Gaunilo assumes that there is no greatest conceivable island, and most philosophers have followed him in this assumption. But the option was open for Anselm (and remains open for us) to bite the bullet and ‘give him his island.’ I argue that such a response is perfectly reasonable for a Platonist like Anselm, and that even a theist who isn’t a Platonist can tolerate the island as a fairly minor addition his or her ontology.

Dealing with the metaphysical foundations of modern physical science, this book demonstrates that not only is classical metaphysics not in conflict with the principles of modern experimental science but that, when analogously transferred to the different divisions of modern science, the metaphysical principle of unity makes intelligible all the laws of modern science. This revolutionary book provides the means for reestablishing the unity of science by interpreting the whole of modern experimental science from the perspective of an analogous transfer of (...) the metaphysical principle of unity rather than in terms of efficient causality. (shrink)

Spatially situated opinions that can be held with different degrees of conviction lead to spatiotemporal patterns such as clustering (homophily), polarization, and deadlock. Our goal is to understand how sensitive these patterns are to changes in the local nature of interactions. We introduce two different mixing mechanisms, spatial relocation and nonlocal interaction (“telephoning”), to an earlier fully spatial model (no mixing). Interestingly, the mechanisms that create deadlock in the fully spatial model have the opposite effect when there is a sufficient (...) amount of mixing. With telephoning, not only is polarization and deadlock broken up, but consensus is hastened. The effects of mixing by relocation are even more pronounced. Further insight into these dynamics is obtained for selected parameter regimes via comparison to the mean-field differential equations. (shrink)

Recent studies show that racism still exists in the American medical profession, the fact of which legitimizes the historically long-legacy of mistrust towards medical profession and health authorities among African Americans. Thus, it was suspected that the participation of black patients in end-of-life care has always been significantly low stemmed primarily from their mistrust of the medical profession. On the other hand, much research finds that there are other reasons than the mistrust which makes African Americans feel reluctant to the (...) end-of-life care, such as cultural-religious difference and genuine misunderstanding of the services. If so, two crucial questions are raised. One is how pervasive or significant the mistrust is, compared to the other factors, when they opt out of the end-of-life care. The other is if there is a remedy or solution to the seemingly broken relationship. While no studies available answer these questions, we have conducted an experiment to explore them. The research was performed at two Philadelphia hospitals of Mercy Health System, and the result shows that Black patients’ mistrust is not too great to overcome and that education can remove the epistemic obstacles as well as overcome the mistrust. (shrink)

Ebola is a deadly disease with no cure; there is no vaccine developed yet. Many died during the 2014 outbreak in West Africa, and many healthcare professionals went to the virus infected area to treat the patients while placing their lives in danger. Not every medical professional placed in the field is a fully trained specialist, and sometimes one or two under-trained doctors are in charge of the entire clinic with some nurses and operating technicians. When unexpected outbreaks of the (...) virus occur in the places, the doctor(s) would encounter medical and ethical dilemmas. Should they leave or stay? In fact, this dilemma is not confined to the Ebola pandemic but relevant to all similar cases. In this paper, three authors, a medical resident, a clinical bioethicist, and a theoretical bioethicist respond to the dilemma. (shrink)

The Deaf culture in the United States is a unique culture that is not widely understood. To members of the Deaf community in the United States, deafness is not viewed as a disease or pathology to be treated or cured; instead it is seen as a difference in human experience. Members of this community do not hide their deafness; instead they take great pride in their Deaf identity. The Deaf culture in the United States is very communitarian not individualistic. Mary (...) Beth and Dominic are a married couple in their late 20s who are genetically deaf. They are active members in the Deaf community and work as advocates for individuals who are deaf, family members of Deaf people and sign language interpreters who identify with the Deaf culture. Mary Beth and Dominic approach the fertility clinic with a request that they only want a child with the genetic gene for deafness. They would want the embryos that do not have the gene to be destroyed. This would entail creating a child who would have the gene for deafness. Medically and ethically, should the fertility clinic agree to the couple’s request? The authors argue that the couple's request should be denied and provide reasons for it from the perspectives of foundational and clinical ethics. (shrink)

As the Zika virus pandemic continues to bring worry and fear to health officials and medical scientists, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) have recommended that residents of the Zika-infected countries, e.g., Brazil, and those who have traveled to the area should delay having babies which may involve artificial contraceptive, particularly condom. This preventive policy, however, is seemingly at odds with the Roman Catholic Church’s position on the contraceptive. As least since the promulgation of (...) Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, the Church has explicitly condemned artificial birth control as intrinsic evil. However, the current pontiff, Pope Francis, during his recent visit to Latin America, remarked that the use of artificial contraception may not be in contradiction to the teaching of Humanae Vitae while drawing a parallel between the current Zika Crisis and the 1960’s Belgian Congo Nun Controversy. The pope mentioned that the traditional ethical principle of the lesser of two evils may be the doctrine that justified the exceptions. The authors of this paper attempt to expand the theological rationale of the pope’s suggestion. In so doing, the authors rely on casuistical reasoning as an analytic tool that compares the Belgian Congo Nun case and the given Zika case, and suggest that the former is highly similar to, if not the same as, the latter in terms of normative moral feature. That is, in both cases the use of artificial contraception is theologically justified in reference to the criteria that the doctrine of the lesser of two evils requires. The authors wish that the paper would provide a solid theological-ethical ground based on which condom-use as the most immediate and effective preventive measure can be recommended in numerous Catholic hospitals as well as among Catholic communities in the world, particularly the most Zika-affected and largest Catholic community in the world, Brazil – 123 million present Brazilian citizens are reported to be Roman Catholic. (shrink)

One of the most insidious consequences of continuous exposure to gaslighting is that agents develop an expectation of further emotional manipulation. Repeated exposure to demeaning and humiliating behavior can make agents prone to interpret any epistemic challenge as a potential instance of gaslighting. Embedded in physiological and affective habits, this expectation become an integral way of interpreting social interactions and other people’s intentions. The concept of gaslighting was originally coined to alleviate a form of hermeneutic injustice, but some applications of (...) the concept paradoxically come to perpetuate exactly this kind of injustice. When agents perceive gaslighting in epistemically ambiguous situations, they foreclose the possibility of benefiting from productive forms of epistemic frictions. (shrink)

By now a consensus has emerged that people, when subjected to high-stakes decisions through automated decision systems, have a moral right to have these decisions explained to them. However, furnishing such explanations can be costly. So the right to an explanation creates what we call the cost problem: providing subjects of automated decisions with appropriate explanations of the grounds of these decisions can be costly for the companies and organisations that use these automated decision systems. In this paper, we explore (...) whether large language models could prove significant in overcoming the cost problem. We provide an initial case for believing that they can but only with serious ethical costs. (shrink)

This paper is a study about Philadelphia’s comprehensive user engagement sites (CUESs) as the authors address and examine issues related to the upcoming implementation of a CUES while seeking solutions for its disputed questions and plans. Beginning with the federal drug schedules, the authors visit some of the medical and public health issues vis-à-vis safe injection facilities (SIFs). Insite, a successful Canadian SIF, has been thoroughly researched as it represents a paradigm for which a Philadelphia CUES can expand upon. Also, (...) the existing criticisms against SIFs are revisited while critically unpackaged and responded to in favor of the establishment. In the main section, the authors propose the layout and services of the upcoming CUES, much of which would be in congruent to Vancouver’s Insite. On the other hand, the CUES would be distinct from Insite, as the authors emphasize, in that it will offer an information center run by individuals in recovery and place additional emphasis on early education for young healthcare professionals by providing them a platform to work at the site. The paper will also briefly investigate the implementation of a CUES site under an ethical scope of the Harm Reduction Theory. Lastly, the authors recommend some strategic plans that the Philadelphia City government may consider employing at this crucial stage. (shrink)

According to a popular view, privacy is a function of people not knowing or rationally believing some fact about you. But intuitively it seems possible for a perpetrator to violate your right to privacy without learning any facts about you. For example, it seems plausible to say that the US National Security Agency’s PRISM program violated, or could have violated, the privacy rights of the people whose information was collected, despite the fact that the NSA, for the most part, merely (...) collected information without examining it, and thus, for the most part, did not acquire knowledge about specific people. This pair of judgements creates the challenge of aligning one of the most popular accounts of what privacy is with a suitable account of the right to privacy. Call this the alignment challenge. -/- In this paper, I criticize two recent attempts to answer the alignment challenge: one based on risk, proposed by Björn Lundgren, and one based on modal robustness, proposed by Carissa Véliz. I then offer my preferred response, which I call the inquiry account. According to this account, the right to privacy protects against certain forms of inquiry. This account explains why there is a gap between what privacy is a what the right to privacy protects people against. Moreover, it explains why it is possible to violate someone’s right to privacy without obtaining knowledge. (shrink)

The stakes associated with an algorithmic decision are often said to play a role in determining whether the decision engenders a right to an explanation. More specifically, “high stakes” decisions are often said to engender such a right to explanation whereas “low stakes” or “non-high” stakes decisions do not. While the overall gist of these ideas is clear enough, the details are lacking. In this paper, we aim to provide these details through a detailed investigation of what we will call (...) the “Simple Stakes Thesis”. The Simple Stakes Thesis, as it will turn out, is too simple. For even if the stakes associated with a specific one-off decision are low—and hence does not engender a right to an explanation—such decisions may nevertheless form part of a high stakes pattern or aggregate of decisions. In such cases, we argue, even a low stakes decision may engender a right to explanation. Not only does this show that the right to explanation is more demanding than so far recognized. It also shows that the stakes thesis is significantly harder to apply in practice. (shrink)

How should an agent revise her epistemic state in the light of doxastic disagreement? The problems associated with answering this question arise under the assumption that an agent’s epistemic state is best represented by her degree of belief function alone. We argue that for modeling cases of doxastic disagreement an agent’s epistemic state is best represented by her confirmation commitments and the evidence available to her. Finally, we argue that given this position it is possible to provide an adequate answer (...) to the question of how to rationally revise one’s epistemic state in the light of disagreement. (shrink)

Many seem to think that AI-induced responsibility gaps are morally bad and therefore ought to be avoided. We argue, by contrast, that there is at least a pro tanto reason to welcome responsibility gaps. The central reason is that it can be bad for people to be responsible for wrongdoing. This, we argue, gives us one reason to prefer automated decision-making over human decision-making, especially in contexts where the risks of wrongdoing are high. While we are not the first to (...) suggest that responsibility gaps should sometimes be welcomed, our argument is novel. Others have argued that responsibility gaps should sometimes be welcomed because they can reduce or eliminate the psychological burdens caused by tragic moral choice-situations. By contrast, our argument explains why responsibility gaps should sometimes be welcomed even in the absence of tragic moral choice-situations, and even in the absence of psychological burdens. (shrink)

"What is the significance of our gut feelings? Can they disclose our deep selves or point to a shared human nature? The phenomenon of perpetrator disgust provides a uniquely insightful perspective by which to consider such questions. Across time and cultures, some individuals exhibit signs of distress while committing atrocities. They experience nausea, convulse, and vomit. Do such bodily responses reflect a moral judgment, a deep-seated injunction against atrocity? What conclusions can we draw about the relationship of our gut feelings (...) to human nature and moral frameworks? Drawing on a broad range of historical examples as well as the latest scholarship from the philosophical and scientific study of emotions, this book explores the relationship of cognition and emotion through the lens of perpetrator disgust. Considering a range of interpretations of this phenomenon, it becomes evident that gut feelings do not carry a straightforward and transparent intentionality in themselves, nor do they motivate any core, specific response; they are templates that can embody a broad range of values and morals. Using this core insight, the book proposes a contextual understanding of emotions, by which an agent's environment shapes their available hermeneutic equipment-concepts, categories, names-that individuals rely on to make sense of their emotions and navigate the world"--. (shrink)

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

Many believe that we ought to treat people as individuals and that this form of treatment is in some sense incompatible with treating people as members of groups. Yet, the relation between these two kinds of treatments is elusive. In this paper, we develop a novel account of the normative requirement to treat people as individuals. According to this account, treating people as individuals requires treating people as agents in the appropriate capacity. We call this the Agency Attunement Account. This (...) view has the surprising implication that it’s not only possible to fail in treating people as individuals but also possible to fail in treating people as members of groups, on the presumption that people’s agency is sometimes nested in, and exercised via, agential groups. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend what we call the ‘Hybrid View’ of privacy. According to this view, an individual has privacy if, and only if, no one else forms an epistemically warranted belief about the individual’s personal matters, nor perceives them. We contrast the Hybrid View with what seems to be the most common view of what it means to access someone’s personal matters, namely the Belief-Based View. We offer a range of examples that demonstrate why the Hybrid View is (...) more plausible than the Belief-Based View. Finally, we show how the Hybrid View generates a more plausible fit between the concept of privacy, and the concept of a (morally objectionable) violation of privacy. (shrink)

Do perceptual states necessarily constitute evidence epistemically supporting corresponding perceptual beliefs? Susanna Schellenberg thinks so. She argues that perceptual states, veridical or not, necessarily provide (or constitute) a kind of evidence (for the existence of the truth-maker) supporting corresponding perceptual beliefs. She uses “phenomenal evidence” as a label for this kind of evidence and calls her argument “The Phenomenal Evidence Argument.” Having introduced her project, we offer a reconstruction of Schellenberg’s argument. A key premise has it that, necessarily, for items (...) with a function, fulfillment of the function (the good case) is explanatorily and metaphysically prior to function failure (the bad case). We suggest that the etiological theory of functions renders this key premise plausible. However, Schellenberg rejects the etiological theory of functions and likewise the idea that the epistemic or warranting force of perceptual states is grounded in their being reliably linked to veridical perception. But then what supports the key premise? Schellenberg argues that accurate perception is a part of the nature of perceptual capacities because the nature of perceptual capacities is explained in terms of their function, and their function is to represent accurately. We suggest that Schellenberg is committed to an understanding of priority which doesn’t require any actual good cases—just possible ones. This reading, we argue, is too weak to support the key premise. Given Schellenberg’s commitments, it is not necessarily the case that perceptual states are evidence for a corresponding perceptual belief. Before concluding we discuss an overgeneralization objection. (shrink)

If I decide to disclose information about myself, this act may undermine other people’s ability to conceal information about them. Such dependencies are called privacy dependencies in the literature. Some say that privacy dependencies generate moral duties to avoid sharing information about oneself. If true, we argue, then it is sometimes justified for others to impose harm on the person sharing information to prevent them from doing so. In this paper, we first show how such conclusions arise. Next, we show (...) that the existence of such a dependency between the moral significance you are inclined to attribute to privacy dependencies and judgments about permissible self-defense puts pressure on at least some ways of spelling out the idea that privacy dependencies ought to constrain our data-sharing conduct. (shrink)

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

This article seeks to describe in general terms what has become the standard way of conceptualizing moral injury in the clinical psychological and psychiatric literature, which is the key source for applications of the concept in other domains. What we call “the standard model” draws on certain assumptions about beliefs, mental states, and emotions as well as an implicit theory of causation about how various forms of harm arise from certain experiences or “events” that violate persons’ moral beliefs and systems. (...) Our analysis makes these assumptions more explicit and subjects them to critical scrutiny. In so doing, we survey the current literature and identify basic features of how moral injuries are defined, how they are thought to occur, and the forms of treatment or repair that appear to be indicated. We caution that it matters how moral experience is characterized and argue that an alternative understanding of what is the moral in moral injury is important for overcoming critical challenges to the standard model. Moreover, recently evolving approaches to moral repair could be more consistent with an alternative model. Our concluding suggestion is that a more robust account of the nature of moral experience and its relations to self-identity and social experience more generally could advance understanding of the etiology of moral injury and promote rehabilitation. (shrink)

We typically think of emotional states as highly individualised and subjective. But visceral gut feelings like discomfort can be better understood as collective and public, when they reflect implicit biases that an individual has internalised. Most of us evade discomfort in favour of comfort, often unconsciously. This inclination, innocent in most cases, also has social and political consequences. Research has established that it is easier to interact with people who resemble us and that such in-group favouritism contributes to subtle forms (...) of discrimination. If we want a more equal and unbiased society, we have a duty to expose ourselves to more discomfort. Living up to this duty requires an enhanced emotional vocabulary that captures the political dimensions of physiological affect. I argue that a better understanding of what I call interaction discomfort can mitigate subtle forms of discrimination. (shrink)

Relational egalitarianism is a theory of justice according to which justice requires that people relate as equals. According to some relational egalitarians, X and Y relate as equals if, and only if, they (1) regard each other as equals; and (2) treat each other as equals. In this paper, we argue that relational egalitarians must give up 1.

Most forms of human papillomavirus can create alterations on a woman's cervix that can lead to cervical cancer in the long run, while others can produce genital or epidermal tumors. Cervical cancer is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality among women in low- and middle-income countries. The prediction of cervical cancer still remains an open challenge as there are several risk factors affecting the cervix of the women. By considering the above, the cervical cancer risk factor dataset from KAGGLE (...) data warehouse is executed for predicting the cervical cancer risk classes. The cervical cancer data set is normalised with incomplete data and Pattern Calibration. Secondly, the interpretive data analysis is carried out, and the target feature's dispersion of the cervical cancer risk is visualised. Thirdly, several classifiers are fitted to the unprocessed data set, and the performance is measured with pre and post feature scaling. Fourth, oversampling methodologies are applied to the pre - processed data set. Fifth, the oversampled dataset by differment methods are applied to all the classifiers and the performance is compared with pre and post feature scaling. Sixth, Precision, recall, Fscore, accuracy, and running time are some of the metrics used in performance analysis. The code is written in Python and executed with Anaconda Navigator on the Spyder framework. The findings of the experiments reveal that the Random forest classifier tends to sustain 96% accuracy pre and post scaling for unporocessed dataset. Similarly the same classifier tends to sustain 98% accuracy for all the oversampling techniques. (shrink)

In everyday life and in science we acquire evidence of evidence and based on this new evidence we often change our epistemic states. An assumption underlying such practice is that the following EEE Slogan is correct: 'evidence of evidence is evidence' (Feldman 2007, p. 208). We suggest that evidence of evidence is best understood as higher-order evidence about the epistemic state of agents. In order to model evidence of evidence we introduce a new powerful framework for modelling epistemic states, Dyadic (...) Bayesianism. Based on this framework, we then discuss characterizations of evidence of evidence and argue for one of them. Finally, we show that whether the EEE Slogan holds, depends on the specific kind of evidence of evidence. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

Assertion is widely regarded as an act associated with an epistemic position. To assert is to represent oneself as occupying this position and/or to be required to occupy this position. Within this approach, the most common view is that assertion is strong: the associated position is knowledge or certainty. But recent challenges to this common view present new data that are argued to be better explained by assertion being weak. Old data widely taken to support assertion being strong has also (...) been challenged. This paper examines such challenges and finds them wanting. Far from diminishing the case for strong assertion, carefully considering new and old data reveals that assertion is as strong as ever. (shrink)

When is it (epistemically) rational to suspend judgment on a proposition? Before addressing this question, one has to clarify what suspension of judgment (in short: suspension) is and establish rationality standards for the attitudes that constitute suspension. Ideally, suspending can be reduced to attitudes for which one already has established rationality standards. This paper distinguishes two kinds of suspension, weak and strong, and offers a reductionist account of suspension based on credence. However, it does not reduce suspension to credence alone (...) but takes a higher-order perspective on credence into account. Other doxastic attitudes such as belief and doubtful belief are also reexamined and defined in the light of this higher-order perspective. (shrink)

Most psychological and philosophical theories assume that we know what we feel. This general view is often accompanied by a range of more specific claims, such as the idea that we experience one emotion at a time, and that it is possible to distinguish between emotions based on their cognition, judgment, behaviour, or physiology. One common approach is to discriminate emotions based on their motivations or ultimate goals. Some argue that empathic distress, for instance, has the potential to motivate empathic (...) concerns; personal distress, on the other hand, is self-oriented and motivates egoistic concerns. In this paper, I argue against this and similarly teleological views of emotions and affect. Through a close study of the emotional breakdown of an American drone operator, I make the case that understanding our emotions entails much more ambiguity than dominant theories assume. In our emotional lives, disorientation and confusion are often the norm. (shrink)

Not only the direct physical experiences of deployment can severely harm soldiers’ mental health. Witnessing violations of their moral principles by the enemy, or by their fellow soldiers and superiors, can also have a devastating impact. It can cause soldiers’ moral disorientation, increasing feelings of shame, guilt, or hate, and the need for general answers on questions of right and wrong. Various attempts have been made to keep soldiers mentally sane. One is to provide convincing causes for their deployment, which (...) risks an “end justifies the means” way of thinking. The good cause can provide a moral justification for horrible atrocities. Another method, introduced in the USA, Canada, and Australia, aims to strengthen military personnel’s resistance by promoting and maintaining a happy, optimistic state of mind through the use of positive psychology. Alongside making soldiers “morally fit” for all kinds of situations, the focus could also be on moral recovery and forgiveness. Such a care-based military ethics approach, aimed at mutual understanding and interdependence, could help soldiers handle the emotional impact of moral conflicts. This demands that military units reflect on their organizational culture and rethink oaths and codes of conduct that focus mainly on efficiency and readiness, as well as the soldierly self-image with its seemingly still deeply rooted warrior ethos. Today, resilience and positive psychology in the military is apparently mainly geared to assuring its soldiers’ readiness. An appropriate set of virtues and understanding of virtue ethics that are less centered on self-perfection and autonomy could point to a different form of character-building and lead to a better understanding of others. (shrink)

What makes discrimination morally bad? In this paper, we discuss the putative badness of a case of consensual discrimination to show that prominent accounts of the badness of discrimination—appealing, inter alia, to harm, disrespect and inequality—fail to provide a satisfactory answer to this question. In view of this, we present a more promising account.

Phenomenal intentionality theories have recently enjoyed significant attention. According to these theories, the intentionality of a mental representation (what it is about) crucially depends on its phenomenal features. We present a new puzzle for these theories, involving a phenomenon called ‘intentional identity’, or ‘co-intentionality’. Co-intentionality is a ubiquitous intentional phenomenon that involves tracking things even when there is no concrete thing being tracked. We suggest that phenomenal intentionality theories need to either develop new uniquely phenomenal resources for handling the puzzle, (...) or restrict their explanatory ambitions. (shrink)

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia. The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunberg? Their answers are classified into four main themes and corresponding sections. The first section, ‘As we bake the earth, let's try and bake it from scratch’, gathers wider philosophical (...) considerations about the intersection between environment, education, and the pandemic. The second section, ‘Bump in the road or a catalyst for structural change?’, looks more closely into issues pertaining to education. The third section, ‘If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you’, focuses to Greta Thunberg’s messages and their responses. The last section, ‘Towards a new normal’, explores future scenarios and develops recommendations for critical emancipatory action. The concluding part brings these insights together, showing that resulting synergy between the answers offers much more then the sum of articles’ parts. With its ethos of collectivity, interconnectedness, and solidarity, philosophy of education in a new key is a crucial tool for development of post-pandemic education. (shrink)

We describe an evaluation undertaken on contract for the New Zealand State Services Commission of a major project (the Administrative Decision-Making Skills Project) designed to produce a model of administrative decision making and an associated teaching/learning packagefor use by government officers. It describes the evaluation of a philosophical model of decision making and the associated teaching/learning package in the setting of the New Zealand Public Service, where a deliberate attempt has been initiated to improve the quality of decision making, especially (...) in relation to moral factors. (shrink)

Having a confirmation bias sometimes leads us to hold inaccurate beliefs. So, the puzzle goes: why do we have it? According to the influential argumentative theory of reasoning, confirmation bias emerges because the primary function of reason is not to form accurate beliefs, but to convince others that we’re right. A crucial prediction of the theory, then, is that confirmation bias should be found only in the reasoning domain. In this article, we argue that there is evidence that confirmation bias (...) does exist outside the reasoning domain. This undermines the main evidential basis for the argumentative theory of reasoning. In presenting the relevant evidence, we explore why having such confirmation bias may not be maladaptive. (shrink)

Was bisexuality a widespread feature of ancient Greek society? This question is an instance of cross-cultural projection -- of taking the means through which people are categorized in one culture and applying it to members of another. It’s widely held by those who think that sexual orientation is socially constructed that its projection poses a problem. In this paper, I offer a more careful analysis of this alleged problem. To analyze projection, I adapt Iris Einheuser’s substratum-carving model of conventionalism to (...) fit the specific needs of social construction. Using this model, I show that projection is conceptually coherent, and so does not for that reason pose any problem. Along the way, I identify some of the epistemic difficulties facing projection. While these difficulties are formidable, they are not substantially affected by the constructivist claim. I therefore conclude that there is no unique problem facing the projection of a socially constructed sexual orientation. (shrink)

Conceptual combination performs a fundamental role in creating the broad range of compound phrases utilised in everyday language. This article provides a novel probabilistic framework for assessing whether the semantics of conceptual combinations are compositional, and so can be considered as a function of the semantics of the constituent concepts, or not. While the systematicity and productivity of language provide a strong argument in favor of assuming compositionality, this very assumption is still regularly questioned in both cognitive science and philosophy. (...) Additionally, the principle of semantic compositionality is underspecifi ed, which means that notions of both "strong" and "weak" compositionality appear in the literature. Rather than adjudicating between different grades of compositionality, the framework presented here contributes formal methods for determining a clear dividing line between compositional and non-compositional semantics. In addition, we suggest that the distinction between these is contextually sensitive. Compositionality is equated with a joint probability distribution modeling how the constituent concepts in the combination are interpreted. Marginal selectivity is introduced as a pivotal probabilistic constraint for the application of the Bell/CH and CHSH systems of inequalities. Non-compositionality is equated with a failure of marginal selectivity, or violation of either system of inequalities in the presence of marginal selectivity. This means that the conceptual combination cannot be modeled in a joint probability distribution, the variables of which correspond to how the constituent concepts are being interpreted. The formal analysis methods are demonstrated by applying them to an empirical illustration of twenty-four non-lexicalised conceptual combinations. (shrink)

Margaret Macdonald was at the institutional heart of analytic philosophy in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. However, her views on the nature of philosophical theories diverge quite considerably from those of many of her contemporaries. In this article, I focus on Macdonald’s provocative 1953 paper, “Linguistic Philosophy and Perception,” in which she argues that the value of philosophical theories is more akin to that of poetry or art than science or mathematics. I do so for two reasons. First, it reveals (...) just how far Macdonald’s metaphilosophical views diverged from those of many of her contemporaries. Second, the discussion in her article preempts recent literature on the nature of philosophical inquiry and the efficacy of philosophical arguments. Indeed, Macdonald’s paper is just as likely to provoke discussion today as it was in the 1950s. (shrink)

Although there is a growing recognition that older adults and those with extensive comorbid conditions undergo cancer screening too frequently, there is little information about patients’ perceptions regarding cessation of cancer screening. Information on older adults’ views of screening cessation would be helpful both for clinicians and for those designing interventions to reduce overscreening.

We suggest that the emerging field of the conservation humanities can play a valuable role in biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where most land remains under collective customary clan ownership. As a first step to mobilising this scholarly field in PNG and to support capacity development for PNG humanities academics, we conducted a landscape review of PNG humanities teaching and research relating to biodiversity conservation and customary land rights. We conducted a systematic literature review, a PNG teaching programme (...) review, and a series of online workshops between the authors (10 PNG-based, 7 UK-based). We found a small but notable amount of PNG research and teaching focused on biodiversity conservation or customary land rights. This included explicit discussion of these topics in 8 of 156 PNG-authored humanities texts published 2010-2020 and related teaching content in the curricula of several different humanities-based programmes. We discuss current barriers to PNG academic development. The growth of fully fledged in-country conservation humanities will require a joint collaborative effort by PNG researchers, who are best placed to carry out such work, and researchers from abroad who can access resources to support the process. (shrink)

Epistemic two-dimensional semantics is a theory in the philosophy of language that provides an account of meaning which is sensitive to the distinction between necessity and apriority. While this theory is usually presented in an informal manner, I take some steps in formalizing it in this paper. To do so, I define a semantics for a propositional modal logic with operators for the modalities of necessity, actuality, and apriority that captures the relevant ideas of epistemic two-dimensional semantics. I also describe (...) some properties of the logic that are interesting from a philosophical perspective, and apply it to the so-called nesting problem. (shrink)

A new puzzle of modal recombination is presented which relies purely on resources of first-order modal logic. It shows that naive recombinatorial reasoning, which has previously been shown to be inconsistent with various assumptions concerning propositions, sets and classes, leads to inconsistency by itself. The context sensitivity of modal expressions is suggested as the source of the puzzle, and it is argued that it gives us reason to reconsider the assumption that the notion of metaphysical necessity is in good standing.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) often outperforms human doctors in terms of decisional speed. For some diseases, the expected benefit of a fast but less accurate decision exceeds the benefit of a slow but more accurate one. In such cases, we argue, it is often justified to rely on a medical AI to maximise decision speed – even if the AI is less accurate than human doctors.

This is the full version of the Delphi Report on critical thinking and critical thinking instruction at the post-secondary level.

[Newspaper Opinion] Before the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying fall in oil prices, a carbon price would have been immediately painful for the countries that imposed it, but far better for everyone over the longer term. In this unprecedented moment, introducing a carbon price would be beneficial both now and for the future.

The term “Gettier Case” is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. What do these cases have in common? It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called “Gettiering.” While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks radical diversity. We argue that the extent of this diversity merits abandoning the notion of a “Gettier case” in (...) a favour of more finely grained terminology. We propose such terminology, and use it to effectively sort the myriad Gettier cases from the theoretical literature in a way that charts deep fault lines in ordinary judgments about knowledge. (shrink)

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