Normative Concept Research Articles

Проблемы нормы и патологии в социологии здоровья

Currently, the norm is usually understood as a certain average, the most common indicator in society. The concept of norm changed and as a result, different standards of health (ancient, adaptive, anthropocentric) were distinguished in different time pe-riods. In the modern postmodern world, there is an intensive reassessment of norms, individual and social consciousness is changing, the concepts of good and evil, norms and pathology are blurring, where the old norm, which contradicts the new views on success, can be canceled and introduced into the status of pathology.The changes also affected medical practice. So, the reforms of F. Pinel (1793) imbues insanity with a certain medical meaning,the condition or behavior begins to be defined as a medical problem requiring medical intervention. Psychiatry gains professionalpower over the patient, and the psychiatrist gains control over the soul and body of the patient. A psychiatrist, remaining the ultimate truth, de-termines a person's place in the structure of society through diagnosis and stigmatization mechanisms. In addition, new risksare being created in the company. Biomedical technologies regulating the processes of birth, prolongation of human life and death are being de-veloped.

The global “political voice deficit matrix”

Abstract The present article illuminates something important yet undertheorized about the relationship between democracy, technology, and globalization. That is, that digital technologies are crucial for certain types of cross-boundary interactions between individuals or communities, and that these interactions are crucial for democratizing relations of power and authority established in and by regimes of global governance. The article does so by linking together two related conversations that have yet to take sufficient account of each other: those taking place between law and technology scholars on the democratizing potential of digital technologies, and those taking place amongst international lawyers on the relationship between democracy and globalization. The article undertakes this alchemy by putting forward the theoretical construct of the “political voice.” This construct offers a normative theory that outlines the democratic functions of vertical communications between individuals and public decision-makers within and across boundaries, but also, crucially, explains how these are dependent on robust horizontal, transnational exchanges between individuals or communities. This construct thus offers a lens through which to evaluate the extent to which digital technologies live up to their democratizing potential, and allows for a normative conceptualization of the possible consequences of their failure to do so as a problem of global governance.

Ambassadors, stewards, advocates—Is engagement of polar tourists in conservation symbolic or substantive? A scoping review

The continued growth of polar tourism is causing increasing concerns about its potential environmental effects, invigorating the current discourse about tourism's role in the sustainable future of the Polar Regions. These concerns are often met with the industry's narratives on purported positive impacts of polar tourists who would become ambassadors, stewards or advocates. However, the extent to, and the ways in which these three seemingly interchangeable ‘ambassador' terms have been used or examined in the scientific literature are largely unknown. To address this gap, we traced the definitions of these terms and identified 16 peer-reviewed studies that incorporated the terms in two types of study design: (1) discussing the terms in the context of investigating relationship and influential factors of tourists' motivations, experiences, behavior intentions, and behavior; and (2) examining the terms as ethical imperatives or normative concepts. Results of this scoping review provides a clearer picture of how the “ambassador” terms are defined and utilized in polar tourism research, and points to the needs for further understanding, conceptualization, and operationalization of the related concepts beyond focusing on tourists themselves as ambassadors.

Rethinking liberal order: the EU and the quest for global justice

Abstract The liberal order is facing severe challenges. This article introduces a special section, ‘Liberal order, the EU and global political justice’, which assesses the implications of these challenges for the European Union and for its ability to remain a relevant global actor. To do so, the different contributions inquire into the interconnections between the normative premises of the EU's foreign policy within different issue areas and those of the liberal order. Presenting the core themes, this introductory article suggests that liberal order is not merely a descriptive but also a normative concept. Indicating how a well-ordered international system ought to be organized, the liberal order generates expectations of a contribution to global justice. The article further advances the hypothesis that the troubles of the liberal order are linked to its inability to fulfill these expectations. As the EU's legitimacy is bound up with that of the liberal script, this hypothesis implies a need to reconsider not only core features of liberal order, but also those of the EU's approach to it. Thus highlighting the relevance of normative factors and their capacity for disruption, the article contributes to filling gaps in scholarly literatures both on the challenges to the liberal order and on the changing role of the EU in an increasingly unsettled world.

Applying Different Concepts and Conceptions of Legitimacy to the International Level: Service, Free Group Agents, and Autonomy

Abstract International institutions are facing increasing criticism of the legitimacy of their authority. But what does it mean for an international institution to be legitimate? Arthur Applbaum’s latest book provides a convincing new concept of legitimacy, namely, the power-liability view, and a new normative conception, the free group agent account. However, it is not clear how they can be applied to the international level. First, this paper examines how different concepts of legitimacy can be applied to international institutions. Second, it assesses three different conceptions of legitimacy, namely, the service conception, Applbaum’s free group agent account and the autonomy-based conception for the international level. It outlines how on the last conception, international institutions’ legitimacy depends on three different aspects required to protect autonomy: the political power of the institution; its purpose; and its relation to other institutions. Finally, the paper argues that the creation of an international institution should be seen as part of relational legitimacy and that state consent plays an important role to protect the political autonomy of peoples.

Constitutional Conventions Concerning the Judiciary beyond the Common Law

AbstractConstitutional conventions are traditionally understood as socially binding, usually unwritten, rules of constitutional importance based on precedent which cannot be enforced before courts. This traditional approach has several limitations, because it debates the normative quality of conventions rather than how to find them and where the real power lies. By doing so it is disconnected from scholarship on informal institutions in social sciences. Moreover, scholarship on constitutional conventions focuses predominantly on common law countries and conventions concerning political branches. This article pushes the boundaries in both directions. It shows how constitutional conventions can be conceptualized in civil law jurisdictions, and also identifies informal practices and constitutional conventions governing the judiciaries. On a broader level, it argues that constitutional conventions as a normative concept can help to filter the informal practices and differentiate between simple repetitive behavior on the one hand and conventions as a subset of informal institutions on the other.

Analysis of academic norms and copyright cognition of scientific and technological journals: Questionnaire survey based on authors and editors

Background: Clarify the connection and difference between academic norms and copyright, to provide a reference for constructing an academic ethics system. Methods: This study designed a questionnaire through expert interviews and adopted a closed-question approach. The questionnaire adopts closed-ended questions, with single-choice questions and multiple-choice questions. Publish questionnaires on the Questionnaire Star platform and disseminate them through WeChat Moments, WeChat Groups, WeChat Side-text, and QQ. A total of 256 people submitted questionnaires. Results: Among the participants, 128 (50%) were editors, 89 (34.77%) were teaching and research posts, and 39 (15.23%) were graduate students. Most of the interviewees are not clear about the concept of academic norms and copyright, especially the senior teaching and research workers. However, most of the interviewees can sensitively detect that the case has academic misconduct, but it is not clear whether the case of academic misconduct violates academic norms or copyright. Conclusions: Editors of scientific and technological journals should particularly grasp the concepts of both, accurately grasp academic norms when reviewing manuscripts, propose reasons for using or not using manuscripts, build a defense line for purifying the academic environment, and provide better publishing platforms and management services for researchers.

Navigating the future: hope and aspirations for future lives among Filipino middling transnational families in Singapore

ABSTRACT This paper sheds light on the experiences of middling Filipino transnational families in Singapore concerning the intersections of hope and aspiration in constructing their imagined futures. In particular, I examine how middling migrants engage in transnational migration and their children’s university education to achieve such futures. Using their case, I explain how hope undergirds and sustains aspired-for familial futures until they come to fruition. I argue that hope, while futural and uncertain, is felt in the present because it is the scaffold on which the imagined future lives of families rest. Moreover, in investigating the importance of place in the construction of future lives, I show how Singapore provides space for hope to emerge in relation to the future lives imagined by middling Filipino transnational families. Finally, veering away from the normative conception of hope as a constant banner of optimism, I suggest that when entangled with familial aspirations, hope brings to the fore emotions and practices that are not always positive but necessary for the realization of aspired-for familial futures.

The Empirical Nature of Norms for Decision in The Works of Eugene Ehrlich and Robert Alexi

The article under studies deals with significance of empirical arguments in juridical methodology. It relies on the fact that empirical dimension of law is an interesting and complicated issue, and E. Ehrlich’s concept of norms is one of the best solutions to it. This solution contains quite a few open questions, and the modern juridical methodology seeks answers to them both with the help of tools known a hundred or more years ago and in the ways developed in the last fifty years within the framework of the theory of juridical argumentation.
 The purpose of the article is to reveal the empirical nature of norms for decision. In order to achieve the goal, it is essential to answer the questions about the concept of the empirical dimension of law, the relationship between reality and necessity, etc., as well as the question about the empirical nature of norms for decision. All in all, the article analyzes the concept of the empirical effect of law, and specifically, how norms for decision make it possible to take into account the empirical aspects of the implementation of law. It has been ascertained that the empirical dimension of law is an approach to law based on the issue of the relationship between reality and necessity. In other words, it is the question of how one can move from reality to necessity, which is impossible within the so-called alethic system of Theophrastus and the corresponding deontic interpretation, the former allowing only the transition from necessity to reality, but not vice versa. Norms for decision are one of the tools for solving an empirical problem, which means that empirical arguments are applied within the framework of the so-called general practical arguments (for example, the results of demographic or other sociological studies, forecasting future outcomes of court proceedings based on statistical data on previous proceedings in similar cases, etc).

Against the newer evidentialists

A new wave of evidentialist theorizing concedes that evidentialism may be extensionally incorrect as an account of all-things-considered rational belief. Nevertheless, these newer evidentialists maintain that there is an importantly distinct type of epistemic rationality about which evidentialism may be the correct account. I argue that natural ways of developing the newer evidentialist position face opposite problems. One version, due to Christensen (Philos Phenomenol Res 103:501–517, 2021), may correctly describe what rationality requires, but does not entail the existence of a distinctively epistemic type of rationality. Another version, due to Maguire and Woods (Philos Rev 129:211–249, 2020), characterizes a normative concept that is both distinct and epistemic, but struggles to explain why this concept should be classified as a type of rationality. I conclude that the newer evidentialist strategy of extensional compromise may be less favorable to evidentialism than previously supposed.

Black box problem and African views of trust

This article draws on the thinking about trust in African scholarship to describe the problems black box clinical artificial intelligence (AI) generates in health professional-patient relationships. Notably, under the assumption of a black box problem, the view of trust as inherently relational implies that health professionals cannot explain whether and how a clinical AI incorporates a patient’s values or leverages the same (in its outputs) to honour fiduciary relations. Additionally, the African view of trust as experience-based and accepting responsibility implies that health professionals can neither be held accountable for black box clinical AI outputs that they can hardly understand nor provide material information (concerning what the clinical AI does and why). Finally, given the understanding of trust as a normative concept, health professionals cannot accept patients’ vulnerabilities, and patients cannot give the same. Given that trust will play a vital role in the global acceptance of clinical AI, future studies should research—from other positionalities—how the black box problem will challenge the relationship of trust in the medical context.

Norms and consumer behaviors in tourism: a systematic literature review

PropósitoEste artículo examina las normas y su relación con el comportamiento del consumidor en el sector turístico. El objetivo de la revisión es identificar brechas con relación a diversas normas y su impacto en la literatura, para proporcionar recomendaciones en futuras investigaciones.MetodologíaSe empleó un método de revisión sistemática de la literatura para analizar las normas en la investigación del comportamiento del consumidor en el contexto del turismo y hostelería. La revisión se centró en el contexto de investigación, conceptualizaciones, roles, medidas, fundamentos teóricos y los principales hallazgos.ResultadosLa revisión revela que las conceptualizaciones y la dimensionalidad de las normas en los estudios previos son inconsistentes, y la mayoría de las investigaciones en el contexto del turismo solo adoptaron parcialmente el concepto sin capturar la totalidad de este. También se identificaron lagunas teóricas y medición de las normas para futuras investigaciones.ImplicacionesEste estudio contribuye a una mejor comprensión del papel de las normas en la formación del comportamiento turístico y puede orientar a los profesionales en el desarrollo de estrategias de marketing efectivas. Los resultados sugieren la necesidad de una comprensión más holística del concepto de normas en el turismo en relación con los fundamentos teóricos, la medición y la aplicación. Las recomendaciones proporcionadas en este estudio pueden guiar futuras investigaciones sobre normas y comportamiento turístico.Originalidad/valorLas normas han sido ampliamente discutidas en la literatura. Este artículo es el primero en revisar sistemáticamente las normas y su influencia en el comportamiento del consumidor en el sector turístico.

Schreckensvision oder Drogenfreuden

Abstract This contribution sketches out the broad field of tobacco literature, which spread rapidly in the 16th century. A single leaf print by Sigmund von Birken (1652) shows discourses for and against the consumption of tobacco. Central to my examination are two poems about the topic (1720 and 1718), which will be interpreted with regard to their contexts. The school rector of Nordhausen, Johann Joachim Meier (1682–1736), wrote a satire in Latin verses (provided here with text, translation, and commentary) against the disastrous consumption of tobacco among pupils and students. This text works with impressive framings (such as the nightly visitation of Apollo at the teacher’s sickbed) and provides a quite informative, polyhistorical commentary of contemporary tobacco literature. This poem will be compared to Johann Christian Günther’s student song “Lob des Knaster-Tobacks”, a text that praises pleasure and joy, using arguments of natural law. Within the horizon of comparable poems (e.g. Canitz), Günther repels religious and institutional paternalism, thus showing separating concepts of life and behavioral norms.

The guilt of omissive conduct in the practice of medicine

The research is developed with the use of deductive and descriptive analytical methods used to obtain information on doctrine and jurisprudence and to establish and describe specific situations in the field of Ecuadorian Medical Law respectively. The main objective is to provide scientific and doctrinal tools to understand guilt in cases of omissive conduct in Ecuadorian medical practice, as well as its comparison with other countries such as Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and Argentina, the results of the research show that the doctrine in the relationship to the categories of Omission, Guilt, Guarantor Position and Permitted Risk is broad and is based on scientific-doctrinal advances of the Normative Conception of Guilt comprised between 1995 and 2022. To establish useful criteria and conclusions, the discussion focuses on defining what is considered “guilty” in the context of Medical Law, highlighting the importance of elements such as the objective duty, the harmful result and the analysis of the concomitant circumstances, emphasizing the importance of considering the context and development of the facts in cases of omissive conduct in medicine and not only the result. In relation to omissions in criminal law, a distinction is made between proper and improper and finally, it concludes by suggesting the modification of article 146 of the Organic Integral Criminal Code to guarantee due process and a effective judicial protection in matters related to health in Ecuador, specifically with regard to causality in cases of omissive conduct.

From 20th century weddings to quarantine weddings: Old and new approaches to analyzing rituals

Although ethnographic studies of marriage in 20th century Hungary have reckoned with the impact of socio-cultural transformations on getting married, nonetheless they primarily emphasized the normative aspects and permanence of the ritual; they stressed that marriage preserved “traditions”, or even that folk tradition acting as an ethno-folk-national “matrix” preserved and maintained the wedding rituals. Even if they touched upon the transformation of rituals, they primarily highlighted the modernization, simplification, fragmentation of the act of getting married and the marginalization of original meanings, traditional community norms, ideologies, and roles. Could this static and normative image depicting marriage not as a changing but rather as a decaying, diminished institution be in fact the result and consequence of an epistemological tradition, a methodological-theoretical focus that hides the process of the emergence of a new conception of marriage based on free choice, improvisation and on the idea of the individual breaking free of the yoke of normative traditions? The purpose of my paper is twofold. I will examine what the earlier Hungarian ethnographic studies understood by constancy, normativity, traditional or modern of wedding rituals. On the other hand, based on my current anthropological research (2019-2022, during the Covid–2019 pandemic) I will analyze the contemporary marriage rituals: and using the results of my research I also undertake a different kind of rereading of 20th century ethnographic descriptions. My paper based on the results of my digital anthropological research carried out between 2019 and 2022 (online questionnaires, digital ethnography, and in-depth interviews). I argue that the earlier Hungarian ethnographic approaches to weddings at the time may have been significantly influenced by prevailing Hungarian and international normative conceptualizations and theories of tradition and modernity.

Effects of Aging on Successful Object Encoding: Enhanced Semantic Representations Compensate for Impaired Visual Representations.

Although episodic memory and visual processing decline substantially with healthy aging, semantic knowledge is generally spared. There is evidence that older adults' spared semantic knowledge can support episodic memory. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with representational similarity analyses (RSAs) to examine how novel visual and preexisting semantic representations at encoding predict subjective memory vividness at retrieval. Eighteen young and seventeen older adults (female and male participants) encoded images of objects during fMRI scanning and recalled these images while rating the vividness of their memories. After scanning, participants discriminated between studied images and similar lures. RSA based on a deep convolutional neural network and normative concept feature data were used to link patterns of neural activity during encoding to visual and semantic representations. Relative to young adults, the specificity of activation patterns for visual features was reduced in older adults, consistent with dedifferentiation. However, the specificity of activation patterns for semantic features was enhanced in older adults, consistent with hyperdifferentiation. Despite dedifferentiation, visual representations in early visual cortex (EVC) predicted high memory vividness in both age groups. In contrast, semantic representations in lingual gyrus (LG) and fusiform gyrus (FG) were associated with high memory vividness only in the older adults. Intriguingly, data suggests that older adults with lower specificity of visual representations in combination with higher specificity of semantic representations tended to rate their memories as more vivid. Our findings suggest that memory vividness in aging relies more on semantic representations over anterior regions, potentially compensating for age-related dedifferentiation of visual information in posterior regions.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Normal aging is associated with impaired memory for events while semantic knowledge might even improve. We investigated the effects of aging on the specificity of visual and semantic information in the brain when viewing common objects and how this information enables subsequent memory vividness for these objects. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with modeling of the stimuli we found that visual information was represented with less specificity in older than young adults while still supporting memory vividness. In contrast semantic information supported memory vividness only in older adults and especially in those individuals that had the lowest specificity of visual information. These findings provide evidence for a spared semantic memory system increasingly recruited to compensate for degraded visual representations in older age.

Two Conceptions of Instrumental Thought

Abstract According to a dominant assumption the truth of instrumental thoughts—thoughts in which one action is identified as a means to another—are not affected by agents’ normative conceptions of their ends. Agents could in principle grasp these thoughts, and thereby the correct means to their ends, without consulting any conception they may have as to the pursuit-worthiness of those ends. I argue this assumption (the ‘Theoretical Conception’) prevents us from explaining how agents can identify means to their ends. I sketch an alternative account according to which the contents of instrumental thoughts are directly determined by agent's reasons for acting. This is explained by the fact that an agent's reasons for action reveal what they take the good of their ends to be. Ultimately, I argue, agents must have a conception of their final ends as intrinsically good if they are to successfully specify means to them.

Improving the quality of mining machines at the stage of designing technological processes for their manufacture

The definitions of such normative concepts as "base" and "basing of objects" are analyzed in comparison to identify their differences and assess correspondence with their application. Amendments are proposed for a better understanding of the process of locating machine parts, taking into account system categories. The ways of improving the quality of mining machines at the design stage by specifying geometric relationships in the model between production facilities are considered. The proposed definitions take into account such system categories as the internal (real) and external environments, which make it possible to determine the boundaries of the observed space and develop algorithms for solving basing problems. Keywords: part, mining machine, manufacturing quality, basing, technology, dimensional analysis, technical system, technological process, reliability Khalimonenko_AD@pers.spmi.ru

Reading in Uncertain Times

Reading in Uncertain Times

Norms for political cynics. A metatheoretical exploration of the relation between power and normativity in politics

ABSTRACT Supporters of political realism and republicanism as well as students of political feasibility and non-ideal theory progressively focus on the dimension of power in the political relation. Yet we lack the theoretical framework to represent these features of power. In this essay, I take a first step towards designing the necessary conceptual tools for such a framework by analyzing the relations between the concepts of power and normativity that define the political relation. Adopting a ‘methodological cynicism’, I analyse the reasons that motivate cynics who are only interested in power to obey a norm against force or violence and to seek legitimacy. This allows us to characterize external or mediate relations between power and normativity (such as the relation underlying political theory’s ambition of offering normative guidance for power) and identify internal and immediate relations between power and normativity.