The Protein Ontology (PRO) provides a formal, logically-based classification of specific protein classes including structured representations of protein isoforms, variants and modified forms. Initially focused on proteins found in human, mouse and Escherichia coli, PRO now includes representations of protein complexes. The PRO Consortium works in concert with the developers of other biomedical ontologies and protein knowledge bases to provide the ability to formally organize and integrate representations of precise protein forms so as to enhance accessibility to results of protein (...) research. PRO (http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro) is part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO; http://proconsortium.org) formally defines protein entities and explicitly represents their major forms and interrelations. Protein entities represented in PRO corresponding to single amino acid chains are categorized by level of specificity into family, gene, sequence and modification metaclasses, and there is a separate metaclass for protein complexes. All metaclasses also have organism-specific derivatives. PRO complements established sequence databases such as UniProtKB, and interoperates with other biomedical and biological ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). PRO relates to (...) UniProtKB in that PRO’s organism-specific classes of proteins encoded by a specific gene correspond to entities documented in UniProtKB entries. PRO relates to the GO in that PRO’s representations of organism-specific protein complexes are subclasses of the organism-agnostic protein complex terms in the GO Cellular Component Ontology. The past few years have seen growth and changes to the PRO, as well as new points of access to the data and new applications of PRO in immunology and proteomics. Here we describe some of these developments. (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.

The Protein Ontology (PRO; http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/pr) formally defines and describes taxon-specific and taxon-neutral protein-related entities in three major areas: proteins related by evolution; proteins produced from a given gene; and protein-containing complexes. PRO thus serves as a tool for referencing protein entities at any level of specificity. To enhance this ability, and to facilitate the comparison of such entities described in different resources, we developed a standardized representation of proteoforms using UniProtKB as a sequence reference and PSI-MOD as a post-translational modification (...) reference. We illustrate its use in facilitating an alignment between PRO and Reactome protein entities. We also address issues of scalability, describing our first steps into the use of text mining to identify protein-related entities, the large-scale import of proteoform information from expert curated resources, and our ability to dynamically generate PRO terms. Web views for individual terms are now more informative about closely-related terms, including for example an interactive multiple sequence alignment. Finally, we describe recent improvement in semantic utility, with PRO now represented in OWL and as a SPARQL endpoint. These developments will further support the anticipated growth of PRO and facilitate discoverability of and allow aggregation of data relating to protein entities. (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)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

We explain and explore class-theoretic potentialism—the view that one can always individuate more classes over a set-theoretic universe. We examine some motivations for class-theoretic potentialism, before proving some results concerning the relevant potentialist systems (in particular exhibiting failures of the $\mathsf {.2}$ and $\mathsf {.3}$ axioms). We then discuss the significance of these results for the different kinds of class-theoretic potentialists.

Quilty-Dunn et al.'s wide-ranging defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH) argues that vision traffics in abstract, structured representational formats. We agree: Vision, like language, is compositional – just as words compose into phrases, many visual representations contain discrete constituents that combine in systematic ways. Here, we amass evidence extending this proposal, and explore its implications for how vision interfaces with the rest of the mind.

In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticized for implying that no one can ever be free to perform any action. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. To assess the possibility of different conceptions of freedom, I consider the trade-offs they make between these two dimensions. I find that pure negative freedom is (...) clearly possible. Republican freedom might also be possible, though its protection requirement is too vague for a definitive verdict. Finally, the recently proposed ‘freedom as independence’ is impossible since it is an attempt to avoid the unavoidable trade-off. (shrink)

All humans have an equal basic moral status. They possess the same fundamental rights, and the comparable interests of each person should count the same in calculations that determine social policy. Neither supposed racial differences, nor skin color, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, intelligence, nor any other differences among humans negate their fundamental equal worth and dignity. These platitudes are virtually universally affirmed. A white supremacist racist or an admirer of Adolf Hitler who denies them is rightly regarded as beyond the (...) pale of civilized dialogue. However, a very simple line of argument developed by Peter Singer challenges our understanding of these platitudes and forces us to rethink the basis and nature of the moral equality of all humans. What I call the “Singer Problem” arises if one accepts that the morally significant cognitive capacities that are relevant to the determination of the fundamental moral status of a being vary from individual to individual by degree. The problem is to specify a moral principle determining fundamental moral status that assigns a superior status to humans compared to other animals on the basis of the superior cognitive capacities of humans but also assigns all human persons an equal fundamental moral status regardless of their differing cognitive capacities. More broadly posed, the problem is to specify moral principles that yield intuitively satisfactory implications for the treatment of human individuals and other individual animals given that cognitive capacities differ across species and individuals. A search for a resolution of the Singer problem leads to disappointing results. (shrink)

Our folk epistemology says that if someone knows that P and tells you that P, then, given the absence of defeaters, if you believe what they tell you, you will come to know that P as well. A speaker's knowledge that P is then, for the most part, enough for a hearer to come to know that P. But there are counterexamples to this principle: testimonial knowledge does not always transfer from the speaker to the hearer. Why should that be (...) so? Because testimonial knowledge arises through the flow of information--from conclusive grounds--from the speaker through the speaker's assertion to the hearer's state of comprehension as of the speaker's assertion. A speaker's belief can be based on conclusive grounds, but the speaker's assertion may fail to provide conclusive grounds to the hearer. Then the hearer won't acquire knowledge, even from a knowledgeable speaker. Knowledge from testimony then works more like knowledge through perception. But wait, you say, that can't be so because testimony involves free will but perception does not. The essay ends with a broadly Hume inspired reply to this objection. (shrink)

A standard line in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that physical theories are equivalent only when they agree on their empirical content, where this empirical content is often understood as being encoded in the equations of motion of those theories. In this article, we question whether it is indeed the case that the empirical content of a theory is exhausted by its equations of motion, showing that (for example) considerations of boundary conditions play a key role in the empirical (...) equivalence (or otherwise) of theories. Having argued for this, we show that philosophical claims made by Weatherall (2016) that electromagnetism in the Faraday tensor formalism is equivalent to electromagnetism in the vector potential formalism, and by Knox (2011) that general relativity is equivalent to teleparallel gravity, can both be called into question. We then show that properly considering the role of boundary conditions in theory structure can potentially restore these claims of equivalence and close with some remarks on the pragmatics of adjudications on theory identity. (shrink)

As there is currently a neo-Aristotelian revival currently taking place within contemporary metaphysics and dispositions, or causal powers are now being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, more attention is beginning to be paid to a central Aristotelian concern: the metaphysics of substantial unity, and the doctrine of hylomorphism. In this paper, I distinguish two strands of hylomorphism present in the contemporary literature and argue that not only does each engender unique conceptual difficulties, but neither adequately captures the (...) metaphysics of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Thus both strands of contemporary hylomorphism, I argue, fundamentally misunderstand what substantial unity amounts to in the hylomorphic framework – namely, the metaphysical inseparability of matter and form. (shrink)

The leading models of disability struggle to fully encompass all aspects of “disability.” This difficulty arises, the author argues, because the models fundamentally misunderstand the nature of disability. Current theoretical approaches to disability can be understood as “nounal,” in that they understand disability as a thing that is caused or embodied. In contrast, this paper presents an adverbial perspective on disability, which shows that disability is experienced as a personally irremediable impediment to daily-living tasks or goals-like-ours. The picture theory of (...) disability technically constitutes a species of relational approach because its analysis references the interplay between an individual and their environment; it differs from other relational accounts, however, by interpreting disability as a certain kind of negative experience—rather than a function of that relationship. This purely descriptive theory makes no normative claims about disability and operates as both a mechanism for the evaluation of the experience of disability and a heuristic device for the proper interpretation of disability. When disability is reframed in this way, the theory offers a particularist perspective which shows if, when, where, and how disability is experienced. (shrink)

Though the realm of biology has long been under the philosophical rule of the mechanistic magisterium, recent years have seen a surprisingly steady rise in the usurping prowess of process ontology. According to its proponents, theoretical advances in the contemporary science of evo-devo have afforded that ontology a particularly powerful claim to the throne: in that increasingly empirically confirmed discipline, emergently autonomous, higher-order entities are the reigning explanantia. If we are to accept the election of evo-devo as our best conceptualisation (...) of the biological realm with metaphysical rigour, must we depose our mechanistic ontology for failing to properly “carve at the joints” of organisms? In this paper, I challenge the legitimacy of that claim: not only can the theoretical benefits offered by a process ontology be had without it, they cannot be sufficiently grounded without the metaphysical underpinning of the very mechanisms which processes purport to replace. The biological realm, I argue, remains one best understood as under the governance of mechanistic principles. (shrink)

The advent of contemporary evolutionary theory ushered in the eventual decline of Aristotelian Essentialism (Æ) – for it is widely assumed that essence does not, and cannot have any proper place in the age of evolution. This paper argues that this assumption is a mistake: if Æ can be suitably evolved, it need not face extinction. In it, I claim that if that theory’s fundamental ontology consists of dispositional properties, and if its characteristic metaphysical machinery is interpreted within the framework (...) of contemporary evolutionary developmental biology, an evolved essentialism is available. The reformulated theory of Æ offered in this paper not only fails to fall prey to the typical collection of criticisms, but is also independently both theoretically and empirically plausible. The paper contends that, properly understood, essence belongs in the age of evolution. (shrink)

Although they are continually compositionally reconstituted and reconfigured, organisms nonetheless persist as ontologically unified beings over time – but in virtue of what? A common answer is: in virtue of their continued possession of the capacity for morphological invariance which persists through, and in spite of, their mereological alteration. While we acknowledge that organisms‟ capacity for the “stability of form” – homeostasis - is an important aspect of their diachronic unity, we argue that this capacity is derived from, and grounded (...) in a more primitive one – namely, the homeodynamic capacity for the “specified variation of form”. In introducing a novel type of causal power – a „structural power‟ – we claim that it is the persistence of their dynamic potential to produce a specified series of structurally adaptive morphologies which grounds organisms‟ privileged status as metaphysically “one over many” over time. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss whether different interpretations of the ‘aim’ of belief—both the teleological and normative interpretations—have the resources to explain certain descriptive and normative features of suspended belief (suspension). I argue that, despite the recent efforts of theorists to extend these theories to account for suspension, they ultimately fail. The implication is that we must either develop alternative theories of belief that can account for suspension, or we must abandon the assumption that these theories ought to be able (...) to account for suspension. To close, I briefly consider some of the reasons we have in favour of pursing each of these options, and I suggest that it is worth exploring the possibility that suspension is best understood as its own attitude, independently of theories of belief’s ‘aim’. (shrink)

Evolutionary developmental biology represents a paradigm shift in the understanding of the ontogenesis and evolutionary progression of the denizens of the natural world. Given the empirical successes of the evo-devo framework, and its now widespread acceptance, a timely and important task for the philosophy of biology is to critically discern the ontological commitments of that framework and assess whether and to what extent our current metaphysical models are able to accommodate them. In this paper, I argue that one particular model (...) is a natural fit: an ontology of dispositional properties coherently and adequately captures the crucial casual-cum-explanatory role that the fundamental elements of evo-devo play within that framework. (shrink)

Abstract Do the central aims of epistemology, like those of moral philosophy, require that we designate some important place for those concepts located between the thin-normative and the non-normative? Put another way, does epistemology need "thick" evaluative concepts and with what do they contrast? There are inveterate traditions in analytic epistemology which, having legitimized a certain way of viewing the nature and scope of epistemology's subject matter, give this question a negative verdict; further, they have carried with them a tacit (...) commitment to what we argue to be an epistemic analogue of the reductionistic centralist thesis which Bernard Williams, in our view, successfully repudiates in ethics. In this essay, we challenge the epistemic analogue of the traditional but mistaken thesis. In offering an alternative to it which provides a comfortable home for the epistemic normativity which attends thick evaluative concepts, we align ourselves with what has been recently called the Value Turn in epistemology. From this perspective, we defend that, contrary to tradition, as influenced by centralist assumptions, epistemology does need thick evaluative concepts. Further, the sort of theories that will be able to give thick evaluative concepts an irreducible role in both belief and agent evaluation are adequately social epistemologies. What loosely refer to as second-wave of virtue epistemology is the widespread interest to provide a comfortable home for the role of thick normativity, as it is connected both with epistemic evaluation, and guidance. We recognize that, in breaking from centralism, there is a worry that a resulting anti-centralist theory will be reductionistic in the other direction, making the thick primary. We contend however that second-wave virtue epistemologies take different sources of social and epistemic value into account; they seek the 'right thickness' to ride with conception of epistemology and a field which due in part to virtue theory's resurgence, is today normative, diverse and expansive than was the traditional set of problems from which it emerged. (shrink)

In this volume, leading philosophers of psychiatry examine psychiatric classification systems, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, asking whether current systems are sufficient for effective diagnosis, treatment, and research. Doing so, they take up the question of whether mental disorders are natural kinds, grounded in something in the outside world. Psychiatric categories based on natural kinds should group phenomena in such a way that they are subject to the same type of causal explanations and respond similarly to (...) the same type of causal interventions. When these categories do not evince such groupings, there is reason to revise existing classifications. The contributors all question current psychiatric classifications systems and the assumptions on which they are based. They differ, however, as to why and to what extent the categories are inadequate and how to address the problem. Topics discussed include taxometric methods for identifying natural kinds, the error and bias inherent in DSM categories, and the complexities involved in classifying such specific mental disorders as "oppositional defiance disorder" and pathological gambling. -/- Contributors George Graham, Nick Haslam, Allan Horwitz, Harold Kincaid, Dominic Murphy, Jeffrey Poland, Nancy Nyquist Potter, Don Ross, Dan Stein, Jacqueline Sullivan, Serife Tekin, Peter Zachar. (shrink)

Although contemporary metaphysics has recently undergone a neo-Aristotelian revival wherein dispositions, or capacities are now commonplace in empirically grounded ontologies, being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, a central Aristotelian concept has yet to be given serious attention – the doctrine of hylomorphism. The reason for this is clear: while the Aristotelian ontological distinction between actuality and potentiality has proven to be a fruitful conceptual framework with which to model the operation of the natural world, the distinction between (...) form and matter has yet to similarly earn its keep. In this chapter, I offer a first step toward showing that the hylomorphic framework is up to that task. To do so, I return to the birthplace of that doctrine - the biological realm. Utilising recent advances in developmental biology, I argue that the hylomorphic framework is an empirically adequate and conceptually rich explanatory schema with which to model the nature of organisms. (shrink)

Dispositional properties are often referred to as ‘causal powers’, but what does dispositional causation amount to? Any viable theory must account for two fundamental aspects of the metaphysics of causation – the causal complexity and context sensitivity of causal interactions. The theory of mutual manifestations attempts to do so by locating the complexity and context sensitivity within the nature of dispositions themselves. But is this theory an acceptable first step towards a viable theory of dispositional causation? This paper argues that (...) the reconceptualization that the theory entails comes at too high a price, and is an unnecessary step in the wrong direction: these two central aspects concerning the metaphysics of causation can and should be accounted for in a dispositional account of causation without it. (shrink)

Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) names a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism, coherentism, reliabilism, and contextualism. While proponents of SAE don’t agree about how to define naturalized epistemology, most agree that a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology can’t work. For the purposes of this paper, we will suppose that a naturalistic theory of epistemology takes as its core, as its starting-point, (...) an empirical theory. The standard argument against naturalistic approaches to epistemology is that empirical theories are essentially descriptive, while epistemology is essentially prescriptive, and a descriptive theory cannot yield normative, evaluative prescriptions. In short, naturalistic theories cannot overcome the is-ought divide. Our main goal in this paper is to show that the standard argument against naturalized epistemology has it almost exactly backwards. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to offer support for the substance view of persons, the philosophical anthropology defended by Patrick Lee in his essay. In order to accomplish this the author presents a brief definition of the substance view; argues that the substance view has more explanatory power in accounting for why we believe that human persons are intrinsically valuable even when they are not functioning as such, why human persons remain identical to themselves over time, and why it (...) follows from these points that the unborn are human persons; and responds to two arguments that attempt to establish the claim that the early human being is not a unified substance until at least fourteen days after conception. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend teleological theories of belief against the exclusivity objection. I argue that despite the exclusive influence of truth in doxastic deliberation, multiple epistemic aims interact when we consider what to believe. This is apparent when we focus on the processes involved in specific instances (or concrete cases) of doxastic deliberation, such that the propositions under consideration are specified. First, I out- line a general schema for weighing aims. Second, I discuss recent attempts to defend the teleological (...) position in relation to this schema. And third, I develop and defend my proposal that multiple epistemic aims interact in doxastic deliberation—a possibility which, as of yet, has received no serious attention in the literature. (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue that (...) both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

According to the proponents of Developmental Systems Theory and the Causal Parity Thesis, the privileging of the genome as “first among equals” with respect to the development of phenotypic traits is more a reflection of our own heuristic prejudice than of ontology - the underlying causal structures responsible for that specified development no more single out the genome as primary than they do other broadly “environmental” factors. Parting with the methodology of the popular responses to the Thesis, this paper offers (...) a novel criterion for ‘causal primacy’, one that is grounded in the ontology of the unique causal role of dispositional properties. This paper argues that, if the genome is conceptualised as realising dispositional properties that are “directed toward” phenotypic traits, the parity of ‘causal roles’ between genetic and extra-genetic factors is no longer apparent, and further, that the causal primacy of the genome is both plausible and defensible. (shrink)

Immoralists hold that in at least some cases, moral fl aws in artworks can increase their aesthetic value. They deny what I call the valence constraint: the view that any effect that an artwork’s moral value has on its aesthetic merit must have the same valence. The immoralist offers three arguments against the valence constraint. In this paper I argue that these arguments fail, and that this failure reveals something deep and interesting about the relationship between cognitive and moral value. (...) In the fi nal section I offer a positive argument for the valence constraint. (shrink)

Abstract In light of the complexity of unfolding disasters, the diversity of rapidly evolving events, the enormous amount of generated information, and the huge pool of casualties, emergency responders (ERs) may be overwhelmed and in consequence poor decisions may be made. In fact, the possibility of transporting the wounded victims to one of several hospitals and the dynamic changes in healthcare resource availability make the decision process more complex. To tackle this problem, we propose a multicriteria decision support service, based (...) on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, that aims to avoid overcrowding and outpacing the capacity of a hospital to effectively provide the best care to victims by finding out the most appropriate hospital that meets the victims’ needs. The proposed approach searches for the most appropriate healthcare institution that can effectively deal with the victims’ needs by considering the availability of the needed resources in the hospital, the victim’s wait time to receive the healthcare, and the transfer time that represents the hospital proximity to the disaster site. The evaluation and validation results showed that the assignment of hospitals was done successfully considering the needs of each victim and without overwhelming any single hospital. (shrink)

According to dispositionalism, de re modality is grounded in the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties. Those properties are able to serve as the ground of de re modal truths, it is said, because they bear a special relation to counterfactual conditionals, one of truthmaking. However, because dispositionalism purports to ground de re modality only on the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties, it had better be the case that they do not play that truthmaking role merely in virtue of their being (...) embedded in some particular, extrinsic causal context. This paper examines a recent argument against dispositionalism that purports to show that the intrinsicality of that relation cannot be maintained, due to the ceteris paribus nature of the counterfactuals that dispositions make-true. When two prominent responses are examined, both are found wanting: at best, they require unjustified special pleading, and at worst, they amount to little more than ad hoc conceptual trickery. (shrink)

Since the human genome was decoded, great emphasis has been placed on the unique, personal nature of the genome, along with the benefits that personalized medicine can bring to individuals and the importance of safeguarding genetic privacy. As a result, an equally important aspect of the human genome – its common nature – has been underappreciated and underrepresented in the ethics literature and policy dialogue surrounding genetics and genomics. This article will argue that, just as the personal nature of the (...) genome has been used to reinforce individual rights and justify important privacy protections, so too the common nature of the genome can be employed to support protections of the genome at a population level and policies designed to promote the public's wellbeing. In order for public health officials to have the authority to develop genetics policies for the sake of the public good, the genome must have not only a common, but also a public, dimension. This article contends that DNA carries a public dimension through the use of two conceptual frameworks: the common heritage framework and the common resource framework. Both frameworks establish a public interest in the human genome, but the CH framework can be used to justify policies aimed at preserving and protecting the genome, while the CR framework can be employed to justify policies for utilizing the genome for the public benefit. A variety of possible policy implications are discussed, with special attention paid to the use of large-scale genomics databases for public health research. (shrink)

Aesthetic internalism claims a link between judgement and motivation: aesthetic judgements bring with them motivations to act in characteristic ways. Critics object that there is a difference between merely liking something and judging it to be aesthetically good, and that it is our likings, not our aesthetic judgements, that motivate us. This paper develops a version of aesthetic internalism that can respond to this criticism. Wholehearted aesthetic judgements are characterized by stability, attention, and motivation. Making such judgements is an important (...) part of a good life, and so at least some aesthetic judgements are motivating. So we have reason to think that this version of aesthetic internalism is true. This paper defends wholehearted aesthetic internalism against objections, and assesses an argument from aesthetic internalism to aesthetic non-cognitivism. While wholehearted aesthetic internalism can only offer qualified support to non-cognitivism, it nonetheless offers a number of fruitful avenues for further work. (shrink)

Strategic Reliabilism is a framework that yields relative epistemic evaluations of belief-producing cognitive processes. It is a theory of cognitive excellence, or more colloquially, a theory of reasoning excellence (where 'reasoning' is understood very broadly as any sort of cognitive process for coming to judgments or beliefs). First introduced in our book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (henceforth EPHJ), the basic idea behind SR is that epistemically excellent reasoning is efficient reasoning that leads in a robustly reliable fashion (...) to significant, true beliefs. It differs from most contemporary epistemological theories in two ways. First, it is not a theory of justification or knowledge – a theory of epistemically worthy belief. Strategic Reliabilism is a theory of epistemically worthy ways of forming beliefs. And second, Strategic Reliabilism does not attempt to account for an epistemological property that is assumed to be faithfully reflected in the epistemic judgments and intuitions of philosophers. If SR makes recommendations that accord with our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions, great. If not, then so much the worse for our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions. (shrink)

I explore the claim that “fictive imagining” – imagining what it is like to be a character – can be morally dangerous. In particular, I consider the controversy over William Styron’s imagining the revolutionary protagonist in his Confessions of Nat Turner. I employ Ted Cohen’s model of fictive imagining to argue, following a generally Kantian line of thought, that fictive imagining can be dangerous if one has the wrong motives. After considering several possible motives, I argue that only internally directed (...) motives can satisfy the moral concern. Finally, I suggest that when one has the right motives, fictive imagining is morally praiseworthy since it improves one’s ability to imagine the lives of others. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify training for the performance of the medical staff and its role in developing the quality of health care in Al-Shifa Medical Complex in the southern Palestinian governorates. , and technicians) of 2150 employees, a stratified random sample of 330 employees was selected, the questionnaire was distributed to them, and 302 questionnaires were retrieved, with a rate of 91.5%. One of the most important results of the study was the existence of a statistically significant effect of (...) training on the development of health care quality. One of the most important recommendations of the study was to provide more suitable opportunities to create a climate for the professional growth of employees, and pay more attention to the expansion of programs and training courses that are in line with the requirements of administrative empowerment. (shrink)

There are kinds of dialogue that support social justice and others that do the reverse. The kinds of dialogue that support social justice require that anger be bracketed and that hiding in safe spaces be eschewed. All illegitimate ad hominem/ad feminem attacks are ruled out from the get-go. No dialogical contribution can be down-graded on account of the communicator’s gender, race, or religion. As well, this communicative approach unapologetically privileges reason in full view of theories and strategies that might seek (...) to undermine reasoning as just another illegitimate form of power. On the more positive side, it is argued in this paper that social justice dialogue will be enhanced by a kind of “communicative upgrading,” which amplifies “person perception,” foregrounds the impersonal forces within our common social spaces rather than the “baddies” within, and orients the dialogical trajectory toward the future rather than the past. Finally, it is argued in this paper that educators have a pressing responsibility to guide their students through social justice dialogue so that their speech contributes to the amelioration of injustice, rather than rendering the terrain more treacherous. (shrink)

Formal clinical trials of pig-to-human organ transplant—known as xenotransplantation—may begin this decade, with the first trials likely to consist of either adult renal transplants or pediatric cardiac transplant patients. Xenotransplantation as a systematic scientific study only reaches back to the latter half of the 20th century, with episodic xenotransplantation events occurring prior to that. As the science of xenotransplantation has progressed in the 20th and 21st centuries, the public's knowledge of the potential therapy has also increased. With this, there have (...) been shifting ethical stances toward xenotransplantation in key areas, such as religious and public viewpoints towards xenotransplantation, animal rights, and public health concerns. This review provides a historical–ethical account of xenotransplantation and details if or how viewpoints have shifted over time. (shrink)

In identifying intrinsic molecular chance and extrinsic adaptive pressures as the only causally relevant factors in the process of evolution, the theoretical perspective of the Modern Synthesis had a major impact on the perceived tenability of an ontology of dispositional properties. However, since the late 1970s, an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have challenged the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of this “chance alone, extrinsic only” understanding of evolutionary change. Because morphological studies of homology, convergence, and teratology have revealed a space (...) of possible forms and phylogenetic trajectories that is considerably more restricted than expected, evo-devo has focused on the causal contribution of intrinsic developmental processes to the course of evolution. Evo-devo’s investigation into the developmental structure of the modality of morphology – including both the possibility and impossibility of organismal form – has led to the utilisation of a number of dispositional concepts that emphasise the tendency of the evolutionary process to change along certain routes. In this sense, and in contrast to the perspective of the Modern Synthesis, evo-devo can be described as a “science of dispositions.” This chapter discusses the recent philosophical literature on dispositional properties in evo-devo, exploring debates about both the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of the central dispositional concepts utilised in contemporary evo-devo and addressing the epistemological question of how dispositional properties challenge existing explanatory models in evolutionary biology. (shrink)

The topic of this essay is how non-realistic novels challenge our philosophical understanding of the moral significance of literature. I consider just one case: Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I argue that standard philosophical views, based as they are on realistic models of literature, fail to capture the moral significance of this work. I show that Catch-22 succeeds morally because of the ways it resists using standard realistic techniques, and suggest that philosophical discussion of ethics and literature must be pluralistic if it (...) is to include all morally salient literature, and not just novels in the “Great Tradition” and their ilk. (shrink)

This paper considers two reasons that might support Russell’s choice of a ramified-type theory over a simple-type theory. The first reason is the existence of purported paradoxes that can be formulated in any simple-type language, including an argument that Russell considered in 1903. These arguments depend on certain converse-compositional principles. When we take account of Russell’s doctrine that a propositional function is not a constituent of its values, these principles turn out to be too implausible to make these arguments troubling. (...) The second reason is conditional on a substitutional interpretation of quantification over types other than that of individuals. This reason stands up to investigation: a simple-type language will not sustain such an interpretation, but a ramified-type language will. And there is evidence that Russell was tacitly inclined towards such an interpretation. A strong construal of that interpretation opens a way to make sense of Russell’s simultaneous repudiation of propositions and his willingness to quantify over them. But that way runs into trouble with Russell’s commitment to the finitude of human understanding. (shrink)

A moralised conception of freedom is based on a normative theory. Understanding it therefore requires an analysis of this theory. In this paper, I show how republican freedom as non-domination is moralised, and why analysing this concept therefore involves identifying the basic components of the republican theory of justice. One of these components is the non-moralised pure negative conception of freedom as non-interference. Republicans therefore cannot keep insisting that their freedom concept conflicts with, and is superior to, this more basic (...) concept. I demonstrate how we can use pure negative freedom to formulate the republican theory more precisely. This exercise is more fruitful than the common focus on the alleged conflict between the two freedom concepts. (shrink)