This study aimed to develop cross-domain deep learning courses of artificial intelligence in vocational senior high schools and explore its impact on students’ learning effects. It initially adopted a literature review to develop a cross-domain SPOC-AIoT Course with SPOC and the Double Diamond 4D model in vocational senior high schools. Afterward, it adopted participatory action research and a questionnaire survey and conducted analyses on the various aspects of the technology acceptance model by SmartPLS. Further, this study explored the impact on (...) the effects of deep learning and knowledge-ability learning of artificial intelligence after 16 weeks of course teaching among 36 Grade I students from the electrical and electronic group of a vocational senior high school. This study revealed that the four stages of the SPOC-AIoT Teaching Mode of the Double Diamond 4D model may effectively guide students to learn AIoT knowledge and skills. Based on the technology acceptance model, the analysis of learning and participation in SmartPLS indicated that this model conformed to the academic fitness requirements of the overall model. After learning with the SPOC-AIoT Teaching Mode, the learning effects of students in AIoT have been significantly improved to a positive aspect. Finally, some suggestions were put forward to promote the development of the SPOC-AIoT Teaching Mode Course in the future. (shrink)

Background: Healthcare workers in the front line of diagnosis, treatment, and care of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 are at great risk of both infection and developing mental health symptoms. This study aimed to investigate the following: whether healthcare workers in general hospitals experience higher mental distress than those in psychiatric hospitals; the role played by religion and alexithymic trait in influencing the mental health condition and perceived level of happiness of healthcare workers amidst the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic; (...) and factors that influence the resilience of healthcare workers at 6 weeks' follow-up.Methods: Four-hundred and fifty-eight healthcare workers were recruited from general and psychiatric hospitals, and 419 were followed-up after 6 weeks. All participants filled out the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale, five-item Brief-Symptom Rating Scale, and the Chinese Oxford Happiness Questionnaire.Results: Under the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, 12.3% of frontline healthcare workers in general hospitals reported having mental distress and perceived lower social adaptation status compared with those working in psychiatric hospitals. Christians/Catholics perceived better psychological well-being, and Buddhists/Taoists were less likely to experience mental distress. The results at 6 weeks of follow-up showed that the perceived lower social adaptation status of general hospital healthcare workers was temporary and improved with time. Christian/Catholic religion and time had independent positive effects on psychological well-being; however, the interaction of Christian/Catholic religion and time had a negative effect.Conclusions: Collectivism and individualism in the cultural context are discussed with regard to alexithymic trait and Buddhist/Taoist and Christian/Catholic religious faiths. Early identification of mental distress and interventions should be implemented to ensure a healthy and robust clinical workforce for the treatment and control of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Data heterogeneity is the obstacle for the resource sharing on Semantic Web, and ontology is regarded as a solution to this problem. However, since different ontologies are constructed and maintained independently, there also exists the heterogeneity problem between ontologies. Ontology matching is able to identify the semantic correspondences of entities in different ontologies, which is an effective method to address the ontology heterogeneity problem. Due to huge memory consumption and long runtime, the performance of the existing ontology matching techniques requires (...) further improvement. In this work, an extended compact genetic algorithm-based ontology entity matching technique is proposed, which uses both the compact encoding mechanism and linkage learning approach to match the ontologies efficiently. Compact encoding mechanism does not need to store and maintain the whole population in the memory during the evolving process, and the utilization of linkage learning protects the chromosome’s building blocks, which is able to reduce the algorithm’s running time and ensure the alignment’s quality. In the experiment, ECGA-OEM is compared with the participants of ontology alignment evaluation initiative and the state-of-the-art ontology matching techniques, and the experimental results show that ECGA-OEM is both effective and efficient. (shrink)

For centuries, westerners have referred to China's numerous traditions of spiritual expression as "religious"--a word born of western thought that cannot completely characterize the passionate writing that fills the pages of this pathbreaking anthology. The first of its kind in well over thirty years, this text offers the student of Chinese ritual and cosmology the broadest range of primary sources from antiquity to the modern era. Readings are arranged chronologically and cover such concepts as Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and even communism. (...) A large number of the selections concern the role of the female in Chinese religion, and are either by or about women. Through invocations, poetry, drama, philosophical texts, religious treatises, and modern fiction, students hear the voices of numerous Chinese masters expounding on the movements and traditions that inspired them: the mysterious Tao-te ching of Lao Tzu, cloaked in the mists of deepest antiquity; the Analects of stately, reverent Confucius; "Nailing a Stick into Empty Space," from The Recorded Conversations of Ch'an Master I-hsuan, and many others, including the work of Mencius, Pan Chao, Han Shan, Chang Tsai, Wang Yang-ming, Lu Hsun, and Mao Tse-tung. Fully one third of the translations are new, and each reading is preceded by an introduction that explains its importance and salient features. Complete with a helpful chronology of dynasties and list of possible video sources, this remarkable volume collects under one cover the most significant and influential works of China's dynamic spiritual tradition, making a fundamental contribution to courses in Chinese religion, literature, and history. (shrink)

The skill model of wisdom argues that practical wisdom can be best understood in terms of practical skill or expertise, and the model is thought to have the characteristic of focusing on how wise people think rather than how wise people feel. However, from the perspective of Kunzmann and Glück, “it is time for an ‘emotional revolution’ in wisdom research, which will contribute to a more balanced view on wisdom that considers emotional factors and processes as equally typical of wisdom (...) as are cognitive and reflective factors” (Kunzmann U, Gluck J [2019] Wisdom and emotion. In: Sternberg R, Gluck J (eds) The cambridge handbook of wisdom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 575–601). Kunzmann and Glück’s appeal for this emotional revolution is significant and intriguing because the inclusion of an explanation of the role of emotion in wisdom can contribute to developing the skill model of wisdom into a more comprehensive framework that recognizes the intricate relation between wisdom and emotions. In this paper, I shall propose and develop a skill account of the emotions of the wise to serve as a supplement to the skill model of wisdom. According to this account, first, at the critical level, having emotions and emotional competence as elements is not essential to wisdom; second, at the theoretical level, a wise person feels an emotion E if and only if E is strategically rational for the wise person; and third, at the metatheoretical level, the primary aim of the skill account is to explain why wise people feel in a particular way rather than to describe how wise people feel. (shrink)

This paper examines whether the modern bioethical principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice proposed by Beauchamp and Childress are existent in, compatible with, or acceptable to the leading Chinese moral philosophy—the ethics of Confucius. The author concludes that the moral values which the four prima facie principles uphold are expressly identifiable in Confucius’ teachings. However, Confucius’ emphasis on the filial piety, family values, the “love of gradation”, altruism of people, and the “role specified relation oriented ethics” will (...) inevitably influence the “specification” and application of these bioethical principles and hence tend to grant “beneficence” a favourable position that diminishes the respect for individual rights and autonomy. In contrast, the centrality of respect for autonomy and its stance of “first among equals” are more and more stressed in Western liberal viewpoints. Nevertheless, if the Confucian “doctrine of Mean” and a balanced “two dimensional personhood” approach are properly employed, this will require both theorists and clinicians, who are facing medical ethical dilemmas, of searching to attain due mean out of competing moral principles thus preventing “giving beneficence a priority” or “asserting autonomy must triumph”. (shrink)

The four principles approach to biomedical ethics (4PBE) has, since the 1970s, been increasingly developed as a universal bioethics method. Despite its wide acceptance and popularity, the 4PBE has received many challenges to its cross-cultural plausibility. This paper first specifies the principles and characteristics of ancient Chinese medical ethics (ACME), then makes a comparison between ACME and the 4PBE with a view to testing out the 4PBE's cross-cultural plausibility when applied to one particular but very extensive and prominent cultural context. (...) The result shows that the concepts of respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice are clearly identifiable in ACME. Yet, being influenced by certain socio-cultural factors, those applying the 4PBE in Chinese society may tend to adopt a "beneficence-oriented", rather than an "autonomy-oriented" approach, which, in general, is dissimilar to the practice of contemporary Western bioethics, where "autonomy often triumphs". (shrink)

Considering the highly complex structure of quantum chaos and the nonstationary characteristics of speech signals, this paper proposes a quantum chaotic encryption and quantum particle swarm extraction method based on an underdetermined model. The proposed method first uses quantum chaos to encrypt the speech signal and then uses the local mean decomposition method to construct a virtual receiving array and convert the underdetermined model to a positive definite model. Finally, the signal is extracted using the Levi flight strategy based on (...) kurtosis and the quantum particle swarm optimization optimized by the greedy algorithm. The bit error rate and similarity coefficient of the voice signal are extracted by testing the source voice signal SA1, SA2, and SI943 under different SNR, and the similarity coefficient, uncertainty, and disorder of the observed signal and the source voice signal SA1, SA2, and SI943 verify the effectiveness of the proposed speech signal extraction method and the security of quantum chaos used in speech signal encryption. (shrink)

I argue that rationally persuading another to do something for their own good is sometimes (objectionably) paternalistic. Rational persuasion may express, and be guided by, the motive of distrust in the other’s capacity to gather or weigh evidence, and may intrude on the other’s deliberative activities in ways that conflict with respecting their agency and autonomy. I also examine factors that make a difference to whether (and when) the provision of reasons is respectful.

In July 2002, I had the honour to be invited to give a 15 minute presentation on behalf of my country, Taiwan, on the topic of “Current system of national guidance on human subject protection in medical research” in a panel discussion of the Forum for Ethical Review Committees in Asia and the Western Pacific , World Health Organization international conference held in Chin-Mai, Thailand. In that conference, four delegates from Taiwan had a rare and therefore very precious opportunity to (...) share Taiwan’s experience in establishing and promoting “human subject protection system” with delegates from 27 WHO member countries of the region. Through the vigorous exchanges of opinion in those four …. (shrink)

People often make less risky decisions for themselves than others. We examined how people allocated risks (i.e., determining the ratio of uncertain outcomes to certain outcomes) between themselves and others. We also investigated gain (vs. loss) domain and social value orientation as predictors of risk allocations. The results of three experiments demonstrated that participants were more likely to share their risks equally between themselves and others than distribute risk unequally. In the gain (vs. loss) domain, participants allocated fewer risks to (...) themselves and more risks to the other person for unequal risk allocations. Compared to proselfs, prosocials were more likely to allocate risks equally. We also found stronger domain effects on unequal risk allocations for proselfs than for prosocials. Therefore, our findings clarify the effects of risk distribution, domain, and social value orientation on interpersonal allocation decisions and highlight equal risk distribution between oneself and others. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 606-622, May 2022.

Phronesis, or practical wisdom, is a capacity the possession of which enables one to make good practical judgments and thus fulfill the distinctive function of human beings. Nir Eisikovits and Dan Feldman convincingly argue that this capacity may be undermined by statistical machine-learning-based AI. The critic questions: why should we worry that AI undermines phronesis? Why can’t we epistemically defer to AI, especially when it is superintelligent? Eisikovits and Feldman acknowledge such objection but do not consider it seriously. In this (...) paper, we argue that there is a way to reconcile Eisikovits and Feldman with their critic by adopting the principle of epistemic heed, according to which we should exercise our rational capacity as much as possible while heeding a superintelligence’s output whenever possible. (shrink)

This paper argues that participation in an intimate relationship can generate additional or stronger reasons for one to act paternalistically toward the intimate. Moreover, participation in such a relationship can also weaken or cancel some of the presumptive reasons of respect one would otherwise have not to interfere. The paper also reflects, more generally, on the nature of intimate relationships, the normative significance of paternalism, and the normative differences between paternalism in larger-scale institutional contexts and paternalism in closer, interpersonal ones. (...) -/- . (shrink)

One of the main challenges in the philosophy of language is determining the form of knowledge of the rules of language. Michael Dummett has put forth the view that knowledge of the rules of language is a kind of implicit knowledge; some philosophers have mistakenly conceived of this type of knowledge as a kind of knowledge-that . In a recent paper in this journal, Patricia Hanna argues against Dummett’s knowledge-that view and proposes instead a knowledge-how view in which knowledge of (...) the rules of language is a kind of practical knowledge, like an agent’s non-propositional knowledge of counting. In this paper I argue, first, that Hanna misunderstands Dummett’s conception of knowledge of linguistic rules, and, second, that Dummett’s considerations of practical knowledge of language pose a problem for Hanna’s knowledge-how view. At the end of the paper, I briefly sketch an account of practical knowledge of language that meets the requirements set by Dummett. (shrink)

Human excellences such as intelligence, morality, and consciousness are investigated by philosophers as well as artificial intelligence researchers. One excellence that has not been widely discussed by AI researchers is practical wisdom, the highest human excellence, or the highest, seventh, stage in Dreyfus’s model of skill acquisition. In this paper, I explain why artificial wisdom matters and how artificial wisdom is possible (in principle and in practice) by responding to two philosophical challenges to building artificial wisdom systems. The result is (...) a conceptual framework that guides future research on creating artificial wisdom. (shrink)

Anti-intellectualists in epistemology argue for the thesis that knowing-how is not a species of knowing-that, and most of them tend to avoid any use of the notion “knowing-that” in their explanation of intelligent action on pain of inconsistency. Intellectualists tend to disprove anti-intellectualism by showing that the residues of knowing-that remain in the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action. Outside the field of epistemology, some philosophers who try to highlight the nature of their explanation of intelligent action in certain fields, such (...) as ethics, tend to classify themselves as intellectualist simply because they appeal to the notion of knowing-that in their explanation. In a word, the idea of knowing-that is harmful to the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action, whether from an insider or outsider perspective. In this paper, I argue that these tendencies are unjustified because they are based on an unclear conception of anti-intellectualism. I shall use Gilbert Ryle’s anti-intellectualism as a paradigm with which to describe anti-intellectualism and to illustrate why the notion of knowing-that is not harmful to but is, on the contrary, beneficial to the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action. If my explication of Ryle’s anti-intellectualism is correct, then most anti-intellectualists in the literature blindly worry about the notion of knowing-that, most intellectualists fire into the wrong flock, and some philosophers outside epistemology mischaracterize their own position. (shrink)

In this paper, we claim that Jesus’ command “Love your enemies” is compatible with the fact that (1) for a group of Cooperators and Defectors repeatedly playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game with each other, Defection will be the dominant strategy, and (2) the Tit-For-Tat strategy, a variant of the Eye-For-Eye principle that Jesus refuted in his Sermon on the Mount, had won Robert Axelrod’s tournaments of Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game in the 1980s. By incorporating relevant biblical commands into an informed (...) cooperative strategy, we find that it itself is a strong contender in a secular world of social evolution. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 10, Page 11-13, October 2011.

Zhu Xi was familiar with Buddhism in youth. After devoting himself to Confucianism at age 30, he became critical of Buddhism. The author shows that Zhu Xi made two basic criticisms of Chinese Buddhism: He criticized, first, that many of the Chinese Buddhist sutras were forged texts, not based on Sanskrit originals, and that the basic Chinese Buddhist concepts were incoherent. However, Zhu Xi hadn’t fully mastered Buddhist history or thought.

Contemporary philosophers have contributed to the development of the skill model of wisdom, according to which practical wisdom is practical skill. However, the model appears to be limited in its explanatory power, since there are asymmetries between wisdom and skill: A person with practical wisdom can and should deliberate about the end being pursued; by contrast, a person with a particular practical skill cannot deliberate about the end of the skill, and even if she can, she is not required to (...) do so. In this paper, I undermine these widely held asymmetries by elucidating the unnoticed nature of skill. (shrink)

This article examines the contrasting conceptions of gratitude in Early Confucian and Western philosophy. It focuses on a key difference: the presence of the notion of ‘debts of gratitude’ in Western thought and its absence in Confucianism. We explore how this difference is rooted in contrasting ethical outlooks and values. Western philosophy often conceives of gratitude as a duty of reciprocation, furthering the values of social equality and individual autonomy. By contrast, Early Confucians viewed gratitude as proper acknowledgement that strengthens (...) social relationships that are part of an ongoing collective project, spanning generations. This view reflects the importance of values such as community, harmony, and ritual propriety in Confucianism. Unlike the Western context, in the Early Confucian social world, there was no role for ‘debts of gratitude’ to play. There were no Confucian values that ‘debts of gratitude’ would help to realize, or would be responsive to, in the way that debts of gratitude further the values of equality and independence in the West. We conclude by noting that some Western philosophers express ideas about gratitude in collaborative contexts that align with Confucian ideas, suggesting some shared elements between Confucian and Western ethical outlooks. (shrink)

What is wisdom? What does a wise person know? Can a wise person know how to act and live well without knowing the whys and wherefores of his own action? How is wisdom acquired? This Element addresses questions regarding the nature and acquisition of wisdom by developing and defending a skill theory of wisdom. Specifically, this theory argues that if a person S is wise, then (i) S knows that overall attitude success contributes to or constitutes well-being; (ii) S knows (...) what the best means to achieve well-being are; (iii) S is reliably successful at acting and living well (in light of what S knows); and (iv) S knows why she is successful at acting and living well. The first three sections of this Element develop this theory, and the final two sections defend this theory against two objections to the effect that there are asymmetries between wisdom and skill. (shrink)

Virtual community websites are one of the applications that provide a platform for people with common interests to extend their social relations in social media. With the proliferation of food safety incidents in recent years, social media has often been a major channel for public engagement in risk communication because of its social networking and immediate interaction. To understand the users’ needs and satisfaction, this study proposed a model to develop and evaluate the antecedents of continuance intention toward food safety (...) information from social media. Based on the questionnaire collected from 289 Facebook users, this study assessed the integrated model of the expectation-confirmation theory and technology acceptance model with technology readiness as moderator. The results showed that the perceived ease-of-use, usefulness, and confirmation indirectly affected social media continuance usage intention through satisfaction; perceived ease-of-use, usefulness, and satisfaction were the direct determinants that affected the users’ social media continuance intention. Furthermore, positive technology readiness had significant effects on the relationship between the perceived ease-of-use, usefulness, confirmation, satisfaction, and continuance intention toward food safety information. This study contributes some important suggestions and managerial implications for food safety promotion providers, practitioners, and academics in the food industry, and social media environment. (shrink)

In Lowe (1995), instead of endorsing a Stalnaker/Lewis-style account of counterfactuals, E. J. Lowe claims that a variation of C. I. Lewis’s strict implication alone captures the essence of everyday conditionals and avoids the paradoxes of strict implication. However, Lowe’s approach fails to account for the validity of simple and straightforward arguments such as ‘if 2=3 then 2+1=3+1’, and Heylen & Horsten (2006) even claims that no variation of strict implication can successfully describe the logical behavior of natural language conditionals. (...) By incorporating the German logician O. Becker’s modal intuition with the insight of Ramsey’s Test, we show that there does exist a unified, strict-conditional based account of everyday conditionals, which withstands all attacks previously raised against truth-conditional accounts of conditionals. Furthermore, a subtle distinction between autistic and realistic readings of the indexical ‘I’ involved in a conditional helps us resolve a recent debate concerning the Thomason conditionals. (shrink)

It is customary practice to define ‘x is composed of the ys’ as ‘x is a sum of the ys and the ys are pairwise disjoint ’. This predicate has played a central role in the debate on the special composition question and on related metaphysical issues concerning the mereological structure of objects. In this note we show that the customary characterization is nonetheless inadequate. We do so by constructing a mereological model where everything qualifies as composed of atoms even (...) though some elements in the domain are gunky, i.e., can be divided indefinitely into smaller and smaller proper parts. (shrink)

The signature of the formal language of mereology contains only one binary predicate P which stands for the relation “being a part of”. Traditionally, P must be a partial ordering, that is, ${\forall{x}Pxx, \forall{x}\forall{y}((Pxy\land Pyx)\to x=y)}$ and ${\forall{x}\forall{y}\forall{z}((Pxy\land Pyz)\to Pxz))}$ are three basic mereological axioms. The best-known mereological theory is “general extensional mereology”, which is axiomatized by the three basic axioms plus the following axiom and axiom schema: (Strong Supplementation) ${\forall{x}\forall{y}(\neg Pyx\to \exists z(Pzy\land \neg Ozx))}$ , where Oxy means ${\exists (...) z(Pzx\land Pzy)}$ , and (Fusion) ${\exists x\alpha \to \exists z\forall y(Oyz\leftrightarrow \exists x(\alpha \land Oyx))}$ , for any formula α where z and y do not occur free. In this paper, I will show that general extensional mereology is decidable, and will also point out that the decidability of the first-order approximation of the theory of complete Boolean algebras can be shown in the same way. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in state power has tended to focus on the state’s coercive powers rather than its expressive powers. I consider an underexplored aspect of the state’s expressive capacity: its capacity to use symbols (such as monuments, memorials, and street names) to promote political ends. In particular, I argue that the liberal state’s deployment of symbols to promote its members’ commitment to liberal ideals is in need of special justification. This is because the state’s exercise of its capacity to use (...) symbols may be in tension with respecting individual autonomy, particularly in cases in which the symbols exert influence without engaging citizens’ rational capacities. But despite the fact that the state’s deployment of symbols may circumvent citizens’ rational capacities, I argue that it may nonetheless be permissible when surrounded by certain liberal institutions and brought about via democratic procedures. (shrink)

The modern doctor-patient relationship displays a patient-centred, mutual-participation characteristic rather than the former active-passive or guidance-cooperation models in terms of medical decision making. Respecting the wishes of patients, amounting to more than mere concern for their welfare, has become the feature central to certain modern bioethics theories. A group of ethical principles such as respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice has been proposed by bioethicists and widely adopted by many medical societies as an ethical guide to how doctors, in (...) their daily practice, should treat their patients. However, seeing patients as persons who are rational, self-conscious beings capable of valuing their own lives, and who are consequently entitled to the liberty and rights to choose for themselves, is in general the backbone of Western bioethical principles.Since Confucian philosophy has long been a representative of the East-Asia cultural tradition and Confucian bioethics has recently been developed as a theory of applied ethics, examining Confucius's idea of “persons” may shed some light on the current bioethical debates. Confucius's concept of persons, which is best interpreted via his theories of “chun-tze”, (the morally ideal person) encapsulating a two-dimensional approach, (the “autonomous person” and the “relational person”), provides a more comprehensive model regarding what a person is and how he/she should be treated. This two-dimensional approach sees a person not only as a rational, autonomous agent but also as a relational, altruistic identity whose self actualisation involves incessant participating in and promoting of the welfare of his fellow persons. Hence this may balance the current bioethical trend whereby “respect for autonomy” often triumphs. (shrink)

Recently virtue ethicists, such as Julia Annas and Matt Stichter, in order to explain what a moral virtue is and how it is acquired, suggest modeling virtue on practical expertise. However, a challenging issue arises when considering the nature of practical expertise especially about whether expertise requires articulacy, that is, whether an expert in a skill is required to possess an ability to articulate the principles underlying the skill. With regard to this issue, Annas advocates the articulacy requirement, while Stichter (...) denies. Stichter raises two objections to Annas’s requirement: first, Annas provides no argument for the requirement; second, there exist counterexamples in which there are experts who cannot articulate what and why they did in skilled performance. In this paper I shall show that Annas did provide an argument and can respond to the counterexamples; however, her argument and response are not convincing. Instead, I construct a new argument for the articulacy requirement by which I call the argument from success-conduciveness. The main idea involved in this new argument, i.e., articulacy is success-conducive, supports further that ethical expertise requires articulacy due to the seriousness of morality. (shrink)

According to Dreyfusian anti-intellectualism, know-how or expertise cannot be explained in terms of know-that and its cognates but only in terms of intuition. Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus do not exclude know-that and its cognates in explaining skilled action. However, they think that know-that and its cognates (such as calculative deliberation and perspectival deliberation) only operate either below or above the level of expertise. In agreement with some critics of Dreyfus and Dreyfus, in this paper, I argue that know-that and (...) its cognates are constitutive of rather than external to know-how and expertise. However, unlike those critics, who argue for this point only from a phenomenological point of view, my argument adopts a (telic) normative point of view. (shrink)

The high turnover of nurses has become a global problem. Several studies have proposed that nurses' perceptions of the ethical climate of their organization are related to higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and thus lead to lower turnover. However, there is limited empirical evidence supporting a relationship between different types of ethical climate within organizations and facets of job satisfaction. Furthermore, no published studies have investigated the impact of different types of ethical climate on the three components of organizational (...) commitment. This study attempts to explore the different types of ethical climate that exist in hospitals, and the degree of job satisfaction and organizational commitment of nurses in Taiwan. It uses path analysis to understand which types of ethical climate influence different facets of job satisfaction. The study also examines the impact of different types of ethical climate and facets of job satisfaction on the three components of organizational commitment. Questionnaires were distributed to 352 nurses. The relationships among variables were assessed by factor analysis, reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations, and regression. The important conclusion is that hospitals can increase job satisfaction and organizational commitment by influencing an organization's ethical climate. Hospital administrators can foster within organizations the climate types of caring, independent, and rules climate that increase satisfaction, while preventing organizations from developing the type of instrumental climate that decreases it. (shrink)

The signature of the formal language of mereology contains only one binary predicate which stands for the relation “being a part of” and it has been strongly suggested that such a predicate must at least define a partial ordering. Mereological theories owe their origin to Leśniewski. However, some more recent authors, such as Simons as well as Casati and Varzi, have reformulated mereology in a way most logicians today are familiar with. It turns out that any theory which can be (...) formed by using the reformulated mereological axioms or axiom schemas is in a sense a subtheory of the elementary theory of Boolean algebras or of the theory of infinite atomic Boolean algebras. It is known that the theory of partial orderings is undecidable while the elementary theory of Boolean algebras and the theory of infinite atomic Boolean algebras are decidable. In this paper, I will look into the behaviors in terms of decidability of those mereological theories located in between. More precisely, I will give a comprehensive picture of the said issue by offering solutions to the open problems which I have raised in some of my papers published previously. (shrink)

Mereological theories are theories based on a binary predicate ‘being a part of’. It is believed that such a predicate must at least define a partial ordering. A mereological theory can be obtained by adding on top of the basic axioms of partial orderings some of the other axioms posited based on pertinent philosophical insights. Though mereological theories have aroused quite a few philosophers’ interest recently, not much has been said about their meta-logical properties. In this paper, I will look (...) into whether those theories are decidable or not. Besides, since theories of Boolean algebras are in some sense upper bounds of mereological theories which can be found in the literature, I shall also make some observations about the possibility of getting mereological theories beyond Boolean algebras. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in state power has tended to focus on the state’s coercive powers rather than its expressive powers. I consider an underexplored aspect of the state’s expressive capacity: its capacity to use symbols (such as monuments, memorials, and street names) to promote political ends. In particular, I argue that the liberal state’s deployment of symbols to promote its members’ commitment to liberal ideals is in need of special justification. This is because the state’s exercise of its capacity to use (...) symbols may be in tension with respecting individual autonomy, particularly in cases in which the symbols exert influence without engaging citizens’ rational capacities. But despite the fact that the state’s deployment of symbols may circumvent citizens’ rational capacities, I argue that it may nonetheless be permissible when surrounded by certain liberal institutions and brought about via democratic procedures. (shrink)