting and negotiating the assignment. As appendices, I include materials which an instructor can use to scaffold the assignment. Note that beyond dispatching Abstractness, Parroting, and Boredom, the assignment invites collaborative/cooperative learning, fosters learner autonomy, and lends itself to online course delivery. (shrink)