A significant change in consumer viewing habits has taken place globally with the introduction and growth of over-the-top television services (OTT TV). In the absence of scientific evidence on television consumer behavior viewership changes, this paper's objective was to ascertain the television viewing patterns, given the rise of OTT TV services in South Africa. The study adopted a quantitative research approach using a convenience sampling method. Online survey questionnaires were distributed on reputable social media networks (...) and collected 391 responses. The study results suggest changes to TV consumption, in that more TV consumers are binge-watching and streaming content online. Furthermore, more than five hours a day are spent online consuming TV content, especially by male respondents. The sharing of OTT TV logon credentials with family and friends is prevalent across all demographic groups. The fundamental aspect of this paper is that it illuminates the rivalry between the Pay-Tv operators and OTT TV service providers while aiding the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) to regulate the market. (shrink)

A significant change in consumer viewing habits has taken place globally with the introduction and growth of over-the-top television services (OTT TV). In the absence of scientific evidence on television consumer behavior viewership changes, this paper's objective was to ascertain the television viewing patterns, given the rise of OTT TV services in South Africa. The study adopted a quantitative research approach using a convenience sampling method. Online survey questionnaires were distributed on reputable social media networks (...) and collected 391 responses. The study results suggest changes to TV consumption, in that more TV consumers are binge-watching and streaming content online. Furthermore, more than five hours a day are spent online consuming TV content, especially by male respondents. The sharing of OTT TV logon credentials with family and friends is prevalent across all demographic groups. The fundamental aspect of this paper is that it illuminates the rivalry between the Pay-Tv operators and OTT TV service providers while aiding the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) to regulate the market. (shrink)

Background The purpose of this study was to examine whether extended use of a variety of screen-based devices, in addition to television, was associated with poor dietary habits and other health-related characteristics and behaviors among US adults. The recent phenomenon of binge-watching was also explored. -/- Methods A survey to assess screen time across multiple devices, dietary habits, sleep duration and quality, perceived stress, self-rated health, physical activity, and body mass index, was administered to a sample of US (...) adults using the Qualtrics platform and distributed via Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Participants were adults 18 years of age and older, English speakers, current US residents, and owners of a television and at least one other device with a screen. Three different screen time categories (heavy, moderate, and light) were created for total screen time, and separately for screen time by type of screen, based on distribution tertiles. Kruskal-Wallis tests were conducted to examine differences in dietary habits and health-related characteristics between screen time categories. -/- Results Aggregate screen time across all devices totaled 17.5 h per day for heavy users. Heavy users reported the least healthful dietary patterns and the poorest health-related characteristics – including self-rated health – compared to moderate and light users. Moreover, unique dietary habits emerged when examining dietary patterns by type of screen separately, such that heavy users of TV and smartphone displayed the least healthful dietary patterns compared to heavy users of TV-connected devices, laptop, and tablet. Binge-watching was also significantly associated with less healthy dietary patterns, including frequency of fast-food consumption as well as eating family meals in front of a television, and perceived stress. -/- Conclusions The present study found that poorer dietary choices, as well as other negative health-related impacts, occurred more often as the viewing time of a variety of different screen-based devices increased in a sample of US adults. Future research is needed to better understand what factors among different screen-based devices might affect health behaviors and in turn health-related outcomes. Research is also required to better understand how binge-watching behavior contributes impacts health-related behaviors and characteristics. (shrink)

The viewing patterns of Global Television in Nigeria seem to have undermined the objectives of local media content in the Nigerian media industry. This paper was designed to examine the factors that indicate that global television affect the development of Nigeria’s local content and why most Nigerians prefer to watch global television programmes at the expense of local television programmes even in the wake of assumed improved local contents in the Nigerian media. The study adopted (...) observational and quantitative methods of acquiring data on reasons why most residents in Nigeria prefer to view foreign programmes and how television viewing of global contents from the foreign stations has affected the development of local media content. The questionnaire was the instrument adopted for eliciting data from primary sources who are television viewers in Nigeria. This study proposed and distributed 300 but recovered 267 copies of the ‘Global Television versus Local Television Viewing’ questionnaire to randomly selected members of the population in Calabar, Cross River State. A review of secondary sources including books and articles on television viewing in Nigeria was carried out. The quantitative data was analysed using simple tables and percentages. Findings revealed that a significant number of Nigerians prefer to watch global television programmes because of their intrinsic interest and creative nature including the educational, informational and entertainment value advantage of the programmes over their local counterparts. The study recommends that the states and federal governments in Nigeria should inject more funds into revitalization of local television stations and should employ more experienced and retrain old television staff in their respective television stations in order to improve on the quality and patronage of local content in the Nigerian media. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper understands mental attitudes such as emotions and desires to be dispositions to behavior. It also acknowledges that people are often ambivalent, i.e., that they may hold opposed attitudes towards something or someone. Yet the first position seems to entail that ambivalence is either tantamount to paralysis or a contradictory notion. I identify the problem as based on a reductive interpretation of the dispositional character of attitudes and of ambivalence. The paper instead defends a post-Davidsonian view of the (...) basic rationality of human life. By focussing on desire and emotion we can see that the mutually exclusive ways of life involved in ambivalence are manifested in the person’s conduct. (shrink)

It has been claimed that the intentional stance is necessary to individuate behavioral traits. This thesis, while clearly false, points to two interesting sets of problems concerning biological explanations of behavior: The first is a general in the philosophy of science: the theory-ladenness of observation. The second problem concerns the principles of trait individuation, which is a general problem in philosophy of biology. After discussing some alternatives, I show that one way of individuating the behavioral traits of an organism is (...) by a special use of the concept of biological function, as understood in an enriched causal role (not selected effect) sense. On this view, a behavioral trait is essentially a special kind of regularity, namely a regularity that is produced by some regulatory mechanism. Regulatory mechanisms always require goal states, which can only be provided by functional considerations. As an example from actual (as opposed to folk) science, I examine the case of social behavior in nematodes. I show that the attempt to explain this phenomenon actually transformed it. This supports the view that scientific explanation does not explain an explanandum phenomenon that is given prior to the explanation; rather, the explanandum is changed by the explanation. This means that there could be a plurality of stances that have some heuristic value initially, but which will be abandoned in favor of a functional characterization eventually. (shrink)

With Jan Degenaar and Kevin O’Regan’s (D&O) critique of (what they call) ‘autopoietic enactivism’ as point of departure, this article seeks to revisit, refine, and develop phenomenology’s significance for the enactive view. Arguing that D&O’s ‘sensorimotor theory’ fails to do justice to perceptual meaning, the article unfolds by (1) connecting this meaning to the notion of enaction as a meaningful co-definition of perceiver and perceived, (2) recounting phenomenological reasons for conceiving of the perceiving subject as a living body, and (3) (...) showing how the phenomenological perspective does a better job at fulfilling D&O’s requirement for grounding notions of mentality in ‘outer’ criteria than they do. The picture that thus emerges is one of perceptual meaning as an integration of lived, living, and behavioral aspects – a structure of behavior that cannot be captured by appeal to sensorimotor capacities alone but that is adequately illuminated by the enactive notion of adaptive autonomy. (shrink)

This paper responds to the Radical Behavioral Challenge to normative business ethics. According to RBC, recent research on bounded ethicality shows that it is psychologically impossible for people to follow the prescriptions of normative business ethics. Thus, said prescriptions run afoul of the principle that nobody has an obligation to do something that they cannot do. I show that the only explicit response to this challenge in the business ethics literature is flawed because it limits normative business ethics to condemning (...) practitioners’ behavior without providing usable suggestions for how to do better. I argue that a more satisfying response is to, first, recognize that most obligations in business are wide-scope which, second, implies that there are multiple ways of fulfilling them. This provides a solid theoretical grounding for the increasingly popular view that we have obligations to erect institutional safeguards when bounded ethicality is likely to interfere with our ability to do what is right. I conclude with examples of such safeguards and some advice on how to use the research findings on bounded ethicality in designing ethical business organizations. (shrink)

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) has been widely used in psychological experiments to assess one’s developmental level of moral reasoning in terms of postconventional reasoning. However, there have been concerns regarding whether the tool is biased across people with different genders and political and religious views. To address the limitations, in the present study, I tested the validity of the brief version of the test, that is, the behavioral DIT, in terms of the measurement invariance and differential item functioning (DIF). (...) I could not find any significant non-invariance at the test level or any item demonstrating practically significant DIF at the item level. The findings indicate that neither the test nor any of its items showed a significant bias toward any particular group. As a result, the collected validity evidence supports the use of test scores across different groups, enabling researchers who intend to examine participants’ moral reasoning development across heterogeneous groups to draw conclusions based on the scores. (shrink)

Pornography refers to sexually explicit media that are primarily intended to sexually arouse the audience‘. Pornography representation of sexual behavior in books, pictures, statues, motion pictures, and other media that is intended to cause sexual excitement. Pornography can be the main source of a young person's sex education. Pornography In many historical societies, frank depictions of sexual behavior, often in a religious context, were common. In the 19th century, the inventions of photography and later motion pictures were quickly put to (...) use in the production of pornography. 21st century there were some four million Web sites devoted to pornography, containing more than a quarter of a billion pages—in other words, more than 10 percent of the Web. Pornography may impact young people‘s adoption of certain sexual behaviors. It is possible that viewing non-mainstream sexual practices can give legitimacy to them, and encourage participation in sexually adventurous behaviors (e.g. heterosexual anal sex). Correlations between adolescent viewing of sexual media and sexual behavior are moderated by parental involvement, including such factors as discussions of television content, communication patterns, and home environments. Pornography as distress (for younger children): Premature or inadvertent exposure to sexually explicit content may be distressing for younger children. First, research on children‘s consumption of sexual content in mainstream media documents that its effects are moderated by such variables as age, gender, sexual experience, physical maturation, and parental involvement. (shrink)

Pornography‘ refers to sexually explicit media that are primarily intended to sexually arouse the audience‘. Pornography representation of sexual behavior in books, pictures, statues, motion pictures, and other media that is intended to cause sexual excitement. Pornography can be the main source of a young person's sex education. Pornography In many historical societies, frank depictions of sexual behavior, often in a religious context, were common. In the 19th century, the inventions of photography and later motion pictures were quickly put to (...) use in the production of pornography. 21st century there were some four million Web sites devoted to pornography, containing more than a quarter of a billion pages—in other words, more than 10 percent of the Web. Pornography may impact on young people‘s adoption of certain sexual behaviours. It is possible that viewing non-mainstream sexual practices can give legitimacy to them, and encourage participation in sexually adventurous behaviors (e.g. heterosexual anal sex). Correlations between adolescent viewing of sexual media and sexual behavior are moderated by parental involvement, including such factors as discussions of television content, communication patterns, and home environments. Pornography as distress (for younger children): Premature or inadvertent exposure to sexually explicit content may be distressing for younger children. First, research on children‘s consumption of sexual content in mainstream media documents that its effects are moderated by such variables as age, gender, sexual experience, physical maturation, and parental involvement. (shrink)

This paper critically explores the ethical dimensions of Behavioral Public Policy (BPP), a domain grounded in the understanding that human rationality is bounded and that this limitation often leads to behaviors deemed irrational. By applying the behavioral lens, which posits that people operate under bounded rationality, BPP aims to craft interventions that safeguard individuals against their biases. However, this approach raises significant ethical concerns, both in the scientific underpinnings of BPP and its application through policy interventions. Accordingly, this paper (...) examines two distinct ethical dimensions of BPP, both as a scientific discipline and through its intervention methodologies. The analysis of the first dimension argues that, viewing bounded rationality as only instrumental in decision-making processes, risks oversimplifying ethical complexities. Such simplification may ignore the moral and value-based rationalities underlying decisions, potentially misattributing instances of immorality and akrasia (the failure to act according to one's judgment) to mere deficiencies in rational thinking. Secondly, the paper examines the impact of BPP on moral behavior and character development, addressing ethical concerns like the evidentiary basis of BPP research, the bounded rationality of choice architects themselves, and the morality of behavior changes induced by policy. Overall, this article provides a much-needed examination of the moral considerations associated with behavioral strategies in public policy and its epistemological foundations, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of their ethical implications . (shrink)

We review some of the main implications of the free-energy principle (FEP) for the study of the self-organization of living systems – and how the FEP can help us to understand (and model) biotic self-organization across the many temporal and spatial scales over which life exists. In order to maintain its integrity as a bounded system, any biological system - from single cells to complex organisms and societies - has to limit the disorder or dispersion (i.e., the long-run entropy) of (...) its constituent states. We review how this can be achieved by living systems that minimize their variational free energy. Variational free energy is an information theoretic construct, originally introduced into theoretical neuroscience and biology to explain perception, action, and learning. It has since been extended to explain the evolution, development, form, and function of entire organisms, providing a principled model of biotic self-organization and autopoiesis. It has provided insights into biological systems across spatiotemporal scales, ranging from microscales (e.g., sub- and multicellular dynamics), to intermediate scales (e.g., groups of interacting animals and culture), through to macroscale phenomena (the evolution of entire species). A crucial corollary of the FEP is that an organism just is (i.e., embodies or entails) an implicit model of its environment. As such, organisms come to embody causal relationships of their ecological niche, which, in turn, is influenced by their resulting behaviors. Crucially, free-energy minimization can be shown to be equivalent to the maximization of Bayesian model evidence. This allows us to cast natural selection in terms of Bayesian model selection, providing a robust theoretical account of how organisms come to match or accommodate the spatiotemporal complexity of their surrounding niche. In line with the theme of this volume; namely, biological complexity and self-organization, this chapter will examine a variational approach to self-organization across multiple dynamical scales. (shrink)

I am very used to strange books and special people but Hawkins stands out due to his use of a simple technique for testing muscle tension as a key to the “truth” of any kind of statement whatsoever—i.e., not just to whether the person being tested believes it, but whether it is really true! What is well known is that people will show automatic, unconscious physiological and psychological responses to just about anything they are exposed to—images, sounds, touch, odors, ideas, (...) people. So muscle reading to find out their true feelings is not radical at all, unlike using it as a dousing stick (more muscle reading) to do “paranormal science”. Hawkins describes the use of decreasing tension in the muscles of an arm in response to increases in cognitive load thus causing the arm to drop in response to the constant pressure of someone’s fingers. He seems unaware that there is a long established and vast ongoing research effort in social psychology referred to by such phrases as ‘implicit cognition’, ‘automaticity’ etc., and that his use of ‘kinesiology’ is one tiny section. In addition to muscle tone (infrequently used) social psychologists measure EEG, galvanic skin response and most frequently verbal responses to words, sentences, images or situations at times varying from seconds to months after the stimulus. Many, such as Bargh and Wegner, take the results to mean we are automatons who learn and act largely without awareness via S1 and many others such as Kihlstrom and Shanks say these studies are flawed and we are creatures of S2. Though Hawkins seems to have no idea, as in other areas of the descriptive psychology of higher order thought, the situation regarding “automaticity” is still as chaotic as it was when Wittgenstein described the reasons for the sterility and barrenness of psychology in the 30’s. Nevertheless, this book is an easy read and some therapists and spiritual teachers may find it of use. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle 59p(2016). For all my articles on Wittgenstein and Searle see my e-book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Wittgenstein and Searle 367p (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 662p (2016). -/- All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. -/- Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) Amazon ASIN # B071HVC7YP. -/- The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) Amazon ASIN # B071P1RP1B. -/- Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) Amazon ASIN # B0711R5LGX . (shrink)

Some researchers and autistic activists have recently suggested that because some ‘autism-related’ behavioural atypicalities have a function or purpose they may be desirable rather than undesirable. Examples of such behavioural atypicalities include hand-flapping, repeatedly ordering objects (e.g., toys) in rows, and profoundly restricted routines. A common view, as represented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) IV-TR (APA, 2000), is that many of these behaviours lack adaptive function or purpose, interfere with learning, and constitute the non-social behavioural (...) dysfunctions of those disorders making up the Autism Spectrum. As the DSM IV-TR continues to be the reference source of choice for professionals working with individuals with psychiatric difficulties, its characterization of the Autism Spectrum holds significant sway. We will suggest Extended Mind and Enactive Cognition Theories, which theorize that mind (or cognition) is embodied and environmentally embedded, as coherent conceptual and theoretical spaces within which to investigate the possibility that certain repetitive behaviours exhibited by autistics possess functions or purposes that make them desirable. As lenses through which to re-examine ‘autism-related’ behavioral atypicalities, these theories not only open up explanatory possibilities underdeveloped in the research literature, but also cohere with how some autistics describe their own experience. Our position navigates a middle way between the view of autism as understood in terms of impairment, deficit and dysfunction and one that seeks to de-pathologize the Spectrum. In so doing we seek to contribute to a continuing dialogue between researchers, clinicians and self- or parent advocates. (shrink)

Public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement––e.g., using stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin to improve mental functioning––are mixed. Attitudes vary by context and prompt ethical concerns about fairness, obligation, and authenticity/character. While people may have strong views about the morality of cognitive enhancement, how these views are affected by the physical characteristics of enhancers is unknown. Visible facial anomalies (e.g., scars) bear negatively on perceptions of moral character. This pre-registered study (osf[dot]io/uaw6c/) tested the hypothesis that such negative biases against people with facial (...) anomalies extend to moral beliefs surrounding their use of cognitive enhancement. In an online survey, 941 participants made moral judgments in response to a vignette about a person who had to decide whether or not to enhance. The vignette was accompanied by a face photograph that ostensibly depicted the potential enhancer and either did or did not have visible anomalies. Participants then learned whether the person ultimately decided to enhance. Next, participants played a modified Trust Game with, they were told, the person from the photograph/vignette. Participants judged enhancement to be less fair and enhancers less authentic if they had facial anomalies, while effects on judgments of moral obligation and on behavior were not detected. These findings extend previous work showing that people with visible differences are subject to an “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype that has negative consequences for perceptions of their moral character. While anomalous faces were judged more harshly, these judgments did not appear to affect behavior. These results are discussed in relation to discrimination and policy. (shrink)

Following Axel Honneth, I accept that recognition is integral to individuals’ self-realization and to social justice and that instances of misrecognition are injustices that cause moral injuries. The change in approach to misrecognition that I advocate is to replace a macrosocial top-down picture of misrecognition, such as Honneth’s typology, with a fine-grained phenomenological picture of multiple dimensions in misrecognition behaviors that offers greater explanatory power. This paper explains why a multidimensional view of misrecognition is needed and explores the various (...) ways that engagement with pathological norms or disengagement from individuals lead to injustices of misrecognition and how understanding behaviors in terms of these two dimensions—norms and individuals—illuminates causes of injustice. The multidimensional view of misrecognition replaces Honneth’s binary view of misrecognition as the contrary to recognition without replacing Honneth’s conceptions of the value of recognition. (shrink)

This article began as a review of a conference, organized by Gerhard Schlosser, entitled “Modularity in Development and Evolution.” The conference was held at, and sponsored by, the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany in May, 2000. The article subsequently metamorphosed into a literature and concept review as well as an analysis of the differences in current perspectives on modularity. Consequently, I refer to general aspects of the conference but do not review particular presentations. I divide modules into three kinds: structural, (...) developmental, and physiological. Every module fulfills none, one, or multiple functional roles. Two further orthogonal distinctions are important in this context: module-kinds versus module-variants-of-a-kind and reproducer versus nonreproducer modules. I review criteria for individuation of modules and mechanisms for the phylogenetic origin of modularity. I discuss conceptual and methodological differences between developmental and evolutionary biologists, in particular the difference between integration and competition perspectives on individualization and modular behavior. The variety in views regarding modularity presents challenges that require resolution in order to attain a comprehensive, rather than a piecemeal and fragmentary, evolutionary developmental biology. (shrink)

I am very used to strange books and special people, but Hawkins stands out due to his use of a simple technique for testing muscle tension as a key to the “truth” of any kind of statement whatsoever—i.e., not just to whether the person being tested believes it, but whether it is really true! What is well known is that people will show automatic, unconscious physiological and psychological responses to just about anything they are exposed to—images, sounds, touch, odors, ideas, (...) people. So, muscle reading to find out their true feelings is not radical at all, unlike using it as a dousing stick (more muscle reading) to do “paranormal science”. -/- Hawkins describes the use of decreasing tension in the muscles of an arm in response to increases in cognitive load thus causing the arm to drop in response to the constant pressure of someone’s fingers. He seems unaware that there is a long established and vast ongoing research effort in social psychology referred to by such phrases as ‘implicit cognition’, ‘automaticity’ etc., and that his use of ‘kinesiology’ is one tiny section. In addition to muscle tone (infrequently used) social psychologists measure EEG, galvanic skin response and most frequently verbal responses to words, sentences, images or situations at times varying from seconds to months after the stimulus. Many, such as Bargh and Wegner, take the results to mean we are automatons who learn and act largely without awareness via S1 (automated System 1) and many others such as Kihlstrom and Shanks say these studies are flawed and we are creatures of S2 (deliberative System 2). Though Hawkins seems to have no idea, as in other areas of the descriptive psychology of higher order thought, the situation regarding “automaticity” is still as chaotic as it was when Wittgenstein described the reasons for the sterility and barrenness of psychology in the 30’s. Nevertheless, this book is an easy read and some therapists and spiritual teachers may find it of use. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

I argue in favor of the Minimal Approval account, an original account of an agent’s moral responsibility for her actions, understood as the conditions that must be met so that an agent’s actions speak for her such that she can appropriately be blamed on their basis. My account shares a general theoretical orientation with Deep Self views, but diverges in several respects. I argue that Deep Self views tend to seriously over-generate exemptions, such that agents are exempt from responsibility even (...) from ordinary weak-willed actions. Accordingly, much of my focus is on giving a more nuanced, and in certain senses narrower, explanation of genuine exemption cases. While I address the advantages the Minimal Approval account has over competing accounts throughout these chapters, the account also aims to provide an empirically informed response to a certain sort of skeptical worry about how it could be the case that anyone is ever responsible for what they do at all. One commonplace thought is that when agents’ behaviors are due to compulsion their “brains make them do it.” But, in a literal sense, it might seem that our brains make all of us do everything that we do. In this dissertation I head off this worry by directly addressing both what the difference is, and what it should mean for our practices. (shrink)

This chapter connects the phenomenon of double bookkeeping to two critical debates in the philosophy of delusion: one from the analytic tradition and one from the phenomenological tradition. First, I will show how the failure of action guidance on the part of some delusions suggests an argument to the standard view that delusions are beliefs (doxasticism about delusion) and how its proponents have countered it by ascribing behavioral inertia to avolition, emotional disturbances, or a failure of the surrounding environment in (...) supporting the agent’s motivation to act. Second, I will show how the mismatch between the experience of double bookkeeping and that of having the usual propositional attitudes of folk psychology suggests another, more recalcitrant argument not only against doxasticism but against the very attempt to fit delusion into folk psychology. Third, I will show how phenomenologically inspired theories of delusion, such as the multiple realities hypothesis, bypass the debates above and focus on describing and understanding the disturbances in the structure of experience undergone by patients. I conclude that the philosophical discussions ensuing from an appreciation of double bookkeeping show some of the limitations of the analytic philosophical approach to delusion. (shrink)

This essay distinguishes some significant commonalities and differences between the film-philosophies of Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (especially in his book Poetics of Cinema) and U.S. philosopher Stanley Cavell. I argue that despite shared senses of the poetics of the film image and certain shared philosophical references, Ruiz and Cavell differed over their conceptions of the model spectator and their relations to autonomous films and worlds from which spectators are excluded (on Cavell's picture) versus fragments out of which the spectator might (...) create their own films and worlds in which a spectator might become included (on Ruiz's picture). I then argue that a striking reconciliation between these perspectives takes place via each's conception of television, since it was precisely the features of the medium and its heteronomous parts that Cavell found bemusing from the perspective of his view of film (and its supposedly autonomous works) that allowed for Ruiz's natural career-long relationship with television and heteronomy, especially in Latin American telenovelas. I thus approach Ruiz's relation to telenovelas via Cavell's understanding of the possibilities of soap operas to explore arguments between different temporalities: "dialectical," narrative time and "undialectical" recurrences of needs and drives. I further explore this possibility with a reading of Ruiz's neglected, late-career Chilean TV series Litoral (2008), focused on the construction of stories by sailors aboard a ghost ship. I argue that the series' treatment of these different temporalities reaches its culmination in the poignant image of a sailor-storyteller stuck within a story of his own creation: a stark rendering of his taking a sideways-on view of the role of his own fantasies in its construction. (shrink)

(This version was submitted to Behavioral and Brain Science. A revised version was published by Biological Theory) Estimates of autism’s incidence increased 5-10 fold in ten years, an increase which cannot be genetic. Though many mutations are associated with autism, no mutation seems directly to cause autism. We need to find the direct cause. Complexity science provides a new paradigm - confirmed in biology by extensive hard data. Both the body and the personality are complex dynamic systems which spontaneously self-organize (...) from simple dynamic systems. Autism may therefore be caused by the failure of a simple dynamic system. We know that infants who cannot track their mother’s face often become autistic, that eye-contact initiates intersubjectivity which is blocked in autism, and that the infant-mother pair seems designed to promote eye-contact, as does the eye’s appearance. This author earlier proposed that failure of eye-contact might directly cause autism and that early non-maternal childcare, including television/video, would therefore be statistically linked to autism. Waldman et al. (2008; 2006) recently proved that autism is strongly linked to precipitation (indoor activity) and to the introduction of cable. The most plausible explanation? Early exposure to television/video is linked to autism. Furthermore a normal developmental cascade (blocked in autism) has been deciphered: (a) Infant-mother eye-contact triggers increased maternal attention. (b) Early maternal attention permanently increases not only baseline vasopressin but also that oxytocin release which is triggered by subsequent maternal attention. (c) Vasopressin and oxytocin promote face recognition, gazing-at-the-eyes, emotion recognition, and social bonding. The eye-contact hypothesis suggests a clinical study addressing prevention: recruit prospective parents who agree to curtail television/video/computer/wi-fi in their families; measure autism’s incidence in their children. (shrink)

Here I outline the argument in Kim Sterelny’s book The Evolved Apprentice. I present some worries for Sterelny from the perspective of modelers in behavioral ecology. I go on to discuss Sterelny’s approach to moral psychology and finally introduce some potential new applications for his evolved apprentice view.

The view that folk psychology is primarily mindreading beliefs and desires has come under challenge in recent years. I have argued that we also understand others in terms of individual properties such as personality traits and generalizations from past behavior, and in terms of group properties such as stereotypes and social norms (Andrews 2012). Others have also argued that propositional attitude attribution isn’t necessary for predicting others’ behavior, because this can be done in terms of taking Dennett’s Intentional Stance (Zawidzki (...) 2013), appealing to social structures (Maibom 2007), shared norms (McGeer 2007) or via solution based heuristics for reaching equilibrium between social partners (Morton 2003). But it isn’t only prediction that can be done without thinking about what others think; we can explain and understand people in terms of their personality traits, habitual behaviors, and social practices as well. The decentering of propositional attitude attributions goes hand in hand with a move away from taking folk psychology to be primarily a predictive device. While experiments examining folk psychological abilities in children, infants, and other species still rest on asking subjects to predict behavior, theoretical investigations as to the evolutionary function of folk psychology have stressed the role of explanation (Andrews 2012) and regulative functions (McGeer 2007, Zawidzki 2013, Fenici 2011). In this paper I argue that an explanatory role for folk psychology is also a regulative role, and that language is not required for these regulative functions. I will start by drawing out the relationship between prediction, explanation, and regulation of behavior according to both mindreading approaches to folk psychology and the pluralistic account I defend. I will argue that social cognition does not take the form of causal reasoning so much as it does normative reasoning, and will introduce the folk psychological spiral. Then I will examine the cognitive resources necessary for participating in the folk psychological spiral, and I will argue that these cognitive resources can be had without language. There is preliminary evidence that some other species understand one another through a normative lens that, through looping effects, creates expectations that community members strive to live up to. (shrink)

View more Abstract If logical truth is necessitated by sheer syntax, mathematics is categorially unlike logic even if all mathematics derives from definitions and logical principles. This contrast gets obscured by the plausibility of the Synonym Substitution Principle implicit in conceptions of analyticity: synonym substitution cannot alter sentence sense. The Principle obviously fails with intercepting: nonuniform term substitution in logical sentences. ‘Televisions are televisions’ and ‘TVs are televisions’ neither sound alike nor are used interchangeably. Interception synonymy gets assumed because logical (...) sentences and their synomic interceptions have identical factual content, which seems to exhaust semantic content. However, intercepting alters syntax by eliminating term recurrence, the sole strictly syntactic means of ensuring necessary term coextension, and thereby syntactically securing necessary truth. Interceptional necessity is lexical, a notational artifact. The denial of interception nonsynonymy and the disregard of term recurrence in logic link with many misconceptions about propositions, logical form, conventions, and metalanguages. Mathematics is distinct from logic: its truth is not syntactic; it is transmitted by synonym substitution; term recurrence has no essential role. The ‘=’ of mathematics is an objectual relation between numbers; the ‘=’ of logic marks a syntactic relation of coreferring terms. -/- . (shrink)

Human language, hominin tool production modes, and multimodal communications systems of primates and other animals are currently well-studied for how they display compositionality or combinatoriality. In all cases, the former is defined as a kind of hierarchical nesting and the latter as a lack thereof. In this article, I extend research on combinatoriality and compositionality further to investigations of everyday primate skills. Daily locomotion modes as well as behaviors associated with subsistence practices, hygiene, or body modification rely on the (...) hierarchical nesting of different behavioral and cognitive actions into complex skills. I introduce a scheme which uses hierarchical organization to differentiate combinatorial from compositional skills. Combinatorial skills are defined either as aggregational or linearly hierarchical depending on whether the skill occurs momentarily in space or unfolds sequentially over time. Compositional skills are defined either as nested or interactionally hierarchical depending on whether the skill results in new constructs or in new interactions between existing constructs. The methodology I propose combines epistemological hierarchy theory with data from primatological field research and experimental and comparative psychological research and provides a means to integrate current constructionist and extended views on cognition and action with older research on behavioral logics in psychology and operational chain thinking in anthropology. The approach furthermore synchronizes with ongoing research on teleonomy, intentionality, and creativity. -/- . (shrink)

Despite the huge and constant progress in the molecular and cellular neuroscience fields, our capability to understand brain alterations and treat mental illness is still limited. Therefore, a paradigm shift able to overcome such limitation is warranted. Behavior and the associated mental states are the interface between the central nervous system and the living environment. Since, in any system, the interface is a key regulator of system organization, behavior is proposed here as a unique and privileged level of control and (...) orchestration of brain structure and activity. This view has relevant scientific and clinical implications. First, the study of behavior represents a singular starting point for the investigation of neural activity in an integrated and comprehensive fashion. Second, behavioral changes, accomplished through psychotherapy or environmental interventions, are expected to have the highest impact to specifically reorganize the complexity of the human mind and thus achieve a solid and long-lasting improvement in mental health. (shrink)

Behavioral economists have proposed that people are subject to an IKEA effect, whereby they attach greater value to products they make for themselves, like IKEA furniture, than to otherwise indiscernible goods. Recently, cognitive psychologist Tom Stafford has suggested there may be an epistemic analog to this, a kind of epistemic IKEA effect. In this paper, I use Stafford’s suggestion to defend a certain thesis about epistemic value. Specifically, I argue that there is a distinctive epistemic value in being an active (...) producer of epistemic goods, like true belief, as opposed to just a passive recipient of such goods, and that because of this it can be rationally permissible to sacrifice truth in a certain way for the sake of this other value. In particular, it is rationally permissible for an epistemic agent to prefer a belief set that contains fewer overall truths but more truths obtained through the agent’s own intellectual labor, in something like the way that a practical agent might prefer furniture they have made through their own manual labor to inherently superior furniture made by someone else. In making my case, I draw on Ernest Sosa’s discussion of causation and praxical epistemic values, and Jennifer Lackey’s testimony-based criticism of the credit view of knowledge. After defending my thesis about epistemic value, I further clarify it by connecting it to the focus of Stafford’s discussion, conspiracy theorists. (shrink)

In this two-part article, I propose a new materialist understanding of behavior. The term “mattering” in the title refers to sense-making behavior that matters, that is, to significant habits and materialized behaviors. By significant habits I mean protocols, practices and routines that generate ways of reading material signs and fixed accounts of movement. I advance a notion of behaving that stresses its materiality and sensory shaping, and I provide select examples from music. I note that current definitions of behavior (...) do not capture its material dimension. This is because behavioral science has mostly viewed matter as passive, and not as an active agency. Such an approach has metaphysically framed behavior as a phenomenon of presence that is external from its environment. The approach of behavioral science to matter where there are fixed borders between the internal and external is lacking, since it does not account for agential cuts as conceptualized by Karen Barad. Instead, I consider behavior performatively; as an ongoing iterative practice and as integral to the growth of immanently self-caused matter that spawns metastable relational formations that produce different possibilities for successive formations. In this regard, behavior matters, and matter behaves. One key aspect of my article advances Bernard Stiegler as a critical new materialist thinker. This advancement concerns the technical doings of artworks, which include the material activity that is generative of sensitivity: feelings and beliefs associated with a sense or meaning. I outline an example of the materiality of habits as constitutive of music. After that, I coin the transformative doings of matter on the artist as a “caripulation,” which is a desired movement or motion that transforms the mover and the moved. Finally, I raise “pharmacological” considerations in terms of the Stieglerian aspects of organic and inorganic organized matter. (shrink)

People display recognizably characteristic behavioral patterns across time and situations, with a given degree of regularity. These patterns may justify the attribution of personality traits. It is arguably the commonsense view that the proper explanation of these behavioral regularities is given by intrinsic properties of the agent’s psychology. In this paper, I argue for an externalistic view of the causal basis of personality-characteristic behaviors. According to the externalistic view, the relevant behavioral regularities are better understood as the result of (...) a systematic interaction between features internal to the agent and environmental-situational factors. Moreover, if the premise is granted that people are typically able to exercise a certain degree of control over the environmental-situational conditions they find themselves in, the resulting picture is of active sort of externalism, as people may at times engage in selection and manipulation of environmental-situational conditions as a way of managing their own behavioral tendencies. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on normative cognition by providing a lineage explanation of human social norm psychology. This approach builds upon theories of goal-directed behavioral control in the reinforcement learning and control literature, arguing that this form of control defines an important class of intentional normative mental states that are instrumental in nature. I defend the view that great ape capacities for instrumental reasoning and our capacity (or family of capacities) for shared intentionality coadapted to (...) each other and argue that the evolution of this capacity has allowed the representation of social norms and the emergence of our capacity for normative guidance. (shrink)

Darwinism presents a paradox. It discredits the notion that one’s life has any intrinsic meaning, yet it predicts that we are designed by Darwinian natural selection to generally insist that it must—and so necessarily designed to misunderstand and doubt Darwinism. The implications of this paradox are explored here, including the question of where then does the Darwinist find meaning in life? The main source, it is proposed, is from cognitive domains for meaning inherited from sentient ancestors—domains that reveal our evolved (...) human nature as the fool that it is: given to distractions and delusions of many kinds, designed by natural selection primarily for one essential purpose—to allay our instinctual fear of failed legacy, rooted in our uniquely human awareness that we are not immortal. Darwinism, however, also teaches that genuine legacy is a fate enjoyed only by individual genes. Accordingly, as argued here, those genes with the grandest legacy—and hence rampant within us—are of two types: “legacy-drive” genes delude us into thinking that the legacy can be individually and personally ours; and “leisure-drive” genes distract us from the agonizing truth that it can never be. The most rudimental delusion of legacy is the perception of offspring as vehicles for memetic legacy—the transmission of resident memes from one’s mind to the minds and behaviors of offspring— thus also ensuring genetic legacy: the transmission of resident genes, including importantly, genes inherited from ancestors that influence both legacy and leisure drives. Today, legacyand leisure-drive genes reveal their phenotypes across a wide range of human affairs, and together with the phenotypes of survival- and sex-drive genes, they provide a foundation for a novel view of the Darwinian roots of cultural evolution. (shrink)

Darwinism presents a paradox. It discredits the notion that one’s life has any intrinsic meaning, yet it predicts that we are designed by Darwinian natural selection to generally insist that it must—and so necessarily designed to misunderstand and doubt Darwinism. The implications of this paradox are explored here, including the question of where then does the Darwinist find meaning in life? The main source, it is proposed, is from cognitive domains for meaning inherited from sentient ancestors—domains that reveal our evolved (...) human nature as the fool that it is: given to distractions and delusions of many kinds, designed by natural selection primarily for one essential purpose—to allay our instinctual fear of failed legacy, rooted in our uniquely human awareness that we are not immortal. Darwinism, however, also teaches that genuine legacy is a fate enjoyed only by individual genes. Accordingly, as argued here, those genes with the grandest legacy—and hence rampant within us—are of two types: “legacy-drive” genes delude us into thinking that the legacy can be individually and personally ours; and “leisure-drive” genes distract us from the agonizing truth that it can never be. The most rudimental delusion of legacy is the perception of offspring as vehicles for memetic legacy—the transmission of resident memes from one’s mind to the minds and behaviors of offspring—thus also ensuring genetic legacy: the transmission of resident genes, including importantly, genes inherited from ancestors that influence both legacy and leisure drives. Today, legacy- and leisure-drive genes reveal their phenotypes across a wide range of human affairs, and together with the phenotypes of survival- and sex-drive genes, they provide a foundation for a novel view of the Darwinian roots of cultural evolution. (shrink)

Evolutionary research on the biological fitness of groups has recently given a prominent value to the role that prosocial behaviors play in favoring a successful adaptation to ecological niches. Such a focus marks a paradigm shift. Early views of evolution relied on the notion of natural selection as a largely competitive mechanism for the achievement of the highest amount of resources. Today, evolutionists from different schools think that collaborative attitudes are an irremovable ingredient of biological change over time. As (...) a consequence, a number of researchers have been attracted by evolutionary studies of human behaviors. Some think that a continuity among prosocial attitudes of human beings and other social mammals can be detected, and that this fact has relevance for accounting for human morality. Others deny one or the other of these claims, or both. The papers in the present special issue address how these topics impact ethics and religion. (shrink)

The performance of natural behavior is commonly used as a criterion in the determination of animal welfare. This is still true, despite many authors having demonstrated that it is not a necessary component of welfare –some natural behaviors may decrease welfare, while some unnatural behaviors increase it. Here I analyze why this idea persists, and what effects it may have. I argue that the disagreement underlying this debate on natural behavior is not one about which conditions affect welfare, (...) but a deeper conceptual disagreement about what the state of welfare actually consists of. Those advocating natural behavior typically take a “teleological” view of welfare, in which naturalness is fundamental to welfare, while opponents to the criterion usually take a “subjective” welfare concept, in which welfare consists of the subjective experience of life by the animal. I argue that as natural functioning is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding welfare, we should move away from the natural behavior criterion to an alternative such as behavioral preferences or enjoyment. This will have effects in the way we understand and measure welfare, and particularly in how we provide for the welfare of animals in a captive setting. (shrink)

The performance of natural behavior is commonly used as a criterion in the determination of animal welfare. This is still true, despite many authors having demonstrated that it is not a necessary component of welfare – some natural behaviors may decrease welfare, while some unnatural behaviors increase it. Here I analyze why this idea persists, and what effects it may have. I argue that the disagreement underlying this debate on natural behavior is not one about which conditions affect (...) welfare, but a deeper conceptual disagreement about what the state of welfare actually consists of. Those advocating natural behavior typically take a “teleological” view of welfare, in which naturalness is fundamental to welfare, while opponents to the criterion usually take a “subjective” welfare concept, in which welfare consists of the subjective experience of life by the animal. I argue that as natural functioning is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding welfare, we should move away from the natural behavior criterion to an alternative such as behavioral preferences or enjoyment. This will have effects in the way we understand and measure welfare, and particularly in how we provide for the welfare of animals in a captive setting. (shrink)

This paper presents a view of nature as a network of infocomputational agents organized in a dynamical hierarchy of levels. It provides a framework for unification of currently disparate understandings of natural, formal, technical, behavioral and social phenomena based on information as a structure, differences in one system that cause the differences in another system, and computation as its dynamics, i.e. physical process of morphological change in the informational structure. We address some of the frequent misunderstandings regarding the natural/morphological computational (...) models and their relationships to physical systems, especially cognitive systems such as living beings. Natural morphological infocomputation as a conceptual framework necessitates generalization of models of computation beyond the traditional Turing machine model presenting symbol manipulation, and requires agent-based concurrent resource-sensitive models of computation in order to be able to cover the whole range of phenomena from physics to cognition. The central role of agency, particularly material vs. cognitive agency is highlighted. (shrink)

A standard view in social science and philosophy is that a lie is a dishonest assertion: to lie is to assert something that you think is false in order to deceive your audience. We report four behavioral experiments designed to evaluate some aspects of this view. Participants read short scenarios and judged several features of interest, including whether an agent lied. We found evidence that ordinary lie attributions can be influenced by aspects of audience uptake, are based on judging that (...) the agent made an assertion (assertion attributions), and, at least in some contexts, are not based on attributions of deceptive intent. The finding on assertion attributions is predicted by the standard view, but the finding on intent attributions is not. These results help to further clarify the ordinary concept of lying and shed light on the psychological processes involved in ordinary lie attributions and related judgments. (shrink)

The standard view of classical cognitive science stated that cognition consists in the manipulation of language-like structures according to formal rules. Since cognition is ‘linguistic’ in itself, according to this view language is just a complex communication system and does not influence cognitive processes in any substantial way. This view has been criticized from several perspectives and a new framework (Embodied Cognition) has emerged that considers cognitive processes as non-symbolic and heavily dependent on the dynamical interactions between the cognitive system (...) and its environment. But notwithstanding the successes of the embodied cognitive science in explaining low-level cognitive behaviors, it is still not clear whether and how it can scale up for explaining high-level cognition. In this paper we argue that this can be done by considering the role of language as a cognitive tool: i.e. how language transforms basic cognitive functions in the high-level functions that are characteristic of human cognition. In order to do that, we review some computational models that substantiate this view with respect to categorization and memory. Since these models are based on a very rudimentary form of non-syntactic ‘language’ we argue that the use of language as a cognitive tool might have been an early discovery in hominid evolution, and might have played a substantial role in the evolution of language itself. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework to understand how multicellular systems realize functionally integrated physiological entities by organizing their intercellular space. From a perspective centered on physiology and integration, biological systems are often characterized as organized in such a way that they realize metabolic self-production and self-maintenance. The existence and activity of their components rely on the network they realize and on the continuous management of the exchange of matter and energy with their environment. One (...) of the virtues of the organismic approach focused on organization is that it can provide an understanding of how biological systems are functionally integrated into coherent wholes. Organismic frameworks have been primarily developed by focusing on unicellular life. Multicellularity, however, presents additional challenges to our understanding of biological systems, related to how cells are capable to live together in higher-order entities, in such a way that some of their features and behaviors are constrained and controlled by the system they realize. Whereas most accounts of multicellularity focus on cell differentiation and increase in size as the main elements to understand biological systems at this level of organization, we argue that these factors are insufficient to provide an understanding of how cells are physically and functionally integrated in a coherent system. In this paper, we provide a new theoretical framework to understand multicellularity, capable to overcome these issues. Our thesis is that one of the fundamental theoretical principles to understand multicellularity, which is missing or underdeveloped in current accounts, is the functional organization of the intercellular space. In our view, the capability to be organized in space plays a central role in this context, as it enables (and allows to exploit all the implications of) cell differentiation and increase in size, and even specialized functions such as immunity. We argue that the extracellular matrix plays a crucial active role in this respect, as an evolutionary ancient and specific (non-cellular) control subsystem that contributes as a key actor to the functional specification of the multicellular space and to modulate cell fate and behavior. We also analyze how multicellular systems exert control upon internal movement and communication. Finally, we show how the organization of space is involved in some of the failures of multicellular organization, such as aging and cancer. (shrink)

Background: Screen time among adults represents a continuing and growing problem in relation to health behaviors and health outcomes. However, no instrument currently exists in the literature that quantifies the use of modern screen-based devices. The primary purpose of this study was to develop and assess the reliability of a new screen time questionnaire, an instrument designed to quantify use of multiple popular screen-based devices among the US population. -/- Methods: An 18-item screen-time questionnaire was created to quantify use (...) of commonly used screen devices (e.g. television, smartphone, tablet) across different time points during the week (e.g. weekday, weeknight, weekend). Test-retest reliability was assessed through intra-class correlation coefficients (ICCs) and standard error of measurement (SEM). The questionnaire was delivered online using Qualtrics and administered through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). -/- Results: Eighty MTurk workers completed full study participation and were included in the final analyses. All items in the screen time questionnaire showed fair to excellent relative reliability (ICCs = 0.50–0.90; all < 0.000), except for the item inquiring about the use of smartphone during an average weekend day (ICC = 0.16, p = 0.069). The SEM values were large for all screen types across the different periods under study. -/- Conclusions: Results from this study suggest this self-administered questionnaire may be used to successfully classify individuals into different categories of screen time use (e.g. high vs. low); however, it is likely that objective measures are needed to increase precision of screen time assessment. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to defend what I call the action-oriented coding theory (ACT) of spatially contentful visual experience. Integral to ACT is the view that conscious visual experience and visually guided action make use of a common subject-relative or 'egocentric' frame of reference. Proponents of the influential two visual systems hypothesis (TVSH), however, have maintained on empirical grounds that this view is false (Milner & Goodale, 1995/2006; Clark, 1999; 2001; Campbell, 2002; Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003; Goodale & (...) Milner, 2004). One main source of evidence for TVSH comes from behavioral studies of the comparative effects of size-contrast illusions on visual awareness and visuo- motor action. This paper shows that not only is the evidence from illusion studies inconclusive, there is a better, ACT-friendly interpretation of the evidence that avoids serious theoretical difficulties faced by TVSH. (shrink)

This paper concerns the conditions under which realism is an artistic merit in perceptual narratives, and its consequences for the practice of non-traditional casting. Perceptual narratives are narrative representations that perceptually represent at least some of their contents, and include works of film, television, theatre and opera. On certain construals of the conditions under which realism is an artistic merit in such works, non-traditional casting, however morally merited, is often artistically flawed. I defend an alternative view of the conditions (...) under which realism is an artistic merit in perceptual narratives. I identify the two forms of realism at issue in debates about the artistic merits of non-traditional casting, and identify the artistic norms that determine the conditions under which each constitutes an artistic merit. I argue that, independently of the relation between moral merits and artistic merits, non-traditional casting violates these norms less often than is sometimes assumed. Moreover, in certain circumstances, non-traditional casting affects realism in artistically meritorious ways. I conclude by considering the implications of my view for the practice of whitewashing. (shrink)

What kind of reference (if any) do terms such as “pencil,” “chair,” “television,” and so on have? On the matter, a de-bate between directly referential theorists and descriptiv-ist theorists is open. It is largely acknowledged that natural kind terms (such as “water,” “gold,” “tiger,” etc.) are directly referential expressions (cf. Putnam,1975). That is, they are expressions whose reference is determined by their refer-ents' nature, independent of whether we know or will ever know what this nature is. However, it does (...) not seem like-wise convincing that all artifactual kind terms (like “pen-cil,” “chair,” “television,” etc.) semantically behave the same. Terms for artifactual kinds seem more likely to be subjected to a descriptivist view, that is, definable not by links to their extensions' nature but in terms of conjunctions or clusters of properties. In his celebrated “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975), Hilary Putnam originated the mentioned debate by arguing that artifactual kind terms also refer directly. Thus, the discussion ultimately revolves around establishing whether artifactual and natural kind terms are both directly referential expressions. The authors engaged in this debate have tried to argue in favor of (or against) Putnam's proposal by highlighting the similarities (or differences) between nat-ural vis-à-vis artifactual kind words and their respective ref-erents. This paper aims to provide a thorough and reasoned overview of the debate at stake, pointing out trends and problems associated with each proposed account. (shrink)

What is so striking about Breaking Bad is how centrally impairment and disability feature in the lives of the characters of this series. It is unusual for a television series to cast characters with visible or invisible impairments. On the rare occasions that television shows do have characters with impairments, these characters serve no purpose other than to contribute to their ‘Otherness.’ Breaking Bad not only centralizes impairment, but impairment drives and sustains the story lines. I use three (...) interrelated themes from Disability Scholarship to analyze Breaking Bad. The first theme, Bodily Control, is that good bodies are controlled bodies and that uncontrolled, messy bodies are frightening, bad bodies. Indeed, the messiness of impairment and disability is so bad, that impaired and disabled individuals are excluded or shut out or excluded from many areas of public life. The second theme, Normalcy, is that the effect of hiding away impairment, of attempting to conceal disability, is that society becomes defined by, and structured around, the concept of normalcy. Normalcy, being normal, attaining and maintaining normalcy, is the preoccupation of most in society. To fail to be normal, or to fall from what is considered to be normal, is a source of tremendous anxiety for most people. These two themes, Bodily Control and Normalcy are conceptually connected: impairment, disease and dying are so feared because they are socially invisible and, therefore unknown and unknowable. They are the undiscussable taboos. The third theme, Bodily Realism, is that having a realistic view of the body, which would at minimum require accepting the fact that human bodies are fragile things, prone to disease and accident and are ultimately destined to die, makes one more at ease in the world, and able to live better lives and live as a better person. Indeed, so the argument goes, our lives would be richer, more rewarding—emotionally and morally—if we cared less about normalcy because of a dread of abnormalcy, but instead learned to accept if not positively value the physical variability of human existence. (shrink)

According to the Behavioral View of consent, consent must be expressed in behavior in order to release someone from a duty. By contrast, the Mental View of consent is that normatively efficacious consent is entirely mental. In previous work, I defended a version of the Behavioral View, according to which normatively efficacious ‘consent always requires public behavior, and this behavior must take the form of communication in the case of high-stakes consent’. In this essay, I respond to two arguments by (...) proponents of the Mental View. First, Larry Alexander, Heidi Hurd and Peter Westen have argued that my view has mistaken implications concerning the culpability of different actors. I counter that my version of the view does not have these implications, as it leaves us free to draw moral and legal distinctions between different offences involving non-consensual behavior. Second, Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan have argued for an analogy between consent and abandonment: on the grounds that the normative power to abandon resides in one’s will, Alexander and Ferzan concludes consent does too. I counter that abandonment requires behavior, and call into question the assumption that the ethics of property have much to teach us about the ethics of sexual consent. (shrink)

Disquotationalism is the view that the only notion of truth we really need is one that can be wholly explained in terms of such trivialities as: “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white. The 'Classical Disquotational Strategy' attempts to establish this view case by case, by showing that each extant appeal to truth, in philosophical or scientific explanations, can be unmasked as an appeal only to disquotational truth. I argue here that the Classical Strategy fails in at least (...) two cases: attributions of truth to context-dependent utterances and uses of truth psychological explanations of behavioral success or, more fundamentally, appeals to falsity in psychological explanations of behavioral failure. -/- It's my intention to turn this paper into two papers. It's become quite unwieldy as it is---not unlike "The Strength of Truth Theories". (shrink)

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new brand of moral philosopher. Straddling the gap between academia on the one hand, and the world of law, medicine, and politics on the other, bioethicists have appeared, offering advice on ethical issues to a wider public than the philosophy classroom. Some bioethicists, like Peter Singer, have achieved wide notoriety in the public realm with provocative arguments that challenge widely held beliefs about the relative moral status of animals, human foetuses and newborn (...) babies. Other bioethicists practice their trade with greater protection from public scrutiny, confining their thoughts to committees in government circles, universities, charitable institutions, or hospitals. But what exactly is it that bioethicists have to offer in such contexts? What sort of expertise do bioethicists have that justifies their employment on these committees, or the time and space accorded to their views on television and the radio, or in newspapers and magazines? In spite of being an expanding group of professionals who attract large sums of private and public funding, bioethicists are sometimes met with suspicion or even hostility, both inside and outside academia. One common criticism is that the presence of bioethicists is unproductive in practical bioethical debate. In light of this criticism one might wonder why the relevant funding bodies have not spotted the hoax and withdrawn their funding. Certainly, if bioethicists.. (shrink)

From the outset, critical social theory has sought to diagnose people’s participation in their own oppression, by revealing the roots of irrational and self-undermining choices in the complex interplay between human nature, social structures, and cultural beliefs. As part of this project, Ideologiekritik has aimed to expose faulty conceptions of this interplay, so that the objectively pathological character of what people are “freely” choosing could come more clearly into view. The challenge, however, has always been to find a way of (...) doing this without arrogantly assuming special access to what is good for people. And this danger of paternalism is one to which social theorists have all too often fallen prey. In this brief essay, I focus on contemporary instances of clearly self-defeating behavior in contexts of complex choices. I begin by discussing a recent attempt to diagnose and solve these failures of choices, namely the public policy recommendations of behavioral economist Richard Thaler and reform-minded legal theorist Cass Sunstein. Their influential “libertarian paternalist” approach is particularly interesting, both in what it includes (attention to the socially constructed nature of choice situations and the roots of the problems in human nature) and in what it leaves out (an understanding of the social construction of human nature and an adequate appreciation of the value of autonomy). After discussing it, I consider a broadly perfectionist alternative, to the effect that the problem lies in a failure to adequately appreciate the importance of developing autonomy. I then turn to sketching the outlines of a new approach, based on the concept of “autonomy gaps,” which approaches overly demanding policies in relational and action-theoretical terms. In the final section, I show how this provides the basis for an analysis both in terms of a critique of ideology and of social pathology. (shrink)