In this essay, I focus on the initial reaction of the then leadership of the Academy of Management to President Trump’s travel ban issued in January 2017. By viewing the travel ban in purely administrative terms, AOM leadership framed it as an example of “political speech”, on which they were organizationally barred to take a public stand. I subject this view to critical assessment, arguing that the travel ban had a distinct moral character, which was antithetical to scholarly values. Τhe (...) travel ban, I suggest, should be viewed as a non-prototypical case of political speech, which required AOM leadership to flexibly adapt existing rules in situ: to imaginatively frame the travel ban in order to undertake responsible action. Accordingly, the early 2017 AOM rules about political speech should be seen not as recipes-for-action but as reminders-for-action, thus allowing an imaginative reframing. Finally, exploring the notion of moral imagination, I distinguish between “disclosive” and “incremental” moral imagination and responsibility, and suggest that AOM leadership engaged mainly in the latter. (shrink)

In clinical practice, decision-making is not performed by individual knowers but by an assemblage of people and instruments in which no one member has full access to every piece of evidence. This is due to decision making teams consisting of members with different kinds of expertise, as well as to organisational and time constraints. This raises important questions for the epistemology of medicine, which is inherently social in this kind of setting, and implies epistemic dependence on others. Trust in these (...) contexts is a highly complex social practice, involving different forms of relationships between trust and reasons for trust: based on reasons, and not based on reasons; based on reasons that are easily accessible to reflection and others that are not. In this paper, we focus on what it means to have reasons to trust colleagues in an established clinical team, collectively supporting or carrying out every day clinical decision-making. We show two important points about these reasons, firstly, they are not sought or given in advance of a situation of epistemic dependence, but are established within these situations; secondly they are implicit in the sense of being contained or nested within other actions that are not directly about trusting another person. The processes of establishing these reasons are directly about accomplishing a task, and indirectly about trusting someone else’s expertise or competence. These processes establish a space of reasons within which what it means to have reasons for trust, or not, gains a meaning and traction in these team-work settings. Based on a qualitative study of decision-making in image assisted diagnosis and treatment of a complex disease called pulmonary hypertension, we show how an intersubjective framework, or ‘space of reasons’ is established through team members forging together a common way of identifying and dealing with evidence. In dealing with images as a central diagnostic tool, this also involves a common way of looking at the images, a common mode or style of perception. These frameworks are developed through many iterations of adjusting and calibrating interpretations in relation to those of others, establishing what counts as evidence, and ranking different kinds of evidence. Implicit trust is at work throughout this process. Trusting the expertise of others in clinical decision-making teams occurs while the members of the team are busy on other tasks, most importantly, building up a framework of common modes of seeing, and common ways of identifying and assessing evidence emerge. It is only in this way that trusting or mistrusting becomes meaningful in these contexts, and that a framework for epistemic dependence is established. (shrink)

Privileging deductive first principles over inductive contingencies, I argue, contributed to the economic meltdown of late and will continue to limit the range of reasonable solutions available to solve entrenched economic problems. I cite Toulmin’s critique of scientific certainty and the rancor over the demise of the ninth planet Pluto to posit a role for rhetoric in making valid claims across all fields of study, calling for more productive uncertainty subject to vigorous argumentation.

In research and teaching on ethical aspects of emerging sciences and technologies, the structure of working environments, spaces and relationships play a significant role. Many of the routines and standard practices of academic life, however, do little to actively explore and experiment with these elements. They do even less to address the importance of contextual and embodied dimensions of thinking. To engage these dimensions, we have benefitted significantly from practices that take us out of seminar rooms, offices and laboratories as (...) well as beyond traditional ways of working and interacting. We have called one such practice the ‘walkshop’. Through walkshops, we have spent several days walking together with our colleagues and students in open outdoor spaces, keeping a sustained intellectual discussion on ethical aspects of science, technology and innovation while moving through these landscapes. For us, this has generated useful opportunities to escape established hierarchies, roles and patterns of thought and to rethink conceptual and philosophical issues from new perspectives, under new attitudes and with renewed energy. In this paper we wish to highlight the potential benefits of the walkshop approach by sharing some of our experiences and describing how we have prepared for and carried out these events. We share this information in the hope that we may encourage others to both experiment with the walkshop approach and exchange information on their own innovative processes for research and teaching in science and engineering ethics. (shrink)

Toulmin (2001) sostiene que la invención de las disciplinas,un cambio iniciado en el siglo XVII, involucró factores tantointelectuales como institucionales. Intelectualmente, el uso dela geometría cartesiana como modelo de conocimiento proveyólos fundamentos; institucionalmente, la división del trabajo enprofesiones y disciplinas hizo el resto. Sin embargo, este cambiose produjo lentamente y sólo alcanzó su apogeo durante el sigloXX, con la conformación de lo que Snow (2012) reconoce comolas dos culturas: las Humanidades y las Ciencias Naturales.Focalizando esta distinción, proponemos reflexionar sobre laargumentación (...) escrita en dos disciplinas (Letras y Biología)desde la perspectiva toulminiana. Al respecto, consideramosque los argumentos y los modos de escribirlos están tanprofundamente ligados a las disciplinas que resulta esencialsaber y reconocer cómo operan estos procesos a fin de entenderla lógica de dichos campos. En efecto, las particularidades decada disciplina están siempre presentes a la hora de escribir yde argumentar por escrito. Todo texto pertenece, por lo menos,a un género y a una disciplina; como tal, emplea movimientosretóricos particulares que varían de comunidad en comunidady de un tipo de discurso a otro. Este trabajo, retoma lapropuesta de Toulmin (2003, 2001) y busca dar cuenta de lasespecificidades de la argumentación escrita en dos carrerasuniversitarias argentinas (Letras y Biología). Así, después dehaber efectuado un trabajo de campo que comprendió, duranteun semestre, observación participante de clases, entrevistasa docentes y alumnos y recolección de documentos áulicos(exámenes escritos y trabajos prácticos), distinguimos cuatrorasgos que caracterizan la argumentación en los ámbitosdisciplinares de las Humanidades y de las Ciencias Naturales:(1) los grados de formalidad; (2) los grados de precisión; (3) losmodos de resolución; y (4) las metas de la argumentación. Estoscuatro rasgos permiten complejizar los elementos estables delesquema toulminiano y pensar sus usos, sus aplicaciones y susalcances en las disciplinas. (shrink)

When assessing North American students' oral participation in classes, should all students be subject to the same evaluation criteria or should teachers make reasonable allowances for Asian students practicing humility? How do we weigh the promotion of 'courage' through character education initiatives with traditional Asian dispositions? Viewing Asian humility in Western classrooms and as it rubs up against liberal principles of equality or justice, and a virtue ethic raises a number of philosophical questions around authenticity, polyvalence, and relativity. I approach (...) first through the lens of liberal philosophy as the 'dilemma of diversity' meets a boundary with communitarianism, and then through the contextualist lenses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault. Drawing on Tully's political philosophy, I inspect humility as embedded in language-games and then open it to revision through comparative history, inviting participants in the teacher's game of assessment to renegotiate the rules: a process complicated by their reticence to speak up. I also use Medina and Scheman's political reading of Wittgenstein to discuss how teachers can discern humility as performative silence within the classroom, distinguishing between genealogical accounts that show how comportments could be otherwise from perspicuous inspection of interconnected language-games in current educational settings. (shrink)

The paper starts by reflecting on what senior engineering students don't know how to do when they confront a real-world project in an industrially sponsored senior design project. Seven, largely qualitatively, skills are found to be lacking: questioning, labeling, qualitatively modeling, decomposing, measuring, ideating, and communicating. These skills, some of the most important critical and creative thinking skills in the arsenal of modern civilization, are termed "the missing basics" and contrasted with what engineering faculty usually call "the basics." The paper (...) critically examines the term "the basics" and other terms that are conceptual hurdles to fundamental reassessment of engineering education at this time. The paper concludes that the engineering academy is stuck in a Kuhnian paradigm born in the cold war, that the reflexive belief in the superiority of math, science, and engineering science to the exclusion of other topics is not itself scientific, and that the use of tired code words is not an argument or a rational defense of a paradigm that may have outlived its usefulness. The paper concludes by highlighting the role philosophy can play in clearing away the conceptual confusion, thereby permitting a more reasoned conversation on the needs of engineering education in our times. (shrink)