Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools designed to help citizens decide how to vote. They typically offer their users a representation of what is at stake in an election by matching user preferences on issues with those of parties or candidates. While the use of VAAs has boomed in recent years in both established and new democracies, this new phenomenon in the electoral landscape has received little attention from political theorists. The current academic debate is focused on epistemic aspects (...) of the question how a VAA can adequately represent electoral politics. We argue that conceptual and normative presuppositions at play in the background of the tool are at least as important. Even a well-developed VAA does not simply reflect what is at stake in the election by neutrally passing along information. Rather, it structures political information in a way that is informed by the developers’ presuppositions. Yet, these presuppositions remain hidden if we interpret the tool as a mirror that offers the user a reflection of him/herself situated within the political landscape. VAAs should therefore be understood as electoral dioramas, staged according to a contestable picture of politics. (shrink)

This paper provides an agonistic interpretation of Robert Brandom's social-pragmatic account of normativity. I argue that social practice, on this approach, should be seen not just as cooperative, but also as contestatory. This aspect, which has so far remained implicit, helps to illuminate Brandom's claim that normative statuses are ‘instituted’ by social practices: normative statuses are brought into play in mutual engagement, and are only in play from an engaged social perspective among others. Moreover, in contrast to a positivist or (...) conventionalist understanding of Brandom's work, it shows that the possibility of a critical stance toward existing practices is not only compatible with, but already implicit in this form of pragmatism. This can be made explicit with the notion of farcical practices: practices that are treated merely as if they institute genuine commitments and entitlements. Interpreting a practice as farcical is taking a critical stance toward it, and this possibility is inherent in Brandom's theoretical framework. This opens the way for a fruitful appropriation of Brandom's pragmatism for social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Agonism is a political theory that places contestation at the heart of politics. Agonistic theorists charge liberal theory with a depoliticization of pluralism through an excessive focus on consensus. This paper examines the agonistic critiques of liberalism from a normative perspective. I argue that by itself the argument from pluralism is not sufficient to support an agonistic account of politics, but points to further normative commitments. Analyzing the work of Mouffe, Honig, Connolly, and Owen, I identify two normative currents of (...) agonistic theory: emancipatory agonism, aimed at challenging violence and exclusion, and perfectionist agonism, aimed at the cultivation of nobility. From a normative perspective the former presents an internal challenge to liberalism, while the latter constitutes an external challenge to liberalism by providing a competing account of the ends of politics. Recognition of the distinction between emancipatory and perfectionist agonism is crucial in assessing the purchase of agonistic critiques of liberalism. Furthermore, this analysis draws us beyond the simple opposition between contestation and consensus. It is not simply a question of valuing genuine pluralism and therefore criticizing consensus; rather the question comes to be: what are the ends of politics? (shrink)

This essay presents a new way of conceptualizing the problem of political obligation. On the traditional ‘normativist’ framing of the issue, the primary task for theory is to secure the content and justification of political obligations, providing practically applicable moral knowledge. This paper develops an alternative, ‘pragmatist’ framing of the issue, by rehabilitating a frequently misunderstood essay by Hanna Pitkin and by recasting her argument in terms of the ‘pragmatic turn’ in recent philosophy, as articulated by Robert Brandom. From this (...) perspective, the content and justification of political obligations cannot be determined in a way that is in principle separable from their application. This casts ‘political obligation’ not as a problem to be philosophically resolved, but as a political predicament that calls for a kind of practical engagement. The merit of this perspective is to draw our attention toward the conditions under which the problem appears as a lived predicament. (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.

This paper examines the differences between moralist, realist, and pragmatist approaches to political legitimacy by articulating their largely implicit views of judgment. Three claims are advanced. First, the salient opposition among approaches to legitimacy is not between “moralism” and “realism.” Recent realist proposals for rethinking legitimacy share with moralist views a distinctive form, called “normativism”: a quest for knowledge of principles that solve the question of legitimacy. This assumes that judging legitimacy is a matter of applying such principles to a (...) case at hand. Second, neither Rawls nor Habermas is a normativist about political legitimacy. The principles of legitimacy they proffer claim to express rather than adjudicate the legitimacy of a liberal-democratic regime, and thus cannot solve the question of legitimacy at a fundamental level. But perhaps we should question the normativist aspiration to theoretically resolving the problem to begin with. My third claim is that a “pragmatist” approach enables us to rethink political legitimacy more deeply by shifting focus from the articulation of principles to the activity of judging. Implicit in Rawls’s and Habermas’s theories I then find clues towards an alternative account of judgment, in which the question of legitimacy calls not for theoretical resolution but for ongoing practical engagement. (shrink)

This contribution develops two objections to Hans Lindahl’s legal philosophy, as exhibited in his Authority and the Globalization of Inclusion and Exclusion. First, his conception of constituent power overstates the necessity of violence in initiating collective action. Second, his rejection of the distinction between participatory and representative democracy on the grounds that participation is representation is misleading, and compromises our ability to differentiate qualitatively among various forms of (purportedly) democratic involvement. Both problems stem from the same root. They result from (...) conflating two distinct senses of ‘representation’: acting-for-someone (or representative agency) and portraying-something-as-something (or representation-as). (shrink)

Eva Erman and Niklas Möller have recently criticised a range of political theorists for committing a pragmatistic fallacy, illicitly drawing normative conclusions from politically neutral ideas abo...

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)

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)

This essay examines the promise of the notion of modus vivendi for realist political theory. I interpret recent theories of modus vivendi as affirming the priority of peace over justice, and explore several ways of making sense of this idea. I proceed to identify two key problems for modus vivendi theory, so conceived. Normatively speaking, it remains unclear how this approach can sustain a realist critique of Rawlsian theorizing about justice while avoiding a Hobbesian endorsement of absolutism. And conceptually, the (...) theory remains wedded to a key feature of social contract theory: political order is conceived as based on agreement. This construes the horizontal tensions among individual or group agents in society as prior to the vertical, authoritative relations between authorities and their subjects. Political authority thereby appears from the start as a solution to societal conflict, rather than a problem in itself. I argue that this way of framing the issue abstracts from political experience. Instead I attempt to rethink the notion of modus vivendi from within the lived experience of political conflict, as oriented not primarily toward peace, but political survival. With this shift of perspective, the idea of modus vivendi shows us, pace Bernard Williams, that the “first political question” is not how to achieve order and stability, but rather: what can I live with? (shrink)

This essay contributes to developing a new approach to political legitimacy by asking what is involved in judging the legitimacy of a regime from a practical point of view. It is focused on one aspect of this question: the role of identity in such judgment. I examine three ways of understanding the significance of identity for political legitimacy: the foundational, associative, and agonistic picture. Neither view, I claim, persuasively captures the dilemmas of judgment in the face of disagreement and uncertainty (...) about who “I” am and who “we” are. I then propose a composite, pragmatic picture. This view casts the question of political legitimacy as an existential predicament: it is fundamentally a question about who you are—both as a person and as a member of collectives. The pragmatic picture integrates rational, prudential, and ethical qualities of good judgment that were heretofore associated with mutually exclusive ways of theorizing legitimacy. It also implies that the question of legitimacy cannot be resolved philosophically. (shrink)

There are at least two politically salient senses of “representation”—acting-for-others and portraying-something-as-something. The difference is not just semantic but also logical: relations of representative agency are dyadic (x represents y), while portrayals are triadic (x represents y as z). I exploit this insight to disambiguate constructivism and to improve our theoretical vocabulary for analyzing political representation. I amend Saward’s claims-based approach on three points, introducing the “characterization” to correctly identify the elements of representational claims; explaining the “referent” in pragmatic, not (...) metaphysical terms; and differentiating multiple forms of representational activity. This enables me to clarify how the represented can be both prior to representation and constituted by it, and to recover Pitkin’s idea that representatives ought to be “responsive” to the represented. These points are pertinent to debates about the role of representatives, the nature of representative democracy, and the dynamics of revolutionary movements. (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.

Recent debates in political theory display a renewed interest in the problem of judgment. This article critically examines the different senses of judgment that are at play in Jürgen Habermas’ theory of law. The article offers a new critical reading of Habermas’ account of the legitimacy of law, and a revisionary interpretation of the reconstructive approach to political theory that underpins it. Both of these are instrumental to an understanding of what is involved in judging the legitimacy of law that (...) is richer than has been recognized thus far by both critics and defenders of Habermas. (shrink)

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are interactive online tools designed to assist voters by improving the basis on which they decide how to vote. In recent years, they have been widely adopted, but their design is the subject of ongoing and often heated criticism. Most of these debates focus on whether VAAs accurately measure the standpoints of political parties and the preferences of users and on whether they report valid results while avoiding political bias. It is generally assumed that if their (...) methodology is sound, then VAAs can be seen as strengthening the democratic process. But as we argue in this chapter, the setup of VAAs raises basic questions of normative democratic theory as well. Insofar as VAAs are supposed to improve the functioning of the democratic process, it must be clarified in what sense they aim to make a contribution, before it even makes sense to discuss their effectiveness at doing so. -/- VAAs are often intended to enhance the democratic process by one or all of the following: (I) informing voters about the policy standpoints of political parties (or individual candidates), (2) increasing voter turnout, and (3) ensuring that the composition of parliaments more accurately reflects the political attitudes of the electorate. In the next three sections, we discuss three central bones of contention in current democratic theory that are crucial to these ways in which VAAs typically take themselves to contribute to strengthening the democratic process: -/- 1. Questions about citizen competence: What forms of competence do citizens need to have, and to what extent, for a democracy to function properly? -/- 2. Questions about political participation: What forms and extent of participation are vital to democracy? -/- 3. Questions about democratic representation: How should the relation between the elected and the electorate be understood? -/- For each issue we aim to show, first, how the design and setup of mainstream VAAs are tacitly structured by a specific conception of the democratic aim at issue and, second, what some alternative positions on these questions are within contemporary political theory. In the final section, we will discuss some of the implications of this analysis for the responsibilities of VAA developers, and particularly for the procedural neutrality to which they are typically committed. Our conclusion will be that once these issues are identified, developers of VAAs should either argue in favour of their views on democratic competence, participation and representation, or they should rethink the design of VA As in ways that move beyond their current assumptions, or both. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 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)

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 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.

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)

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)

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

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.

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)

Theoretical arguments and empirical investigations indicate that a high proportion of published findings do not replicate and are likely false. The current position paper provides a broad perspective on scientific error, which may lead to replication failures. This broad perspective focuses on reform history and on opportunities for future reform. We organize our perspective along four main themes: institutional reform, methodological reform, statistical reform and publishing reform. For each theme, we illustrate potential errors by narrating the story of a fictional (...) researcher during the research cycle. We discuss future opportunities for reform. The resulting agenda provides a resource to usher in an era that is marked by a research culture that is less error-prone and a scientific publication landscape with fewer spurious findings. (shrink)

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)

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)

Als Plato de hedendaagse academie zou aanschouwen, zou hij niet alleen stomverbaasd zijn over de massificatie en de byzantijnse bureaucratie, maar gezien het ethische doel van de universiteit zou hij ook reden hebben om bezorgd te zijn.

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)

Iconic photographs are visual arguments depicting an, often dramatic, particular situation showing victims of disasters. Spectators watching the photo of the particular situation, empathise with it, and project the feelings evoked onto the events that form the context for the scene in the picture. This mobilises them into political action. In the process, however, the depicted personal misery is perused to exemplify the larger events. The tragedy of iconic photographs is analysed not as the misery experienced by the depicted persons, (...) but as the breach of their right to shame which is required for the photo to acquire iconicity. Examples are addressed, as well as the contrast classes of the self-portrait and Byzantine icons. (shrink)

Inspired by Bas van Fraassen’s Stance Empiricism, Anjan Chakravartty has developed a pluralistic account of what he calls epistemic stances towards scientific ontology. In this paper, I examine whether Chakravartty’s stance pluralism can exclude epistemic stances that licence pseudo-scientific practices like those found in Scientology. I argue that it cannot. Chakravartty’s stance pluralism is therefore prone to a form of debilitating relativism. I consequently argue that we need (1) some ground or constraint in relation to which epistemic stances can be (...) ranked by degrees, and (2) some way to demarcate science from pseudo-science so that we know what epistemic stances are about. Regarding (1), I argue that empirical detectability can serve as the ground in relation to which epistemic stances are ranked by degrees. Regarding (2), I argue for ranking sciences on a continuum according to established institutional criteria, rather than attempting to draw a strict demarcation. (shrink)

Bas van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism (CE) has been much discussed. There is, however, a curious feature of van Fraassen’s writings that has been overlooked up until now. This is that he sometimes capitalises certain key terms, notably “Induction”. This is done to differentiate a pragmatic small ‘i’ induction (which has epistemic import) from a rule-bound capital ‘I’ induction (which does not). In this paper, I argue that van Fraassen’s small letter/capital letter distinction reveals an underlying dualism, one that is reminiscent (...) of the notoriously problematic semantic dualism in Logical Positivism (between a theoretical language and an observation language). Despite partly developing CE to overcome Logical Positivism’s kind of dualism, van Fraassen seems to have tacitly endorsed it anyway. If so, then CE requires revision. It is, however, not clear how to conduct such a revision. It is not clear what the way forward should be once CE is understood as innately dualistic. (shrink)

In this article , I first engage in some conceptual clarification of what the words "imagine," "imagining," and "imagination" can mean. Each has a constructive sense, an attitudinal sense, and an imagistic sense. Keeping the senses straight in the course of cognitive theorizing is important for both psychology and philosophy. I then discuss the roles that perceptual memories, beliefs, and genre truth attitudes play in constructive imagination, or the capacity to generate novel representations that go well beyond what's prompted by (...) one's immediate environment. (shrink)

Mindfulness is a form of meditation that derives from Buddhist practice and is one of the fastest growing areas of psychological research. Studies investigating the role of mindfulness in the treatment of behavioural addictions have – to date – primarily focused on gambling disorder. Recent pilot studies and clinical case studies have demonstrated that weekly mindfulness therapy sessions can lead to clinically significant change among individuals with gambling problems. Although preliminary findings indicate that there are applications for mindfulness approaches in (...) the treatment of gambling disorder, further empirical and clinical research utilizing larger-sample controlled study designs is clearly needed. (shrink)

Imaginative representations are crucial to the generation of action--both pretense and plain action. But well-known theories of imagination on offer in the literature [1] fail to describe how perceptually-formatted imaginings (mental images) and motor imaginings function in the generation of action and [2] fail to recognize the important fact that spatially rich imagining can be integrated into one's perceptual manifold. In this paper, I present a theory of imagining that shows how spatially rich imagining functions in the generation of action. (...) I also describe the imaginative structures behind two under-explored forms of action: semi-pretense and pretense layering. In addition, I suggest that my theory of imagining meshes better than the competitors with current work in cognitive and affective neuroscience. (shrink)

In an earlier issue, I argue (2014) that psychology and epistemology should distinguish religious credence from factual belief. These are distinct cognitive attitudes. Levy (2017) rejects this distinction, arguing that both religious and factual “beliefs” are subject to “shifting” on the basis of fluency and “intuitiveness.” Levy’s theory, however, (1) is out of keeping with much research in cognitive science of religion and (2) misrepresents the notion of factual belief employed in my theory. So his claims don’t undermine my distinction. (...) I conclude by suggesting some approaches to empirically testing our views. (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)