A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

What might early Buddhist teachings offer neuroscience and how might neuroscience inform contemporary Buddhism? Both early Buddhist teachings and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the conditioning of our cognitive apparatus and brain plays a role in agency that may be either efficacious or non-efficacious. Both consider internal time to play a central role in the efficacy of agency. Buddhism offers an approach that promises to increase the efficacy of agency. This approach is found in five early Buddhist teachings that are re-interpreted (...) here with a view to explaining how they might be understood as a dynamic basis for ‘participatory will’ in the context of existing free will debates and the neuroscientific work of Patrick Haggard (et al.). These perspectives offer Buddhism and neuroscience a basis for informing each other as the shared themes of: (1) cognition is dynamic and complex/aggregate based, (2) being dynamic, cognition lacks a fixed basis of efficacy, and (3) efficacy of cognition may be achieved by an understanding of the concept of dynamic: as harmony and efficiency and by means of Buddha-warranted processes that involve internal time. (shrink)

We apply the analysis that we have developed over the course of several publications on the significance of ignorance for decision-making, especially in surrogate (and, thus, in political) contexts, to political decision-making, such as it has been, during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Scheall 2019; Crutchfield and Scheall 2019; Scheall and Crutchfield 2020; Scheall 2020). Policy responses to the coronavirus constitute a case study of the problem of policymaker ignorance. We argue that political responses to the virus cannot be (...) explained by assuming that the interests of policymakers were at loggerheads with those of their constituents at the beginning of the crisis. In order to explain the responses of policymakers, it is necessary to recognize the effects of relevant ignorance on their incentives to pursue different policy objectives. We discuss the knowledge that policymakers required at the start of the pandemic in order to deliberately realize the goal of limiting overall human suffering and the spontaneous forces that could have facilitated the realization of this goal. The problem of policymaker ignorance implies that policymakers have not earnestly pursued the goal of limiting overall suffering due to the novel coronavirus, but have repeatedly resorted to the pursuit of relatively less epistemically burdensome goals. The problem of policymaker ignorance explains why policymakers have focused primarily on limiting one kind of suffering – physical suffering due to the virus – and have mostly ignored related kinds of suffering, i.e., the economic, sociological, psychological, and physical suffering caused by policies to limit physical suffering from the virus. The problem of policymaker ignorance also helps to explain why policymakers relied on the relatively blunt instrument of economic lockdown rather than more focused protection policies, and why they continue to resort to lockdowns, despite the emerging scientific evidence of their ineffectiveness at mitigating physical suffering due to the virus. (shrink)

What might early Buddhist teachings offer neuroscience and how might neuroscience inform contemporary Buddhism? Both early Buddhist teachings and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the conditioning of our cognitive apparatus and brain plays a role in agency that may be either efficacious or non-efficacious. Both consider internal time to play a central role in the efficacy of agency. Buddhism offers an approach that promises to increase the efficacy of agency. This approach is found in five early Buddhist teachings that are re-interpreted (...) here with a view to explaining how they might be understood as a dynamic basis for ‘participatory will’ in the context of existing free will debates and the neuroscientific work of Patrick Haggard. These perspectives offer Buddhism and neuroscience a basis for informing each other as the shared themes of: cognition is dynamic and complex/aggregate based, being dynamic, cognition lacks a fixed basis of efficacy, and efficacy of cognition may be achieved by an understanding of the concept of dynamic: as harmony and efficiency and by means of Buddha-warranted processes that involve internal time. (shrink)

The author advocates for teaching about varieties of ignorance with a psychoanalytic sensibility as one strategy with which to engage the emotional investments that sustain apathy and the ignorant refusal to care in this new era of suffering and spectatorship. Ignorance, here conceived, is complex, far from consisting only in some passive lack of knowledge. It is understood multidimensionally, as activity, rarely innocent, always inevitable, and entirely ineradicable; it is a powerful agent in the maintenance of oppression, but (...) it is also an important resource on which we can draw to promote curiosity and less defensive encounters with difficult knowledge and different Others. In diagnosing different forms of ignorance, we can distinguish between the varieties that are culturally produced and disseminated for profit from those forms which might serve as impetus for investigation. (shrink)

The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be (...) ignorant with respect to a question if the question is sound. (shrink)

Willful ignorance is an important concept in criminal law and jurisprudence, though it has not received much discussion in philosophy. When it is mentioned, however, it is regularly assumed to be a kind of self-deception. In this article I will argue that self-deception and willful ignorance are distinct psychological kinds. First, some examples of willful ignorance are presented and discussed, and an analysis of the phenomenon is developed. Then it is shown that current theories of self-deception give (...) no support to the idea that willful ignorance is a kind of self-deception. Afterwards an independent argument is adduced for excluding willful ignorance from this category. The crucial differences between the two phenomena are explored, as are the reasons why they are so easily conflated. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss various hard cases that an account of moral ignorance should be able to deal with: ancient slave holders, Susan Wolf’s JoJo, psychopaths such as Robert Harris, and finally, moral outliers. All these agents are ignorant, but it is not at all clear that they are blameless on account of their ignorance. I argue that the discussion of this issue in recent literature has missed the complexities of these cases by focusing on the question (...) of epistemic fault. It is not clear that all blameworthy morally ignorant agents have committed an epistemic fault. There are other important issues that pull us in various directions: moral capacity, bad will, and formative circumstances. I argue that bad will is what is crucial, and moral ignorance itself can be a form of bad will. I argue that we should distinguish between two sorts of bad will, and correspondingly, two sorts of blameworthiness. Ordinary blameworthiness, requires moral knowledge, and is based on akratic action. The other kind of blameworthiness, objective blameworthiness, applies when the agent is morally ignorant, and when this indicates bad will. Objective blameworthiness can be undermined by unfortunate formative circumstances. (shrink)

The goal of the present paper is to construct a formal explication of the pluralistic ignorance explanation of the bystander effect. The social dynamics leading to inaction is presented, decomposed, and modeled using dynamic epistemic logic augmented with ‘transition rules’ able to characterize agent behavior. Three agent types are defined: First Responders who intervene given belief of accident; City Dwellers, capturing ‘apathetic urban residents’ and Hesitators, who observe others when in doubt, basing subsequent decision on social proof. It is (...) shown how groups of the latter may end in a state of pluralistic ignorance leading to inaction. Sequential models for each agent type are specified, and their results compared to empirical studies. It is concluded that only the Hesitator model produces reasonable results. (shrink)

Feminist decolonial scholars have called for disengaging from the current system built on a hierarchical logic of race and gender central to modern, colonial thinking. They have looked to worlds outside the modern system to lead us out of current unjust practices harming both humans and the environment. Although policymaking may be seen as the stronghold of the current political agenda and of the structures that have led to the climate crisis, we argue that climate policies too, are also crucial (...) for rethinking and transforming societies. Our examination of climate adaptation policies in Sweden and the literature from Europe shows how policy documents ignore and unknow the oppressive intersections of gender and power despite the knowledge that exists on these issues in the public domain. Drawing on the tools of agnotology, we examine how this is achieved by strategies of ‘denial, dismissal, diversion and displacement.’ Building on feminist post and decolonial scholarship, we make explicit the gendered and racial hierarchies and dichotomies underpinning these policy documents. At the same time, we bring attention to the nuances in the policy documents we study and look for the openings that might be used to bring about transformation by making these hierarchies explicit and calling them into question. We argue that a transformation is possible through a feminist post and decolonial intervention, even in policymaking otherwise ignorant of culture, values and the colonial histories that have produced contemporary society. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that a person’s moral judgments (about both their own and others’ actions) are constrained by the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance and, thus, that such judgments are determined in the first instance by the person’s epistemic circumstances. It has been argued, in other words, that the epistemic is logically prior to other normative (e.g., ethical, prudential, pecuniary) considerations in human decision-making, that these other normative considerations figure in decision-making only after (logically and (...) temporally) relevant ignorance has constrained the decision-maker’s menu of options. If this is right, then a person’s moral judgments in some set of circumstances should vary with their knowledge and ignorance of these circumstances. In this study, we test the hypothesis of the logical priority of the epistemic. We describe two experiments in which subjects’ knowledge and ignorance of relevant consequences were manipulated. In the second experiment, we also compared the effect of ignorance on moral judgments with that of personal force, a factor previously shown to influence moral judgments. We found broad empirical support for the armchair arguments that epistemic considerations are logically prior to normative considerations. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that a person’s moral judgments (about both their own and others’ actions) are constrained by the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance and, thus, that such judgments are determined in the first instance by the person’s epistemic circumstances. It has been argued, in other words, that the epistemic is logically prior to other normative (e.g., ethical, prudential, pecuniary) considerations in human decision-making, that these other normative considerations figure in decision-making only after (logically and (...) temporally) relevant ignorance has constrained the decision-maker’s menu of options. If this is right, then a person’s moral judgments in some set of circumstances should vary with their knowledge and ignorance of these circumstances. In this study, we test the hypothesis of the logical priority of the epistemic. We describe two experiments in which subjects’ knowledge and ignorance of relevant consequences were manipulated. In the second experiment, we also compared the effect of ignorance on moral judgments with that of personal force, a factor previously shown to influence moral judgments. We found broad empirical support for the armchair arguments that epistemic considerations are logically prior to normative considerations. (shrink)

Public opinion has it that ethics should be concerned with studying and providing precise and reliable rules of conduct. This view is based in a long philosophical tradition which begins with the Stoics and continues at least to Kant; it is, however, a false view. There are good reasons to turn our attention to these aspects of moral thinking which refer to and emphasize the element of risk and uncertainty. In the article I briefly discuss two of such reasons: the (...) problem of moral luck and the problem of action based on ignorance. Consideration of these two problems leads to the conclusion that the most tricky element in moral thinking is the firm belief of the subject in the truth of the premises on which they base their actions and in the irrelevance of external factors to the assessment of their deeds. In this light I argue that the basic requirement for a moral justification of a particular action is not its conformity to a certain set of rules but the subject’s critical reflection on their course of action. Indeed, what turns an attitude into a moral attitude is an amoral, epistemological factor: criticism and openness to uncertainty. (shrink)

The paper examines one of the considerations that determines the extent to which policymakers pursue the objec- tives demanded by constituents. The nature and extent of their ignorance serve to determine the incentives confronted by policymakers to pursue their constituents’ demands. The paper also considers several other consequences of policymaker ig- norance and its relationship to expert failure.

When moral philosophers study ignorance, their efforts are almost exclusively confined to its exculpatory and blameworthy aspects. Unfortunately, though, this trend overlooks that certain kinds of propositional ignorance, namely of the personal costs and benefits of altruistic actions, can indirectly incentivize those actions. Humans require cooperation from others to survive, and that can be facilitated by a good reputation. One avenue to a good reputation is helping others, sticking to moral principles, and so forth, without calculating the personal (...) costs of doing so, e.g., saving someone from a burning building without calculating how personally costly or beneficial it would be. These actions are indirect moral benefits (partly) resulting from that kind of propositional ignorance. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to a fundamental problem for a version of the tracing strategy defended by a number of theorists in the current literature (Rosen 2004, Fischer and Tognazzini 2009). I argue that versions of the tracing strategy that require reasonable foreseeability are in tension with the view that blameless ignorance excuses. A stronger version of the tracing strategy is consistent with the view that blameless ignorance excuses and is therefore preferable for those tracing theorists who wish (...) to continue maintaining that it does. (shrink)

Given the significant exculpatory power that ignorance has when it comes to moral, legal, and epistemic transgressions, it is important to have an accurate understanding of the concept of ignorance. According to the Standard View of factual ignorance, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not know that p, while on the New View, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not truly believe that p. On their own though, neither of these accounts (...) explains how ignorance can often be a degreed notion—how we can sometimes be slightly ignorant, quite ignorant, or completely ignorant that p. In this paper, I will argue that there is a route for advocates of the Standard View and the New View to accommodate the gradability of ignorance. On the view I defend, ‘ignorant’ picks out everyone that is ignorant to some degree, making it possible that ignorance can be both degreed and characterized as a lack of knowledge or true belief. Even though we can be ignorant to a greater or lesser extent, the only way to avoid being ignorant that p is to know or truly believe. (shrink)

As is the case in other situations of deep uncertainty, the unknowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic have aroused a great deal of attention in the media. Drawing insights both from mediatization theory and ignorance studies, we discuss the coverage of the AstraZeneca vaccine controversies to develop a new concept that we call the mediatization of ignorance. In doing so, we conceptualize the procedure through which unknowns become mediatized as a three-step process that results from a combination (...) of logics from the areas of politics, health, and science/industry. Moreover, we argue that the mediatization of ignorance may have promoted vaccine hesitancy at a moment when vaccination was crucial for addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude by suggesting the need to explore in further detail the role that ignorance plays not only in the management of the COVID-19 crisis but also in different areas of society. (shrink)

Much of the discussion of set-theoretic independence, and whether or not we could legitimately expand our foundational theory, concerns how we could possibly come to know the truth value of independent sentences. This paper pursues a slightly different tack, examining how we are ignorant of issues surrounding their truth. We argue that a study of how we are ignorant reveals a need for an understanding of set-theoretic explanation and motivates a pluralism concerning the adoption of foundational theory.

To reconcile the standard possible worlds model of knowledge with the intuition that ordinary agents fall far short of logical omniscience, a Stalnakerian strategy appeals to two components. The first is the idea that mathematical and logical knowledge is at bottom metalinguistic knowledge. The second is the idea that non-ideal minds are often fragmented. In this paper, we investigate this Stalnakerian reconciliation strategy and argue, ultimately, that it fails. We are not the first to complain about the Stalnakerian strategy. But (...) in contrast to existing complaints, we want to cause trouble for the strategy directly on its home turf. That is, we will advance our objection while granting both the plausibility of the fragmentation component—save for an extreme version of it—and that of the metalinguistic component. Once our central objection to the Stalnakerian strategy is in place, we will show how it negatively affects Adam Elga and Augustín Rayo’s recent attempt to apply the Stalnakerian strategy in the context of Bayesian decision theory. (shrink)

Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid to group-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher order group-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemic obligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) (...) that our epistemic obligations concern not just our own knowledge and beliefs but those of others, too and (2) that our epistemic obligations can be held collectively where the epistemic tasks cannot be performed by individuals acting in isolation, for example, when we are required to produce joint epistemic goods. (shrink)

Can moral ignorance excuse? This chapter argues that philosophical debate of this question has been based on a mistaken assumption: namely that excuses are all-or-nothing affairs; to have an excuse is to be blameless. The chapter argues that we should reject this assumption. Excuses are not binary but gradable: they can be weaker or stronger, mitigating blame to greater or lesser extent. This chapter explores the notions of strength of excuses, blame miti- gation and the relationship between excuses and (...) moral responsibility. These ideas open up some principled middle-ground between the two positions staked out in the literature. Moral ignorance may well excuse but it does not exculpate. (shrink)

Recent philosophical secondary literature on white ignorance – a concept most famously developed by the late philosopher Charles W. Mills – suggests that white ignorance is, one way or another, a non-structural phenomenon. I analyse two such readings, the agential view and the cognitivist view. I argue that they misinterpret Mills’ work by (among other things) committing a kind of structural erasure, and one which implies that Mills’ account cannot capture, for example, cases where white ignorance (and (...) white racial domination) involves historical erasure, especially when perpetrated by sociopolitical institutions. This is particularly salient in cases such as the recent movement against anti-racist education, now widely conflated with critical race theory, in the United States and United Kingdom, which I offer as a brief case study. (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to investigate how professionals learn from varying experiences with errors in health-care digitalization and develop and use negative knowledge and digital ignorance in efforts to improve digitalized health care. Design/methodology/approach. A two-year qualitative field study was conducted in the context of a public health-care organization working with digital patient communication. The data consisted of participant observation, semistructured interviews and document data. Inductive coding and a theoretically informed generation of themes were applied. Findings. (...) The findings show that both health-care and digital communication professionals learn through experiences with digital “rule-” and “knowledge-based” errors in patient communication and develop negative knowledge and awareness of digital ignorance. In their joint efforts, they use negative knowledge to “bend the rules” and to explore digital ignorance in efforts to improve patient communication. Originality/value. This study provides insight into the importance of collaboration between professionals with varying experience of errors in digitalizing patient communication. Such collaboration is required to acknowledge own shortcomings and create complementary negative knowledge to improve digital patient communication. This is particularly important when working with innovative digitalization in health care. (shrink)

One typical aim of responsibilist virtue epistemology is to employ the notion of intellectual virtue in pursuit of an ameliorative epistemology. This paper focuses on “political inquiry” as a case study for examining the ameliorative value of intellectual virtue. The main claim is that the case of political inquiry threatens to expose responsibilist virtue epistemology in a general way as focusing too narrowly on the role of individual intellectual character traits in attempting to improve our epistemic practices.

According to the Good True Self (GTS) theory, if an action is deemed good, its psychological source is typically viewed as more reflective of its agent’s true self, of who the agent really is ‘deep down inside’; if the action is deemed bad, its psychological source is typically viewed as more external to its agent’s true self. In previous work, we discovered a related asymmetry in judgments of blame- and praiseworthiness with respect to the mitigating effect of moral ignorance (...) via childhood deprivation. Inspired by work motivating the GTS theory, we ran a new study to discover whether our asymmetry likewise reflected judgments about the true self. It did. However, it is unclear whether our results fit with the ‘good’ part of the GTS theory: some of our and others’ results suggest that, in certain contexts, wrong actions are taken to be more expressive of agents’ true selves than right ones. In this paper, we propose that our and others’ data can be explained by the hypothesis that we are inclined to judge as the GTS theory predicts when there is a readily available external explanation for an agent’s action. In short, we give people the benefit of the doubt. (shrink)

A critical notice of Alexander Nehamas's Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art.

Keith DeRose’s new book The Appearance of Ignorance is a welcome companion volume to his 2009 book The Case for Contextualism. Where latter focused on contextualism as a view in the philosophy of language, the former focuses on how contextualism contributes to our understanding of some perennial epistemological problems, with the skeptical problem being the main focus of six of the seven chapters. DeRose’s view is that a solution to the skeptical problem must do two things. First, it must (...) explain how it is that we can know lots of things, such as that we have hands. Second, it must explain how it can seem that we don’t know these things. In slogan form, DeRose’s argument is that a contextualist semantics for knowledge attributions is needed to account for the “appearance of ignorance”—the appearance that we don’t know that skeptical hypotheses fail to obtain. In my critical discussion, I will argue inter alia that we don’t need a contextualist semantics to account for the appearance of ignorance, and in any case that the “strength” of the appearance of ignorance is unclear, as is the need for a philosophical diagnosis of it. (shrink)

The present volume is a sequel to Deontic Logic: Introductory and Systematic Readings : its purpose is to offer a view of some of the main directions of research in contemporary deontic logic. Most of the articles included in Introductory and Systematic Readings represent what may be called the standard modal approach to deontic logic, in which de on tic logic is treated as a branch of modal logic, and the normative concepts of obligation, permission and prohibition are regarded as (...) analogous to the "alethic" modalities necessity, possibility and impossibility. As Simo Knuuttila shows in his contribution to the present volume, this approach goes back to late medieval philosophy. Several 14th century philosophers observed the analogies between deontic and alethic modalities and discussed the deontic interpretations of various laws of modal logic. In contemporary deontic logic the modal approach was revived by G. H. von Wright's classic paper 'Deontic Logic'. Certain analogies between deontic and alethic modalities are obvious and uncontroversial, but the standard approach has often been criticized on the ground that it exaggerates the analogies and tends to ignore those features of normative concepts which distinguish them from other modalities. (shrink)

In this paper I identify Schleiermacher as an intermediary between the two stages of the religious set forth in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Gesturing toward categories integral to the Kierkegaardian project at large, I also argue that he occupies a pivotal role between Socratic ignorance and second immediacy. These schemata uncover answers to a dilemma that has recently been articulated: whereas Kierkegaard administers highest praise to Schleiermacher at the beginning of his pseudonymous authorship, he becomes inexplicably hostile toward him at (...) the end of his life and authorship. (shrink)

There has been a growing charge that perdurantism—with its bloated ontology of very person-like objects that coincide persons—implies the repugnant conclusion that we are morally obliged to be feckless. I argue that this charge critically overlooks the epistemic situation—what I call the ‘veil of ignorance’—that perdurantists find themselves in. Though the veil of ignorance still requires an alteration of our commonsense understanding of the demands on action, I argue for two conclusions. The first is that the alteration that (...) is required isn’t a moral one, but rather an alteration of prudential reasoning. Second, and more importantly, this alteration isn’t necessarily a repugnant one. In fact, given that it prudentially pushes one towards greater impartiality, it may be seen as a point in favor of perdurantism. (shrink)

This chapter presents an account of an angrily virtuous, or patient, person informed by research on emotion in empirical and philosophical psychology. It is argued that virtue for anger is determined by excellence and deficiency with respect to all three of anger’s psychological functions: appraisal, motivation, and communication. Many competing accounts of virtue for anger assess it by attention to just one function; it is argued that singular evaluations of a person’s anger will ignore important dimensions of anger that bear (...) on virtue and vice. Thus, possessing excellence with respect to only one function of anger is insufficient for virtue. The account is also extended to the characteristic vices of anger: wrath and meekness. (shrink)

A few years ago, we made the decision to add a new dimension to our role as Buddhist monks by immersing ourselves in Western academia and undertaking research into the health benefits of meditation and Buddhist philosophy. After having devoted decades to the study, practice, and teaching of Buddhism (that is obviously based on Eastern philosophical principles), and despite the fact we are both originally from the West, the move into the Western academic setting has – for various reasons – (...) been an eye-opening experience. This doesn’t so much relate to the challenges of writing for academic journals (because in just the last two-years we have accrued over 100 academic publications – including numerous articles in leading peer-reviewed psychology and medical journals), but relates more to coming to terms with what many Western academics appear to perceive as desirable qualities for the modern scholar. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...) their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

Business ethics should include illicit businesses as targets of investigation. For, though such businesses violate human rights they have been largely ignored by business ethicists. It is time to surmount this indifference in view of recent international efforts to define illicit businesses for regulatory purposes. Standing in the way, however, is a meta-ethical question as to whether any business can be declared unqualifiedly immoral. In support of an affirmative answer I address a number of counter-indications by comparing approaches to organized (...) crime and to corporate crime, comparing the ethical critique of businesses studied in business ethics and those socially banned, and comparing the business ethics assumption as to businesses’ ethicality to societal ethical neutrality regarding war-related businesses. My conclusion: to help advance respect for human rights, business ethicists should apply their expertise to the task of defining illicit businesses. (shrink)

There are presently two approaches to the study of well-being. Philosophers typically focus on normative theorizing, attempting to identify the things that are ultimately good for a person, while largely ignoring empirical research. The idea is that empirical attention cannot be directed to the right place without a rigorous theory. Meanwhile, social scientists typically focus on empirical research, attempting to identify the causes and consequences of well-being, while largely ignoring normative theorizing. The idea is that conceptual and theoretical clarity will (...) come with time and more data. This paper argues that neither is a good approach to the study of well-being. The traditional philosophical approach underappreciates the vital importance of empirical investigation, while the atheoretical empirical approach underappreciates the vital importance of normative theorizing. The proposed solution is to bring these methods together. Well-being research should be interdisciplinary. The paper proposes a “conceptual engineering” approach as a novel alternative. This approach involves an iterative process of normative theorizing, empirical investigation, and conceptual revision, with the aim of articulating concepts and theories of well-being that optimally suit particular interests and purposes. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, namely in the specificity of the Conflict of interpretations category, is a fruitful resource in the constitution of Women's Studies as well as to legitimize the need for its full integration in the canons of humanistic knowledge. In general, they continue to ignore the immense body of knowledge and perspectives that Women's Studies have produced in recent decades. In this sense, it begins by presenting the general features of the (...) hermeneutic problematic and the theme of Conflict of Interpretations, and then showing its proven contribution to the development of Women's Studies and defending its possible contribution to enhancing their integration into canons. (shrink)

Over the centuries, magicians have developed extensive knowledge about the manipulation of the human mind—knowledge that has been largely ignored by psychology. It has recently been argued that this knowledge could help improve our understanding of human cognition and consciousness. But how might this be done? And how much could it ultimately contribute to the exploration of the human mind? We propose here a framework outlining how knowledge about magic can be used to help us understand the human mind. Various (...) approaches—both old and new—are surveyed, in terms of four different levels. The first focuses on the methods in magic, using these to suggest new approaches to existing issues in psychology. The second focuses on the effects that magic can produce, such as the sense of wonder induced by seeing an apparently impossible event. Third is the consideration of magic tricks—methods and effects together—as phenomena of scientific interest in their own right. Finally, there is the organization of knowledge about magic into an informative whole, including the possibility of a science centered around the experience of wonder. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that there is a bidirectional relationship between gender-based social norms and gender-segregated education policies that excludes girls from knowledge production within the Iranian school system. I argue that gender segregation in education reproduces hermeneutic inequality through the reinforcement of epistemic segregation as a form of epistemic injustice. In particular, I focus on gender-based instructional epistemic injustice, which refers to a set of epistemic practices that actively exclude a student or an education professional in their capacity (...) as a knower from the process of knowledge production within an education system based on gender dynamics, roles, norms, or expectations. This, in addition, has an impact on schoolboys through the reproduction of active ignorance. I conclude that in societies such as Iran, where highly gendered norms play out in the school system and are further reinforced by that system, the result is not limited to gender segregation itself, but extends beyond it to a form of epistemic injustice that wrongs students by reproducing and reinforcing those highly gendered norms. (shrink)

The study has been presented the role of home environment to learn English language particularly in Bangladesh. Parental as well as siblings role is very essential to grow the sense of learning and the learners can grow a great influence by it. Parents’ as well as siblings’ positive attitude, education and awareness according to individual requirements and needs are provided constant encouragement and support for the learners. Parents make the greatest difference to achievement through supporting their learning at home rather (...) than supporting activities in school. A learner, whose family members are habituated to use English at home, feels encouraged to learn English which facilitates learning process. My findings, on the other hand, show that children of those parents who are ignorant of providing sound family atmosphere, lack confidence as well as self-esteem. This study also inspects the impact of home environment on children’s achievement in English language. The findings reveal that there is a constant relationship between the role of family and students’ academic achievement. (shrink)

There have been several calls from LIS researchers for practical or applied research not to ignore the epistemological assumptions underlying the systems and artifacts they design lest they showcase only the dominant theory at a given time. Others have also deplored the "epistemological promiscuity" or "eclecticism" of the field, its incessant borrowing of theories and models from elsewhere and the fact that the field has largely neglected the contributions that philosophy and epistemology could have made in its research. This problem (...) raises that of the boundaries of LIS and is all the more troublesome because boundaries between epistemological theories are fuzzy. Indeed, some epistemological theories share the same basic assumptions or are historically derived from one another. Gathering a wide array of acknowledged theorists in philosophy of science and epistemology, this panel aims to examine how research work in the LIS field can clearly articulate the epistemological assumptions underlying that research and under what constraints this can be achieved. The topic is of prime importance to Information studies as a whole and to ASIST as the scientific flag bearer of information scientists worldwide. (shrink)

The modern concept of ideology was established by the liberal politician and philosopher Destutt de Tracy, with the objective of creating an all-embracing and general science of ideas, which followed the sensualist and empiricist trend initiated by Locke that culminated in the positivism of Comte. Natural selection and immunity are two key concepts in the history of biology that were strongly based on the Malthusian concept of struggle for existence. This concept wrongly assumed that population grew faster than the means (...) of existence. This “natural” law contained implicitly the idea that the poor and least gifted would not survive. This idea led to the progressive development of the concept of natural selection, whose definitive version was given by Darwin. Mechnikov took the concepts of struggle for existence and natural selection and conceived infectious diseases as a struggle between a host and its invader, the so-called phagocytosis theory. This theory created the necessity to possess mechanisms to discriminate between the own and the foreign, and led to the conception of the immune self. These concepts were not developed from ideas coming from perceptions or sensations, but from ideas coming from their values: individual interest, inevitable inequality, property, utility and profit. Values are ideals that constitute an ideological matrix which exerts a numinous activity and influence the development of our future actions. In consequence, science and its practice cannot avoid and ignore the values that drive them and impulse them towards certain directions. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold: -/- 1) to highlight the widely ignored but fundamental problem of ‘superpopulations’ for the use of inferential statistics in development studies. We do not to dwell on this problem however as it has been sufficiently discussed in older papers by statisticians that social scientists have nevertheless long chosen to ignore; the interested reader can turn to those for greater detail. -/- 2) to show that descriptive statistics both avoid the problem of superpopulations (...) and can be a powerful tool when used correctly. A few examples are provided. -/- The paper ends with considerations of some reasons we think are behind the adherence to methods that are known to be inapplicable to many of the types of questions asked in development studies yet still widely practiced. (shrink)

In this article, I provide a historical and philosophical discussion of the so-called “science wars”. The term “science wars” refers to a series of debates which took place in the second half of the 1990s and which centered on the status of science and the nature of scientific knowledge. On the one hand, a group of authors reacted against what they perceived as a “postmodern” attack on science. This in turn led to several reactions from those who were labeled as (...) “postmodernists”. Among these, some authors in turn claimed that it were the scientists and their epigones who were the real aggressors, using the authority of science to attack any form of critical thinking and even democracy itself. I first provide a short historical overview and analysis of the science wars. The aim of this overview is to show how critics of postmodernism ignored differences between different approaches in science studies and in this way constructed the idea of the existence of a homogeneous postmodern attack on science. This resulted in an intellectual trench war, in which more nuanced positions got overlooked, being trapped in the no man’s land between two extreme positions. After this historical overview, I explore this no man’s land. I discuss several scholars and approaches within science studies that had been grouped together by critics of postmodernism. I will focus on the differences between these approaches, thus providing a more nuanced picture of science studies. Finally, I argue for the relevance of revisiting the science wars. Blindly labelling (certain approaches in) science studies as “anti science” disables us from using important insights from these studies, insights which could be relevant in dealing with complex societal issues in which scientific knowledge plays a role such as climate change. (shrink)

Tantra means knowledge of methodical and mechanical investigational-technique through which we develop our consciousness and faculties of consciousness. It is also a process through which we can able to be realized our inherent spiritual powers. The term “Tantra” has been derived from the Sanskrit term “Tan” which means to “Magnify” or to “Outspread”. People use Tantra in a very mechanical way to transform their personality from animalhood to divinity. Basically, in the school of Buddhism, Tantra has developed a system of (...) thought which makes us see the universe as if it were within ourselves, and ourselves as if we were within the universe. In addition, we can argue that the forces governing the cosmos on the macro-level are believed to govern the individual in the micro-level. According to Tantra, there is a pyramid among individual being and universal being rather both sides are same. Thus all that exists in the universe must also exist in the individual body. It means we are all one under the umbrella of the sky. According to Buddhism, Tantra is the best way to salvation. Because, through the mechanism of Tantra, people can overcome to ignorance and affection towards the material world and can achieve wisdom. (shrink)

Privation of exposure, women cluster of our society were ignored, their potentiality and credentials never note-of for productive utilization, thus, their qualities remains unveiled. The SHG movement of microfinance (mF),bring an exception and has able to reach all over the world for her easy factors of financing , where women occupied the major share, as such, the entrepreneurial and other potentialities of this neglected cluster, become a case of concern. Same instance is in the Gobardhana Block, where woman’s shows their (...) potentialities of excellence in various economic activities , especially in weaving and farming. But, to have desired result, women clients of mF are in need of due care and attention like training, management etc. as demand by the time. (shrink)

Hegel endorsed proofs of the existence of God, and also believed God to be a person. Some of his interpreters ignore these apparently retrograde tendencies, shunning them in favor of the philosopher's more forward-looking contributions. Others embrace Hegel's religious thought, but attempt to recast his views as less reactionary than they appear to be. Robert Williams's latest monograph belongs to a third category: he argues that Hegel's positions in philosophical theology are central to his philosophy writ large. The book is (...) diligently researched, and marshals an impressive amount of textual evidence concerning Hegel's view of the proofs, his theory of personhood, and his views on religious community.Many of... (shrink)