Resolving conflicts among principles: ranking, balancing, and specifying.

While much attention has been given to the use of principles in biomedical ethics and increasing attention is given to alternative theoretical approaches, relatively little attention has been devoted to the critical task of how one resolves conflicts among competing principles. After summarizing the system of principles and some problems in conceptualizing the principles, several strategies for reconciling conflicts among principles are examined including the use of single-principle theories (pure libertarianism, pure utilitarianism, and pure Hippocratism), balancing theories, conflicting appeals theories, and lexical ordering. Then a mixed strategy is proposed in which consequentialist principles are balanced between themselves as are nonconsequentialist principles, after which the result of balancing the nonconsequentialist principles is lexically ranked over the result of balancing the consequentialist ones. Finally, strategies involving specifying and rule generation are discussed concluding that most current specification and rule-generating theories must involve some degree of lexical ordering of principles.     

Neologicist Nominalism

The goal is to sketch a nominalist approach to mathematics which just like neologicism employs abstraction principles, but unlike neologicism is not committed to the idea that mathematical objects exist and does not insist that abstraction principles establish the reference of abstract terms. It is well-known that neologicism runs into certain philosophical problems and faces the technical difficulty of finding appropriate acceptability criteria for abstraction principles. I will argue that a modal and iterative nominalist approach to abstraction principles circumvents those difficulties while still being able to put abstraction principles to a foundational use.     

Applied Ethics: Naturalism, Normativity and Public Policy

abstract   Normative argument is supposed to guide ways in which we might change the world, rather than to fit the world as it is. This poses certain difficulties for the notion of applied ethics. Taken literally the phrase 'applied ethics' suggests that principles or standards with substantial philosophical justification, in particular ethical and political principles with such justification, are applied to particular cases and guide action. However, the 'cases' which applied ethics discusses are themselves indeterminate, and the relation of principles to these 'cases' differs from the relation of principles to cases in naturalistic, truth-oriented inquiry. Writing in 'applied ethics', I shall argue, does not need elaborate case histories or scenarios, since the testing points for normative principles are other normative principles rather than particular cases. Normative principles and contexts to which they are applicable are indeed needed for any reasoning that is practical, but they are not sufficient. Practical ethics needs principles that can not merely be applied in certain cases or situations, but also enacted in certain ways, and requires an account of practical judgement and of the public policies that support that judgement .     

Understanding and using principles of arithmetic: operations involving negative numbers

Previous work has investigated adults' knowledge of principles for arithmetic with positive numbers ( Dixon, Deets, & Bangert, 2001 ). The current study extends this past work to address adults' knowledge of principles of arithmetic with a negative number, and also investigates links between knowledge of principles and problem representation. Participants ( N = 44) completed two tasks. In the Evaluation task, participants rated how well sets of equations were solved. Some sets violated principles of arithmetic and others did not. Participants rated non-violation sets higher than violation sets for two different principles for subtraction with a negative number. In the Word Problem task, participants read word problems and set up equations that could be used to solve them. Participants who displayed greater knowledge of principles of arithmetic with a negative number were more likely to set up equations that involved negative numbers. Thus, participants' knowledge of arithmetic principles was related to their problem representations.     

Vagueness and Margin for Error Principles*

Timothy Williamson's potentially most important contribution to epistemicism about vagueness lies in his arguments for the basic epistemicist claim that the alleged cut‐off points of vague predicates are not knowable. His arguments for this are based on so‐called ‘margin for error principles’. This paper argues that these principles fail to provide a good argument for the basic claim. Williamson has offered at least two kinds of margin for error principles applicable to vague predicates. A certain fallacy of equivocation (on the meaning of ‘knowable’) seems to underlie his justification for both kinds of principles. Besides, the margin for error principles of the first kind can be used in the derivation of unacceptable consequences, while the margin for error principles of the second kind can be shown to be compatible with the falsity of epistemicism, under a number of assumptions acceptable to the epistemicist.     

Interactions between intrinsic principles of similarity and proximity and extrinsic principle of common region in visual perception

The interactions between intrinsic grouping principles (by proximity or by similarity in shape or luminance) and extrinsic grouping by common region were examined by presenting both principles acting alone or conjoined with another principle in visual patterns. The procedure used in our study closely mirrored that of Quinlan and Wilton (1998 Perception 27 417-430). However, in the present experiment, the intrinsic and extrinsic grouping principles involved had similar relative salience in order to avoid their possible effects on interactions. The results showed that the grouping effect of conjoined cooperating principles was greater than that of either principle acting alone, and the grouping effect of conjoined competing principles was lower than that of either principle operating alone. Compatibility of data with additive effects of grouping principles has been examined.     

临床病理诊断中蕴涵的哲学原理及其重要性初探

准确的临床病理诊断有赖于正确的思维方法,将哲学原理运用于临床病理诊断有利于更准确地诊断疾病。在临床病理诊断中应注重和运用理论源于实践,又反过来指导实践;透过现象看本质,抓住事物的主要矛盾;事物的发展具有普遍规律和特殊规律两个方面;事物是普遍联系的等原理。     

Explaining enkratic asymmetries: knowledge-first style

There are two different kinds of enkratic principles for belief: evidential enkratic principles and normative enkratic principles. It’s frequently taken for granted that there’s not an important difference between them. But evidential enkratic principles are undermined by considerations that gain no traction at all against their normative counterparts. The idea that such an asymmetry exists between evidential and normative enkratic principles is surprising all on its own. It is also something that calls out for explanation. Similarly, the considerations that undermine evidential enkratic principles also undermine certain narrow-scope evidential principles. This too generates explanatory questions. I show how a knowledge-first view of rationality can easily address these (and further) explanatory questions. Thus we have one more reason to put knowledge first in epistemology.     

Development of the concept of comparative subjective probability

This study investigates which formal principles govern subjective probability, and whether the validity of these principles depends on age. Two types of tasks were administered to 144 subjects from 3;8 to 19 years: a gambling task (with objective probabilities) and a sporting task (without objective probabilities). Six formal principles of the mathematical concept of qualitative probability (a nonnumerical concept based on ordinal scale properties) were tested. Results indicate that these principles are valid as principles of subjective probability for all age groups. Only the youngest age group (4 years or younger) had a smaller degree of confirmation.     

COHEN TO THE RESCUE!

Cohen seeks to rescue the concept of justice from those, among whom he includes Rawls, who think that correct fundamental moral principles are fact‐sensitive. Cohen argues instead that any fundamental principles of justice, and fundamental moral principles generally, are fact‐insensitive and that any fact‐sensitive principles can be traced back to fact‐insensitive ones. This paper seeks to clarify the nature of Cohen's argument, and the kind of fact‐insensitivity he has in mind. In particular, it distinguishes between internal and external fact‐sensitivity – that is, whether facts are referenced in the content of the principle, or must otherwise be the case in order for the principle to apply at all. Cohen himself seems likely to endorse internally fact‐sensitive fundamental principles. This leads to a discussion of Cohen's Platonism about moral principles and the extent to which his arguments cover all its rivals. 1     

The role of conscious reasoning and intuition in moral judgment: testing three principles of harm

Is moral judgment accomplished by intuition or conscious reasoning? An answer demands a detailed account of the moral principles in question. We investigated three principles that guide moral judgments: (a) Harm caused by action is worse than harm caused by omission, (b) harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm foreseen as the side effect of a goal, and (c) harm involving physical contact with the victim is worse than harm involving no physical contact. Asking whether these principles are invoked to explain moral judgments, we found that subjects generally appealed to the first and third principles in their justifications, but not to the second. This finding has significance for methods and theories of moral psychology: The moral principles used in judgment must be directly compared with those articulated in justification, and doing so shows that some moral principles are available to conscious reasoning whereas others are not.     

What Principles Are Used to Judge the Fairness of Retrenchment Actions?

The present study identified the bipolar principles that workers use for evaluating the fairness of a broad range of negative organizational events. Two hundred forty-eight respondents were asked to describe recent negative events that occurred in their organizations, and explain the reasons for their fairness perceptions of the events. The responses were coded to yield 5 principles associated with outcome fairness and 8 principles associated with process fairness; this set included principles not found in earlier taxonomies. Support for previous justice models and needed areas of research are discussed.     

MENTAL ARITHMETIC IN AFRICA AND AMERICA: STRATEGIES,PRINCIPLES, AND EXPLANATIONS*

Mental arithmetic abilities were studied among unschooled African adults and American college students. A set of problems tested the use of the four basic arithmetic operations. Performance was analyzed for: strategies, implicit arithmetic principles, and explicit explanations of the principles. Both groups showed accurate mental arithmetic strategies related to the base ten structure of their native counting systems. The American students' mental strategies additionally made use of algorithms based on written place values. Several principles were implicit in the calculation strategies of both groups, and both used these principles to short-cut calculations. Though the African subjects did not, the American subjects did describe these abstract principles in explicit common language or algebraic expressions. Relationships between schooling and cognition are discussed.     

Where’s the GPS? navigating treatment with co-existing problems. A reflective journey amongst graduate practitioners

This paper examines reflective portfolios of graduate students studying co-existing problems (CEP) within an alcohol and drug studies programme in New Zealand. The methodology employs Todd’s principles of treating co-existing disorders (culture, management, engagement, assessment, integrated care, well-being and management). The metaphor, a GPS, is employed in the title to describe how Todd’s principles are used as a GPS to help navigate the murky waters of working with this specialised client population. The principles, allocated as themes within the portfolios, highlight how these principles are reflected upon within their workplace. Culture and engagement principles were the most endorsed themes within the portfolios. The reflective portfolios also allowed us to reflect upon the ongoing process of curriculum development for this specialised client population.     

Children's reasoning about physics within and across ontological kinds

Reasoning about seven physics principles within and across ontological kinds was examined among 188 5- and 7-year-olds and 59 adults. Individuals in all age groups tended to appropriately generalize what they learned across ontological kinds. However, children also showed sensitivity to ontological kind in their projections: when learning principles with reference to people they were more likely to assume that the principles apply to another person than to an inanimate object, and when learning with reference to an inanimate object they were more likely to assume that the principles apply to another inanimate object than to a person. Five-year-olds, but not 7-year-olds, projected concepts learned about people to a greater extent than principles learned about inanimate objects, closely paralleling the findings of Carey for the biological domain (Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Results from a separate sample of 22 5-year-olds suggest that the primary findings cannot be explained by response perseveration. The present findings indicate that children understand physics principles that apply to both animate and inanimate objects, but distinguish between these ontological kinds.     

Some prerequisites for a political casuistry of justice

After briefly vindicating casuistries which successively apply a number of different moral principles, I describe some of the principles of justice liable to figure in such casuistries, assess the relative popularity of these principles and show that some of the most popular cannot be consistently applied in all circumstances.     

The representations of the arithmetic operations include functional relationships

Current theories of mathematical problem solving propose that people select a mathematical operation as the solution to a problem on the basis of a structure mapping between their problem representation and the representation of the mathematical operations. The structure-mapping hypothesis requires that the problem and the mathematical representations contain analogous relations. Past research has demonstrated that the problem representation consists of functional relationships, or principles. The present study tested whether people represent analogous principles for each arithmetic operation (i.e., addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division). For each operation, college (Experiments 1 and 2) and 8th grade (Experiment 2) participants were asked to rate the degree to which a set of completed problems was a good attempt at the operation. The pattern of presented answers either violated one of four principles or did not violate any principles. The distance of the presented answers from the correct answers was independently manipulated. Consistent with the hypothesis that people represent the principles, (1) violations of the principles were rated as poorer attempts at the operation, (2) operations that are learned first (e.g., addition) had more extensive principle representations than did operations learned later (multiplication), and (3) principles that are more frequently in evidence developed more quickly. In Experiment 3, college participants rated the degree to which statements were indicative of each operation. The statements were either consistent or inconsistent with one of two principles. The participants' ratings showed that operations with longer developmental histories had strong principle representations. The implications for a structure-mapping approach to mathematical problem solving are discussed.     

Tailoring common treatment principles to fit individual personalities

The American Psychological Association Task Force headed by Castonguay and Beutler (2006) distilled general treatment principles common to all therapies from the empirical literature. As part of this work, Critchifield and Benjamin (2006a, 2006b) summarized principles for treatment of personality disorder. The principles are pragmatic in the sense that they are based on evidence of what works, and clinicians are encouraged to apply them in ways that fit the unique presentation and needs of a given patient. An important element of the recommended approach is that it be coherent, well-coordinated, and agreed upon by the patient. Additional principles emphasize the importance of an individual's attachment and trauma history. A complex case example is presented to illustrate one way in which emphasis on an individual's relational learning history can be used to further refine and extend wisdom inherent in the cross-cutting principles and move in the direction of an integrative treatment that is closely tailored to specific case features. A research approach is also outlined for how to test the validity of principles that prescribe differential use of technique to address diverse patient presentations.     

First Principles Organize Attention to and Learning About Relevant Data: Number and the Animate-Inanimate Distinction as Examples

Early cognitive development benefits from nonlinguistic representations of skeletal sets of domain-specific principles and complementary domain-relevant data abstraction processes. The principles outline the domain, identify relevant inputs, and structure coherently what is learned. Knowledge acquisition within the domain is a joint function of such domain-specific principles and domain-general learning mechanisms. Two examples of early learning illustrate this. Skeletal preverbal counting principles help children sort different linguistic strings into those that function as the conventional count-word as opposed to labels for objects in the child's linguistic community. Skeletal causal principles, working with complementary perceptual processes that abstract information about biological and nonbiological conditions and patterns of movement, lead to the rapid acquisition of knowledge about the animate-inanimate distinction. By 3 years of age children con soy whether photographs of unfamiliar nonmammalian animals, mammals, statues, and wheeled objects portray objects capable or incapable of self-generated motion. They also generate answers to questions about the insides of animate items more readily than ones about the insides of inanimate items. Although these children already ore articulate about matters relevant to a theory of action, their limited knowledge of growth illustrates that early skeletal principles do not rule out the need to acquire new principles, in this case ones that underlie a biological account of animacy (Carey, 1985).     

Curricular Treatments of Length Measurement in the United States: Do They Address Known Learning Challenges?

Extensive research has shown that elementary students struggle to learn the basic principles of length measurement. However, where patterns of errors have been documented, the origins of students’ difficulties have not been identified. This study investigated the hypothesis that written elementary mathematics curricula contribute to the problem of learning length measurement. We analyzed all instances of length measurement in three mathematics curricula (grades K–3) and found a shared focus on procedures. Attention to conceptual principles was limited overall and particularly for central ideas; conceptual principles were often presented after students were asked to use procedures that depended on them; and students often did not have direct access to conceptual principles. We also report five groupings of procedures that appeared sequentially in all three curricula, the conceptual principles that underlie those procedures, and the conventional knowledge that receives substantial attention by grade 3.