Should Inherent Human Dignity Be Considered Intrinsically Heuristic?

What are “human rights” supposed to protect? According to most human rights doctrines, including most notably the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), human rights aim to protect “human dignity.” But what this concept amounts to and what its source is remain unclear. According to Glenn Hughes (2011), human rights theorists ought to consider human dignity as an “intrinsically heuristic concept,” whose content is partially understood but is not fully determined. In this comment, I criticize Hughes's account. On my view, understanding inherent human dignity as an intrinsically heuristic concept tethers it to an “indeterminateness of sense,” which leaves it open to exploitation from theorists unsympathetic to the moral salience of rights and what rights are supposed to protect.     

Perceptions of Ethical Behaviour among Business Faculty in Canada

Faculty members at Canadian business schools were surveyed regarding their ethical perceptions of behaviours related to undergraduate instruction. Fifty-five behavioural statements were listed and respondents were asked to rate the extent to which they felt each behaviour was ethical or unethical. The only item that respondents endorsed as unequivocally unethical (90% indicated it was definitely unethical) was Becoming sexually involved with an undergraduate in one of your classes. We also compared the results of our sample to those of an American sample. Overall, an interesting pattern of differences emerged between the responses obtained in Canada and the U.S. In general, the direction of the significant differences was such that Canadian professors viewed the behaviours in question as less ethical than did their American counterparts.     

易学思维之葩掇拾

本文选取《易》四卦探析其思维特征:从《泰》、《否》剖辨其因果思维,《泰》之以"果"示"因"更属辩证逻辑思维,从而否定C·G荣格关于《易》不从"因果关系论事"的判断。以《蛊》卦之"蛊"不训"弊乱"而应训如钱钟书先生所证之"事"、"事业",论定《蛊》属于创造性思维范畴,继承前辈事业,在自己的努力实践中创新业,立新功。以《》卦辞"不利即戎"断句或连读,探析前人关于战争的两种思考,一是果决地抓住战机打击敌人,如周武王讨伐纣之《牧誓》所示;一是先安顿内部,"施禄及下"以得民心,如《左传》"曹刿论战"所示,是"攘外必先安内"的战略性思考。     

用循证医学证据丰富经验医学内涵——谈临床医生如何面对医学实践模式改变

从具体病例分析入手谈临床医生实践循证医学既需要思维模式转变、又要求掌握实际应用方法,即要敢于分析循证医学证据的实用性、又要善于用循证医学证据丰富经验医学内涵。新医学模式的普及将是临床医生群体认识史上一次具有深度和广度的飞跃。     

从年级、元理解策略指数看小学生阅读说明性文本的理解监控策略

该研究旨在了解年级、元理解策略指数,理解监控策略,对阅读理解的成绩的影响。研究表明年级高,元理解策略指数高的学生多采用全局语境的监控策略,成绩较好;年级低,元理解策略指数低的学生多采用局部语境的监控策略,成绩较差。     

A Computational Evaluation of Sentence Processing Deficits in Aphasia

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non‐canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan, Waters, Dede, Michaud, & Reddy, 2007; Haarmann, Just, & Carpenter, 1997) propose that the underlying structural representations are unimpaired, but sentence comprehension is affected by processing deficits, such as slow lexical activation, reduction in memory resources, slowed processing and/or intermittent deficiency, among others. We test the claims of two processing accounts, slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, and two versions of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), in a computational framework for sentence processing (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) implemented in ACT‐R (Anderson, Byrne, Douglass, Lebiere, & Qin, 2004). The assumption of slowed processing is operationalized as slow procedural memory, so that each processing action is performed slower than normal, and intermittent deficiency as extra noise in the procedural memory, so that the parsing steps are more noisy than normal. We operationalize the TDH as an absence of trace information in the parse tree. To test the predictions of the models implementing these theories, we use the data from a German sentence—picture matching study reported in Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, and De Bleser (2011). The data consist of offline (sentence‐picture matching accuracies and response times) and online (eye fixation proportions) measures. From among the models considered, the model assuming that both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency are present emerges as the best model of sentence processing difficulty in aphasia. The modeling of individual differences suggests that, if we assume that patients have both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, they have them in differing degrees.     

Better Never to Have Been Born

The pro‐life paradox, as I call it, begins with a single claim endorsed by many American Christians: infants and young children are innocent in the sight of God because they cannot yet take responsibility for their spiritual well‐being. With this in mind, I argue that pro‐life believers have unwittingly fallen victim to a theological paradox in which their attempts to save the earthly lives of unborn children make it theoretically possible for said children to die an eternal death. On the one hand, many Christians trust in an eventual spiritual reckoning where God will separate the “sheep” from the “goats” (see Matthew 25:31–46), ushering the former into heaven while damning the latter to hell. However, those who cannot yet repent and seek salvation are not blamed for their spiritual failings. If they die, they go to heaven because they are too young and intellectually immature to know any better. But if dead children are spiritually blameless, then abortion practitioners have perversely and paradoxically saved millions of unborn souls by removing human volition (and thus damnation itself) from the equation and by making it possible for the unborn to experience the joys of heaven without the temptations of earth.