Background: Efforts to better understand and improve letters of recommendation (LORs) in the resident selection process have identified unwritten rules and hidden practices that may limit their effectiveness. The objective of our study is to explore these unwritten rules and hidden practices more fully in one Canadian academic medical community. -/- Methods: We conducted semi-structured, discourse-based interviews with 18 faculty members from the departments of Internal Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Interviews were guided by sample LORs (...) and were focused on experiences with either writing or reading LORs. We analyzed interviews using key concepts from genre theory and Aristotle’s appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos. -/- Results: Participants described how the practices surrounding LORs are guided by unwritten rules. These practices contributed to writers’ use of visible strategies and textual silence to establish credibility, build a strong case, and appeal to readers. Readers rely on similar strategies, but not always as intended by the writers. -/- Conclusions: The unwritten rules of one academic community can impede a nationally-facilitated resident selection process. Our findings highlight how critiques and potential improvements to LORs could benefit from considering the use of visible and invisible rhetorical strategies in specific contexts. (shrink)

Concerns about the risks of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions are growing. At the same time, confidence that international policy agreements will succeed in considerably lowering anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is declining. Perhaps as a result, various geoengineering solutions are gaining attention and credibility as a way to manage climate change. Serious consideration is currently being given to proposals to cool the planet through solar-radiation management. Here we analyze how the unique and nontrivial risks of geoengineering strategies pose fundamental questions at (...) the interface between science and ethics. To illustrate the importance of integrated ethical and scientific analysis, we define key open questions and outline a coupled scientific-ethical research agenda to analyze solar-radiation management geoengineering proposals. We identify nine key fields of coupled research including whether solar-radiation management can be tested, how quickly learning could occur, normative decisions embedded in how different climate trajectories are valued, and justice issues regarding distribution of the harms and benefits of geoengineering. To ensure that ethical analyses are coupled with scientific analyses of this form of geoengineering, we advocate that funding agencies recognize the essential nature of this coupled research by establishing an Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications program for solar-radiation management. (shrink)

Le traité Du Régime se démarque des autres traités du corpus hippocratique à bien des égards. Aucun autre texte de ce corpus n’a poussé aussi loin le lien entre le corps humain en tant que microcosme et le cosmos, son macrocosme. Ce lien se manifeste notamment dans de multiples analogies, dans des expressions communes utilisées pour les décrire, ainsi que dans des explications identiques des phénomènes qui les caractérisent. Le présent article enquêtera sur une expression spécifique liant l’homme et le (...) cosmos : le terme περίοδος. Dans la continuité des travaux de Luc Brisson et Jacques Jouanna qui ont signalé plusieurs traits communs au Timée de Platon et au traité Du Régime, il s’agira de mettre en lumière l’importance du terme περίοδος, du concept de rotation/révolution, dans l’association microcosme-macrocosme, autant d’un point de vue structurel que fonctionnel. (shrink)

The precarious rights of senior citizens, especially those who are highly educated and who are expected to counsel and guide the younger generations, has stimulated the creation internationally of advocacy associations and opinion leader groups. The strength of these groups, however, varies from country to country. In some countries, they are supported and are the focus of intense interest; in others, they are practically ignored. For this is reason we believe that the creation of a network of all these associations (...) is essential. The proposed network would act as a support for the already-existing policies of the United Nations’ High Commission for Human Rights, of independent experts, and of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Older People. All three have long ago recommended the creation of a recognized instrument for uniting presently scattered efforts. The proposed network, therefore, will seek to promote the international exchange of relevant expertise, and it will reinforce the commitments and actions that single countries are currently taking to meet these objectives. For example, informative public events can be organised to promote particular support initiatives and to provide an opportunity for new members of the network to be presented. The network will promote health for senior citizens, disease prevention, senior mobility, safe free time for seniors, alimentary education, protection against new risks and dangers, as well as equity in the services necessary for seniors to adopt new information and communication technologies. In the case of retired academic members, the network will promote equality with respect to continuing use of digital technologies (particularly email), continuing access to research libraries, and the guaranteed ability for seniors to fund their own research programs and to deliver free seminars. (shrink)

The link is to an expanded, English version of this essay.

Translation (French to English) of Jean-Luc Nancy's "L'Annoncée.".

comparative civilizations in relation to cyclical versus linear concepts of time; translation, intertemporal encounters, and their political ramifications (including international relations); extends Koselleck's _Begriffsgeschichte_ by engaging it in a critical dialogue with translation studies.

At a distance of more ten years from publication (2000 French/2005 English translation), with this essay I will re-read, comment and discuss, in different way and in form of anthological sketch, the Derridean volume ‘On Touching-Jean Luc Nancy’, focusing in particular on its ‘tangents and its metonymies’, its manifold entanglements with the metaphysics of touch and bodily connections. Making use of the geometrical figure of the tangent, Derrida affirms that "[if] philosophy has touched the limit [my emphasis-J. D. ]. (...) of the ontology of subjectivity, this is because philosophy has been led to this limit”. To touch is to touch a limit, a limit without depth or surface. How have we regarded touching in the past? The body? My thesis is that if Derridean reflection remains mostly anchored to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, it is inspired nevertheless by a different deconstructive gesture/s similar to different geometric tangents (the deconstructive practice is similar to the tracing of many tangents). Discussing in particular Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, Derrida’essay ‘Deconstruction of Christianity’ and devoting an entire section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels, Derrida gives us numerous and special considerations on deconstruction and the deconstruction of touch in Christianity, admitting as well the enormity of this task. A reflection on the Kas Saghafi, “Safe, Intact”: Derrida, Nancy, and the “Deconstruction of Christianity” will follow in an exemplary way. Following a discussion of touch and the body in both animal and human spheres, in the closing section of the essay, I will comment on the Patrick Llored’s essay A Philosophy of Touching Between the Human and the Animal: The Animal Ethics of Jacques Derrida, recently published in A Companion to Derrida (2014). This study addresses highly topical questions such as: ‘What does it teach us about touch, but also about the body and the life of the animal? To what extent is it capable of renewing our knowledge [connaissance] of non-human life and of generating an animal ethics reconceived from top to bottom? If touching is coextensive with the living body, that implies not only that we place the haptical question at the centre of reflection on the animal, but also that we take into account the consequence that is most disruptive for us today (A Companion, p. 512). And conclude along with Patrick Llored that the question of touch promises to transform everything we have understood until now about animality. (shrink)

Reseña en español del diálogo entre A. Badiou y J.-L. Nancy, editado por Jan Völker y publicado en 2017.

In this eleventh book of scilogs – called in-turns and out-turns –, one may find new and old questions and solutions, referring mostly to topics on Neutrosophy, but also Multispace, with miscellaneous addition of topics on Physics, Mathematics, or Sociology – email messages to research colleagues, or replies, notes about authors, articles, or books, spontaneous ideas, and so on. -/- Exchanging ideas with Prem Kumar Singh, Feng Liu, Nicolae Bălașa, Jimmy Quellet, Minodora Rușchița, Frank Gelli, A. R. Vătuiu, Victor Christianto, (...) Vladimir I. Rogozhin, Robert Neil Boyd, Akira Kanda, Stefan Spaarmann, Oliver Consa, Yabin Shao, Junle Zhuo, Nivetha Martin, Said Broumi, Jean Dezert, Erick González, Tomasz Witczak, B. De Baets, I. Couso, D. Dubois, L. Good, Mihaela Colhon, Atiqe Ur Rahman, Muhammad Saeed, Muhammad Ihsan, Edeline Nancy, Shawkat Alkhazaleh, Shazia Rana, Vasantha Kandasamy, Santanu Acharjee, Mohamed Al-Shmrani, Parimala Manie, Mehmet Unver, Murat Olgun, Adel Aleidhri, Akira Kanda, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, Mircea Zărnescu, R. Tayebi Khorami, Arsham Borumand Saeid, Maisam Jdid, M. Abobala, Riad Hamido, Rafael Rojas, Esmaeil Zarei, Faisal Khan, Rouzbeh Abbassi, Adel Al-Odhari, Henry Garrett, Ackbar Rezaei, Saeid Jafari, Karthika Muthusamy, Harish Garg, Huda E. Khalid, Gonca D. Güngör, Muslim A. Noah Zainal, Fakhry Asad Agusfrianto, Madeleine Al-Tahan, Mariam Hariri, Yudi Mahatma, Masoud Ghods, Marco Brigliadori, Luis Enrique Aponte Pérez, Amr Mohammed, M. Aslam (in order of reference in the book). (shrink)

Can the best arguments for a privation theory of evil be parodied, with equal plausibility, as arguments for a privation theory of good? The privation theory of evil claims that evil has no positive existence, and it is but a privation of good. The privation theory of good claims the opposite. I approach this topic as one element in the so-called evil-God Challenge. Stephen Law has argued that the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect God (...) (theism) is on a par with the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, but completely evil-God (maltheism). In fact, he concludes, the arguments for an evil God are symmetrical with, and isomorphic to, those for a good God. The privation theory of evil has often been used to defend theism against the argument from evil. Thus, part of the evil-God Challenge is to evaluate arguments for the privation theory of evil for their vulnerability to maltheist parody. I consider a broad range of arguments for the privation theory of evil, and I argue that most of them are vulnerable to parodic neutralization. Furthermore, I argue that although the thesis of the convertibility of being and goodness is often held to entail the privation theory of evil, or to be entailed by it (or to be equivalent to it), it is independent of the privation theory. I do find that David Oderberg’s recent argument for the privation theory of evil resists any easy maltheist parody, but I argue that it has a defect. I sketch an argument according to which his good-as-fulfillment account is compatible with a perfectly evil god. My tentative conclusion is that the privation theory of evil enjoys little more plausibility than does the privation theory of good. (shrink)

Moral duties are regularly attributed to groups. Does this make conceptual sense or is this merely political rhetoric? And what are the implications for these individuals within groups? Collins outlines a Tripartite Model of group duties that can target political demands at the right entities, in the right way and for the right reasons.

The ethics of care has flourished in recent decades yet we remain without a succinct statement of its core theoretical commitment. This book uses the methods of analytic philosophy to argue for a simple care ethical slogan: dependency relationships generate responsibilities. It uses this slogan to unify, specify and justify the wide range of views found within the care ethical literature.

Philosophers increasingly argue that collective agents can be blameworthy for wrongdoing. Advocates tend to endorse functionalism, on which collectives are analogous to complicated robots. This is puzzling: we don’t hold robots blameworthy. I argue we don’t hold robots blameworthy because blameworthiness presupposes the capacity for a mental state I call ‘moral self-awareness’. This raises a new problem for collective blameworthiness: collectives seem to lack the capacity for moral self-awareness. I solve the problem by giving an account of how collectives have (...) this capacity. The trick is to take seriously individuals’ status as flesh-and-blood material constituents of collectives. The idea will be: under certain conditions that I specify, an individual can be the locus of a collective's moral self-awareness. The account provides general insights concerning collectives’ dependence on members, the boundaries of membership, and the locus of collectives’ phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper investigates agents’ blameworthiness when they are part of a group that does harm. We analyse three factors that affect the scope of an agent’s blameworthiness in these cases: shared intentionality, interpersonal influence, and common knowledge. Each factor involves circumstantial luck. The more each factor is present, the greater is the scope of each agent’s vicarious blameworthiness for the other agents’ contributions to the harm. We then consider an agent’s degree of blameworthiness, as distinct from her scope of blameworthiness. (...) We suggest that an agent mostly controls her degree of blameworthiness—but even here, luck constrains what possible degrees of blameworthiness are open to her. (shrink)

Modal epistemologists parse modal conditions on knowledge in terms of metaphysical possibilities or ways the world might have been. This is problematic. Understanding modal conditions on knowledge this way has made modal epistemology, as currently worked out, unable to account for epistemic luck in the case of necessary truths, and unable to characterise widely discussed issues such as the problem of religious diversity and the perceived epistemological problem with knowledge of abstract objects. Moreover, there is reason to think that this (...) is a congenital defect of orthodox modal epistemology. This way of characterising modal epistemology is however optional. It is shown that one can non-circularly characterise modal conditions on knowledge in terms of epistemic possibilities, or ways the world might be for the target agent. Characterising the anti-luck condition in terms of epistemic possibilities removes the impediment to understanding epistemic luck in the case of necessary truths and opens the door to using these conditions to shed new light on some longstanding epistemological problems. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals.

Societies of the East are often contrasted with those of the West in their stances toward technology. This paper explores these perceived differences in the context of international ethics guidance for artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Japan serves as an example of the East, while Europe and North America serve as examples of the West. The paper’s principal aim is to demonstrate that Western values predominate in international ethics guidance and that Japanese values serve as a much-needed corrective. We recommend (...) a hybrid approach that is more inclusive and truly ‘international’. Following an introduction, the paper examines distinct stances toward robots that emerged in the West and Japan, respectively, during the aftermath of the Second World War, reflecting history and popular culture, socio-economic conditions, and religious worldviews. It shows how international ethics guidelines reflect these disparate stances, drawing on a 2019 scoping review that examined 84 international AI ethics documents. These documents are heavily skewed toward precautionary values associated with the West and cite the optimistic values associated with Japan less frequently. Drawing insights from Japan’s so-called ‘moonshot goals’, the paper fleshes out Japanese values in greater detail and shows how to incorporate them more effectively in international ethics guidelines for AI and robotics. (shrink)

Which kinds of responsibility can we attribute to which kinds of collective, and why? In contrast, which kinds of collective responsibility can we not attribute—which kinds are ‘gappy’? This study provides a framework for answering these questions. It begins by distinguishing between three kinds of collective and three kinds of responsibility. It then explains how gaps—i.e. cases where we cannot attribute the responsibility we might want to—appear to arise within each type of collective responsibility. It argues some of these gaps (...) do not exist on closer inspection, at least for some collectives and some of the time. (shrink)

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...) liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative. (shrink)

Theorists of democratic multiculturalism have long-defended individuals’ religious exemptions from generally-applicable laws. Examples include Sikhs being exempt from motorcycle helmet laws, or Jews and Muslims being exempt from humane animal slaughter laws. This paper investigates religious exemptions for organisations. Should organisations ever be granted exemptions from generally-applicable laws in democratic societies, where those exemptions are justified by the organisation’s religion? The paper considers four arguments for this, which respectively rely on: the ‘transferring up’ to organisations of individuals’ claims to autonomy (...) or recognition; organisations’ own claims to autonomy or recognition; organisations’ status in the accountability-community; and organisations’ procedural constraints. The paper concludes that only the last argument works—and then, only with caveats. (shrink)

This is an encyclopedia article about epistemic closure principles. The article explains what they are, their various philosophical uses, how they are argued for or against, and provides an overview of the related literature.

A collective duty gap arises when a group has caused harm that requires remedying but no member did harm that can justify the imposition of individual remedial duties. Examples range from airplane crashes to climate change. How might collective duty gaps be filled? This paper starts by examining two promising proposals for filling them. Both proposals are found inadequate. Thus, while gap-filling duties can be defended against objections from unfairness and demandingness, we need a substantive justification for their existence. I (...) argue that substantive justification can be found in the normative force of commitments individuals make to others with regard to ends. Along the way, I argue that gap-filling duties must be conceptualized differently in group agents, as compared to non-agent groups: in the former, gap-filling duties can be understood as duties to “take up the slack”; in the latter, this would be a category error. (shrink)

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. Not all groups are moral agents. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties. Moreover, if such duties imply ability then moral agents – of both the individual and group varieties – can only bear duties over actions they are able to perform. I tease out the implications of this for duties over group actions, and argue that groups in many instances cannot bear these duties. This is because only groups (...) with the right kind of structure – groups I call ‘collectives’ – have the agency to bear action-demanding duties. Yet neither can individuals bear these duties, assuming that individuals cannot perform group actions and that duty implies ability. This appears to leave us at a loss when assigning duties to perform some group actions. I argue we can solve this problem by assigning collectivization duties to individuals – duties to form a collective that then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivization duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers. (shrink)

In this chapter, Stephanie Collins examines the idea that individuals can acquire ‘membership duties’ as a result of being members of a group that itself bears duties. In particular, powerful and wealthy states are duty-bearing groups, and their citizens have derivative membership duties (for example, to contribute to putting right wrongs that have been done in the past by the group in question, and to increase the extent to which the group fulfils its duties). In addition, she argues, individuals (...) have duties to signal their willingness to coordinate with others so as to do more good than the sum of what each could do on their own. Putting these two things together, Collins suggests, individuals’ duties in (for instance) matters of global poverty might be largely driven by such group-based considerations, leaving little room for the duties that would follow from more individualistic reasoning. (shrink)

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what (...) they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts. (shrink)

Many governments are failing to act sufficiently strongly on climate change. Given this, what should motivated affluent individuals in high-consumption societies do? This paper argues that social norms are a particularly valuable target for individual climate action. Within norm-promotion, the paper makes the case for a focus on anti-fossil fuel norms specifically. Section 1 outlines gaps in the existing literature on individuals’ climate change obligations. Section 2 characterises social norms. Section 3 provides seven reasons why social norms are a particularly (...) worthy target for individual climate actors. Section 4 asks which social norms individuals should emphasise, arguing that anti-fossil fuel norms have advantages over emissions reduction and offsetting norms. Section 5 outlines the pathways and mechanisms individuals might exploit to promote anti-fossil fuel norms. (shrink)

Forty years have passed since video-games were first made widely available to the public and subsequently playing games has become a favorite past-time for many. Players continuously engage with dynamic visual displays with success contingent on the time-pressured deployment, and flexible allocation, of attention as well as precise bimanual movements. Evidence to date suggests that both brief and extensive exposure to video-game play can result in a broad range of enhancements to various cognitive faculties that generalize beyond the original context. (...) Despite promise, video-game research is host to a number of methodological issues that require addressing before progress can be made in this area. Here an effort is made to consolidate the past 30 years of literature examining the effects of video-game play on cognitive faculties and, more recently, neural systems. Future work is required to identify the mechanism that allows the act of video-game play to generate such a broad range of generalized enhancements. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Assistance Principle is common currency to a wide range of moral theories. Roughly, this principle states: if you can fulfil important interests, at not too high a cost, then you have a moral duty to do so. I argue that, in determining whether the ‘not too high a cost’ clause of this principle is met, we must consider three distinct costs: ‘agent-relative costs’, ‘recipient-relative costs’ and ‘ideal-relative costs’.

Stephen Law developed a challenge to theism, known as the evil-god challenge (Law (2010) ). The evil-god challenge to theism is to explain why the theist’s responses to the problem of evil are any better than the diabolist’s – who believes in a supremely evil god – rejoinders to the problem of good, when all the theist’s ploys (theodicy, sceptical theism, etc.) can be parodied by the diabolist. In the first part of this article, I extend the evil-god challenge by (...) showing that additional theist replies to the problem of evil (more theodicies, the privation view of evil, and others) also may be appropriated, with just as much plausibility, in support of the diabolist position. In the second part of the article, I defend the evil-god challenge against several objections. (shrink)

A topic of special importance when it comes to responsibility and implicit bias is responsibility for knowledge. Are there strategies for becoming more responsible and respectful knowers? How might we work together, not just as individuals but members of collectives, to reduce the negative effects of bias on what we see and believe, as well as the wrongs associated with epistemic injustice? To explore these questions, Chapter 9 introduces the concept of epistemic responsibility, a set of practices developed through the (...) cultivation of basic epistemic virtues, such as open-mindedness, epistemic humility, and diligence that help knowers seek information about themselves, others, and the world. (shrink)

A standard objection to socioeconomic human rights is that they are not claimable as human rights: their correlative duties are not owed to each human, independently of specific institutional arrangements, in an enforceable manner. I consider recent responses to this ‘claimability objection,’ and argue that none succeeds. There are no human rights to socioeconomic goods. But all is not lost: there are, I suggest, human rights to ‘socioeconomic consideration’. I propose a detailed structure for these rights and their correlative duties, (...) while remaining neutral on substantive moral debates. I argue that socioeconomic-consideration human rights are satisfactorily claimable and sufficiently practical. (shrink)

Individuals sometimes pass their duties on to collectives, which is one way in which collectives can come to have duties. The collective discharges its duties by acting through its members, which involves distributing duties back out to individuals. Individuals put duties in and get (transformed) duties out. In this paper we consider whether (and if so, to what extent) this general account can make sense of states' duties. Do some of the duties we typically take states to have come from (...) individuals having passed on certain individual duties? There are complications: states can discharge their duties by contracting fulfilment out to non-members; states seem able to dissolve the duties of non-members; and some of states' duties are not derived in this way. We demonstrate that these complicate, but do not undermine, the general account and its application to states. And the application has an interesting upshot: by asking which individuals robustly participate in this process of duty transfer-and-transformation with a given state, we can begin to get a grip on who counts as a member of that state. (shrink)

The dead donor rule justifies current practice in organ procurement for transplantation and states that organ donors must be dead prior to donation. The majority of organ donors are diagnosed as having suffered brain death and hence are declared dead by neurological criteria. However, a significant amount of unrest in both the philosophical and the medical literature has surfaced since this practice began forty years ago. I argue that, first, declaring death by neurological criteria is both unreliable and unjustified but (...) further, the ethical principles which themselves justify the dead donor rule are better served by abandoning that rule and instead allowing individuals who have suffered severe and irreversible brain damage to become organ donors, even though they are not yet dead and even though the removal of their organs would be the proximal cause of death. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Organismal superposition holds that the same individual both is and is not an organism, as a consequence of organismal pluralism. When coupled with the assumption that death is the cessation of an organism, this entails that there is no unique answer as to whether brain death is biological death. This essay argues that concerns about organismal pluralism and superposition do not undermine a theory of biological death, nor entail any metaphysical indeterminacy about the biological vital status of a brain-dead individual.

The conventional wisdom about advance care planning holds that the normative force of my prior wishes is simply that they are mine. It is their connection to me that matters. This paper challenges conventional thinking. I propose that the normative force of prior wishes does not depend exclusively on personal identity. Instead, it sometimes depends on a special relationship that exists between a prior, capacitated person and a now incapacitated person. I consider what normative guidance governs persons who stand in (...) a special relationship, and contrast these with the standard model of respect for autonomy. My conclusion is that advance care planning for individuals who have lost decision-making capacity should incorporate the virtues of prudence and integrity, even when one and the same person ceases to exist, and respect for personal autonomy is no longer relevant. (shrink)

A cognitive ethnography of how bioengineering scientists create innovative modeling methods. In this first full-scale, long-term cognitive ethnography by a philosopher of science, Nancy J. Nersessian offers an account of how scientists at the interdisciplinary frontiers of bioengineering create novel problem-solving methods. Bioengineering scientists model complex dynamical biological systems using concepts, methods, materials, and other resources drawn primarily from engineering. They aim to understand these systems sufficiently to control or intervene in them. What Nersessian examines here is how cutting-edge (...) bioengineering scientists integrate the cognitive, social, material, and cultural dimensions of practice. Her findings and conclusions have broad implications for researchers in philosophy, science studies, cognitive science, and interdisciplinary studies, as well as scientists, educators, policy makers, and funding agencies. In studying the epistemic practices of scientists, Nersessian pushes the boundaries of the philosophy of science and cognitive science into areas not ventured before. She recounts a decades-long, wide-ranging, and richly detailed investigation of the innovative interdisciplinary modeling practices of bioengineering researchers in four university laboratories. She argues and demonstrates that the methods of cognitive ethnography and qualitative data analysis, placed in the framework of distributed cognition, provide the tools for a philosophical analysis of how scientific discoveries arise from complex systems in which the cognitive, social, material, and cultural dimensions of problem-solving are integrated into the epistemic practices of scientists. Specifically, she looks at how interdisciplinary environments shape problem-solving. Although Nersessian’s case material is drawn from the bioengineering sciences, her analytic framework and methodological approach are directly applicable to scientific research in a broader, more general sense, as well. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the question of who has duties regarding poverty and what those duties demand, from within the perspective of contemporary analytic normative philosophy. The chapter is structured in three sections. Section 1 considers the duties of those living in poverty, which might be either self-regarding or other-regarding duties, and which must be tempered by concerns of overdemandingness. Section 2 considers the duties of affluent individuals. These are imperfect duties grounded in affluent individuals’ relations to the structures that (...) produce poverty: relations of contribution, benefit, and ability to change. Section 3 considers duties of collective agents – including states, for-profits, charities, and civil society groups. The poverty-related duties of these collective agents are sometimes perfect and sometimes imperfect, and include both primary and secondary duties, and both positive and negative duties. (shrink)

Are obligations of collective agents—such as states, businesses, and non-profits—ever overdemanding? I argue they are not. I consider two seemingly attractive routes to collective overdemandingness: that an obligation is overdemanding on a collective just if the performance would be overdemanding for members; and that an obligation is overdemanding on a collective just if the performance would frustrate the collective’s permissible deep preferences. I reject these. Instead, collective overdemandingness complaints should be reinterpreted as complaints about inability or third-party costs. These are (...) not the same as overdemandingness. Accordingly, we can ask an awful lot of collective agents. (shrink)

In “A Tension in the Strong Program: The Relation between the Rational and the Social”, Shahram Shahryari (2021) advances the following thesis: In his Strong Program in the sociology of science, David Bloor blames traditional philosophy of science for adopting a dualist strategy in explaining scientific developments, as it employs rational explanation for successful science and social explanation for flawed science. Instead, according to Bloor, all scientific developments should be explained monistically, i.e. in terms of social causes. This is also (...) referred to as the Symmetry Principle, and it is a key tenet in the Strong Program. The author detects a tension here, as Bloor apparently asserts that traditional philosophy of science deploys two kinds of explanation, and simultaneously insists that there is only one kind, i.e. social explanation. (shrink)

This paper has as its topic two recent philosophical disputes. One of these disputes is internal to the project known as decision theory, and while by now familiar to many, may well seem to be of pressing concern only to specialists. It has been carried on over the last twenty years or so, but by now the two opposing camps are pretty well entrenched in their respective positions, and the situation appears to many observers (as well as to some of (...) the parties involved) to have reached a sort of stalemate. The second of these two disputes is, on the other hand, very much alive. While it has been framed in decision theoretic terms, it is definitely not a dispute internal to that enterprise. It is, rather, a debate about the very coherence of the notion of objective value, and as such touches on issues of central importance to, for example, meta–ethics and moral psychology. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the myriad ways that gender roles are interrogated within The Left Hand of Darkness and “When It Changed.” I first examine gender as science in §1, outlining the ways Le Guin and Russ consider and critique essentialist perspectives holding that gender roles are ‘natural’ phenomena driven by rigid biological differences between men and women. Then, in §2, I explore gender as fiction, analyzing how each text presents gender roles as discursively constructed and malleable. In §3, (...) I explicate these observations within a hybrid conceptualization of gender as science fiction and argue that this suitably describes the gender portrayals Le Guin and Russ make in their texts. (shrink)

I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...) of teleofunction, explicated in terms of natural selection. -/- To explain (ii), we begin by recognizing that representational states do not have content, that is, they are neither true nor false except insofar as they both “point to” or “refer” to something, as well as “say” something regarding whatever it is they are about. To distinguish veridical from false representations, there must be a way for these separate aspects to come apart; hence, we explain (ii) by providing independent theories of what I call f-reference and f-predication (the ‘f’ simply connotes ‘fundamental’, to distinguish these things from their natural language counterparts). -/- Causal theories of representation typically founder on error, or on what Fodor has called the disjunction problem. Resemblance or isomorphism theories typically founder on what I’ve called the non-uniqueness problem, which is that isomorphisms and resemblance are practically unconstrained and so representational content cannot be uniquely determined. These traditional problems provide the motivation for my theory, the structural preservation theory, as follows. F-reference, like reference, is a specific, asymmetric relation, as is causation. F-predication, like predication, is a non-specific relation, as predicates typically apply to many things, just as many relational systems can be isomorphic to any given relational system. Putting these observations together, a promising strategy is to explain f-reference via causal history and f-predication via something like isomorphism between relational systems. -/- This dissertation should be conceptualized as having three parts. After motivating and characterizing the problem in chapter 1, the first part is the negative project, where I review and critique Dretske’s, Fodor’s, and Millikan’s theories in chapters 2-4. Second, I construct my theory about the nature of representation in chapter 5 and defend it from objections in chapter 6. In chapters 7-8, which constitute the third and final part, I address the question of how representation is implemented in biological systems. In chapter 7 I argue that single-cell intracortical recordings taken from awake Macaque monkeys performing a cognitive task provide empirical evidence for structural preservation theory, and in chapter 8 I use the empirical results to illustrate, clarify, and refine the theory. (shrink)

Our approach is based on a tri-partite method of integrating psychodynamic hypotheses, cognitive subliminal processes, and psychophysiological alpha power measures. We present ten social phobic subjects with three individually selected groups of words representing unconscious conflict, conscious symptom experience, and Osgood Semantic negative valence words used as a control word group. The unconscious conflict and conscious symptom words, presented subliminally and supraliminally, act as primes preceding the conscious symptom and control words presented as supraliminal targets. With alpha power as a (...) marker of inhibitory brain activity, we show that unconscious conflict primes, only when presented subliminally, have a unique inhibitory effect on conscious symptom targets. This effect is absent when the unconscious conflict primes are presented supraliminally, or when the target is the control words. Unconscious conflict prime effects were found to correlate with a measure of repressiveness in a similar previous study (Shevrin et al., 1992, 1996). Conscious symptom primes have no inhibitory effect when presented subliminally. Inhibitory effects with conscious symptom primes are present, but only when the primes are supraliminal, and they did not correlate with repressiveness in a previous study (Shevrin et al., 1992, 1996). We conclude that while the inhibition following supraliminal conscious symptom primes is due to conscious threat bias, the inhibition following subliminal unconscious conflict primes provides a neurological blueprint for dynamic repression: it is only activated subliminally by an individual's unconscious conflict and has an inhibitory effect specific only to the conscious symptom. These novel findings constitute neuroscientific evidence for the psychoanalytic concepts of unconscious conflict and repression, while extending neuroscience theory and methods into the realm of personal, psychological meaning. (shrink)