Changing the Paradigm for Engineering Ethics

Modern philosophy recognizes two major ethical theories: deontology, which encourages adherence to rules and fulfillment of duties or obligations; and consequentialism, which evaluates morally significant actions strictly on the basis of their actual or anticipated outcomes. Both involve the systematic application of universal abstract principles, reflecting the culturally dominant paradigm of technical rationality. Professional societies promulgate codes of ethics with which engineers are expected to comply (deontology), while courts and the public generally assign liability to engineers primarily in accordance with the results of their work, whether intended or unintended (consequentialism). A third option, prominent in ancient philosophy, has reemerged recently: virtue ethics, which recognizes that sensitivity to context and practical judgment are indispensable in particular concrete situations, and therefore rightly focuses on the person who acts, rather than the action itself. Beneficial character traits—i.e., virtues—are identified within a specific social practice in light of the internal goods that are unique to it. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for implementing virtue ethics within engineering.     

Aesthetic Testimony and the Norms of Belief Formation

Unusability pessimism has recently emerged as an appealing new option for pessimists about aesthetic testimony—those who deny the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony. Unusability pessimists argue that we should reject the traditional pessimistic stance that knowledge of aesthetic matters is unavailable via testimony in favour of the view that while such knowledge is available to us, it is unusable. This unusability stems from the fact that accepting such testimony would violate an important non‐epistemic norm of belief formation. In this article I present an objection to unusability pessimism and argue that Robert Hopkins, the view's most prominent defender, fails to motivate adequately the claim that there are such non‐epistemic belief norms. The cases which putatively legitimize usability norms can be explained by appeal to more familiar norm types: epistemic norms of belief formation, and non‐epistemic norms which govern action other than belief formation. The intent of this article is not primarily negative, however, and I will also argue that understanding why the unusability position fails helps us to identify a promising new direction for the pessimist's opponents who wish to defend the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony.     

Applying the Chaos Theory of Careers as a Framework for College Career Centers

The chaos theory of careers (CTC; Pryor & Bright, 2011 ) has emerged as a career development theory to describe the reality of career development and account for the changing nature of work in the 21st century. Integrating CTC into a coherent framework accessible to practitioners is an ongoing process. In recent years, CTC has gained traction within some college career centers. Although techniques and interventions have been discussed to address some of the primary issues, no overarching framework has been conceptualized. This article proposes a model to conceptualize CTC in an accessible framework for college career centers, students, and beyond.     

Pure Logic of Many-Many Ground

A logic of grounding where what is grounded can be a collection of truths is a “many-many” logic of ground. The idea that grounding might be irreducibly many-many has recently been suggested by Dasgupta (2014). In this paper I present a range of novel philosophical and logical reasons for being interested in many-many logics of ground. I then show how Fine’s State-Space semantics for the Pure Logic of Ground (plg) can be extended to the many-many case, giving rise to the Pure Logic of Many-Many Ground (plmmg). In the second, more technical, part of the paper, I do two things. First, I present an alternative formalization of plg; this allows us to simplify Fine’s completeness proof for plg. Second, I formalize plmmg using an infinitary sequent calculus and prove that this formalization is sound and complete.     

Evidence Evaluation and Evidence Integration in Legal Decision‐Making: Order of Evidence Presentation as a Moderator of Context Effects

Legal decision‐making studies often demonstrate context effects: People's initial beliefs about a suspect's guilt influence their evaluation of subsequent evidence. We examine three potential moderators of these context effects: Order of evidence presentation, ability to ruminate, and valence of the initial belief (innocence or guilt). College students (n = 382) were presented with DNA evidence (incriminating or exonerating) and an ambiguous alibi in one of two orders (or just the alibi), and then evaluated how strongly the alibi incriminated the suspect and the suspect's likelihood of guilt. Results indicated that alibi evaluation exhibited context effects when (i) initial beliefs were of guilt (but not of innocence) and when (ii) evaluating subsequent evidence (but not when retroactively evaluating prior evidence). Rumination failed to moderate any effects. The integration of evidence exhibited recency effects: DNA had a greater impact on participants' beliefs in the suspect's guilt when presented last rather than first. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE NATURALIZATION OF SCRIPTURAL REASON IN SEVENTEENTH‐CENTURY EPISTEMOLOGY

Several scholars have claimed that the decline of revealed or Scriptural mysteries in the early Enlightenment was a consequence of the trajectories of Reformed theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reformed theology's fideistic stance, it is claimed, undermined earlier frameworks for relating reason to revealed mysteries; consequently, rationalism emerged as an alternative to such fideism in figures like the Cambridge Platonists. This article argues that Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century were not fideists but re‐affirmed Medieval claims about the eschatological concord of reason and revealed mysteries. Furthermore, the article suggests that early Enlightenment attitudes to religious mysteries owe more to innovations in Socinianism and Cambridge Platonism than to mainstream Reformed theology.     

Post-traumatic stress symptoms of children and adolescents exposed to the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake: A longitudinal study of 5-HTTLPR genotype main effects and gene–environment interactions

Experiencing disasters causes severe mental disorders, among which post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the most common. We conducted a longitudinal study to examine the effect of 5-hydroxyl tryptamine transporter gene-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR) genotype on child and adolescent PTSD symptom course after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake. We genotyped 963 participants who personally experienced the earthquake. PTSD symptoms were measured by University of California, Los Angeles PTSD reaction index at 2.5, 3.5, 4.5 and 5.5 years after the earthquake, respectively. Latent growth model was utilised to examine the main effect and gene–environment interaction effect of 5-HTTLPR on PTSD's symptom course. 5-HTTLPR genotype predicted initial PTSD symptom severity (β = 0.108, p = .019) and rates of symptom recovery (β = −0.120, p = .031) between 2.5 and 5.5 years. Compared with L′ allele carriers, those with S′S′ genotype showed higher initial symptom severity but also faster recovery rate. 5-HTTLPR genotype only predicted symptom severity at 2.5 years after the earthquake, after controlling for sex, age, ethnicity and trauma severity (β = 0.108, p = .019). This is the first evidence of the effect of 5-HTTLPR genotype on child and adolescent PTSD symptoms longitudinally, offering a novel perspective on the effect of 5-HTTLPR on PTSD symptom development following trauma exposure.     

Temporal Synechism: A Peircean Philosophy of Time

Axiomathes - Charles Sanders Peirce is best known as the founder of pragmatism, but the name that he preferred for his overall system of thought was “synechism” because the principle of...