Practical Commitments Research Articles

Is personal identity intransitive?

There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here, we ask whether the intransitive judgments found in these studies truly reflect the operation of an intransitive concept of personal identity. We manipulate several factors that arbitrate between transitivity and intransitivity and find most support for transitivity: In contrast to the prior work, most participants do not make intransitive judgments when there is any reason to favor one individual over another. People change which single individual they personally identify with, depending on which individual competes more strongly or weakly for identity, rather than identifying with both individuals. Even when two individuals are identical and therefore both entitled to be the same person, we find that people make more transitive judgments once they understand the practical commitments of their responses (Experiment 4) and report not being able to actually imagine two perspectives simultaneously when reasoning about the scenario (Experiment 5). In short, we suggest that while people may make intransitive judgments, these do not reflect that they psychologically represent identity in an intransitive manner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Zur Ambivalenz von ‚Werten‘ in Diskussionen zur Klima- und Umweltethik

Abstract In environmental ethics, many approaches are searching for a justification of the protection of nature and biodiversity via an account of the intrinsic or inherent value of non-human nature, i. e. a justification that does not rely on the perspective of human beings. This leads to intricate problems regarding value theory. This paper proposes to avoid those problems by investigating explicitly anthropocentric pathways. It discusses what kinds of reasons for the protection of nature can be developed from the consistent practical self-understanding of agents. First, it is argued that the practical commitments of agents necessarily involve some normative commitments to the protection of the generic conditions of agency, which are particularly relevant for the ecological conditions that enable us to act and to realise goals. Second, it is discussed whether the presence of non-human nature is particularly relevant from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. Is it not important for human beings to experience non-human nature as an environment that is not fully planned and designed by human beings? The general aim is to show that it is worthwhile to search for justifications of the protection of nature and biodiversity from the practical self-understanding of human beings.

In Search of Public Values in Private Systems: A Response to the Montesquieu Lecture by Karen Yeung

This response to Yeung explores the political implications of the New Public Analytics, in relation to the theory of ‘orders of worth’. Firms engaging in NPA enter into both ethical and practical commitments with regard to their activities which impact on the public. This commentary identifies missing standards for what constitutes acceptable involvement by the private sector in facilitating, and setting the parameters for, interventions on the public. I argue that in large-scale interventions on the national or transnational scale, a conflation of public with commercial aims and values is occurring which requires a rethinking of the notion of procurement, but also of regulation. The engagements occurring under the definition of NPA raise the question of rule of law in new ways. To whom should regulation apply and at what point does a commercial firm become defined as a public-sector actor? How are firms escaping this definition, and what kind of response to this escape from scrutiny and regulation is appropriate?

Talbot Taylor's engagement with stylistic theory

I review Talbot Taylor’s rigorous critique of stylistic theory (begun as early as his first book in 1981 and resumed periodically, at least implicitly, in the decades since), and speculate as to why it appeared to have little impact on the practice of literary stylistics. Are stylisticians simply too engrossed in the practical and pedagogical commitments of stylistics to be embarrassed by the deep theoretical contradictions Taylor identified? Or perhaps the appearance of disregard is deceptive; perhaps some contemporary stylisticians have accepted the Taylorian theoretical critique, and tacitly recognise that literary stylistics is in essence a highly specialized form of the normative metadiscourse, applied to literary texts, that Taylor has argued lies at the heart of lay linguistics.

Improving Practical UC-Secure Commitments based on the DDH Assumption

At Eurocrypt 2011, Lindell presented practical static and adaptively UC-secure commitment schemes based on the DDH assumption. Later, Blazy et al. (at ACNS 2013) improved the efficiency of the Lindell's commitment schemes. In this paper, we present static and adaptively UC-secure commitment schemes based on the same assumption and further improve the communication and computational complexity, as well as the size of the common reference string.

What Is Marxism?

ABSTRACT The question “What is Marxism?” is not as straightforward as it appears. There are different ways of answering it. One can study and describe what Marx himself wrote and said, but Marx’s views changed, and Marxism has had a life beyond Marx. Some try to define Marxism by specifying an agreed core of doctrines, others by its method, or by its practical commitments. Each of these definitions captures an aspect of the nature of Marxism, but none is without problems. Controversy still rages about Marx’s legacy and its contemporary significance.

Plan B

ABSTRACT We sometimes strive to achieve difficult goals when our evidence suggests that success is unlikely—not just because it will require strength of will, but because we are targets of prejudice and discrimination or because success will require unusual ability. Optimism about one’s prospects can be useful for persevering in these cases. With that said, excessive optimism can be dangerous; when our evidence is unfavourable, we should be at most agnostic about whether we will succeed. This paper explores the nature and rational significance of agnostic practical commitments. Most importantly, the rationality of striving against the odds can depend on investing in a plan for failure—a plan B. I aim to make headway on an account of what backup plans are, how they are related to primary plans, and whether the standard norms of plan rationality apply to our agnostic commitments.

Eliminating Selves and Persons

AbstractThe Buddhist no-self and no-person revisionary metaphysics aims to produce a better structure that is motivated by the normative goal of eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering. The revised structure, in turn, entails a major reconsideration of our ordinary everyday person-related concerns and practices and interpersonal attitudes, such as moral responsibility, praise and blame, compensation, and social treatment. This essay explores the extent to which we must alter and perhaps discard some of our practical commitments in light of the Buddhist revisionism. I do not argue here that we should change our ordinary practices, concerns, and attitudes, or that the Buddhist metaphysics does succeed in presenting a better structure. Rather, I offer it as an alternative structure that should be considered seriously.

How children approach the false belief test: social development, pragmatics, and the assembly of Theory of Mind

Evidence from the knowledge access task and the diverse belief task suggests that, before age four, children may find it difficult to attribute false beliefs to others, despite demonstrating a basic comprehension of the concept of belief. Challenging this view, this article assumes a sociopragmatic perspective on language to argue that even children younger than four may not understand at all the concept of belief but may nevertheless master naively the pragmatics of belief reports in specific conversational contexts. The proposal suggests a novel interpretation of both the reasons behind younger children’s difficulty with (elicited-response) false belief tasks, and the critical factors enabling children’s success in them. On the one hand, it proposes that younger children fail (elicited-response) false belief tasks because they do not understand the importance of focusing on an agent’s (verbally ascribed) mental states to infer her practical commitments. On the other hand, it suggests that children’s active engagement in conversations where the caregiver credits an agent with a belief is the critical factor integrating their initially scattered mastery of the pragmatics of belief reports, teaches them to track belief reports across contexts, and accordingly shapes their understanding of belief as a representational mental state.

Struggles for Self-liberation in African Philosophy

Since its inception as an academic discipline, African philosophy has positioned itself at the centre of the struggle for justice and self-determination, and by that jettisoning—and rightly so—the otherwise sterile pursuit of the abstract. There is an inherent emancipatory urge that is, therefore, historical and that has conferred to African philosophy its identity as a uniquely context-oriented tradition. Even as it seeks to satisfy the quest for knowledge, African philosophy proceeds on the realisation that philosophy cannot hide behind the abstract quest for knowledge at the expense of its practical and ethical commitments. This paper analyses these key issues within the ongoing struggle for liberation in African philosophy. At the same time, attention is also drawn to a problem that potentially threatens this realisation. Unless we choose to ignore history, we should never forget that philosophy, as a practice, has a history of lending itself easily to exclusionary and repressive tendencies—even as the expectation is that it should be the paragon of intellectual freedom. To recognise this fact is an important step in the struggle for intellectual liberation in African philosophy.

The origins of mindreading: how interpretive socio-cognitive practices get off the ground

Recent accounts of mindreading—i.e., the human capacity to attribute mental states to interpret, explain, and predict behavior—have suggested that it has evolved through cultural rather than biological evolution. Although these accounts describe the role of culture in the ontogenetic development of mindreading, they neglect the question of the cultural origins of mindreading in human prehistory. We discuss four possible models of this, distinguished by the role they posit for culture: (1) the standard evolutionary psychology model (Carruthers), (2) the individualist empiricist model (Wellman, Gopnik), (3) the cultural empiricist model (Heyes), and (4) the radical socio-cultural constructivist model, which we favor. We motivate model (4) by arguing that many forms of mental state ascription do not serve the function of simply describing inner states causally responsible for the behavior of a cognitive agent; rather, they relate the agent to her environment by characterizing her practical commitments. Making these practical commitments explicit has an important regulatory function in that it supports action coordination and alignment on joint goals. We propose a model of how the ascription of mental states may have evolved as a linguistic device to perform exactly this function of making agents’ practical commitments explicit.

The Challenges to the Protection of Women Against Domestic Violence in Jimma Zone, Oromia Regional State, Ethiopia

Domestic violence against women is one of the scourge and pervasive violence directed against women by their; current or former husband, current or former boyfriends and other friends who has sexual relation with the women. It has numerous and devastating physical and psychological consequences for the victim. Victims of domestic violence experience both short-term and long-lasting health outcomes including death, grave physical injury, reproductive health, unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, depression and suicidal behavior. However, despite of its devastating consequence, its prevalence is very high and the problems are socially condoned in Ethiopia and specifically in Jimma zone. This clearly indicates that the protection of women against domestic violence in the Jimma zone has been not succeeded which manifests the existence of challenges and obstacles. Hence, the aim of this article is to identify the challenges to the protection of women against domestic violence. To this end, the Ethiopian policy and laws regarding domestic violence are analyzed, the practical commitments of law enforcement authority of Jimma zone and socio-cultural and religious of Jimma zone community are evaluated in lights of the rights to women against domestic violence. Accordingly, the research identifies different challenges to the protection of women against domestic violence in Jimma zone which includes; legal gap, practical challenges, socio-cultural, socio-economic and religious challenges dominantly. Therefore, unless, take action upon the identified challenges, the women’s human rights will continuously to be violated. Hence, lastly to this end, the researcher arrived at the set of recommendations. Keywords : Domestic violence against women, the challenges, Laws and policy, Ethiopia, Jimma Zone, Law enforcement authority, socio-cultural, legal instruments. DOI : 10.7176/JAAS/55-04 Publication date :May 31 st 2019

Exploring new paradigms in mental health and capacity law: persons, populations, and parity of esteem

This paper examines key contemporary policy and legal agendas regarding mental health, with a view to highlighting contributions that may be brought from new and emerging discourses in academic health law. In particular, it does so from the perspective of the related fields of public health law and human rights law. Whilst core definitions of public health speak to questions regarding mental health and well-being, recent reports from a range of professional and advocacy organisations urge the message that mental health remains a neglected area of concern. This has led to an emphasis on the field of public mental health as a discrete area of study, policy and practice. We argue and explain how the related field of public mental health law should be conceptualised and operationalised. This entails an examination of the fundamental requirement of law to support and promote good mental health, with a renewed focus on prevention and proactive intervention rather than reactive measures. We suggest that a framing made by reference to human rights models will support the combined ethical and practical commitments that must be met by public mental health law.

AUTONOMY AND INDOCTRINATION: WHY WE NEED AN EMOTIONAL CONDITION FOR AUTONOMOUS REASONING AND REFLECTIVE ENDORSEMENT

Abstract:I argue that none of the main accounts of autonomy in the literature can explain the fact that people who undergo a certain subtle but powerful kind of indoctrination are not autonomous or self-governing in reflectively acquiring and endorsing the views, values, goals, and practical commitments that they are successfully indoctrinated to adopt. I suggest that, assuming there are historical conditions on autonomous reasoning and reflective endorsement, there is a condition that specifically concerns emotions: the person’s emotional state and dispositions, and her web of emotional dependencies. I explain what we know so far about the kind of indoctrination on which I focus, and I motivate the claim that people who are successfully indoctrinated in this way are not self-governed in reflectively acquiring and endorsing even the first views and values that they adopt as a result of indoctrination. I argue that this heteronomy is not explained by any of the accounts that postulate historical conditions on autonomy: neither by classical accounts such as Rousseau’s and Piaget’s, nor by so-called historical accounts in the contemporary literature, nor by relational accounts. I argue that an accurate account of autonomy must include an emotional condition on autonomous reasoning and reflective endorsement that goes beyond the emotional conditions postulated or implied by historical accounts, and I offer a tentative sketch of this condition.

Expressivism without Mentalism in Meta-Ontology

ABSTRACTCarnap (1956) famously argued that there are two kinds of questions and claims concerning the existence or reality of entities: internal and external ones. We focus on Carnapian external ontological claims of the form: ‘Xs really exist’, where ‘X’ stands for some traditional metaphysical category, such as ‘substance’, ‘fact’ or ‘structure’ (at least in traditional debates among ontologists). While Carnap considered them as meaningless, we consider them as faultlessly meaningful. However, in line with an expressivist guise, we do not claim that they have the meaning they have in virtue of representing a certain range of entities in the world or describing pieces of reality. Quite the contrary, we maintain that they are meaningful because they perform a function that is fundamentally expressive, that is, a non-descriptive function. In particular, they may imply a distinctive type of metalinguistic expressive function. Moreover, we avoid accuses of mentalism insofar as we explain the meaning of external ontological claims in terms of the practical commitments to the adoption of certain linguistic forms they express, rather than as expressing some kind of mental state (inside the head).

Towards a semantics for metanormative constructivism

The status of constructivism as a metaethical or metanormative theory is unclear partly due to the lack of a clear semantics for central normative terms such as ‘reason’ and ‘ought’. In a series of recent papers, Sharon Street has attempted to clarify the central commitments of constructivism by focusing on the idea of a practical point of view and what follows from it. We improve upon the informal understanding provided by Street and attempt to provide a semantics for ‘ought’. Our semantics respects the core intuition of the constructivist that normative claims are made true because of our practical commitments as agents and also reflects the constructivist’s commitment to the centrality of practical deliberation to normative truth. On our view, a normative claim of the form ⌜S ought to ϕ⌝ is true if ϕ is entailed from S’s set of evaluative attitudes. We argue that a virtue of our definition is that it allows us to see precisely what is distinctive about constructivism as opposed to realism and expressivism.

Keep Safe: the development of a manualised group CBT intervention for adolescents with ID who display harmful sexual behaviours

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on the development of Keep Safe, a manualised group intervention for adolescents with intellectual disabilities (ID) who display harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) as the initial phase of a feasibility study. National reports have highlighted the need for the development of specialist programmes, as adolescents with ID make up a significant proportion of young people referred to specialist HSB services and there is a lack of evidence or practice-based interventions for them. Aims included taking account of adolescents’ and families’ needs, motivations and practical commitments, integrating best- practice and being accessible and appropriate across different types of services.Design/methodology/approachKeep Safe development progressed from the practitioner/researcher collaborative young sex offender treatment services collaborative-ID through a project team, Keep Safe development group, comprising a range of practitioners with a variety of clinical expertise across services and an Advisory Group of people with ID. An expert-consensus methodology based on the Delphi method was used. The iterative process for the manual draws on the slim practice-based evidence from UK, New Zealand, North America and Australia.FindingsKeep Safe comprises six modules distributed through 36 term-time young people’s sessions, alongside 16 concurrent parental/ carer sessions (some joint). The main focus of Keep Safe is to enhance well-being and reduce harm. Four initial sites volunteered as feasibility leads, and two more were added as recruitment was more difficult than foreseen.Originality/valueNational reports have highlighted the need for the development of specialist programmes, as adolescents with ID make up a significant proportion of young people referred to specialist HSB services and there is a lack of evidence or practice-based interventions for them. This study is innovative and valuable given the recognition that research and practice is significantly lacking in this area.

Did the Paris Agreement Plant the Seeds of a Climate Consistent International Financial Regime?

Finance has been critical to the development of interest and momentum concerning the Paris Agreement, which emerged from COP21. However, a quick scan of the accord could lead many to derive a disappointing picture because of the absence of practical commitments to financial devices that can limit the risks of climate change. We support the opposite view that the text marks a new departure by committing countries to “making financial flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development ». This was matched by parallel developments such as the Financial Stability Board’s launch of a new Task Force on climate disclosure. We argue that, further steps now need to be taken within the broader context of financing the new model of prosperity laid out in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN, September 2015). At a time of increasing financial uncertainty and inadequate investment in the real economy, putting in place a framework for financing the transition to a low-carbon, resilient model of development is now an economic imperative – and an immense opportunity. Mitigating the systemic risks of climate change while putting the global financial system on a path toward balanced and sustainable development, is in the long-term strategic interests of both industrialized and developing countries and we suggest what practical steps can be accomplished in a near future in this direction.

PP15 Incorporating Participatory Design Approaches Into HTA

Introduction:To address local workability, cross-setting variation, and clinician and patient perspectives, health technology assessment (HTA) practitioners and health system decision-makers incorporate varying forms of qualitative evidence into evaluations of novel health technologies. Employing principles and methods from long-established sociotechnical fields such as participatory design (PD) may help HTA teams in the production of formal, rigorous ‘practice-based evidence’.Methods:We draw on a theoretical review of foundational PD literature and experiences using PD for a large-scale health information technology project to summarize principles and strategies for the effective introduction and evaluation of new technologies in healthcare.Results:HTA may benefit from observing some of the core commitments of PD: (i) Ensuring that technologies enhance rather than detract from the quality of working life; (ii) Fostering democratic engagement in the implementation and evaluation of technologies; and (iii) Proceeding via direct partnership with technology users. These are practical commitments stemming from the recognition that technology implementation entails re-configuring existing practices and social arrangements. The experts of this existing milieu are the people on the ground, who may reject or underutilize technologies that they perceive as impractical, ill-adapted to their needs, or having negative consequences on their work. At the same time, PD recognizes that local activities occur within larger systems and that effective technology introduction also requires attention to macro-politics (e.g. governance challenges, competing priorities). PD employs a diversity of methods (e.g. participant observation, focus groups, workshops, interviews) to develop evidence that is holistically informed.Conclusions:Many of the challenges that HTA faces, both in terms of evidence production and translation, have been encountered before in PD. Given that decision-making around health technologies necessarily involves consideration of many forms of qualitative evidence, there is value in producing and evaluating such evidence in carefully designed manner – a challenge to which fields like PD can lend a wealth of experience.

Crafting socialist embryology: dialectics, aquaculture and the diverging discipline in Maoist China, 1950-1965.

In the 1950s, embryology in socialist China underwent a series of changes that adjusted the disciplinary apparatus to suit socialism and the national goal of self-reliance. As the Communist state called on scientists to learn from the Soviets, embryologists' comprehensive view on heredity, which did not contradict Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976)'s doctrines, provided a space for them to advance their discipline. Leading scientists, often trained abroad in the tradition of experimental embryology, rode on the tides of Maoist ideology and repositioned their research. Some of their creative realignment of previous research questions, materials, and traditions to Marxist philosophy and agricultural objectives generated productive programs. In particular, Tong Dizhou (1902-1979) translated Engels's dialectics of nature into a research question about cytoplasmic inheritance. His continuing investigation on it led to the first goldfish "clone" through a nuclear transplantation experiment; Zhu Xi and his associates transferred a goldfish model in embryology into studies on improving carp aquaculture, leading to a rare success in the Great Leap Forward of 1958. These directions for embryology continued well into the 1960s. At a time when global embryology was diversifying and began to be molecularized, eventually forming "developmental biology," socialist embryology took shape in China with a different set of epistemic and practical commitments. The history of its development challenges and enriches our understanding of the concrete process of change in one discipline under Mao, showing ways in which scientists creatively adapted state-sanctioned ideologies and visions to do productive work outside the framework of molecular biology during the Cold War.