A number of philosophers endorse, without argument, the view that there’s something it’s like consciously to think that p, which is distinct from what it’s like consciously to think that q. This thesis, if true, would have important consequences for philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I offer an argument for it, and attempt to induce examples of it in the reader. The argument claims it would be impossible introspectively to distinguish conscious thoughts with respect to their (...) content if there weren’t something it’s like to think them. This argument is defended against several objections. Then I use what I call “minimal pair” experiences—sentences read without and with understanding—to induce in the reader an experience of the kind I claim exists. Further objections are considered and rebutted. (shrink)

In the past few years, a number of philosophers ; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Pitt 2004) have maintained the following three theses: there is a distinctive sort of phenomenology characteristic of conscious thought, as opposed to other sorts of conscious mental states; different conscious thoughts have different phenomenologies; and thoughts with the same phenomenology have the same intentional content. The last of these three claims is open to at least two different interpretations. It might mean that the phenomenology of a (...) thought expresses its intentional content, where intentional content is understood as propositional, and propositions are understood as mind-and language-independent abstract entities. And it might mean that the phenomenology of a thought is its intentional content—that is, that the phenomenology of a thought, like the phenomenology of a sensation, constitutes its content. The second sort of view is a kind of psychologism. Psychologistic views hold that one or another sort of thing—numbers, sentences, propositions, etc.—that we can think or know about is in fact a kind of mental thing. Since Frege, psychologism has been in bad repute among analytic philosophers. It is widely held that Frege showed that such views are untenable, since, among other things, they subjectivize what is in fact objective, and, hence, relativize such things as consistency and truth to the peculiarities of human psychology. The purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of the thesis that intentional mental content is phenomenological and to try to reach a conclusion about whether it yields a tenable view of mind, thought and meaning. I believe the thesis is not so obviously wrong as it will strike many philosophers of mind and language. In fact, it can be defended against the standard objections to psychologism, and it can provide the basis for a novel and interesting account of mentality. (shrink)

Some analytic philosophers have recently been defending the thesis that there’s “something it’s like” to consciously think a particular thought, which is qualitatively different from what it’s like to be in any other kind of conscious mental state and from what it’s like to think any other thought, and which constitutes the thought’s intentional content. (I call this the “intentional phenomenology thesis”). One objection to this thesis concerns the introspective availability of such content: If it is true that intentional phenomenology (...) is constitutive of intentional content, and that conscious phenomenology is always introspectively available, then it ought to be true that the content of any concept consciously entertained is always introspectively available. But it is not. For example, one can know introspectively that one is thinking that one knows that p without knowing introspectively what the content of the concept of knowledge is. Hence, it cannot be that intentional content is constituted by cognitive phenomenology. -/- I explore three responses to this objection. First, it is not clear that all of the contents of consciousness must be equally available to introspection. The capacities for conscious experience and introspective attention to it are distinct. It is not implausible that the resolving power of the latter might be insufficient to discern all of the fine-grained details of the former, or that its scope might be limited. Second, it is possible that in cases of incomplete accessibility one is entertaining only part of the concept the relevant term expresses in one’s language. In the knowledge case, for example, perhaps one is thinking only that one has justified true belief that p (one’s self-attribution of a thought about knowledge is in fact false). Finally, in such cases one might be consciously entertaining only part of the relevant concept, the rest remaining unconscious, and so unavailable to conscious introspection. I conclude that the objection is not decisive against the intentional phenomenology thesis. (shrink)

Been working on this approach for years. Hope to get around to publishing it sometime soon!

Failure of substitutivity of coreferential terms, one of the hallmarks of referential opacity, is standardly explained in terms of the presence of an expression (such as a verb of propositional attitude, a modal adverb or quotation marks) with opacity-inducing properties. It is thus assumed that any term in a complex expression for which substitutivity fails will be within the scope of an expression of one of these types, and that where there is an expression of one of these types there (...) will be failure of substitutivity for terms within its scope. I shall discuss a series of examples that have been thought to challenge this explanation by exhibiting failure of substitutivity of coreferential terms for positions not within the scope of any of the standard opacity-inducing expressions. If these examples are genuine, then the usual explanations of opacity are either incomplete – because there are sources of opacity other than those standardly identified, or completely mistaken – because the standardly identified expressions are not causes of opacity. I will argue, however, that the examples only exhibit failure of substitutivity of non-coreferential terms, and, hence, do not present a challenge to standard explanations of opacity. (shrink)

Call a thought whose expression involves the utterance of an indexical an indexical thought. Thus, my thoughts that I’m annoyed, that now is not the right time, that this is not acceptable, are all indexical thoughts. Such thoughts present a prima facie problem for the thesis that thought contents are phenomenally individuated -- i.e., that each distinct thought type has a proprietarily cognitive phenomenology such that its having that phenomenology makes it the thought that it is -- given the assumption (...) that phenomenology is intrinsically determined. My concern in this paper is to blunt standard intuitions concerning the external individuation of indexical thought contents, and to defend a conception of indexical thought content that is entirely phenomenal and internalist. (shrink)

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties: only groups with sufficient structure—call them ‘collectives’—have the necessary agency. Moreover, if duties imply ability then moral agents (of both the individual and collectives varieties) can bear duties only over actions they are able to perform. It is thus doubtful that individual agents can bear duties to perform actions that only a collective could perform. This appears to leave us at a loss (...) when assigning duties in circumstances where only a collective could perform some morally desirable action and no collective exists. But, I argue, we are not at a loss. This article outlines a new way of assigning duties over collective acts when there is no collective. Specifically, we should assign collectivisation duties to individuals. These are individual duties to take steps towards forming a collective, which then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivisation duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers. (shrink)

Digital phenotyping will potentially enable earlier detection and prediction of mental illness by monitoring human interaction with and through digital devices. Notwithstanding its promises, it is certain that a person’s digital phenotype will at times be at odds with their first-person testimony of their psychological states. In this paper, we argue that there are features of digital phenotyping in the context of psychiatry which have the potential to exacerbate the tendency to dismiss patients’ testimony and treatment preferences, which can be (...) instances of epistemic injustice. We first explain what epistemic injustice is, and why it is argued to be an extensive problem in health and disability settings. We then explain why epistemic injustice is more likely to apply with even greater force in psychiatric contexts, and especially where digital phenotyping may be involved. Finally, we offer some tentative suggestions of how epistemic injustice can be minimised in digital psychiatry. (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 arguments of Fodor, Garret, Walker and Parkes [(1980) Against definitions, Cognition, 8, 263-367] are the source of widespread skepticism in cognitive science about lexical semantic structure. Whereas the thesis that lexical items, and the concepts they express, have decompositional structure (i.e. have significant constituents) was at one time "one of those ideas that hardly anybody [in the cognitive sciences] ever considers giving up" (p. 264), most researchers now believe that "[a]ll the evidence suggests that the classical [(decompositional)] view is (...) wrong as a general theory of concepts" [Smith, Medin & Rips (1984) A psychological approach to concepts: comments on Rey, Cognition, 17, 272], and cite Fodor et al. (1980) as "sounding the death knell for decompositional theories" [MacNamara & Miller (1989) Attributes of theories of meaning, Psychological Bulletin, 106, 360]. I argue that the prevailing skepticism is unmotivated by the arguments in Fodor et al. Fodor et al. misrepresent the form, function and scope of the decompositional hypothesis, and the procedures they employ to test for the psychological reality of definitions are flawed. I argue, further, that decompositional explanations of the phenomena they consider are preferable to their primitivist alternatives, and, hence, that there is prima facie reason to accept them as evidence for the existence of decompositional structure. Cognitive scientists would, therefore, do well to revert to their former commitment to the decompositional hypothesis. (shrink)

Externalism is the view that the intentional content of a mental state supervenes on its relations to objects in the extramental world. Nativism is the view that some of the innate states of the mind/brain have intentional content. I consider both “causal” and “nomic” versions of externalism, and argue that both are incompatible with nativism. I consider likely candidates for a compatibilist position – a nativism of “narrow” representational states, and a nativism of the contentless formal “vehicles” of representational states. (...) I argue that “narrow nativism” is either too implausible to appeal to the nativist – because it entails that innate representational states are lost as the mind becomes more experienced, or too costly to appeal to the externalist – because a reasonable version of it requires the analytic-synthetic distinction. Finally, I argue that “syntactic nativism” is indistinguishable from classical anti-nativist empiricism, given the latter’s broad tolerance for innate implementation of psychological principles and mechanisms. (shrink)

Some contemporary states are morally culpable for historically distant wrongs. But which states for which wrongs? The answer is not obvious, due to secessions, unions, and the formation of new states in the time since the wrongs occurred. This paper develops a framework for answering the question. The argument begins by outlining a picture of states’ agency on which states’ culpability is distinct from the culpability of states’ members. It then outlines, and rejects, a plausible-seeming answer to our question: that (...) culpability transmits from a past state’s action to a present state just if the two states share a numerical identity, for example as determined by international law. I advocate a different answer: culpability transmits from a past action to a present state to the extent that the present state ‘descends from’ the aspects of the past state that underpinned the past action. One potential upshot is that some present-day settler-colonies (such as Australia) are culpable for the centuries-ago invasion of their lands by European powers—even though these states did not perform these invasions and indeed did not exist at the time. (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)

This is a corrected version of the final proofs. I've fixed a number of typos, and corrected a blunder in chapter 4. In chapter 4 I say that 'this is this' is analytic, and 'this is not this' is antonymous. This is inconsistent with what I say in chapter 5, and not what I actually think. Rather, 'this is this' is taugologous, and 'this is not this' is contradictory. Analyticity and autnonmy are sense properties while tautologousness and contradictoriness are formal (...) logical properties. Heading, ToC and Index updated accordingly. (Oxford will make these corrections in their online version and in future print runs.). (shrink)

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.

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)

Climate change is more than a discrete issue demanding political attention and response. A changing climate permeates political life as material processes of planetary change reverberate in our bodies, affecting subterranean processes of attention and evoking bodily responses at and below the threshold of awareness. By way of example, I explore the register of bodily feeling to raise the possibility that proliferating anomalies in atmospheric, oceanic, and seismic activities are entering into subliminal experiences of time and confounding embodied expectations of (...) how the future is likely to flow from the past. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of how micropolitical strategies to amplify visceral experiences of climatic changes might valuably contribute to larger programs for climate action. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the harms inflicted upon transgender persons through “misgendering,” that is, such deployments of gender terms that diminish transgender persons’ selfrespect, limit the discursive resources at their disposal to define their own gender, and cause them microaggressive psychological harms. Such deployments are morally contestable, that is, they can be challenged on ethical or political grounds. Two characterizations of “woman” proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. When we consider what would happen to transgender (...) women upon the broad implementation of these characterizations within transgender women’s social context, we discover that they suffer from two defects: they either exclude at least some transgender women, or else they implicitly foster hierarchies among women, marginalizing transgender women in particular. In conclusion, I claim that the moral contestability of gender-term deployments acts as a stimulus to regularly consider the provisionality and revisability of our deployments of the term “woman.”. (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)

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)

In this paper, we focus on the moral responsibility of organized groups in light of historicism. Historicism is the view that any morally responsible agent must satisfy certain historical conditions, such as not having been manipulated. We set out four examples involving morally responsible organized groups that pose problems for existing accounts of historicism. We then pose a trilemma: one can reject group responsibility, reject historicism, or revise historicism. We pursue the third option. We formulate a Manipulation Condition and a (...) Guarding Condition as addendums to historicism that are necessary to accommodate our cases of group responsibility. (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)

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)

Reductive representationalism is the view that the qualitative properties associated with conscious experience are properties of the objects of the experience, and not of the experience itself. A prima facie problem for this view arises from dreams and hallucinations, in which qualitative properties are experienced but not instantiated in external objects of perception. I argue that representationalist attempts to solve it by appeal to actually uninstantiated properties are guilty of an absurdity akin to that which Ryle accused Descartes of in (...) the latter’s doctrine of immaterial substance. (shrink)

The principle of energy conservation is widely taken to be a se- rious difficulty for interactionist dualism (whether property or sub- stance). Interactionists often have therefore tried to make it satisfy energy conservation. This paper examines several such attempts, especially including E. J. Lowe’s varying constants proposal, show- ing how they all miss their goal due to lack of engagement with the physico-mathematical roots of energy conservation physics: the first Noether theorem (that symmetries imply conservation laws), its converse (that conservation (...) laws imply symmetries), and the locality of continuum/field physics. Thus the “conditionality re- sponse”, which sees conservation as (bi)conditional upon symme- tries and simply accepts energy non-conservation as an aspect of interactionist dualism, is seen to be, perhaps surprisingly, the one most in accord with contemporary physics (apart from quantum mechanics) by not conflicting with mathematical theorems basic to physics. A decent objection to interactionism should be a posteri- ori, based on empirically studying the brain. (shrink)

This article argues that through her songs and music videos Pagan Poetry, Cocoon and Hidden Place, versatile artist Björk is able to carve out a space for erotic tenderness. This erotic tenderness will be unearthed as a queer or minor sexuality, in the sense that it goes against a phallic and genital majoritarian account of sexuality. Tender sexuality might not be obviously queer, yet a detour through the early work of Freud will show how our hegemonic account of sexuality is (...) built upon a repression of such a tender sexuality. Freud’s psychoanalysis is only able to regard this sexual tenderness in a negative vein as a pathological symptom. Supported primarily by the works of Deleuze, Guattari and Muñoz, this article will propose that Björk’s artistry is able to produce a line of flight outside of this tender-less sexuality, liberating an otherwise repressed minor tender sexuality through a visually and sonically becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-BwO and becoming-molecular. (shrink)

In order for states to fulfil (many of) their moral obligations, costs must be passed to individuals. This paper asks how these costs should be distributed. I advocate the common-sense answer: the distribution of costs should, insofar as possible, track the reasons behind the state’s duty. This answer faces a number of problems, which I attempt to solve.

Tim Crane maintains that beliefs cannot be conscious because they persist in the absence of consciousness. Conscious judgments can share their contents with beliefs, and their occurrence can be evidence for what one believes; but they cannot be beliefs, because they don’t persist. I challenge Crane’s premise that belief attributions to the temporarily unconscious are literally true. To say of an unconscious agent that she believes that p is like saying that she sings well. To say she sings well is (...) to say that when she sings, her singing is good. To say that she believes that p is to say that when she consciously considers the content that p she consciously affirms it. I also argue that the phenomenal view of intentional content Crane appears to endorse prima facie commits him to the view, at least controversial, perhaps incoherent, that there is unconscious phenomenology. Keywords : Belief; Consciousness; Unconscious; Intentional Content; Judgment. Credenze coscienti Riassunto: Tim Crane sostiene che le credenze non possano essere coscienti, dal momento che perdurano anche in assenza di coscienza. I giudizi formulati consapevolmente possono condividere i loro contenuti con le credenze e il loro verificarsi può essere una forma di evidenza a supporto di quanto uno crede. E tuttavia essi non possono essere credenze, dal momento che non perdurano. Nel commento metto in discussione la premessa di Crane secondo cui porre l’attribuzione di credenze su un piano temporaneamente inconscio sia vero in senso letterale. Dire di un agente non cosciente che esso creda che p è come dire che canti bene. Dire che canti bene è dire che quando canta, il suo canto è buono. Dire che crede che p è dire che quando considera consapevolmente il contenuto p costui lo afferma consapevolmente. Inoltre intendo affermare che la visione fenomenica del contenuto intenzionale che Crane sembra abbracciare lo impegni prima facie nei confronti della prospettiva, quantomeno controversa e probabilmente incoerente, secondo cui esisterebbe una dimensione fenomenica inconscia. Parole chiave: Credenza; Coscienza; Inconscio; Contenuto intenzionale; Giudizio. (shrink)

This short article provides an overview of "care ethics" for students who are new to moral theory.

The primary goal of this article is point out certain close parallels between some ideas of the radical feminist theorist Mary Daly and those of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. These similarities are particularly striking regarding distinctions made by both authors between two fundamentally contrasting types of cognitive faculty, of time and temporal experience, and of self and emotion. Daly departs from Bergson inasmuch as she employs these distinctions in her own way. She does not—like Bergson—employ them to depict the (...) result of a natural process of consciousness or life, and the dangers for human freedom and thought of not properly respecting these differences. Rather, she locates these differences within a more liberatory, ethical perspective to ground a sharp, inimical contrast between feminist creative movement on the one hand, and static, fixing, and “fixating” patriarchy, with its “technocratic” pretensions, on the other. My hope is that highlighting the similarities between Daly and Bergson will open new paths of appreciation and critique of Daly’s work. (shrink)

I argue that what determines whether a science is ‘formal’ or ‘empirical’ is not the ontological status of its objects of study, but, rather, its methodology. Since all sciences aim at generalizations, and generalizations concern types, if types are abstract (non-spatiotemporal) objects, then all sciences are concerned to discover the nature of certain abstract objects. What distinguishes empirical from formal sciences is how they study such things. If the types of a science have observable instances (‘tokens’), then the nature of (...) the types may be determined empirically. If they types have either abstract tokens, or no tokens at all, their nature must be determined by non-empirical methods involving intuition, reasoning and proof. I conclude that the status of (theoretical) linguistics depends on the methodologies of syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology and orthography (and any other subdiscipline that is concerned with the study of the structure of language). (shrink)

According to Brian Loar, an adequate theory of intentionality must acknowledge the fundamental role phenomenology plays in the determination of intentional content. It must take into account individuals’ experience of their intentional states, from a subjective point of view. From this perspective, intentional content is internally determined (given that phenomenology is). On the other hand, Loar is convinced (by arguments given by Tyler Burge) that mental states also have externally determined contents, fixed by objective facts about thinkers’ sociolinguistic environments. This (...) paper argues that Loar’s theory of intentionality is compromised by his acceptance of the Burgean intuitions (which do not, their power and influence notwithstanding, support anti-individualism) and by an overly narrow view of the scope of phenomenology. (shrink)

The thesis that conceptual content is experiential faces a prima facie objection. Phenomenology is not in general compositional. For example, the experienced color of a thing will change depending on its context. If conceptual phenomenology is also subject to context effects, then thought contents will not be compositional. However, the compositionality of thought content is, arguably, explanatorily indispensable. This paper considers several different conceptions of compositionality, but in the end maintains there is no introspective evidence for conceptual context effects.

In this reply to an article of Toni Erskine's, I argue that coalitions of the willing are moral agents. They can therefore bear responsibility in their own right.

In Switzerland, institutions through which legal knowledge and education are produced have systemi-cally enabled epistemic injustice through forms of silencing and the cultivation of active ignorance along individual and institutional dimensions. As such, we argue that an important form of intervention in the legal education system, which would not only provide instruments to address epistemic injustice, but also better equip lawyers as individuals and as members of a collective, epistemic community, is feminist critical theory. Providing access and engagement with critical (...) legal methodology, throughout legal studies, is integral to the development of epistemic capacities. It would help prevent formation of insensitivities to experiences of injustice and interrupt the perpetuation of silencing and cultivation of active ignorance along individual and institutional dimensions. -/- . (shrink)

This paper replies to a number of objections brought against the solution to Jennifer Saul's puzzle of failure of substitutivity in transparent contexts presented in my 2001 paper "Alter Egos and Their Names".

In this paper we argue that there is a large class of expressions, typified by ‘plastic flower’, ‘stuffed animal’ and ‘kosher bacon’, that have a unique semantics combining compositional, idiomatic and decompositional interpretation. These expressions are compositional because their constituents contribute their meanings to the meanings of the wholes; they are idiomatic because their interpretation involves assigning dictionary entries to non-terminal elements in their syntactic structure; and they are decompositional because their meanings have proper parts that are not the meanings (...) of any of their syntactic constituents. We argue that extensionalist semantics, on which the meaning of an expression is a function from domains to extensions in those domains, cannot provide an adequate account of the semantics of these expressions, and that supplementation with a theory of pragmatic interpretation does not improve the situation. We show how our account explains the intensionality and the productivity of these expressions. (shrink)

Gender inequality is still present as it was over 100 years ago when women in the United States were fighting for their given right to vote, a right that was stolen from them by the grips of a male figure. However, with social media, the potential to oppose gender inequality is present. Social media is a modern tool that has the ability to bring different groups together to fight against gender inequality. Social media permits this linkage, especially when the awareness (...) of kidnapping and abduction targeting females is now more present than ever. This raise in awareness motivated the question, is there enough evidence to stay that social media majorly impacts the progress of gender equality? Different sources implement the evidence that social media strongly influences the progress in gender equality by introducing the TIGER program, statistical data explaining the high distressing rates of misogyny, the limits of social media in gender-related issues, and the evidence for why social media is the best tool at the moment. Through these sources, the evidence solidifies to conclude that social media considerably impacts the movement of gender equality. (shrink)

In his celebrated 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel stages a human-bat encounter to illustrate and support his claim that “subjective experience” is irreducible to “objective fact”: because Nagel cannot experience the world as a bat does, he will never know what it is like to be one. In Nagel’s account, heterogeneity is figured negatively—as a failure or lack of resemblance—and functions to constrain his knowledge of bats. Today, as white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations (...) across North America, might figuring heterogeneity positively, as a condition of creativity, open up new modes of receptivity and responsiveness to species extinctions? This essay turns to philosophies of becoming and to recent research in the biological sciences to explore this possibility. I suggest that attending to the heterogeneity of experience alerts us to more public dimensions of our being and may thereby work against the tendency to understand and experience ourselves as self-contained and closed off from one another and the world we share in common. This may in turn enhance our sense of entanglement with the events, bodies, and forces on the “outside” of experience, including bats and the white-nose syndrome with which they are afflicted today. Such an affirmation of heterogeneity as a condition of creativity holds the greatest promise for multispecies ethics today, I propose, when it is joined to an affirmation of incompatibilities within and between things as a real force of suffering and destruction in a heterogeneous world. (shrink)

Questionable research practices are a well-recognized problem in psychology. Coding bias, or the tendency of review studies to disproportionately cite positive findings from original research, has received comparatively little attention. Coding bias is more likely to occur when original research, such as neuroimaging, includes large numbers of effects, and is most concerning in applied contexts. We evaluated coding bias in reviews of structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) studies of PCL-R psychopathy. We used PRISMA guidelines to locate all relevant original sMRI (...) studies and reviews. The proportion of null-findings cited in reviews was significantly lower than those reported in original research, indicating coding bias. Coding bias was not affected by publication date or review design. Reviews recommending forensic applications—such as treatment amenability or reduced criminal responsibility—were no more accurate than purely theoretical reviews. Coding bias may have contributed to a perception that structural brain abnormalities in psychopaths are more consistent than they actually are, and by extension that sMRI findings are suitable for forensic application. We discuss possible sources for the pervasive coding bias we observed, and we provide recommendations to counteract this bias in review studies. Until coding bias is addressed, we argue that this literature should not inform conclusions about psychopaths' neurobiology, especially in forensic contexts. (shrink)

The editors cull the works of 11 noted French and German philosophers for their contributions to the debate about what animals are like and how we should relate to them. Each selection gives the gist of the philosopher's view followed by a noted scholar's comments. The result, as Peter Singer notes in his merciless Foreward, is that most of the Continentals have had almost nothing of interest to say on the topic.

Some scholars working on the ethics of belief argue that we can wrong each other in virtue of what we believe. This thesis is known as doxastic wronging. Proponents of doxastic wronging have different views about when our beliefs wrong. A prominent view is that our beliefs wrong when they falsely diminish. I call this the false diminishment account of doxastic wronging. In this paper, I argue against this account on the grounds that it is morally overdemanding. Nevertheless, I agree (...) with proponents that our beliefs are sometimes morally objectionable. I offer an account of disrespectful belief which holds that our beliefs are disrespectful when they falsely deflate, i.e., incorrectly underestimate, and thereby lead us to undervalue morally significant features of each other’s personhood. My view implies that we can form disrespectful beliefs about each other even if we do not wrong each other by forming them. (shrink)

This essay seeks to see if one side or the other in the hunting debate gets more purchase if we first ask what gives the state the moral right to promote sport hunting when the practice is in deep decline. We look at the dominant economic and political reasons for state support, none of which settle the moral matter. We then look at various state appeals to moral justification (ethical hunting, the right to hunt, the value of heritage, etc.) and (...) determine that they beg the same prior questions that hunters beg--questions about the new scientific understanding of animal cognition and about the ideal individual and society in the 21st C. Neither side in the philosophical debate is helped by state promotion of hunting, given that anti-hunters also often dispense with the deeper questions and the relevant science. Conclusion: the debate should be based on the new scientific understanding of animals' capacities and on current ideals of the individual and society. State policy should reflect that. -/- thehe state should see that it is on slippery ground when it devises programs to gratify hunters and to encourage the innocent, the reluctant, and the lapsed to take up the practice. (shrink)

Millikan's account of substance concepts is based on a notion of “substance” expanded from realist notions of individuals and natural kinds. Her metaphysical notion, based on “inductive potential,” is shown to be too puristic and needs to incorporate cognizing subjects. This could preserve the realist/nondescriptionist insight that the extension of substances is determined by the world.