ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: grief is, by definition, a response to a death; grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are unconvincing, (...) we sketch a positive case for a conception of grief that is not specific to bereavement, by noting some features that grief following bereavement shares with other experiences of loss. (shrink)

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that sight—the capacity to see or to have visual experiences—has the power to give us knowledge about things in the environment and some of their properties in a distinctive way. Seeing the goose on the lake puts me in a position to know that it is there and that it has certain properties. And it does this by, when all goes well, presenting us with these features of the goose. One might even think that it is (...) part of what it is to be a perceptual capacity that it has this kind of epistemological power, such that a capacity that lacked this power could not be perceptual. My focus in this essay is the sense of taste—the capacity to taste things or to have taste experiences. It has sometimes been suggested that taste lacks sight-like epistemological power. I argue that taste has epistemological power of the same kind as does sight, but that as a matter of contingent fact, that power often goes unexercised in our contemporary environment. We can know about things by tasting them in the same kind of way as we can know about things by seeing them, but we often do not. I then consider the significance of this conclusion. I suggest that in one way, it matters little, because our primary interest in taste is not epistemic but aesthetic. But, I end by suggesting, it can matter ethically. (shrink)

A background assumption of this paper is that the repertoire of inference schemes available to humanity is not fixed, but subject to change as new schemes are invented or refined and as old ones are obsolesced or abandoned. This is particularly visible in areas like health and environmental sciences, where enormous societal investment has been made in finding ways to reach more dependable conclusions. Computational modeling of argumentation, at least for the discourse in expert fields, will require the possibility of (...) modeling change in a stock of schemes that may be applied to generate conclusions from data. We examine Randomized Clinical Trial, an inference scheme established within medical science in the mid-20th Century, and show that its successful defense by means of practical reasoning allowed for its black-boxing as an inference scheme that generates (and warrants belief in) conclusions about the effects of medical treatments. Modeling the use of a scheme is well-understood; here we focus on modeling how the scheme comes to be established so that it is available for use. (shrink)

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic adjectives. We show (...) that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions. (shrink)

The aim of this research was to find out what the most popular films among the Akan in southeast Amsterdam (The Netherlands) are and how these films are used by this West African diaspora in the formation of a new religious identity after their migration to Europe. The outcome of this research is that the most popular films among the Akan are those with Pentecostal-Charismatic proselytizing messages. The Akan use these films to create an ‘imagined diasporic community’ to remain culturally (...) connected to West Africa. The second most popular films are those of an Akan indigenous religious nature. However, because the name of these films does not fit with the newly acquired European Christian identity of the Akan people in the diaspora, they have slightly changed the name of these movies to ‘cultural films’ in order to overcome the contradiction between over three centuries of ‘Akan spirits of migration’ to Europe with the recent ‘migration of spirits’ via Ghanaian films. (shrink)

Illusions are thought to make trouble for the intuition that perceptual experience is "open" to the world. Some have suggested, in response to the this trouble, that illusions differ from veridical experience in the degree to which their character is determined by their engagement with the world. An understanding of the psychology of perception reveals that this is not the case: veridical and falsidical perceptions engage the world in the same way and to the same extent. While some contemporary vision (...) scientists propose to draw the distinction between veridical experience and illusion in terms of the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of “hidden assumptions” deployed in the course of normal perceptual inference, I argue for a different approach. I contend that there are, in a sense, no illusions – illusions are as “open” as veridical experiences. Percepts lack the kinds of intentional content that would be needed for perceptual misrepresntation. My view gives a satisfying solution to a philosophical problem for disjunctivism about the good case/bad case distinction: with respect to illusions, every "bad case" of seeing an X can be equally well construed as a "good case" of seeing some Y (different from X). -/- . (shrink)

Published in 1903, this book was the first comprehensive treatise on the logical foundations of mathematics written in English. It sets forth, as far as possible without mathematical and logical symbolism, the grounds in favour of the view that mathematics and logic are identical. It proposes simply that what is commonly called mathematics are merely later deductions from logical premises. It provided the thesis for which _Principia Mathematica_ provided the detailed proof, and introduced the work of Frege to a wider (...) audience. In addition to the new introduction by John Slater, this edition contains Russell's introduction to the 1937 edition in which he defends his position against his formalist and intuitionist critics. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, (...) the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. (shrink)

This introduction provides a brief overview of the issues and arguments that arise in Hume's _Dialogues concerning Natural Religion_ (1779). It also provides a few brief comments relating to the historical context in which this text should be interpreted , as well as an account of the place of the _Dialogues_ in relation to Hume's other philosophical works.

Could space consist entirely of extended regions, without any regions shaped like points, lines, or surfaces? Peter Forrest and Frank Arntzenius have independently raised a paradox of size for space like this, drawing on a construction of Cantor’s. I present a new version of this argument and explore possible lines of response.

Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy is a collection of essays that are all concerned with major figures and topics in the early modern philosophy. Most of the essays are concerned, more specifically, with the philosophy of David Hume (1711-1776). The sixteen essays included in this collection are divided into five parts. These parts are arranged under the headings of: (1) Metaphysics and Epistemology; (2) Free Will and Moral Luck; (3) Ethics, Virtue and Optimism; (4) Skepticism, Religion and Atheism; and (...) (5) Irreligion and the Unity of Hume’s Thought. A particularly important theme running through many of these essays is the subject of Hume’s irreligious aims and intentions. The fifth and final part of the collection is devoted to an articulation and defence of this specific understanding of Hume’s philosophical thought. (shrink)

People with the kind of preferences that give rise to the St. Petersburg paradox are problematic---but not because there is anything wrong with infinite utilities. Rather, such people cannot assign the St. Petersburg gamble any value that any kind of outcome could possibly have. Their preferences also violate an infinitary generalization of Savage's Sure Thing Principle, which we call the *Countable Sure Thing Principle*, as well as an infinitary generalization of von Neumann and Morgenstern's Independence axiom, which we call *Countable (...) Independence*. In violating these principles, they display foibles like those of people who deviate from standard expected utility theory in more mundane cases: they choose dominated strategies, pay to avoid information, and reject expert advice. We precisely characterize the preference relations that satisfy Countable Independence in several equivalent ways: a structural constraint on preferences, a representation theorem, and the principle we began with, that every prospect has a value that some outcome could have. (shrink)

A singular thought can be characterized as a thought which is directed at just one object. The term ‘thought’ can apply to episodes of thinking, or to the content of the episode (what is thought). This paper argues that episodes of thinking can be just as singular, in the above sense, when they are directed at things that do not exist as when they are directed at things that do exist. In this sense, then, singular thoughts are not object-dependent.

Atheists are frequently demonized as arrogant intellectuals, antagonistic to religion, devoid of moral sentiments, advocates of an "anything goes" lifestyle. Now, in this revealing volume, nineteen leading philosophers open a window on the inner life of atheism, shattering these common stereotypes as they reveal how they came to turn away from religious belief. These highly engaging personal essays capture the marvelous diversity to be found among atheists, providing a portrait that will surprise most readers. Many of the authors, for example, (...) express great affection for particular religious traditions, even as they explain why they cannot, in good conscience, embrace them. None of the contributors dismiss religious belief as stupid or primitive, and several even express regret that they cannot, or can no longer, believe. Perhaps more important, in these reflective pieces, they offer fresh insight into some of the oldest and most difficult problems facing the human mind and spirit. For instance, if God is dead, is everything permitted? Philosophers without Gods demonstrates convincingly, with arguments that date back to Plato, that morality is independent of the existence of God. Indeed, every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong. Moreover, they contend that secular life can provide rewards as great and as rich as religious life. A naturalistic understanding of the human condition presents a set of challenges--to pursue our goals without illusions, to act morally without hope of reward--challenges that can impart a lasting value to finite and fragile human lives. Collectively, these essays highlight the richness of atheistic belief--not only as a valid alternative to religion, but as a profoundly fulfilling and moral way of life. "This Atheists R Us compilation differs markedly in tone from Hitchens and Dawkins. Excellent fare for Christian small groups whose members are genuinely interested in the arguments raised by atheists." --Christianity Today "Readable, personal, and provocative.... Contrary to the popular image, atheism isn't all rebellious trumpets and defiant drums.... Here we have all the varieties of unreligious experience, a full symphony of unbelief." --Free Inquiry "Compelling and sophisticated arguments that religious people ought to confront." --Tikkun. (shrink)

Decision theorists widely accept a stochastic dominance principle: roughly, if a risky prospect A is at least as probable as another prospect B to result in something at least as good, then A is at least as good as B. Recently, philosophers have applied this principle even in contexts where the values of possible outcomes do not have the structure of the real numbers: this includes cases of incommensurable values and cases of infinite values. But in these contexts the usual (...) formulation of stochastic dominance is wrong. We show this with several counterexamples. Still, the motivating idea behind stochastic dominance is a good one: it is supposed to provide a way of applying dominance reasoning in the stochastic context of probability distributions. We give two new formulations of stochastic dominance that are more faithful to this guiding idea, and prove that they are equivalent. (shrink)

Desire theories of well-being claim that how well our life goes for us is solely determined by the fulfilment and frustration of our desires. Several writers have argued that these theories are incorrect because they fail to capture the harms of self-sacrifice and severe depression. In this paper, I argue that desire theories of well-being can account for the harm of both phenomena by rejecting proportionalism about desire and motivation. This is the view that desires always motivate proportionally to their (...) strength. If we reject this view, then we can explain the harm of many cases of self-sacrifice as arising when we act upon our weaker desires and thereby frustrate our stronger desires. Moreover, the harm of many cases of severe depression can be explained by its suppression of the motivational force of desires. This inevitably frustrates desires that we are left unmotivated to fulfil. I argue that this approach captures the experiential quality of self-sacrifice and severe depression better than rival views that seek to problematise these phenomena for desire theories of well-being. Moreover, these theories have sufficient conceptual resources to account for residual cases of self-sacrifice and severe depression that are less well explained by this approach. (shrink)

The Limits of Free Will presents influential articles by Paul Russell concerning free will and moral responsibility. The problems arising in this field of philosophy, which are deeply rooted in the history of the subject, are also intimately related to a wide range of other fields, such as law and criminology, moral psychology, theology, and, more recently, neuroscience. These articles were written and published over a period of three decades, although most have appeared in the past decade. Among the (...) topics covered: the challenge of skepticism; moral sentiment and moral capacity; necessity and the metaphysics of causation; practical reason; free will and art; fatalism and the limits of agency; moral luck, and our metaphysical attitudes of optimism and pessimism. (shrink)

Philosophy has a language problem. A recent study by Schwitzgebel, Huang, Higgins and Gonzalez-Cabrera (2018) found that, in a sample of papers published in elite journals, 97% of citations were to work originally written in English. 73% of this same sample didn’t cite any paper that had been originally written in a language other than English. Finally, a staggering 96% of elite journal editorial boards are primarily affiliated with an Anglophone university. This is consistent with earlier data suggesting that journal (...) submissions from countries that are outside the Anglophone world and Europe have disturbingly low chances of being accepted. The route forward is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that this structural disadvantage deserves closer philosophical and empirical attention. We owe this to current and future members of our philosophical community who speak English non-natively. We also need this if we want to make sure philosophy is enriched by a diverse group of thinkers who have a grasp of different languages, and of the cultures strongly associated with them. (shrink)

In this article the author concentrates on the use of Indigenous Religion among the Akuapem in Ghana for the construction of their group identity. She discusses the way in which the Akuapem make use of the celebration of an annual indigenous religious festival (Odwira) to strengthen their group identity by self-identification, differentiation and the perception of other cultural groups. Her specific focus is on the common Asante-Akuapem history, the foundation of the Akan Golden Stools, akom dancing and the Odwira festival (...) procession and Durbars. She concludes that Indigenous Religion should not be left out in the study of the construction of group identities in the social sciences. (shrink)

In this book, Russell examines Hume's notion of free will and moral responsibility. It is widely held that Hume presents us with a classic statement of a compatibilist position--that freedom and responsibility can be reconciled with causation and, indeed, actually require it. Russell argues that this is a distortion of Hume's view, because it overlooks the crucial role of moral sentiment in Hume's picture of human nature. Hume was concerned to describe the regular mechanisms which generate moral sentiments (...) such as responsibility, and Russell argues that his conception of free will must be interprted within this naturalistic framework. He goes on to discuss Hume's views about the nature and character of moral sentiment; the extent to which we have control over our moral character; and the justification of punishment. Throughout, Russell argues that the naturalistic avenue of interpretation of Hume's thought, far from draining it of its contemporary interest and significance, reveals it to be of great relevance to the ongoing contemporary debate - particuarly in relation to the views of P.F. Strawson and his influential paper "Freedom and Resentment". (shrink)

Bernard Williams is widely recognized as belonging among the greatest and most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth-century – and arguably the greatest British moral philosopher of the late twentieth-century. His various contributions over a period of nearly half a century changed the course of the subject and challenged many of its deepest assumptions and prejudices. There are, nevertheless, a number of respects in which the interpretation of his work is neither easy nor straightforward. One reason for this is that (...) both his views and his methods evolved and shifted in significant ways, especially around the time that he wrote and published Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (i.e. the early 1980s). One way of gauging and assessing these changes in Williams’ views and outlook is to consider his relationship and attitude to other philosophers during this period. Of particular interest is his changing attitude to the moral philosophy of David Hume. This relationship is of considerable importance, not only because it serves as a useful tool for the interpretation of Williams’ views but also because it provides us with some critical insight into the respective strengths and weaknesses of both Hume’s and Williams’ contributions. -/- . (shrink)

Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge, in Pretense and Pathology, make an ambitious and far-ranging case that philosophical fictionalism (particularly the pretence variety that they favour) illuminates several long-standing philosophical puzzles posed by words in ordinary language, such as ‘exist’, ‘true’ and ‘means that’, as well as the more technical, ‘refers to’, ‘proposition’ and ‘satisfies’. Along the way, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge discuss topics in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, ontology, epistemology and more. An important aspect of their project is (...) its nominalist aspiration: by showing (if they do) that pretence is involved when we use the foregoing terms, they hope to show that it’s false that these uses induce ontological commitments (to, e.g., propositions or properties). In this respect, their pretence approach is yet another attempt to undercut the family of indispensability arguments (pioneered by W.V.O. Quine) that prima facie force ontological commitments by means of indispensable language usage. (shrink)

In the third and final part of his A Theory of Determinism (TD) Ted Honderich addresses the fundamental question concerning “the consequences of determinism.” The critical question he aims to answer is what follows if determinism is true? This question is, of course, intimately bound up with the problem of free will and, in particular, with the question of whether or not the truth of determinism is compatible or incompatible with the sort of freedom required for moral responsibility. It is (...) Honderich’s aim to provide a solution to “the problem of the consequences of determinism” and a key element of this is his articulation and defence of an alternative response to the implications of determinism that collapses the familiar Compatibilist/Incompatibilist dichotomy. Honderich offers us a third way – the response of “Affirmation” (HFY 125-6). Although his account of Affirmation has application and relevance to issues and features beyond freedom and responsibility, my primary concern in this essay will be to examine Honderich’s theory of “Affirmation” as it concerns the free will problem. (shrink)

We prove a representation theorem for preference relations over countably infinite lotteries that satisfy a generalized form of the Independence axiom, without assuming Continuity. The representing space consists of lexicographically ordered transfinite sequences of bounded real numbers. This result is generalized to preference orders on abstract superconvex spaces.

Stephen Jay Gould argued that replaying the ‘tape of life’ would result in radically different evolutionary outcomes. Recently, biologists and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the theoretical importance of convergent evolution—the independent origination of similar biological forms and functions—which many interpret as evidence against Gould’s thesis. In this paper, we examine the evidentiary relevance of convergent evolution for the radical contingency debate. We show that under the right conditions, episodes of convergent evolution can constitute valid natural experiments (...) that support inferences regarding the deep counterfactual stability of macroevolutionary outcomes. However, we argue that proponents of convergence have problematically lumped causally heterogeneous phenomena into a single evidentiary basket, in effect treating all convergent events as if they are of equivalent theoretical import. As a result, the ‘critique from convergent evolution’ fails to engage with key claims of the radical contingency thesis. To remedy this, we develop ways to break down the heterogeneous set of convergent events based on the nature of the generalizations they support. Adopting this more nuanced approach to convergent evolution allows us to differentiate iterated evolutionary outcomes that are probably common among alternative evolutionary histories and subject to law-like generalizations, from those that do little to undermine and may even support, the Gouldian view of life. (shrink)

The reality of spirits? A historiography of the Akan concept of 'mind' (La réalité des esprits: Vers une historiographie de la conception akan de l'esprit). In this article the following thesis is considered: the classifications used to define African Indigenous Religions are 'inventions' of Western scholars of religion who employ categories that are entirely "non-indigenous". The author investigates the presumptions of this statement and discusses the work of scholars of religion studying the Akan and in particular the Akan concept of (...) mind. In the analytic philosophical tradition the precise meaning of Akan concepts of mind such as okra and sunsum, described by various scholars of religion in different eras, are reviewed. The pre-colonial, colonial and the postcolonial era all have had specific influence on the conceptualisation of the mind. On the basis of an historiography of the Akan mind the author concludes that, contrary to the originally thesis under review, 'cultural background' and 'academic discipline' are relatively unimportant in the classification of 'indigenous religions'. The 'paradigm' prevailing within a discipline , 'personal belief' and the spatio-temporal context in which conceptualisations are created, turn out to be far more significant. (shrink)

It is a commonly held view that the existence of moral value somehow depends upon the existence of God. Some proponents of this view take the very strong position that atheism entails that there is no moral value; but most take the weaker position that atheism cannot explain what moral value is, or how it could have come into being. Call the first position Incompatibility, and the second position Inadequacy. In this paper, I will focus on the arguments for Inadequacy. (...) There are two main arguments for this position: the Argument from Arbitrariness and the Screening-Off Argument. I’ll discuss each in turn., and argue that neither is successful. To conclude, I’ll sketch what I think is a promising beginning to a naturalistic account of morality. (shrink)

I examine what the mathematical theory of random structures can teach us about the probability of Plenitude, a thesis closely related to David Lewis's modal realism. Given some natural assumptions, Plenitude is reasonably probable a priori, but in principle it can be (and plausibly it has been) empirically disconfirmed—not by any general qualitative evidence, but rather by our de re evidence.

Psychological eudaimonism is the view that we are constituted by a desire to avoid the harmful. This entails that coming to see a prospective or actual object of pursuit as harmful to us will unseat our positive evaluative belief about that object. There is more than one way that such an 'unseating' of desire may be caused on an intellectualist picture. This paper arbitrates between two readings of Socrates' 'attack on laziness' in the Meno, with the aim of constructing a (...) model of moral education based on PE's implied moral psychology. In particular, we argue against the view that when we come to see - through prudential reasoning - that our blatant evaluative beliefs and desires disserve eudaimonism, we will no longer perceive their intentional objects as choice-worthy. We suggest, instead, that it is by experiencing shame that we cease to see the intentional objects of our evaluative beliefs and desires as worthy of pursuit. This form of 'hydraulic education' bypasses reason-responsiveness altogether. As such, it only allows for practical norms to be derived from the nature of agency indirectly, namely by enabling the use of discursive practical reasoning. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor has argued that concept acquisition cannot be a psychological or “rational-causal” process, but can only be a “brute-causal” process of acquisition. This position generates the “doorknob  DOORKNOB” problem: why are concepts typically acquired on the basis of experience with items in their extensions? I argue that Fodor’s taxonomy of causal processes needs supplementation, and characterize a third type: what I call “intelligible-causal processes.” Armed with this new category I present what I regard as a better response than (...) Fodor’s to the doorknob  DOORKNOB problem. (shrink)

Contemporary reasoning about health is infused with the work products of experts, and expert reasoning about health itself is an active site for invention and design. Building on Toulmin’s largely undeveloped ideas on field-dependence, we argue that expert fields can develop new inference rules that, together with the backing they require, become accepted ways of drawing and defending conclusions. The new inference rules themselves function as warrants, and we introduce the term “warranting device” to refer to an assembly of the (...) rule plus whatever material, procedural, and institutional resources are required to assure its dependability. We present a case study on the Cochrane Review, a new method for synthesizing evidence across large numbers of scientific studies. After reviewing the evolution and current structure of the device, we discuss the distinctive kinds of critical questions that may be raised around Cochrane Reviews, both within the expert field and beyond. Although Toulmin’s theory of field-dependence is often criticized for its relativism, we find that, as a matter of practical fact, field-specific warrants do not enjoy immunity from external critique. On the contrary, they can be opened to evaluation and critique from any interested perspective. (shrink)

The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety. He seeks not to inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life. Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of his own existence. Superficially relaxed and tolerant, he finds little use for dogmas of racial and ethnic purity but at the same time forfeits the security of group loyalties and regards everyone as a rival for the favors conferred by (...) a paternalistic state. His sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, even though his emancipation from ancient taboos brings him no sexual peace. Fiercely competitive in his demand for approval and acclaim, he distrusts competition because he associates it unconsciously with an unbridled urge to destroy. Hence he repudiates the competitive ideologies that flourished at an earlier stage of capitalist development and distrusts even their limited expression in sports and games. He extols cooperation and teamwork while harboring deeply antisocial impulses. He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of “atheism” as it arises in Hume’s _Dialogues_. It argues that the concept of “atheism” involves several signficiant ambiguities that are indicative of philosophical and interpretive disagreements of a more substantial nature. It defends the view that Philo’s general sceptical orientation accurately represents Hume’s own “irreligious” and “atheistic” commitments, both in the _Dialogues_ and in his other (“earlier”) writings. While Hume was plainly a “speculative atheist”, his “practical atheism” was targeted more narrowly against “superstition” - (...) as opposed to deism or religion of a more “philosophical” kind. (shrink)

This article examines the free will problem as it arises within Thomas Hobbes' naturalistic science of morals in early modern Europe. It explains that during this period, the problem of moral and legal responsibility became acute as mechanical philosophy was extended to human psychology and as a result human choices were explained in terms of desires and preferences rather than being represented as acts of an autonomous faculty. It describes how Hobbes changed the face of moral philosophy, through his Leviathan, (...) in ways that still structure and resonate within the contemporary debate. (shrink)

Some time ago, the philosopher Luciano Floridi suggested that Western philosophy, and the mainstream contemporary approach to it traditionally called ‘analytic philosophy’, is in dire need of a reboot. The concern was that the discipline might be in a period of decadence. Analytic philosophy would be benefited by greater internationalization, wider and more transparent decision-making, and the reduction (as much as possible) of conflicts of interest as well as of its current habit of hiring and providing publication opportunities on the (...) basis of contacts, networking, and academic pedigree. If we are right, then we need a reconditioning of the institutional framework of analytic philosophy that adjusts it to the current global and interconnected world. (shrink)

Dudgeon, William (1705/6–1743), freethinker and philosopher, is of unknown origins. A tenant farmer who resided at Lennel Hill Farm, near Coldstream, Berwickshire, he was one of several philosophers active in the borders area of Scotland during this period. Other figures in this group include Andrew Baxter, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and most importantly David Hume.....

Within the framework of the “capability approach” to human rights, this paper argues that adults who facilitate participatory planning and design with children and youth have an ethical obliga- tion to foster young people’s capacities for active democratic citizenship. Practitioners often worry, justifiably, that if young people fail to see their ideas realized, they may become disillusioned and alienated from political life. Based on the experience of the Growing Up in Cities program of UNESCO, four rules of good practice are (...) distilled which can help promote young people’s belief in the value of collective action, regardless of the challenges that the full implementation of their ideas may face. (shrink)

What degrees of belief does Sleeping Beauty's evidence support? That depends.

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one logic. Logical normativism is the view that logic is normative. These positions have often been assumed to go hand-in-hand, but we show that one can be a logical pluralist without being a logical normativist. We begin by arguing directly against logical normativism. Then we reformulate one popular version of pluralism—due to Beall and Restall—to avoid a normativist commitment. We give three non-normativist pluralist views, the most promising of which depends (...) not on logic’s normativity but on epistemic goals. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we find in Kant a more plausible alternative to his transcendental conception of freedom. In the Metaphysics of Morals in particular, we find a naturalistic conception of freedom premised upon a theory of rational self-cultivation. The motivation for a naturalising reading of Kant is two-fold. On the one hand, a naturalistic conception of freedom avoids the charges levelled against Kant’s 'panicky metaphysics', which both forces us to accept an ontologically extravagant picture of the world (...) and the self, and also commits us to understanding freedom in nonspatiotemporal terms, thus excluding the possibility that the process of becoming free is progressive. And second, on a naturalistic reading we can repackage normativity back into Kant’s account of freedom, which has seemed to scholars unacceptably absent. I explain how the process of becoming free, on the naturalistic view, involves cultivating certain 'aesthetic preconditions of the mind’s receptivity to concepts of duty'.1 Happily, these conditions incur no unpalatable ontological penalties; rather, they constitute an achievement of the rational aspect of the self. Pointedly, this is not a self who is free only in virtue of having membership in the noumenal realm. Rather, effortful self-development entails a battle to become practically free, and thereby moral. The primary attraction to this reading of Kant is that it describes freedom as a naturalistic achievement, rather than a metaphysical given. Thus I show that by jettisoning, or at least naturalising, the picture of noumenal selfhood we not only find a theory that is poorer in panicky metaphysics, but much richer in normative force. (shrink)

Enactivists frequently argue their account heralds a revolution in cognitive science: enactivism will unseat cognitivism as the dominant paradigm. We examine the lines of reasoning enactivists employ in stirring revolt, but show that none of these prove compelling reasons for cognitivism to be replaced by enactivism. First, we examine the hard sell of enactivism: enactivism reveals a critical explanatory gap at the heart of cognitivism. We show that enactivism does not meet the requirements to incite a paradigm shift in the (...) Kuhnian sense—there is no internal crisis in cognitivism. Nor does it provide inherently better explanations of cognition as some have claimed. Second, we consider the soft sell of enactivism: enactivism provides a more attractive, parsimonious, or clear-eyed lens on cognition. This move proves to boil down to a misunderstanding of how theories are selected in science. Instead we lend support to a broader and more desirable way to conceive of enactivism, the recent proposal that enactivism is a philosophy of nature. We explain how a philosophy of nature does more than support a single research paradigm by integrating scientific questions into a cohesive picture. (shrink)

As a libertarian studying, embracing, and teaching a philosophy of individual freedom, John Hospers, like many of us, was heavily influenced by the philosophical writings of Ayn Rand. Rand’s major novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged continue to delight and empower readers through embracing the heroic creator or inventor, technological and scientific progress, and the competent individual. These are some of the archetypes of the Randian hero. At the other end of the scale were the incompetent looters and moochers who (...) could only function in her world by controlling those with ability and the savages of ancient or undeveloped cultures who could not comprehend ability, seizing the means of progress before killing the inventor, then retreating into mysticism and magic. Rand was not an archaeologist and wrote at a time before scholars of prehistory focused on the rational and productive aspects of ancient civilizations upon which enabled the present to emerge in fits and starts. These aspects include technology, record keeping, maritime trade, and pre- monetary economies. This paper will consider the emergence of globalized connectivites in the Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1700-1300 BCE) which was arguably the first age of globalization in human history. It was also one of the first ages of social acceleration characterized by a confluence of increasing technological and economic interdependency, yet fragile in its susceptibility to climate change, plagues, and authoritarian city-states and small empires ruled by kings claiming divinity or divine authority. Thus, the Late Bronze Age was also an economically fragile era with a high concentration of wealth distributed among supra-regional global elite plutocrats unified more by wealth and shared symbolism than by cultural tradition or ideology. This era was susceptible to populist resistance in the form of piratical activity and banditry. This paper explores the globalist and populist aspects of the ancient Mediterranean. In doing so, I suggest that some globalized elites of the present day perpetuate another Randian archetype, the moochers and looters. In doing so, it transcends ideology to focus on how the non-productive in current society acquire vast concentrations of wealth and power. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the continued circulation and use of retracted science as a complex problem: Multiple stakeholders throughout the publishing ecosystem hold competing perceptions of this problem and its possible solutions. We describe how we used a participatory design process model to co-develop recommendations for addressing this problem with stakeholders in the Alfred P. Sloan-funded project, Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS). After introducing the four core RISRS recommendations, we discuss how the issue of retraction-related stigma (...) gives rise to recommendation #4, Educate stakeholders about retraction and pre- and post-publication stewardship of the scholarly record. This recommendation is important for training publishing professionals and realizing this recommendation will require further collaborative design work across scholarly communications. We highlight ongoing stakeholder work which is now re-starting the design cycle. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing activities facilitating uptake and refinement of RISRS research and the implementation agenda. (shrink)

In Québec, the Act Respecting Access to Documents Held by Public Bodies and the Protection of Personal Information provides an exception to transparency to most public institutions where public health research is conducted by allowing them to not disclose their uses of personal data. This exceptionalism is ethically problematic due to important concerns and we argue that all those who conduct research should be transparent and accountable for the work they do in the public interest.

This paper considers a new problem for desire theories of well-being. The problem claims that these theories are implausible because they misvalue the effects of fleeting desires, long-standing desires, and fluctuations in desire strength on well-being. I begin by investigating a version of the desire theory of well-being, simple concurrentism, that fails to capture intuitions in these cases. I then argue that desire theories of well-being that are suitably stability-adjusted can avoid this problem. These theories claim that the average strength (...) of a desire, and the length of time that it is held, both influence the extent to which its fulfilment or frustration affects well-being. I end by considering whether value-fulfilment theories of well-being have a more attractive response to this problem. I find that these theories have significant downsides that make them unappealing alternatives. (shrink)

This manuscript examines two accounts that discuss rights disputes. On the one hand, Russ Shafer-Landau argues for specificationism (or what is referred to here as SA), which deems rights as having innate limitations. One the other, Judith Jarvis Thomson defends infringement theory (or what is referred to here as IVA), which views rights to be competing factors. Shafer-Landau in “Specifying Absolute Rights” endeavored to discredit Thomson’s IVA and promote his favored theory. This material responds to and criticizes the claims Shafer-Landau (...) pressed in his article. First part of the thesis addresses his concerns and finds them unconvincing. Using tools of logic, it is demonstrated that Shafer-Landau’s demands on compensation are without warrant. More than this, his demands on the tripartite are misguided. Second part tackles some shortcomings of SA. One of which is the finding that two of the three arguments Shafer-Landau posited for SA’s superiority run counter to each other. Should Shafer-Landau save one, it would remain untenable for the foundations therein rest on a mistake. Finally, his position of SA being sufficiently explanatory is in itself wanting. Though this material does not go as far as proving which theory is practically better, the project is not bereft of purpose. By the end, IVA would already have been relieved of the criticisms whereas SA would be confronted with multiple challenges. (shrink)

This concluding chapter of FREEDOM AND MORAL SENTIMENT (OUP 1995) provides a qualified defense of Hume's naturalistic approach to the problem of free will and moral responsibility. A particularly important theme is the contrast between Hume's naturalistic approach and the “rationalistic” approach associated with classical compatibilism. Whereas the rationalistic approach proceeds as an a priori, conceptual investigation into the nature and conditions of moral responsibility, the naturalistic approach is committed to an empirically oriented (i.e., psychologically informed) examination of these issues (...) – giving particular prominence to the role of moral sentiment in understanding moral life and the place of justificatory issues as they arise within it. Whereas the rationalistic approach leads us into intractable difficulties and moral skepticism, the naturalistic approach makes real progress on this subject. On a more critical note, however, I also argue that, despite its strengths, Hume's theory of moral responsibility has significant weaknesses in the areas of moral virtue, moral capacity, and moral freedom. -/- . (shrink)

Mechanistic explanations are often said to explain because they reveal the causal structure of the world. Conversely, dynamical models supposedly lack explanatory power because they do not describe causal structure. The only way for dynamical models to produce causal explanations is via the 3M criterion: the model must be mapped onto a mechanism. This framing of the situation has become the received view around the viability of dynamical explanation. In this paper, I argue against this position and show that dynamical (...) models can themselves reveal causal structure and consequently produce nonmechanistic, dynamical explanations. Taking the example of cell fates from systems biology, I show how dynamical models, and specifically the attractor landscapes they describe, identify the causes of cell differentiation and explain why cells select particular fates. These dynamical features of the system better fit Woodward’s (2010, 2018) criteria of specificity and proportionality and make them the best candidate causes of cell fates than mechanisms. I also show how these causes are irreducible and inaccessible to mechanistic models, making 3M unworkable and counterproductive in this case. Dynamical models can reveal dynamical causes and thereby provide causal explanations. (shrink)