From Speculative Nanoethics to Explorative Philosophy of Nanotechnology

In the wake of the emergence and rapid development of nanoethics there swiftly followed fundamental criticism: nanoethics was said to have become much too involved with speculative developments and was concerning itself too little with actually pending questions of nanotechnology design and applications. If this diagnosis is true, then large parts of nanoethics are misguided. Such fundamental criticism must surely either result in a radical reorientation of nanoethics or be refuted for good reasons. In this paper, I will examine the critics’ central arguments and, building on this scrutiny, formulate an answer to these alternatives. The results lead to conclusions which allow explaining and unfolding the thesis of this paper that instead of speculative nanoethics we should better speak of and develop explorative philosophy of nanotechnology.     

Computing finite models by reduction to function-free clause logic

Recent years have seen considerable interest in procedures for computing finite models of first-order logic specifications. One of the major paradigms, MACE-style model building, is based on reducing model search to a sequence of propositional satisfiability problems and applying (efficient) SAT solvers to them. A problem with this method is that it does not scale well because the propositional formulas to be considered may become very large.We propose instead to reduce model search to a sequence of satisfiability problems consisting of function-free first-order clause sets, and to apply (efficient) theorem provers capable of deciding such problems. The main appeal of this method is that first-order clause sets grow more slowly than their propositional counterparts, thus allowing for more space efficient reasoning.In this paper we describe our proposed reduction in detail and discuss how it is integrated into the Darwin prover, our implementation of the Model Evolution calculus. The results are general, however, as our approach can be used in principle with any system that decides the satisfiability of function-free first-order clause sets.To demonstrate its practical feasibility, we tested our approach on all satisfiable problems from the TPTP library. Our methods can solve a significant subset of these problems, which overlaps but is not included in the subset of problems solvable by state-of-the-art finite model builders such as Paradox and Mace4.     

Cyberethics and Co-operation in the Information Society

The task of this paper is to ground the notion of cyberethics of co-operation. The evolution of modern society has resulted in a shift from industrial society towards informational capitalism. This transformation is a multidimensional shift that affects all aspects of society. Hence also the ethical system of society is penetrated by the emergence of the knowledge society and ethical guidelines for the information age are needed. Ethical issues and conflicts in the knowledge society are connected to topics of ecological and social sustainability. For information ethics and cyberethics, the sustainable design of society, social, and socio-technological systems is important. In this context the notions of sustainability and co-operation are discussed. Based on these categories, the approach of cyberethics of co-operation can be theoretically grounded.     

The maintenance of fluency after intensive in-patient therapy: Long-term follow-up

Maintenance of fluency after intensive in-patient treatment was studied in eight male stammerers. Reasons for success and failure are discussed in relation to objective and subjective data collected at the final follow-up interview.     

The phenomenology and development of social perspectives

The paper first gives a conceptual distinction of the first, second and third person perspectives in social cognition research and connects them to the major present theories of understanding others (simulation, interaction and theory theory). It then argues for a foundational role of second person interactions for the development of social perspectives. To support this thesis, the paper analyzes in detail how infants, in particular through triangular interactions with persons and objects, expand their understanding of perspectives and arrive at a self–other metaperspective. This allows them to grasp the other’s as well as their own perspective as such, which is equivalent to an explicit third person perspective and to an explicit first person perspective or self-consciousness. The paper describes the major steps towards these perspectives, pointing to a close interdependence of both developments. It argues that embodied second person interactions are not only an enabling, but the constitutive condition for the development of an explicit first and third person perspective.     

Physical exercise and anxiety as moderators of the stress-illness relationship

This study examines the interplay of unemployment stress, trait anxiety and physical exercise in the development of physical health. Longitudinal data were taken from a sample of East German migrants (N = 330) who were confronted with the potentially stressful demand of finding a job in the Western society. Unemployment stress was found to exert a main effect on illness level. Trait anxiety was a moderator of the stress-illness relationship, but exercise was not. As indicated by a three-way interaction involving exercise, anxiety, and stress, exercise was most beneficial among high-anxious subjects who were not exposed to unemployment stress. Results of this study suggest that exercise may not buffer the deleterious effects of stressful situational conditions (unemployment), but may effectively mitigate the health-damaging consequences of lacking personal resources, such as high dispositional anxiety.     

Deutsche Fassung der Therapist Rating Scale-10

The German version of the Therapist Rating Scale-10 (TRS-10) by W.L. and L.E. Marshall is presented. The scale appears to be a suitable method for recording progress in therapy of sexual offenders.     

Quantifying temporal ventriloquism in audiovisual synchrony perception

The integration of visual and auditory inputs in the human brain works properly only if the components are perceived in close temporal proximity. In the present study, we quantified cross-modal interactions in the human brain for audiovisual stimuli with temporal asynchronies, using a paradigm from rhythm perception. In this method, participants had to align the temporal position of a target in a rhythmic sequence of four markers. In the first experiment, target and markers consisted of a visual flash or an auditory noise burst, and all four combinations of target and marker modalities were tested. In the same-modality conditions, no temporal biases and a high precision of the adjusted temporal position of the target were observed. In the different-modality conditions, we found a systematic temporal bias of 25–30 ms. In the second part of the first and in a second experiment, we tested conditions in which audiovisual markers with different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between the two components and a visual target were used to quantify temporal ventriloquism. The adjusted target positions varied by up to about 50 ms and depended in a systematic way on the SOA and its proximity to the point of subjective synchrony. These data allowed testing different quantitative models. The most satisfying model, based on work by Maij, Brenner, and Smeets (Journal of Neurophysiology 102, 490–495, 2009), linked temporal ventriloquism and the percept of synchrony and was capable of adequately describing the results from the present study, as well as those of some earlier experiments.