Morton Winston

An empirical taxonomy of part-whole relations: Effects of part-whole relation type on relation identification

Abstract A taxonomy of part-whole (meronym) relations was developed (Experiment 1). Subjects sorted examples of relations and named each relation with a part-term, e.g. component, member, portion The resulting empirical taxonomy distinguished three major types of meronymy: part-whole (cup-handle), stuff (cup-china), and phase (growing up-adolescence). The part-whole relations were further subdivided into eight types: integral object-component (car-wheel), event-feature (circus-trapeze act), topological part-area (room-corner), collection-member (forest-tree), area-place (desert-oasis), time-occasion (February-Valentines Day), measure-unit (mile-yard) and mass-portion (pie-slice). Relations adjacent in the taxonomy tended to be named with the same part-term. In Experiment 2 subjects made yes/no decisions about word pairs in answer to the question, “Is A part of B?” Types of meronym pairs were presented in blocks Responses were slower at the start of a new block. This result indicated that the type of mero...

Human Rights as Moral Rebellion and Social Construction

This paper describes and defends a moral constructivist theory of human rights which characterizes them as an historically-evolved, socially-constructed ethico-legal paradigm designed to prevent and ameliorate systematic or institutionalized forms of oppression. After describing this theory and comparing it with alternative accounts of the nature, origins, and justifications of human rights, I argue that by grounding a common understanding of human rights within this framework, the global human rights community can better address the challenge of effectively protecting “all human rights for all” through the development of a more empirically grounded and cosmopolitan conception of human rights.

“Robins are a part of birds”: The confusion of semantic relations

Multidimensional scaling, applied to similarity ratings of parts, was used to demonstrate that parts are not organized in memory in terms of similarity. Parts differ, in this way, from category members. Similarity is one element of the class inclusion relation, but not of the part-whole relation. Failure to attend to the properties of relations is one source of relation confusion. Relation confusion appears to be pervasive in relation comprehension and this raises doubts about the use of semantic relations as theoretical primitives in theories of semantic memory.

Human rights in the news: Balancing new media participation with the authority of journalists and human rights professionals

From the outset the modern human rights movement has relied on the press and media as an essential partner in its work to hold governments accountable for human rights violations. When Peter Benenson sought to draw attention to the plight of “forgotten prisoners,” he wrote an article in the London Observer published on May 28, 1961, launching an “Appeal for Amnesty.” Amnesty International was born from the union of human rights activists and the press. Similarly, Human Rights Watch began in 1978 with the formation of the Helsinki Watch Committee that sought to enforce compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords by publicly “naming and shaming” the Soviet Union through media coverage. But at the time these organizations were formed, newspapers were published exclusively on paper printed with ink, television news was broadcast over the airwaves and received by antennas, and letters from human rights activists to government officials were written on typewriters and sent by the post office. The digital information revolution that has radically altered our means of communicating has also dramatically changed the terms of the partnership between human rights campaigners and the media. The articles curated for this special issue of the Journal of Human Rights, “Human Rights in the News,” explore this altered media landscape and analyze its significance for the global human rights movement. In “A New Era of Human Rights News? Contrasting Two Paradigms of Human Rights News-Making,” Matthew Powers sets the stage by contrasting two “paradigms” of human rights news making. He points out that the concept of “human rights news” can no longer be defined narrowly as information produced by media organizations, but must now be understood as also coming from “NGOs, civic groups, or indeed even individuals” (315). In the older media paradigm, the one that reigned before August 6, 1991, the day the World Wide Web went live, human rights campaigners mainly relied on newspapers, journalists, and editors as the gate-keepers of access to mass audiences. Even well-respected and recognized international human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch needed to strategically deploy “facts and narratives in order to capture the attention of journalists” and to “appease dominant news norms that favor conflict and spectacle” (316). The need to satisfy the tastes of news organizations in order to pass through the media gateway often made it difficult for campaigners to get their issues before the public, particularly if the country or region in which the human rights abuses were occurring was obscure and the issues involved complex. This limitation often

The Humanitarian Argument for the Iraq War

As the case that Saddam Hussein posed a “threat of unique urgency” to the national security of the United States began to unravel, the Bush administration increasingly turned to the “humanitarian argument” to provide the causus belli for the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. The humanitarian argument has a certain appeal since, unlike the claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction or that he collaborated with Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks, it is at least based on factual assumptions. No one denies that Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant who viciously oppressed the Iraqi people, particularly the Kurds and Shi’a, for more than 20 years. That he and his government perpetrated murder, mass murder, torture, political imprisonment, denial of fair trial, silencing of political dissent, and a vast array of other serious human rights violations and abuses had been widely documented by UN and NGO reports many years before the U.S./UK invasion. In his 2004 report, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iraq, Mr. Andreas Mavrommatis, found that, “Evidence gathered so far points to a consistent pattern of gross and systematic human rights violations by Saddam Hussein’s regime, accompanied by an elaborate system of suppressing the truth at most, if not all, governmental levels.”1 The estimated number of persons still missing in Northern Iraq due to the 1988 Anfal campaign is 182,000. Chemical weapons used during the Iran–Iraq war resulted in approximately 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths. A U.S. military report on war crimes in 1990–1991 includes “taking hostages, torture and murder of civilians, looting civilian property, looting cultural property, indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants . . . illegal employment of sea mines, mistreatment of prisoners of war, and unnecessary destruction of property. . . . ”2 There is evidence that Iraqi authorities summarily executed Kuwaiti and other third-country nationals after the 1991 Gulf War; identified remains include nationals of Kuwait, Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.3 By the end of 2003, approximately 273 mass grave sites had been reported, of which 55 were confirmed as containing several thousand corpses.4 With respect to the country’s internal repression, Mavrommatis believes that “it is now beyond doubt that there was a deliberate and carefully executed campaign to arrest and execute, relocate or deport Kurds, as well as other nationalities such as Turkmen, Assyrians, or Chaldeans in a process which came to be known as

‘If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die’: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor

‘If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die’: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor Geoffrey Robinson Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010 311 pp,

Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry (review)

45 (hbk) On 30 August 1999, the people of East...

The death penalty and the Forfeiture Thesis

On his second overseas trip as a young and inexperienced sweatshop inspector employed by a US-based private monitoring firm, Joshua Samuel Brown visited a typical mainland Chinese apparel factory and found every violation in the book: the workers were putting in ninety hour weeks to meet production quotas, there were no fire extinguishers or fire exits, no safety guards on the sewing machines, and the first-aid boxes contained nothing but packages of instant noodles. Despite these conditions, the workers he interviewed said they were happy to be making

Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms (review)

100 a month from their piece-rate wages because that was enough for them to be able to send remittances to their families back home in the countryside, and they were nervous that the inspectors would close down the factory and they would lose their jobs. When Brown confronted the factory owner with his report and recommendations for corrective action, she acknowledged his findings and invited him and his partner to share a pot of tea. She thanked him for caring so much about poor Chinese factory workers but then went on to say, “But really, it’s all about profit. If I paid my workers more money, I’d have to raise the price to my buyers, the people who are sending you here to inspect my factory. Do you think they would accept that?” When Brown tried to explain to her that a “new consciousness” is developing among Western consumers and investors that is causing brand name manufacturers to want to clean up the Chinese factories that stitch apparel for them, she replied by reciting an old Chinese proverb, “Gua yang tou, mai gou rou,” which means, “Hang a sheep head but serve dog-meat.” This striking account, reprinted as an appendix to her detailed and wellresearched study of the sweatshop monitoring movement, encapsulates the Esbenshade’s main thesis: the private apparel factory monitoring schemes set up in the 1990s to eliminate “sweatshops” have done little to ameliorate the plight of workers in the apparel industry and mainly serve as public relations exercises for brand name manufacturers designed to deflect criticism from social consumers and NGO activists back home. Private monitoring schemes involve branded apparel manufacturers adopting voluntary labor codes and then sending in their own employees as inspectors (internal monitoring), or requiring that their contractors hire private social auditing companies (external monitoring), to inspect the contractor’s factories to determine whether they are in compliance with these codes. Data that Esbenshade has assembled and analyzed from Department of Labor Surveys of the garment industry in Los Angeles indicate that “monitoring seems to significantly raise the rates of compliance in the industry.”1 However, she cautions against assuming a single causal link between monitoring and compliance on the grounds that the manufacturers may be using the better shops and selecting them for monitoring. She em-

A Taxonomy of Part‐Whole Relations

Opponents of the death penalty argue that judicial executions violate the condemned prisoners right to life. Death penalty retentionists often attempt to counter this argument by asserting that persons convicted of capital crimes have forfeited their right to life. This paper examines the logic of the Forfeiture Thesis, and a related assumption, the State Authority Thesis, in relation to the properties of the human right to life of inalienability, waivability, defeasibility, and derogability. A new argument for the inalienability of the right to life is presented that refutes the Forfeiture Thesis. Further, it is argued that it is implausible and unnecessary to believe that the human right to life is alienable under any circumstances, and, in particular, it is dangerous to allow sovereign states, no matter how their governments are constituted, the power to alienate a persons human right to life, but that it is justifiable to allow governments to define specific conditions under which claims made under this right can be defeated. The upshot of this argument is to discredit one of the more popular reasons for retaining the death penalty, and to clarify the conditions under which various other retentionist arguments for its continued use can possibly be successful.