Results for 'Jacob M. Kolman'

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Jacob Kolman
Rice University
  1. Conflicts among Multinational Ethical and Scientific Standards for Clinical Trials of Therapeutic Interventions.Jacob M. Kolman, Nelda P. Wray, Carol M. Ashton, Danielle M. Wenner, Anna F. Jarman & Baruch A. Brody - 2012 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (1):99-121.
    There has been a growing concern over establishing norms that ensure the ethically acceptable and scientifically sound conduct of clinical trials. Among the leading norms internationally are the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, guidelines by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, the International Conference on Harmonization's standards for industry, and the CONSORT group's reporting norms, in addition to the influential U.S. Federal Common Rule, Food and Drug Administration's body of regulations, and information sheets by the Department of (...)
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  2. Totalism without Repugnance.Jacob M. Nebel - 2022 - In Jeff McMahan, Tim Campbell, James Goodrich & Ketan Ramakrishnan (eds.), Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 200-231.
    Totalism is the view that one distribution of well-being is better than another just in case the one contains a greater sum of well-being than the other. Many philosophers, following Parfit, reject totalism on the grounds that it entails the repugnant conclusion: that, for any number of excellent lives, there is some number of lives that are barely worth living whose existence would be better. This paper develops a theory of welfare aggregation—the lexical-threshold view—that allows totalism to avoid the repugnant (...)
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  3. The Sum of Well-Being.Jacob M. Nebel - forthcoming - Mind.
    Is well-being the kind of thing that can be summed across individuals? This paper takes a measurement-theoretic approach to answering this question. To make sense of adding well-being, we would need to identify some natural "concatenation" operation on the bearers of well-being that satisfies the axioms of extensive measurement and can therefore be represented by the arithmetic operation of addition. I explore various proposals along these lines, involving the concatenation of segments within lives over time, of entire lives led alongside (...)
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  4. The Good, the Bad, and the Transitivity of Better Than.Jacob M. Nebel - 2018 - Noûs 52 (4):874-899.
    The Rachels–Temkin spectrum arguments against the transitivity of better than involve good or bad experiences, lives, or outcomes that vary along multiple dimensions—e.g., duration and intensity of pleasure or pain. This paper presents variations on these arguments involving combinations of good and bad experiences, which have even more radical implications than the violation of transitivity. These variations force opponents of transitivity to conclude that something good is worse than something that isn’t good, on pain of rejecting the good altogether. That (...)
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  5. Aggregation Without Interpersonal Comparisons of Well‐Being.Jacob M. Nebel - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1):18-41.
    This paper is about the role of interpersonal comparisons in Harsanyi's aggregation theorem. Harsanyi interpreted his theorem to show that a broadly utilitarian theory of distribution must be true even if there are no interpersonal comparisons of well-being. How is this possible? The orthodox view is that it is not. Some argue that the interpersonal comparability of well-being is hidden in Harsanyi's premises. Others argue that it is a surprising conclusion of Harsanyi's theorem, which is not presupposed by any one (...)
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  6. Normative Reasons as Reasons Why We Ought.Jacob M. Nebel - 2019 - Mind 128 (510):459-484.
    I defend the view that a reason for someone to do something is just a reason why she ought to do it. This simple view has been thought incompatible with the existence of reasons to do things that we may refrain from doing or even ought not to do. For it is widely assumed that there are reasons why we ought to do something only if we ought to do it. I present several counterexamples to this principle and reject some (...)
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  7. Status Quo Bias, Rationality, and Conservatism about Value.Jacob M. Nebel - 2015 - Ethics 125 (2):449-476.
    Many economists and philosophers assume that status quo bias is necessarily irrational. I argue that, in some cases, status quo bias is fully rational. I discuss the rationality of status quo bias on both subjective and objective theories of the rationality of preferences. I argue that subjective theories cannot plausibly condemn this bias as irrational. I then discuss one kind of objective theory, which holds that a conservative bias toward existing things of value is rational. This account can fruitfully explain (...)
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  8. An Intrapersonal Addition Paradox.Jacob M. Nebel - 2019 - Ethics 129 (2):309-343.
    I present a new argument for the repugnant conclusion. The core of the argument is a risky, intrapersonal analogue of the mere addition paradox. The argument is important for three reasons. First, some solutions to Parfit’s original puzzle do not obviously generalize to the intrapersonal puzzle in a plausible way. Second, it raises independently important questions about how to make decisions under uncertainty for the sake of people whose existence might depend on what we do. And, third, it suggests various (...)
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  9. Rank-Weighted Utilitarianism and the Veil of Ignorance.Jacob M. Nebel - 2020 - Ethics 131 (1):87-106.
    Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices that violate the unanimous preferences of (...)
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  10. Hopes, Fears, and Other Grammatical Scarecrows.Jacob M. Nebel - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (1):63-105.
    The standard view of "believes" and other propositional attitude verbs is that such verbs express relations between agents and propositions. A sentence of the form “S believes that p” is true just in case S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition that p; this proposition is the referent of the complement clause "that p." On this view, we would expect the clausal complements of propositional attitude verbs to be freely intersubstitutable with their corresponding proposition descriptions—e.g., "the proposition that p"—as (...)
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  11. Utils and Shmutils.Jacob M. Nebel - 2021 - Ethics 131 (3):571-599.
    Matthew Adler's Measuring Social Welfare is an introduction to the social welfare function (SWF) methodology. This essay questions some ideas at the core of the SWF methodology having to do with the relation between the SWF and the measure of well-being. The facts about individual well-being do not single out a particular scale on which well-being must be measured. As with physical quantities, there are multiple scales that can be used to represent the same information about well-being; no one scale (...)
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  12. Priority, Not Equality, for Possible People.Jacob M. Nebel - 2017 - Ethics 127 (4):896-911.
    How should we choose between uncertain prospects in which different possible people might exist at different levels of wellbeing? Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey offer an egalitarian answer to this question. I give some reasons to reject their answer and then sketch an alternative, which I call person-affecting prioritarianism.
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  13. Extensive Measurement in Social Choice.Jacob M. Nebel - manuscript
    Extensive measurement is the standard measurement-theoretic approach for constructing a ratio scale. It involves the comparison of objects that can be "concatenated" in an additively representable way. This paper studies the implications of extensively measurable welfare for social choice theory. We do this in two frameworks: an Arrovian framework with a fixed population and no interpersonal comparisons, and a generalized framework with variable populations and full interpersonal comparability. In each framework we use extensive measurement to introduce novel domain restrictions, independence (...)
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  14. Asymmetries in the Value of Existence.Jacob M. Nebel - 2019 - Philosophical Perspectives 33 (1):126-145.
    According to asymmetric comparativism, it is worse for a person to exist with a miserable life than not to exist, but it is not better for a person to exist with a happy life than not to exist. My aim in this paper is to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. My account of asymmetric comparativism begins with a different asymmetry, regarding the (dis)value of early death. I offer an account of this early death asymmetry, appealing to the (...)
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  15. Strong dictatorship via ratio-scale measurable utilities: a simpler proof.Jacob M. Nebel - forthcoming - Economic Theory Bulletin.
    Tsui and Weymark (Economic Theory, 1997) have shown that the only continuous social welfare orderings on the whole Euclidean space which satisfy the weak Pareto principle and are invariant to individual-specific similarity transformations of utilities are strongly dictatorial. Their proof relies on functional equation arguments which are quite complex. This note provides a simpler proof of their theorem.
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  16. A fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction.Jacob M. Nebel - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (9):2779-2787.
    According to the person-affecting restriction, one distribution of welfare can be better than another only if there is someone for whom it is better. Extant problems for the person-affecting restriction involve variable-population cases, such as the nonidentity problem, which are notoriously controversial and difficult to resolve. This paper develops a fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction. The problem reveals that, in the presence of incommensurable welfare levels, the person-affecting restriction is incompatible with minimal requirements of impartial beneficence even in fixed-population (...)
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  17. Ethics Without Numbers.Jacob M. Nebel - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of (...)
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  18. Conservatisms about the Valuable.Jacob M. Nebel - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (1):180-194.
    ABSTRACT Sometimes it seems that an existing bearer of value should be preserved even though it could be destroyed and replaced with something of equal or greater value. How can this conservative intuition be explained and justified? This paper distinguishes three answers, which I call existential, attitudinal, and object-affecting conservatism. I raise some problems for existential and attitudinal conservatism, and suggest how they can be solved by object-affecting conservatism.
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  19. Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution.Jacob M. Nebel & H. Orri Stefánsson - 2023 - Economics and Philosophy 39 (1):67-98.
    This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. Finally, (...)
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  20. The Case for Comparability.Cian Dorr, Jacob M. Nebel & Jake Zuehl - 2023 - Noûs 57 (2):414-453.
    We argue that all comparative expressions in natural language obey a principle that we call Comparability: if x and y are at least as F as themselves, then either x is at least as F as y or y is at least as F as x. This principle has been widely rejected among philosophers, especially by ethicists, and its falsity has been claimed to have important normative implications. We argue that Comparability is needed to explain the goodness of several patterns (...)
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  21. Consequences of Comparability.Cian Dorr, Jacob M. Nebel & Jake Zuehl - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):70-98.
    We defend three controversial claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe.
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  22. A taxonomy of multinational ethical and methodological standards for clinical trials of therapeutic interventions.C. M. Ashton, N. P. Wray, A. F. Jarman, J. M. Kolman, D. M. Wenner & B. A. Brody - 2011 - Journal of Medical Ethics 37 (6):368-373.
    Background If trials of therapeutic interventions are to serve society's interests, they must be of high methodological quality and must satisfy moral commitments to human subjects. The authors set out to develop a clinical - trials compendium in which standards for the ethical treatment of human subjects are integrated with standards for research methods. Methods The authors rank-ordered the world's nations and chose the 31 with >700 active trials as of 24 July 2008. Governmental and other authoritative entities of the (...)
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  23. Developing an objective measure of knowledge of factory farming.Adam Feltz, Jacob N. Caton, Zac Cogley, Mylan Engel, Silke Feltz, Ramona Ilea, L. Syd M. Johnson & Tom Offer-Westort - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology.
    Knowledge of human uses of animals is an important, but understudied, aspect of how humans treat animals. We developed a measure of one kind of knowledge of human uses of animals – knowledge of factory farming. Studies 1 (N = 270) and 2 (N = 270) tested an initial battery of objective, true or false statements about factory farming using Item Response Theory. Studies 3 (N = 241) and 4 (N = 278) provided evidence that responses to a 10-item Knowledge (...)
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  24. Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck and M. Norton Wise , Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8223-4068-3. £12.99. [REVIEW]Jacob Stegenga - 2009 - British Journal for the History of Science 42 (4):626.
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  25. Armstrong on Probabilistic Laws of Nature.Jonathan D. Jacobs & Robert J. Hartman - 2017 - Philosophical Papers 46 (3):373-387.
    D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all three interpretations (...)
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  26. Anscombe's Relative Bruteness.Jacob Sparks - 2020 - Philosophical News 18:135-145.
    Ethical beliefs are not justified by familiar methods. We do not directly sense ethical properties, at least not in the straightforward way we sense colors or shapes. Nor is it plausible to think – despite a tradition claiming otherwise – that there are self-evident ethical truths that we can know in the way we know conceptual or mathematical truths. Yet, if we are justified in believing anything, we are justified in believing various ethical propositions e.g., that slavery is wrong. If (...)
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    Epistemic Insouciance is Not a Moral Vice.Jacob Nofal - manuscript
    In this paper, I'm going to ask and answer the following question: Is epistemic insouciance a moral vice? This is an important question because whether epistemic insouciance is a moral vice or not will tell us whether epistemic insouciance should be condemned and avoided. Cassam points out that epistemic insouciance is an epistemic vice, but not all epistemic vices ought to be avoided/condemned. I plan to argue that epistemic insouciance is not a moral vice and therefore the insouciant person should (...)
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  28. Invariance, intrinsicality and perspicuity.Caspar Jacobs - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-17.
    It is now standard to interpret symmetry-related models of physical theories as representing the same state of affairs. Recently, a debate has sprung up around the question when this interpretational move is warranted. In particular, Møller-Nielsen :1253–1264, 2017) has argued that one is only allowed to interpret symmetry-related models as physically equivalent when one has a characterisation of their common content. I disambiguate two versions of this claim. On the first, a perspicuous interpretation is required: an account of the models’ (...)
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  29. Lorhard, Ramus, and Timpler and “The birth of ontology”.Peter Øhrstrøm & Sara L. Uckelman - 2022 - Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 3 (2):48-56.
    This review article offers a discussion of some aspects of the historical and conceptual context when the term “ontology” (Lat. ontologia) was first introduced in the scholarly circles of the early 17th century. In particular, Barry Smith's (2022) analysis of the birth of ontology provides a springboard for some further remarks on the author of the work with the first known occurrence of the word “ontologia”, Jacob Lorhard, including an analysis of his relationship with earlier philosophers Petrus Ramus and (...)
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  30. Disability, sex rights and the scope of sexual exclusion.Alida Liberman - 2017 - Journal of Medical Ethics:medethics-2017-104411.
    In response to three papers about sex and disability published in this journal, I offer a critique of existing arguments and a suggestion about how the debate should be reframed going forward. Jacob M. Appel argues that disabled individuals have a right to sex and should receive a special exemption to the general prohibition of prostitution. Ezio Di Nucci and Frej Klem Thomsen separately argue contra Appel that an appeal to sex rights cannot justify such an exemption. I argue (...)
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  31. Beauty Unlimited.Peg Zeglin Brand (ed.) - 2013 - Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
    Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the (...)
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  32. Cross-Examination of IDKR at AAR.Stephen R. Palmquist - 2012 - Faith and Philosophy 29 (2):170-180.
    This essay offers constructive criticism of the book “In Defense of Kant’s Religion” (2008), by Chris L. Firestone and Nathan Jacobs. Follow the link given here to see the published version of this article. In the same journal issue where that version appeared (Faith & Philosophy 29.2), Jacobs and Firestone each published essays that claimed to respond to my criticisms of their book; but for the most part they merely skirted around the points my article makes, often avoiding the key (...)
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  33. Review of Hintikka and Remes. The Method of Analysis (Reidel, 1974).John Corcoran - 1979 - MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS 58:3202-3.
    John Corcoran. 1979 Review of Hintikka and Remes. The Method of Analysis (Reidel, 1974). Mathematical Reviews 58 3202 #21388. -/- The “method of analysis” is a technique used by ancient Greek mathematicians (and perhaps by Descartes, Newton, and others) in connection with discovery of proofs of difficult theorems and in connection with discovery of constructions of elusive geometric figures. Although this method was originally applied in geometry, its later application to number played an important role in the early development of (...)
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  34. All that is Intelligible, Ontology, and Charts: A Brief Assessment of the Birth of Ontology.J. S. Freedman - 2022 - Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 3 (2):57-60.
    Abstract In this commentary motivated by Øhrstrøm & Uckelman (2022), I provide important remarks concerning All that is Intelligible and Ontology – and how both concepts evolved.
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  35. Jihadism: What is a Terror Apparatus? Interview with Jacob Rogozinski.Jacob Rogozinski & Andreas Wilmes - 2017 - Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence 1 (2):176-185.
    In the present interview, Jacob Rogozinski elucidates the main concepts and theses he developed in his latest book dedicated to the issue of modern jihadism. On this occasion, he explains his disagreements with other philosophical (Badiou, Baudrillard, Žižek) and anthropological (Girard) accounts of Islamic terrorism. Rogozinski also explains that although jihadism betrays Islam, it nonetheless has everything to do with Islam. Eventually, he describes his own philosophical journey which led him from a phenomenological study of the ego and the (...)
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  36. Arnošt Kolman’s Critique of Mathematical Fetishism.Jakub Mácha & Jan Zouhar - 2020 - In Radek Schuster (ed.), The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. pp. 135-150.
    Arnošt Kolman (1892–1979) was a Czech mathematician, philosopher and Communist official. In this paper, we would like to look at Kolman’s arguments against logical positivism which revolve around the notion of the fetishization of mathematics. Kolman derives his notion of fetishism from Marx’s conception of commodity fetishism. Kolman is aiming to show the fact that an entity (system, structure, logical construction) acquires besides its real existence another formal existence. Fetishism means the fantastic detachment of the physical (...)
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  37. James M. Buchanan, John Rawls, and Democratic Governance.S. M. Amadae - 2011 - In Robert Cavelier (ed.), Approaching Deliberative Democracy. Pittsburgh, PA, USA: pp. 31-52.
    This article compares James M. Buchanan's and John Rawls's theories of democratic governance. In particular it compares their positions on the characteristics of a legitimate social contract. Where Buchanan argues that additional police force can be used to quell political demonstrations, Rawls argues for a social contract that meets the difference principle.
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  38. Robustness, discordance, and relevance.Jacob Stegenga - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (5):650-661.
    Robustness is a common platitude: hypotheses are better supported with evidence generated by multiple techniques that rely on different background assumptions. Robustness has been put to numerous epistemic tasks, including the demarcation of artifacts from real entities, countering the “experimenter’s regress,” and resolving evidential discordance. Despite the frequency of appeals to robustness, the notion itself has received scant critique. Arguments based on robustness can give incorrect conclusions. More worrying is that although robustness may be valuable in ideal evidential circumstances (i.e., (...)
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  39. Real (M)othering: The Metaphysics of Maternity in Children's Literature.Shelley M. Park - 2005 - In Sally Haslanger & Charlotte Witt (eds.), Real (M)othering: The Metaphysics of Maternity in Children's Literature. In Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt, eds. Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 171-194. Cornell University Press. pp. 171-194.
    This paper examines the complexity and fluidity of maternal identity through an examination of narratives about "real motherhood" found in children's literature. Focusing on the multiplicity of mothers in adoption, I question standard views of maternity in which gestational, genetic and social mothering all coincide in a single person. The shortcomings of traditional notions of motherhood are overcome by developing a fluid and inclusive conception of maternal reality as authored by a child's own perceptions.
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  40. Marcel Weber: Philosophy of Experimental Biology: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, USD 75.00, ISBN 0521829453 (hbk), 374 pp. [REVIEW]Jacob Stegenga - 2009 - Erkenntnis 71 (3):431-436.
    Philosophers have committed sins while studying science, it is said – philosophy of science focused on physics to the detriment of biology, reconstructed idealizations of scientific episodes rather than attending to historical details, and focused on theories and concepts to the detriment of experiments. Recent generations of philosophers of science have tried to atone for these sins, and by the 1980s the exculpation was in full swing. Marcel Weber’s Philosophy of Experimental Biology is a zenith mea culpa for philosophy of (...)
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  41. Is meta-analysis the platinum standard of evidence?Jacob Stegenga - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (4):497-507.
    An astonishing volume and diversity of evidence is available for many hypotheses in the biomedical and social sciences. Some of this evidence—usually from randomized controlled trials (RCTs)—is amalgamated by meta-analysis. Despite the ongoing debate regarding whether or not RCTs are the ‘gold-standard’ of evidence, it is usually meta-analysis which is considered the best source of evidence: meta-analysis is thought by many to be the platinum standard of evidence. However, I argue that meta-analysis falls far short of that standard. Different meta-analyses (...)
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  42. Gauge Invariance for Classical Massless Particles with Spin.Jacob A. Barandes - 2021 - Foundations of Physics 51 (1):1-14.
    Wigner's quantum-mechanical classification of particle-types in terms of irreducible representations of the Poincaré group has a classical analogue, which we extend in this paper. We study the compactness properties of the resulting phase spaces at fixed energy, and show that in order for a classical massless particle to be physically sensible, its phase space must feature a classical-particle counterpart of electromagnetic gauge invariance. By examining the connection between massless and massive particles in the massless limit, we also derive a classical-particle (...)
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  43. Belief, Credence, and Pragmatic Encroachment.Jacob Ross & Mark Schroeder - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2):259-288.
    This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...)
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  44. Measuring effectiveness.Jacob Stegenga - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 54:62-71.
    Measuring the effectiveness of medical interventions faces three epistemological challenges: the choice of good measuring instruments, the use of appropriate analytic measures, and the use of a reliable method of extrapolating measures from an experimental context to a more general context. In practice each of these challenges contributes to overestimating the effectiveness of medical interventions. These challenges suggest the need for corrective normative principles. The instruments employed in clinical research should measure patient-relevant and disease-specific parameters, and should not be sensitive (...)
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  45. Justifying Scientific Progress.Jacob Stegenga - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    I defend a novel account of scientific progress centred around justification. Science progresses, on this account, where there is a change in justification. I consider three options for explicating this notion of change in justification. This account of scientific progress dispels with a condition for scientific progress that requires accumulation of truth or truthlikeness, and it emphasises the social nature of scientific justification.
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  46. Robustness and Independent Evidence.Jacob Stegenga & Tarun Menon - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (3):414-435.
    Robustness arguments hold that hypotheses are more likely to be true when they are confirmed by diverse kinds of evidence. Robustness arguments require the confirming evidence to be independent. We identify two kinds of independence appealed to in robustness arguments: ontic independence —when the multiple lines of evidence depend on different materials, assumptions, or theories—and probabilistic independence. Many assume that OI is sufficient for a robustness argument to be warranted. However, we argue that, as typically construed, OI is not a (...)
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  47. Can Magnetic Forces Do Work?Jacob Barandes - manuscript
    Standard lore holds that magnetic forces are incapable of doing mechanical work. More precisely, the claim is that whenever it appears that a magnetic force is doing work, the work is actually being done by another force, with the magnetic force serving only as an indirect mediator. However, the most familiar instances of magnetic forces acting in everyday life, such as when bar magnets lift other bar magnets, appear to present manifest evidence of magnetic forces doing work. These sorts of (...)
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  48. Down with the Hierarchies.Jacob Stegenga - 2014 - Topoi 33 (2):313-322.
    Evidence hierarchies are widely used to assess evidence in systematic reviews of medical studies. I give several arguments against the use of evidence hierarchies. The problems with evidence hierarchies are numerous, and include methodological shortcomings, philosophical problems, and formal constraints. I argue that medical science should not employ evidence hierarchies, including even the latest and most-sophisticated of such hierarchies.
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  49. Intellect et Imagination dans la Philosophie Médiévale. Actes du XIe Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale de la S.I.E.P.M., Porto du 26 au 31 Août 2002.M. C. Pacheco & J. Meirinhos (eds.) - 2004 - Brepols Publishers.
    Le XI.ème Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale de la Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (S.I.E.P.M..) s’est déroulé à Porto (Portugal), du 26 au 30 août 2002, sous le thème général: Intellect et Imagination dans la Philosophie Médiévale. A partir des héritages platonicien, aristotélicien, stoïcien, ou néo-platonicien (dans leurs variantes grecques, latines, arabes, juives), la conceptualisation et la problématisation de l’imagination et de l’intellect, ou même des facultés de l’âme en général, apparaissaient comme une ouverture possible pour aborder (...)
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  50. Population Pluralism and Natural Selection.Jacob Stegenga - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (1):1-29.
    I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal concepts. I (...)
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