Report on Dagstuhl Seminar 07132, Schloss Dagstuhl, March 27-30 , 2007.

This study examined the degree to which students indulge in six prominent misconducts in Distance Education Institutions (DEIs). The study also quantified how class size, instructional delivery and institutional policies predict students’ indulgence in sharp practices using a general linear modelling approach. A sample of 871 participants was drawn from 1,742 final-year students across two DEIs in Nigeria. A structured questionnaire was used for data collection. The questionnaire had acceptable psychometric estimates of dimensionality, content and construct validity, as well as (...) reliability. Sharp practices such as cheating, plagiarism, falsification, impersonation, and arm-twisting were more prevalent in large classes, whereas only inducement was higher in small classes. Class size influenced students’ indulgence in sharp practices in DEIs. Instructional delivery and institutional policies negatively predicted students’ indulgence in the six sharp practices. Almost all the six sharp practices correlated positively and significantly, except for impersonation and inducement. Therefore, distance education students who cheat, plagiarize, arm-twist, falsify records, induce lecturers, and promote impersonation are more likely to indulge in other forms of sharp practices. It was concluded that large class sizes, poor instructional delivery, and poorly implemented institutional policies promote sharp practices among distance education students. Based on this conclusion, key policy and research implications are discussed. (shrink)

Discerning the decisionmaking of Kim Jong-Un and the North Korean regime on issues of peaceful engagement and warlike actions endures as a mighty challenge for U.S. intelligence analysts and policymakers. In this report, we seek to inform analysis of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leadership decisionmaking. To do so, we use three discussion papers that were written to facilitate discussion of an interagency working group. The three papers are assembled here in a single report. The first discussion paper describes (...) decisionmaking among different authoritarian regimes, including North Korea, and the opening up of those economies to outside engagement. The second paper outlines two different scenarios that might occur when conventional deterrence on the Korean Peninsula breaks down and the resulting decisions that North Korea’s leadership could face. The third paper assesses DPRK decisionmaking about nuclear weapon use. The report concludes with some observations, drawn from the issues covered in these three discussion papers, about DPRK decisionmaking and stability on the Korean Peninsula. (shrink)

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by callous antisocial behavior and criminal recidivism. Here we examine whether psychopathy is associated with alterations in functional connectivity in three large-scale cortical networks. Using fMRI in 142 adult male prison inmates, we computed resting-state functional connectivity using seeds from the default mode network, frontoparietal network, and cingulo-opercular network. To determine the specificity of our findings to these cortical networks, we also calculated functional connectivity using seeds from two comparison primary sensory networks: visual and (...) auditory networks. Regression analyses related network connectivity to overall psychopathy scores and to subscores for the “factors” and “facets” of psychopathy: Factor 1, interpersonal/affective traits; Factor 2, lifestyle/antisocial traits; Facet 1, interpersonal; Facet 2, affective; Facet 3, lifestyle; Facet 4, antisocial. Overall psychopathy severity was associated with reduced functional connectivity between lateral parietal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. The two factor scores exhibited contrasting relationships with functional connectivity: Factor 1 scores were associated with reduced functional connectivity in the three cortical networks, whereas Factor 2 scores were associated with heightened connectivity in the same networks. This dissociation was evident particularly in the functional connectivity between anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. The facet scores also demonstrated distinct patterns of connectivity. We found no associations between psychopathy scores and functional connectivity within visual or auditory networks. These findings provide novel evidence on the neural correlates of psychopathy and suggest that connectivity between cortical association hubs, such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, may be a neurobiological marker of the disorder. (shrink)

In this chapter, I produce counterexamples to Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism (PEC), a view about the semantics of ‘knowledge’-ascriptions that I have argued for elsewhere. According to PEC, the semantic content of the predicate ‘know’ at a context C is partly determined by the speakers’ pragmatic presuppositions at C. The problem for the view that I shall be concerned with here arises from the fact that pragmatic presuppositions are sometimes known to be true by the speakers who make them: hence the (...) Problem of Known Presuppositions. After discussing several unsuccessful ways to solve the problem, I propose the addition of a new Lewisian rule of proper ignoring to the semantics of PEC--namely, the Rule of Evidence-Based Ignoring. If the proposed account succeeds, the Problem of Known Presuppositions has a straightforward solution within the framework of PEC. (shrink)

This paper offers a qualified defense of a historically popular view that I call sentimental perceptualism. At a first pass, sentimental perceptualism says that emotions play a role in grounding evaluative knowledge analogous to the role perceptions play in grounding empirical knowledge. Recently, András Szigeti and Michael Brady have independently developed an important set of objections to this theory. The objections have a common structure: they begin by conceding that emotions have some important epistemic role to play, but then (...) go on to argue that understanding how emotions play that role means that there must be some alternative, emotion-independent route to obtaining knowledge of value. If there has to be such an emotion-independent route, then the perceptual analogy breaks down in a significant way. In this paper, I argue that the right ways for sentimental perceptualists to respond to each of these objections are revealed by thinking through how analogous objections applied to perception and the empirical domain would be answered. Although Szigeti's and Brady's objections should not persuade sentimental perceptualists to give up their view, the objections do put important constraints on what a form of the view has to be like in order to do exciting metaethical work. (shrink)

For many years there has been a debate about the role of the parietal lobe in the generation of behavior. Does it generate movement plans (intention) or choose objects in the environment for further processing? To answer this, we focus on the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), an area that has been shown to play independent roles in target selection for saccades and the generation of visual attention. Based on results from a variety of tasks, we propose that LIP acts as (...) a priority map in which objects are represented by activity proportional to their behavioral priority. We present evidence to show that the priority map combines bottom-up inputs like a rapid visual response with an array of top-down signals like a saccade plan. The spatial location representing the peak of the map is used by the oculomotor system to target saccades and by the visual system to guide visual attention. (shrink)

The distinction between the essential and the accidental characteristics of a thing should be understood not in modal terms (the received view) nor in definitional terms (Fine’s recent proposal) but as follows: an essential characteristic of a thing is one that is not explained by any other of that thing’s characteristics, and an accidental characteristic of a thing is one that is so explained. Various versions of this proposal can be formulated.

Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? Employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defend a surprising answer last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. For replies to critics, see my publications of 1997 and (especially) 2003.

Episodic memory (memories of the personal past) and prospecting the future (anticipating events) are often described as mental time travel (MTT). While most use this description metaphorically, we argue that episodic memory may allow for MTT in at least some robust sense. While episodic memory experiences may not allow us to literally travel through time, they do afford genuine awareness of past-perceived events. This is in contrast to an alternative view on which episodic memory experiences present past-perceived events as mere (...) intentional contents. Hence, episodic memory is a way of coming into experiential contact with, or being again aware of, what happened in the past. We argue that episodic memory experiences depend on a causal-informational link with the past events being remembered, and that, assuming direct realism about episodic memory experiences, this link suffices for genuine awareness. Since there is no such link in future prospection, a similar argument cannot be used to show that it also affords genuine awareness of future events. Constructivist views of memory might challenge the idea of memory as genuine awareness of remembered events. We explain how our view is consistent with both constructivist and anti-causalist conceptions of memory. There is still room for an interpretation of episodic memory as enabling genuine awareness of past events, even if it involves reconstruction. (shrink)

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, USA, conducted a species status assessment for a petition to list the Alexander Archipelago wolf (Canis lupus ligoni) under the Endangered Species Act in 2020-2022. This federal undertaking could not be adequately prepared without including the knowledge of Indigenous People who have a deep cultural connection with the subspecies. Our objective is to communicate the authoritative expertise and voice of the Indigenous People who partnered on the project by demonstrating how their (...) knowledge contributed to the species status assessment. The Indigenous knowledge applied in the assessment is the cultural and intellectual property of those who have shared it. We employed rapid appraisal research to expeditiously develop a preliminary and qualitative understanding of Indigenous People's cultural and ecological knowledge of Alexander Archipelago wolves. We used semi-directed interviewing and inductive coding from grounded theory for text analysis. Indigenous knowledge contributed to the agency's understanding of the Alexander Archipelago wolf in Southeast Alaska and helped the agency with their classification decision. Indigenous research partners explained the rich cultural significance and position of wolves in Tlingit society and described human–wolf relationships and ecological interactions. The agency used a single-species assessment approach based in species ecology and conservation biology, whereas the Indigenous wolf experts applied a multi-species, community ecology approach based in a sociocultural context of balance and respect. The Indigenous wolf experts successfully addressed knowledge gaps identified by the agency. The partners were challenged by a short regulatory timeframe that did not allow for comprehensive study of Indigenous knowledge and constrained review and feedback by Indigenous experts. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service learned that its assessment framework was not designed to account for an Indigenous worldview. To level the playing field, the agency and Indigenous experts should discuss how to co-develop an assessment framework that equitably applies both perspectives. (shrink)

Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of understanding what cooperation entails. Philosophical analyses have suggested that we should release our partner from a joint activity anytime the activity conflicts with fulfilling a moral obligation. To probe young children’s understanding of this aspect, we investigated whether 3-year-old children (N = 60) are sensitive to the legitimacy of motives (selfish condition vs. moral condition) leading agents to intentionally interrupt their joint activity. We measured whether (...) children protested or released their partner by scoring their reactions. Our results indicate that children did not manifest different reactions when the motive behind their partner leaving was moral than when the motive was selfish. However, our data showed a stable pattern: regardless of the partner’s motives, some 3-year-olds take initiatives to release their partners from joint activity, suggesting that measuring release is a valuable tool for investigating joint action. -/- . (shrink)

The standard way to test alternative descriptive theories of moral judgment is by asking subjects to evaluate (amongst others) sacrificial dilemmas, where acting classifies as a utilitarian moral judgment and not acting classifies as a deontological moral judgment. Previous research uncovered many situational factors that alter subject’s moral judgments without affecting which type of action utilitarianism or deontology would recommend. This literature review provides a systematic analysis of the experimental literature on the influence of situational factors on moral judgments in (...) sacrificial dilemmas. It analyses 53 articles in detail and reports mean effect sizes, as well as operationalizations, for 36 situational factors that significantly influence moral judgment. Moreover, the review discusses how the impact of situational factors relates to a dual process theory of moral judgment. It supports the view that utilitarian judgments are driven by controlled cognitive processes and shows that the drivers of deontological judgments depend on valence. (shrink)

This paper argues against the common justification for the necessity of the state through the particular difficulty of private property right. Instead, I argue that the necessity of the state is internal to the concept of right in general. In order to show this, I point out how Kants adoption of hylomorphic language for the concept of right, where there is a formal and material aspect of right, allows us to understand the Rechtslehre as progressing through a syllogistic deduction from (...) innate right (major), private right (minor) to public right (conclusion). Material right is made necessary through its subsumption under formal right in the civil condition. (shrink)

If there is something (P) that every possible agent is committed to value, and certain actions or attitudes either enhance or diminish P, then normative claims about a range of intentional actions can be objectively and non-trivially evaluated. I argue that the degree of existence as an agent depends on the consistency of reflexive-relating with other individuals of the agent-kind: the ontological thesis. I then show that in intending to act on a reason, every agent is rationally committed to value (...) ‘above all else’ being an agent, what consists in exercising the capacity to act and having the freedom to discriminate between more or less valuable actions: the transcendental thesis. Since the degree of possession of this personal but non-contingent good depends on relating to other agents in a special way, certain actions and attitudes may be objectively right or wrong for all agents. (shrink)

1. The primary evidence and motivation for externalism in the philosophy of mind is provided by the semantic facts that support direct reference theories of names, indexi- cal pronouns, and natural kind terms. But many externalists have forgotten their sem- antic roots, or so I shall contend here. I have become convinced of this by a common reaction among externalists to the main argument of my 1991 paper AAnti-Individual- ism and Privileged Access.@ In that argument, I concluded that externalism is (...) incompat- ible with the principle that we can have privileged, non-empirical knowledge of the contents of our own thoughts. The reaction in question amounts to a dismissive denial of one of my argument=s main premises. This premise, which I defended at length in the paper, is that an externalist thesis regarding a cognitive property should hold that possession of the property by a person _logically_, or _conceptually_, implies the existence of objects external to that person. (shrink)

Speedrunning is a kind of ‘metagame’ involving video games. Though it does not yet have the kind of profile of multiplayer e-sports, speedrunning is fast approaching e-sports in popularity. Aside from audience numbers, however, from the perspective of the philosophy of sport and games, speedrunning is particularly interesting. To the casual player or viewer, speedrunning appears to be a highly irreverent, even pointless, way of playing games, particularly due to the incorporation of “glitches”. For many outside the speedrunning community, the (...) use of glitches appears to be cheating. For speedrunners, however, glitches are entirely within the bounds of acceptability. Because of this, however, speedrunning frequently involves sidestepping what are typically taken to be the core challenges of the game. By examining the distinction between the use of glitches and cheating in speedrunning, we can gain a greater understanding of the unique ethos of this activity; that is, we can make sense of what fundamentally constitutes speedrunning as a metagame. I argue that by understanding the code of the game not as rules but as physics, and by examining what actions are deemed impermissible by the speedrunning community – such as hardware modification and hacking – we can see that the ethos of speedrunning has three components: constitutive skills (including dexterity, memorisation and mental fortitude); a collective, fine-grained knowledge of the game and the desire to subvert the intentions of the programmers. Each of these components limits and structures the earlier ones: collective knowledge takes priority over constitutive skills, and subversion takes priority over both. These three components form the ethos that structures speedrunning as a metagame, expressing what speedrunners take to be its central aim. (shrink)

Amid the wide variety of interpretations of quantum mechanics, the notion of a fully coherent ontological interpretation has seen a promising evolution over the last few decades. Despite this progress, however, the old dualistic categorical constraints of subjectivity and objectivity, correlate with the metrically restricted definition of local and global, have remained largely in place – a reflection of the broader, persistent inheritance of these comfortable strictures throughout the evolution of modern science. If one traces this inheritance back to its (...) ancient roots in Plato and Aristotle, it is clear that the coherence, scientific utility, and historical durability of the various natural philosophies that followed have been directly proportional to their commitment, tacit or explicit, to object-oriented realism. As Simondon might put it, it is a commitment to the primacy of individuated substance over the process of individuation. For Whitehead, it is the misplaced assimilation of becoming to being, of potentiality to actuality. Quantum mechanics has challenged this commitment with a combined breadth and depth of force that far exceeds any other theory in the history of science. The theory’s objectively demonstrable empirical application is manifest only by way of a fundamentally subjective, context-dependent mechanism of measurement. More compelling still, actual system states are always actualizations of locally contextualized yet globally conditioned potential system states, such that “globally objective” reality is no longer merely the object of local measurement, but also its product. Thus, any coherent, ontological interpretation of quantum theory must include a conceptual framework by which objectivity and subjectivity, actuality and potentiality, global and local, being and becoming, individuated fact and process of individuation, are no longer understood as merely epistemic, mutually exclusive category pairs descriptive of an already extant, closed reality – but rather as mutually implicative ontological categories explicative of an ontogenetic, open reality-in-process. (shrink)

Several anti-debunkers have argued that evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs fail to meet a necessary condition on undermining defeat called modal security. They conclude that evolution, therefore, does not debunk our moral beliefs. This article shows that modal security is false if knowledge is virtuous achievement. New information can undermine a given belief without providing reason to doubt that that belief is sensitive or safe. This leads to a novel conception of undermining defeat, and it shows that successful debunking (...) of moral realism is possible. (shrink)

I address Andrew Moon's recent discussion (2016, this journal) of the question whether third-factor accounts are valid responses to debunking arguments against moral realism. Moon argues that third-factor responses are valid under certain conditions but leaves open whether moral realists can use his interpretation of the third-factor response to defuse the evolutionary debunking challenge. I rebut Moon's claim and answer his question. Moon's third-factor reply is valid only if we accept externalism about epistemic defeaters. However, even if we do, I (...) argue, the conditions Moon identifies for a valid third-factor response are not met in the case of moral realism. (shrink)

In this article I argue that while an attachment to one's country is both natural and even partially justifiable, cultivating loyal patriotism in schools is untenable insofar as it conflicts with the legitimate aims of education. These aims include the epistemological competence necessary for ascertaining important truths germane to the various disciplines; the cultivation of critical thinking skills ; and developing the capacity for economic self‐reliance. I argue that loyal patriotism may result in a myopic understanding of history, an unhealthy (...) attitude of superiority relative to other cultures, and a coerced sense of attachment to one's homeland. (shrink)

Grief research in philosophy agrees that one who grieves grieves over the irreversible loss of someone whom the griever loved deeply, and that someone thus factored centrally into the griever’s sense of purpose and meaning in the world. The analytic literature in general tends to focus its treatments on the paradigm case of grief as the death of a loved one. I want to restrict my account to the paradigm case because the paradigm case most persuades the mind that grief (...) is a past-directed emotion. The phenomenological move I propose will enable us to (1) respect the paradigm case of grief and a broader but still legitimate set of grief-generating states of affairs, (2) liberate grief from the view that grief is past directed or about the past, and thus (3) account for grief in a way that separates it from its closest emotion-neighbor, sorrow, without having to rely on the affective quality of those two emotions.If the passing of the beloved causes the grief but is not what the grief is about, then we can get at the nature of grief by saying its temporal orientation is in the past (the event of the passing), but its temporal meaning is the present and future—the new significance of a world with the pervasive absence that is the world without the beloved. The no-longer of grief is a no-longer oriented by a past (that which is no longer) that is referred a present and future (that which is a no-longer understood as not now as it once was). Looking at the griever’s relation to time can tell us much about the pain and the object of grief, then. As the griever puts the past before himself with a certainty about this world “henceforth,” a look at the griever’s lived sense of the fi nality of the irreversibly lost (1) liberates grief from the tendency in the literature to be reduced to a past-directed emotion, (2) accounts for grief ’s intensity, its affective force or poignancy, and thus (3) enables us to separate grief from sorrow according to its intentionalobject in light of the temporal meaning of these emotions. (shrink)

A wide body of psychological research corroborates the claim that whether one’s life is (or will be) meaningful appears relevant to whether it is rational to continue living. This article advances conceptions of life’s meaningfulness and of suicidal choice with an eye to ascertaining how the former might provide justificatory reasons relevant to the latter. Drawing upon the recent theory of meaningfulness defended by Cheshire Calhoun, the decision to engage in suicide can be understood as a choice related to life’s (...) meaningfulness insofar as an individual can see no point in investing her agency in her anticipated future. These meaning-based reasons relevant to suicidal choice either cannot be reduced to the reasons of well-being that philosophers have typically used to analyse suicide decisions or at least forms a distinct class of reasons within those that contribute to well-being. (shrink)

When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. Independent representation of roles (e.g., containers vs. supporters) and “fillers” of those roles (e.g., bowls vs. cups, tables vs. chairs) is a core principle of language and higherlevel reasoning. But does such role-filler independence also arise in automatic visual processing? (...) Here, we show that it does, by exploring a surprising error that such independence can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in forcedynamic relations — e.g., a phone contained in a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting in a cup. Participants had to respond to a single target image (e.g., a phone in a basket) within a stream of distractors presented under time constraints. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images matching the target’s relational category than to those that did not — even when those images involved completely different objects. In other words, participants searching for a phone in a basket were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments ruled out strategic responses and also controlled for various confounding image features. We suggest that visual processing represents relations abstractly, in ways that separate roles from fillers. (shrink)

The social welfare functional approach to social choice theory fails to distinguish a genuine change in individual well-beings from a merely representational change due to the use of different measurement scales. A generalization of the concept of a social welfare functional is introduced that explicitly takes account of the scales that are used to measure well-beings so as to distinguish between these two kinds of changes. This generalization of the standard theoretical framework results in a more satisfactory formulation of welfarism, (...) the doctrine that social alternatives are evaluated and socially ranked solely in terms of the well-beings of the relevant individuals. This scale-dependent form of welfarism is axiomatized using this framework. The implications of this approach for characterizing classes of social welfare orderings are also considered. (shrink)

Philosophers debate whether all, some or none of the represcntational content of our sensory experience is conccptual, but the technical term "concept" has different uses. It is commonly linked more or less closely with the notions of judgdment and reasoning, but that leaves open the possibility that these terms share a systematic ambiguity or indeterminacy. Donald Davidson, however, holds an unequivocal and consistent, if paradoxical view that there are strictly speaking no psychological states with representational or intentional content except the (...) propositional attitudes of language users, since thc source or fundamental bearer of intentionality is the employed sentence. Accordingly he claims that what has content in ordinary sense experience is not sensation, but propositional belief caused, but not justified, by sensation. John McDowell, sharing some ofDavidson's premises,holds a less paradoxical, but (l will argue) equivocal and incoherent view that post-infantile human sensory expcrience must have content in so far as it is what grounds perceptual belief but that this content is itself conceptual or propositional, dependent on language and culture. Reasons are givcn in the present article for rejecting both views, and their common premises. It is argued that perceptual or sensory states have intentional content which is no more conceptual or propositional than the world is. Recognition that perceptual content and conceptual content are, in a certain unsurprising way incommensurable allows for a more realistic understanding of the relationship between Language and the world as we experience it. (shrink)

Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? In Burke 1994, employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defended a surprising position last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. This paper defends that position against objections by Stone, Carter, Olson, and others. Most notably, it offers a novel, conservative solution (...) to the many-thinkers problem, a solution that enables us to accept the existence of brain-containing person-parts while denying that those person-parts are thinking, conscious beings. (shrink)

The paper takes up a traditional view that has also been a part of some recent analytic metaphysics, namely, the view that substance is to be understood in terms of independence. Taking as my point of departure some recent remarks by Kit Fine, I propose reviving the Aristotelian-scholastic idea that the sense in which substances are independent is that they are non-inherent, and I do so by developing a broad notion of inherence that is more usable in the context of (...) contemporary analytic metaphysics than the traditional notion is. I end by showing how non-inherence, while necessary for being a substance, cannot be taken as sufficient without some qualifying remarks. (shrink)

Respect appears to generate a puzzling self-other asymmetry: Respect for others can demand that we avoid knowledge of others or ignore that knowledge in deciding how we treat others. This demand for epistemic distancing lies behind the imperatives not to violate others’ privacy or to treat them paternalistically. Self-respect, in contrast, mandates that we pursue knowledge of ourselves and that we choose and act light of that self-knowledge. Individual agents thus do not have a duty to epistemically distance themselves from (...) themselves; a fortiori, they have self-regarding duties to reduce such distance. This article elaborates this asymmetry and offers a plausible solution to it, rooted in the distinctive importance that self-knowledge (and acting in the world on the basis of that self-knowledge) has for self-respecting rational agents: Self-respecting agents have reasons to have others defer to their ‘surfaces’ or self-presentations in order to inhibit making themselves vulnerable to others in ways that undermine their self-respect by subordinating their wills to the wills of others. A measure of control over what others know about us and over what they do with that knowledge thus undergirds self-respect by enabling self-knowledge to play the role that it should play in the lives of self-respecting agents. Epistemic distancing thus operates in concert with the ways in which self-respecting agents value and pursue epistemic intimacy with themselves. (shrink)

I develop a contractualist theory of just intelligence collection based on the collective moral responsibility to deliver security to a community and use the theory to justify certain kinds of signals interception. I also consider the rights of various intelligence targets like intelligence officers, service personnel, government employees, militants, and family members of all of these groups in order to consider how targets' waivers or forfeitures might create the moral space for just surveillance. Even people who are not doing anything (...) prejudicial to other states' security can be modeled as ceding rights against diagnostic collection--light touch collection limited to ascertaining if someone is likely an intelligence threat--as part of their duty to support just foreign institutions. Foreign intelligence officers could not perform the same job potential targets can reasonably demand their intelligence agencies perform on their behalf without this ceding of rights. More invasive forms of collection can only be justified if officers can reasonably model their citizens consenting to being the target of the same sort of collection by adversary states. (shrink)

This article presents a case study of the structure and logic of the author’s dissertation, with a focus on theoretical content. Designed for use in proposal writing seminars or research methods courses, the article stresses the value of identifying the originating, specifying and subsidiary research questions; clarifying the subject and object of the research; situating research within a particular research tradition, and using a competing theories approach. The article stresses the need to identify conceptual problems and empirical problems and their (...) associated conceptual and operational definitions. The primary theoretical perspective is drawn from emerging sociology of externalities rooted in ecological theory, within the institutionalist tradition. (shrink)

I consider a puzzling case presented by Jose Benardete, and by appeal to this case develop a paradox involving counterfactual conditionals. I then show that this paradox may be leveraged to argue for certain non-obvious claims concerning the logic of counterfactuals.

A moral theory T is esoteric if and only if T is true but there are some individuals who, by the lights of T itself, ought not to embrace T, where to embrace T is to believe T and rely upon it in practical deliberation. Some philosophers hold that esotericism is a strong, perhaps even decisive, reason to reject a moral theory. However, proponents of this objection have often supposed its force is obvious and have said little to articulate it. (...) I defend a version of this objection—namely, that, in light of the strongly first-personal epistemology of benefit and burden, esoteric theories fail to justify the allocation of benefits and burdens to which moral agents would be subject under such theories. Because of the holistic nature of moral-theory justification, this conclusion in turn implies that the entirety of a moral theory must be open to public scrutiny in order for the theory to be justified. I conclude by answering several objections to my account of the esotericism objection. (shrink)

Informed consent is a central concept for empirical and theoretical research concerning pregnancy management decisions and is often taken to be one of the more fundamental goals of the profession of genetic counseling. Tellingly, this concept has been seen by disability communities as salutary, despite longstanding critiques made by disability activists, advocates, and scholars concerning practices involved in genetic counseling more generally. In this chapter, we show that the widespread faith in informed consent is misleading and can be detrimental to (...) the practice of genetic counseling as guided by concerns of justice and equity. We proceed in two steps. First, we explain how informed consent is flawed as a practical concept. Second, we show how the inadequacy of informed consent illuminates the animating core of disability critiques of genetic counseling: the issue of ableism. We argue that the problem of ableism cannot be solved with informed consent because it is not merely a problem of information, but also of epistemic schemas. We suggest that what we call critically informed consent is better suited to move genetic counseling from being aware of the problem of ableism to becoming actively anti-ableist. (shrink)

Discusses the old problem of how to characterize apparently intentional states that appear to lack objects. In tandem with critically discussing a recent proposal by Tim Crane, I develop the line of reasoning according to which talking about intentional objects is really a way of talking about intentional states—in particular, it’s a way of talking about their satisfaction-conditions.

After a brief review of the golden ratio in history and our previous exposition of the fine-structure constant and equations with the exponential function, the fine-structure constant is studied in the context of other research calculating the fine-structure constant from the golden ratio geometry of the hydrogen atom. This research is extended and the fine-structure constant is then calculated in powers of the golden ratio to an accuracy consistent with the most recent publications. The mathematical constants associated with the golden (...) ratio are also involved in both the calculation of the fine-structure constant and the proton-electron mass ratio. These constants are included in symbolic geometry of historical relevance in the science of the ancients. (shrink)

New research suggests that a healthy democracy requires intellectual humility. When citizens are intellectually humble, they are less polarized, more tolerant and respectful of others, and display greater empathy for political opponents. But a flourishing democracy also requires people with political convictions. If the electorate were apathetic, they would not participate in democratic decision-making. Do these two democratic ideals conflict? The standard view in philosophy and psychology is that intellectual humility and political conviction are compatible. In this paper, we challenge (...) the standard view. We appeal to empirical and theoretical work indicating that intellectual humility can result in political apathy or lack of conviction. We conclude by suggesting that there are different varieties of intellectual humility, some aligned with conviction and engagement, and others of a more quietist character. To illustrate this, we sketch a kind of ‘political quietism’ modelled by philosophical thinkers such as Burke and Oakeshott. (shrink)

This paper investigates the role of visual experience in Wittgenstein's work. The specific thesis is that visual experience provides not only diverse illustrative examples of what could be an explanation of meaning, but that it also provides a recurrent metaphor for the whole process of meaning and understanding. Wittgenstein uses a great number of visual examples in his texts. Their diversity may be accounted for by the great diversity of ways in which he attempts to describe the relationship between a (...) word and its meaning. The resultant variety of visual examples may be summarised by what I call the Visual Discontinuity Thesis. However, beneath this diversity there lies a thread of continuity. This is provided by the persistent use of visual experience in the description of the word-meaning relation. This use underlies the projection relationship of the Tractatus and the "seeing-as" relationship of the Investigations. This recurrent visual metaphor may be summarised by what I call the Visual Continuity Thesis. This paper presents the latter thesis in the context of a description of the former. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer reasons to justify the explanatory credentials of dynamical modeling in the context of the metaplasticity thesis, located within a larger grouping of views known as 4E Cognition. Our focus is on showing that dynamicism is consistent with interventionism, and therefore with a difference-making account at the scale of system topologies that makes sui generis explanatory differences to the overall behavior of a cognitive system. In so doing, we provide a general overview of the interventionist approach. (...) We then argue that recent mechanistic attempts at reducing dynamical modeling to a merely descriptive enterprise fail given that the explanatory standard in dynamical modeling can be shown to rest on interventionism. We conclude that dynamical modeling captures features of nested and developmentally plastic cognitive systems that cannot be explained by appeal to underlying mechanisms alone. (shrink)

According to the propositional view of belief, a belief situation involves a believer’s standing in the relation of belief to a proposition. It is argued that the propositional view has unacceptable implications concerning the identity conditions of belief situations involving beliefs with indexical contents, especially where such beliefs are held over a period of time during which background circumstances change. After a critical discussion of Perry’s alternative to the propositional view, a version of the adverbial theory of belief, which accounts (...) satisfactorily for the identity conditions of belief situations, is advanced. This theory, which avoids the standard objections to adverbialism, is defended against the charge that it cannot provide an account of the semantics of sentences attributing the same belief to two or more believers. In the course of this defense it is argued that the standard propositional account of such sentences is insensitive to everyday language. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO) web resource provides an integrative framework for protein-centric exploration and enables specific and precise annotation of proteins and protein complexes based on PRO. Functionalities include: browsing, searching and retrieving, terms, displaying selected terms in OBO or OWL format, and supporting URIs. In addition, the PRO website offers multiple ways for the user to request, submit, or modify terms and/or annotation. We will demonstrate the use of these tools for protein research and annotation.

This article examines an appendix to the Doctrine of Virtue which has received little attention. I argue that this passage suggests that Kant makes it a duty, internal to his system of duties, to ‘join the graces with virtue’ and so to ‘make virtue widely loved’ (MM, 6: 473). The duty to make virtue widely loved obligates us to bring the standards of respectability, and so the social graces, into a formal agreement with what morality demands of us, such that (...) the social graces give the illusion of virtue. The existence of such a duty can answer Schiller’s persistent objection that Kant’s ethics scares away the Graces with Duty. (shrink)

The testimonia concerning weight in early Greek atomism appear to contradict one another. Some reports assert that the atoms do have weight, while others outright deny weight as a property of the atoms. A common solution to this apparent contradiction divides the testimonia into two groups. The first group describes the atoms within a κόσμος, where they have weight; the second group describes the atoms outside of a κόσμος, where they are weightless. A key testimonium for proponents of this solution (...) is Aëtius 1.3.18. It apparently denies weight as a property of the atoms, and supposedly describes the atoms when they are outside of a κόσμος. I argue against this interpretive solution by demonstrating, first, that Aëtius 1.3.18 does not deny that weight is a property of the atoms. Second, I argue that the report does not describe the atoms when they are outside of a κόσμος. Although these are largely negative conclusions, I contend that we are not left without a solution to the present interpretive difficulty. Once our testimonia concerning weight in early Greek atomism are examined thoroughly, it is clear that there is no conflict among them. (shrink)

This is a copy of the presentation given at the "Workshop on Agency and Distributed Cognition" at Macquarie University, March 2012. What is noteworthy about this piece of work is that (i) it is a very early foray into the pedagogy, ontology, and epistemology of virtual worlds (it's 2012, way before David Chalmers' book "Reality+" in 2022); and (ii) it was my first foray into "social epistemology" beyond the standard "S knows that p" epistemology, drawing on Vygotskian collaborative approaches to (...) learning and teaching, moving beyond analytic philosophy into educational research. Finally, (iii) there's a hyperlink to the actual virtual world in Unity3D created by a cross-disciplinary team of researchers from Sydney University and Macquarie University for the purposes of teaching scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Preprinted in God and the Problem of Evil(Blackwell 2001), ed. William Rowe. Many people deny that evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. After all, they say, the grounds for belief in God are much better than the evidence for atheism, including the evidence provided by evil. We will not join their ranks on this occasion. Rather, we wish to consider the proposition that, setting aside grounds for belief in God and relying only on (...) the background knowledge shared in common by nontheists and theists, evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. Our aim is to argue against this proposition. We recognize that in doing so, we face a formidable challenge. It’s one thing to say that evil presents a reason for atheism that is, ultimately, overridden by arguments for theism. It’s another to say that it doesn’t so much as provide us with a reason for atheism in the first place. In order to make this latter claim seem initially more plausible, consider the apparent design of the mammalian eye or the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to support life. These are often proposed as reasons to believe in theism. Critics commonly argue not merely that these supposed reasons for theism are overridden by arguments for atheism but rather that they aren’t good reasons for theism in the first place. Our parallel proposal with respect to evil and atheism is, initially at least, no less plausible than this proposal with respect to apparent design and theism. (shrink)

In this article I offer a critique of certain moral perspectives that are found in the second edition of Engelhardt’s Foundation of Bioethics. These views are spelled out in explicit detail in his second edition, and follow on the heels of a profound religious conversion. I question some of the conclusions that Engelhardt reaches as they touch upon moral frameworks, pluralism, and a ‘secular’ bioethics.

Aquinas’s analyses of akrasia can be divided into two: the discussions in his theological works and his Ethics commentary. The latter has sometimes been regarded as merely repetitive of Aristotle and unrepresentative of Aquinas’s own thoughts. As such, little attention has been paid to the specific, and sometimes significant, differences between the two treatments and to what those differences might mean. This paper remedies this situation by focusing on four such differences. I ultimately provide rationales for these differences, thereby arguing (...) for the consistency of the two treatments and the importance of consulting Aquinas’s Ethics commentary to gain a full appreciation of his view of akrasia. Using this strategy, the paper concludes with a controversial suggestion regarding the structure of the weak akratic’s reasoning. (shrink)

La psychologie a toujours traité le comportement et l’expérience comme étant enchâssés dans un flux temporel unidimensionnel, « le courant du comportement » dans lequel les événements et les actions occupent des intervalles de temps qui ne se chevauchent pas. Pourtant, une analyse phénoménologique révèle que la structure de nos vies est bien plus riche et intéressante. En utilisant la notion de « quasidécomposabilité » de Herbert Simon, je décris cette structure comme un assemblage d’épisodes quasi-indépendants se réalisant de façon (...) concurrente, et de nature asynchrone. Il s’agit d’une « structure profonde» des vies contrairement à la conception courante qui conçoit les vies comme « plates » Psychology has always treated behavior and experience as embedded in a unidimensional flow in time, the "stream of behavior." This means that events and actions occupy non-overlapping time-intervals in this stream. Nevertheless a phenomenological analysis reveals that the structure of lives is richer and far more interesting. Using Herb Simon's notion of near-decomposability, I describe the structure of lives as a composite of nearly independent strands that run concurrently, and are asynchronous. This is a "deep structure"' of lives in contrast to the current conception, which conceives of lives as "flat." . (shrink)