Capacity Of Human Beings Research Articles

Economic Perspectives on Creativity

Creativity refers to capacity of human beings to generate new productions or services that have value at the individual or collective level. The economic and social development of humanity since the Neolithic Revolution testifies to the tremendous power of creativity to promote change. This article focuses on explanations and measures of the economic and social consequences of creativity. Main economic theories concerning innovation are described and examined.

Enhancing Care

AbstractIf moral enhancement is possible, the caring capacity of human beings should be considered one of the first and most important traits for augmentation. To assess the plausibility of enhancing care, I will explore how the concept and its associated human dispositions are socially constructed, and identify some of the critical points and complexities. Scientific advances regarding neuro-enhancing substances that allegedly make humans more caring will be considered and assessed against the main principles that govern the ethics of care approach. I argue that given the relational and contextual nature of care, its enhancement, if targeted at the individual level, can be more disadvantageous than helpful, by overlooking the “webs of care” people are situated in, and the role of social institutions in shaping behaviours, duties, attitudes, and principles.

On becoming political: the political in subjectivity

This article explores mundane political agency. We introduce the notion of the political ordinary as agency based on the capacity of human beings to carry out acts that are undetermined and unexpected, and thus capable of challenging, opposing, negotiating, maintaining, and readjusting prevailing conditions. We approach subjectivity from a pragmatist and phenomenological point of view and argue that it is the condition of possibility of political agency. The paper demonstrates how political subjectivity can be located in the ways in which people take up issues that stand out as important to them. To this end, we look into the everyday life experiences of an eleven-year-old girl whose struggles related to proposed subject positions provide examples of mundane political agency. We conclude by arguing that political agency is the subject’s action when in a state of becoming prompted by future-oriented demands and contingencies of social life.

Nationalism as a Mental Construct: The Linguistic Basis of the Sinhala-Tamil Conflict

Nationalism as a concept could be the concern of political scientists, but is it purely political in nature? Are there neurological connections that revolve around one of the highly evolved capacities of human beings as compared to other species; that is the ability to use language for communication? It is only because we are endowed with a machinery of cognition that receives and analyzes information from the external world and initiates us into identifying and assigning a set of characteristics to the objects and ideas we encounter in our everyday encounters with the multitude of events of the world. Karl Popper hinted towards the dichotomous relationship between ‘nominalism’ and ‘essentialism’, with the aid of which we classify and label the entities around us. While the debate between ‘reason’ and ’emotion’ has stayed alive for thousands of years tracing its origin to the antiquity coinciding with the heydays of the Hellenic glory or the ancient times of the Nyaya-Mimansa school of Indian philosophy, scholars and thinkers have shown a strong tendency to separate out the ‘objective’ from the ‘subjective’, a necessary corollary of the distinction between ‘reason’ and ’emotion’. The difference could be very well transposed upon the difference between ‘objects’ and ‘ideas’. Hence, one needs to attempt at unravelling the emotional-psychological basis of nationalism.

The challenge of model complexity: improving the interpretation of large causal models through variety filters

AbstractWhile large causal models provide detailed insights to the analysts who develop them, general users are often challenged by their complexity. Commonly, these models overwhelm the cognitive capacities of human beings. The inaccessibility of large causal models is particularly regrettable when they deliver valuable expertise and information that should be shared with other researchers and practitioners. To address this issue, we propose a set of tools—so‐called variety filters—to reduce model complexity and promote the accurate interpretation of their results. These filters encompass interpretive model partitioning, structural model partitioning and algorithmic detection of archetypal structures (ADAS). We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed variety filters using the World3–2003 Model—a simulation model of remarkable complexity. The filters drastically attenuate the complexity while enhancing the comprehension of the model. Based on our findings, we derive implications for the use of complex models and their interpretation.Copyright © 2018 System Dynamics Society

Comment: The Making of a Reference Book

Comment: The Making of a Reference Book

Finitude, Freedom and Biomedicine: An Engagement with Gilbert Meilaender’s Bioethics

A fundamental theme in Gilbert Meilaender’s work on bioethical issues is the relationship between the ethical claims of finitude (that is, the biological necessity that characterizes human beings as finite creatures) and of freedom (that is, the capacity of human beings to transcend biological necessity). This article identifies two ways in which Meilaender articulates this relationship (one Niebuhrian, the other Augustinian) and proposes a third (Barthian) way which avoids the limitations of the first two ways while serving Meilaender’s purpose, which is to redress what he sees as an imbalance in favor of the claims of freedom over those of finitude in contemporary biomedicine and bioethics. The article ends by suggesting that Meilaender’s purpose would be best served by avoiding tensions between finitude and freedom as the third way does.

Rhetorical prehistory and the Paleolithic

ABSTRACTI contribute to a prehistory of rhetoric by exploring early rhetorical practices in the Paleolithic era. Using new materialist methodologies (Karen Barad, Andy Clark), I theorize how humans are constitutively entangled with material environments and objects. I also emphasize a materialist historiographic method that seeks bottom-up, emergent explanations for cultural innovations. I propose two rhetorical forms in the Paleolithic: first, rhetoric as an emergent development stemming from increased sociomaterial complexity, performed via plaques, beads, pigments, and spatial arrangement; and second, rhetoric as integrated into mysterious cave rituals, which are given lasting inscription in the famous cave images. Contemporary theories argue that some of the cave imagery stems from visions achieved through altered states, but we might well understand such states as something environed—a capacity of human beings elevated to a techne and performed via the material affordances of cave properties. These cave rituals show that rhetoric recruited from other cultural developments, including magic and religion, a point that can help differently illuminate Greek rhetoric as well. My overall goal is to help forge a materialist-oriented prehistory that demonstrates rhetoric to be fundamentally entwined with the emergence of modern humans.

Espera e espelho: um ensaio trivial

O problema da determinação da ação humana ocupou a filosofia durante séculos. O presente ensaio procura contribuir para esse debate através da proposta de duas teses filosóficas. A primeira tese defende que toda a ação humana se organiza numa estrutura de espera de algo que determine a consciência. Toda a iniciativa e todo o ato voluntário dependem de algo que surge no fluxo de consciência. Neste sentido, o sujeito parece ser visitado do exterior por algo que irá iniciar o comportamento. Em defesa desta tese apresentam-se relatos fenomenológicos do processo de decisão, registos históricos de eventos mentais como visitações, representações literárias e teorias filosóficas do tempo. Em particular, mostra-se que as teorias sobre a dimensão corpuscular ou granular do tempo e do fluxo da consciência são especialmente relevantes para a explicação da capacidade de atuação dos seres humanos. Em complemento, propõe-se um inventário dos grandes temas que organizam a ação. Trabalham-se conteúdos culturais ligados às universidades, à internet e à literatura. Defende-se uma segunda tese filosófica segundo a qual os seres humanos só se interessam maioritariamente por si mesmos. O ensaio termina com a defesa da ideia de que a filosofia, a ciência e a religião não têm meios racionais para explicar a atuação humana, restando apenas a abordagem sapiencial. As várias linhas de pensamento deste ensaio são unificadas pela ideia de que a trivialidade da vida humana esconde problemas intelectuais dignos de investigação.

Debt Time is Straight Time

In this article, I examine certain features of contemporary capitalism with particular attention to the temporal, spatial, social, and person-forming aspects of debt. Debt is difficult to dislodge because it mobilizes the individual and social promise-making capacities of human beings so that the future is determined by promises made in the past. I argue that the demonic, larger-than-life powers of debt can be countered by queer prophetic performances that create temporal and spatial contiguities between people who then become a “we.”

Envisaging Canada in a Disenchanted World: Reflections on Federalism, Nationalism, and Distinctive Indigenous Identity

I have taught law for more than twenty years. I have gradually become convinced that jurists (like myself), political scientists, and philosophers who are interested in federalism and Indigenous issues — whether they themselves are of Indigenous origin or not — do not always take sufficient consideration of the Trickster in their understanding of these matters. Their intellectual constructions lack asperities. No provision is made for the unforeseen. Everything is just too smooth. Above all, these constructions often overestimate or underestimate the capacity of human beings to think by and for themselves.

Rawlsian altruism with perfect discrimination leads to social efficiency

ABSTRACTRecent studies draw attention on the highly specialized capacity of human beings in recognizing altruists versus cheaters in social interactions. These results hint at the existence of specialized abilities that support discriminating behavior in strategic interactions. In this paper, we explore the implications of discriminating behavior in the study of the indirect evolutionary selection of selfish versus altruistic motivations in the context of generic 2×2 base games, and in particular for coordination and cooperation scenarios. We find that inequality averse (Rawlsian) altruism can enforce under rather general conditions socially optimal outcomes, including cases where selfishness cannot, such as in prisoner’s dilemmas. Inequality seeking (Nietzschian) altruism in no case improves upon Rawlsian altruism in terms of social optimality of outcomes, and often does worse. In the cooperation scenario in particular, Nietzschean altruism never manages to implement the cooperative outcome. Under perfect discrimination, moreover, inequality averse (Rawlsian) altruism often evolves at the expense of selfishness. These results suggest that the development of sophisticated discrimination abilities may be strongly adaptive in supporting fairness-oriented forms of pro-sociality in humans in the context of social dilemmas and coordination problems.

Towards a Kantian Theory of Judgment: the Power of Judgment in its Practical and Aesthetic Employment

Human beings orient themselves in the world via judgments; factual, moral, prudential, aesthetic, and all kinds of mixed judgments. Particularly for normative orientation in complex and contested contexts of action, it can be challenging to form judgments. This paper explores what one can reasonably expect from a theory of the power of judgment from a Kantian approach to ethics. We reconstruct practical (prudential and moral) judgments on basis of the self-reflexive capacities of human beings, and argue that for the subject to see himself as committed to prudential goods it is necessarily implied that he understands himself as committed to moral judgment. However, to understand the normativity of understanding oneself as a being with practical commitments at all, the aesthetic judgment is introduced: the power of judgment in its pure form of selfreflexivity. We claim that aesthetic reflection and judgment is conditional on the possibility for human beings to enter the space of reasons, and therewith for practical self-understanding as such. The paper concludes with a preliminary sketch of different conceptual possibilities in fleshing out the role of the power of judgment in its aesthetic employment in developing mixed judgments.

Hannah Arendt: on judgment and responsibility

This article considers the relevance of Hannah Arendt’s writing on responsibility and judgment for legal academics. It begins by providing a summary of Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial, focusing in particular on the gradual shift in her thinking from theorising evil as radical to something that is banal. Following this, I connect Arendt’s thinking on judgment with her writing on plurality and what it means to keep company with oneself. I contend that Arendt’s most important contribution to moral thinking was the disenchantment of evil from its religious legacy. Finally, I consider the continued relevance of Arendt’s warning about the risks mass technological society poses for the capacity of human beings to think and make reflective judgments. These uniquely human characteristics need to be protected, if we are to guard against the rise of inverted totalitarianism and the reduction of human beings to homo oeconomicus.

Transcendent Mind, Emergent Universe in the Thought of Michael Polanyi

AbstractThis essay vindicates two major aspects of the science-based philosophy of Michael Polanyi: 1. His concept of tacit knowing, and 2. His concept of the multi-levelled character of reality. These two notions relate closely with one another, and together support the thesis to be argued here, that when it comes to understanding human beings, and most especially the human mind, science and religion have to meet on the common ground of the transcendent capacities of human beings, which are pointers to the transcendent character of the universe. The mind is an emergent of the universe, as are all of its other amazing characteristics, but mind is also, therefore, a clue to the character of the universe and its encompassing reality. Mind reflects reality; reality invites mind.

A Framework for Communities of Practice in Learning Organizations

Knowledge Management (KM) helps organizations adapt, survive, and compete in a discontinuous and ever-changing business environment. Essentially, this involves a set of organizational processes which harness the data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings. Communities of practice (CoP) are the social tools to connect, engage, and share knowledge in organizations. The research reported here aims to examine the critical factors for successful implementation of CoPs. Based on a survey of 223 respondents who have participated in successful organizational initiatives related to KM and CoPs, this study uses a regression model to analyze the findings. The results identify four essential factors which lead to an effective CoP implementation—providing proper community support, people factors, alignment of the KM initiative with the business strategy, and key KM processes. The results strongly support the appropriateness of the research model in identifying the success factors. Finally, this study discusses the implications of these findings and offers directions for future research.

Syntax.

Syntax is the cognitive capacity of human beings that allows us to connect linguistic meaning with linguistic form. The study of syntax is a huge field that has generated a great deal of empirical and theoretical work over the decades. This article outlines why understanding our syntactic capacity is important to cognitive science in general and why the data of syntactic research is to be taken seriously. It then provides an overview of a number of broad findings about the character of the syntax of human language, including evidence for abstract constituent structure, core properties of constituents, the importance of functional categories, the link between syntactic structure and meaning, and the range of types of syntactic dependencies, including dependencies of form, dependencies of position, and dependencies that create new meanings. WIREs Cogn Sci 2015, 6:131–147. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1332

Figuring the Animal Autobiography: Animals and Landscapes in Daniel Naudé's Exhibition “African Scenery & Animals”

SummaryDaniel Naudé's exhibition of photographic artworks, “African Scenery & Animals”, is discussed in this article, to consider the ways in which images of animal beings are mostly received as figurative vehicles for anthropocentric narratives. Naudé's particularised portraits of AfriCanis dogs and other domestic creatures are considered in relation to figurative anthropocentric analysis of the artworks that the artist's gallery and other reviewers have undertaken. I argue that Naudé's oeuvre is more in line with J.M. Coetzee's fictional character Elizabeth Costello's notion of imaginative empathy, proposing the capacity of human beings to imagine what it might be like to be an(other) (Coetzee 2004: 79), and that Naudé's portraits of animal beings provoke imaginative empathetic (Coetzee 2004: 79) transposition in the viewer. I recount my imaginative empathetic encounters (Coetzee 2004: 79) with particular artworks from the “African Scenery & Animals” series, and consider the imperial legacy of the landscape genre and the photographic medium employed by Naudé in relation to the artist's use of destabilising formal and contextual devices.

Toward an effective long-term strategy for preventing motor vehicle crashes and injuries.

Casualties due to motor vehicle crashes (MVCs) include some 40,000 deaths each year in the United States and one million deaths worldwide. One strategy that has been recommended for improving automobile safety is to lower speed limits and enforce them with speed cameras. However, motor vehicles can be hazardous even at low speeds whereas properly protected human beings can survive high-speed crashes without injury. Emphasis on changing driver behavior as the focus for road safety improvements has been largely unsuccessful; moreover, drivers today are increasingly distracted by secondary tasks such as cell phone use and texting. Indeed, the true limiting factor in vehicular safety is the capacity of human beings to sense and process information and to make rapid decisions. Given that dramatic reductions in injuries and deaths from MVCs have occurred over the past century due to improvements in safety technology, despite increases in the number of vehicles on the road and miles driven per vehicle, we propose that an effective long-term strategy for reducing MVC-related injury would be continued technological innovation in vehicle design, aimed at progressively removing the driver from routine operational decision-making. Once this is achieved, high rates of speed could be achieved on open highways, with minimal risk of crashes and injury to occupants and pedestrians.

The shape of science

Real science is both an historical and a social phenomenon. Its study must be more like an historical science than a theoretical one. To tell a credible and useful story about it will demand a rich variety of theoretical resources, and a wide range of narrative structures based on them. Some will appeal to our understanding of social institutions, the rules that govern them, and how they shape the behaviour of those who play various roles within them. Some will appeal to the ordinary perceptual and reasoning capacities of human beings. And some will draw on the particular characteristics that have made science the fascinating and epistemically successful enterprise it is.