Daniel Bell and Wang Pei’s recent monograph, Just Hierarchy, seeks to defend hierarchical relationships against more egalitarian alternatives. This paper addresses their argument, offered in one chapter of the book, in favour of a hierarchical relationship between human and nonhuman animals. This relationship, Bell and Pei argue, should conform to what they call “subordination without cruelty:” it is permissible to subordinate and exploit animals for human ends, provided that we do not treat them cruelly. We focus on three aspects (...) of their view: their argument for a hierarchical view; their understanding of cruelty; and their account of the heightened duties they claim we owe to nonhuman animals who are intelligent, domesticated, and/or “cute.” We argue that the reasons that Bell and Pei offer fail to support their conclusions, and that, even if one accepts a hierarchical view, the conclusions that Bell and Pei draw about the permissibility of practices such as killing animals for food do not follow. We conclude by emphasizing philosophers’ responsibility to thoroughly test their arguments and to engage with existing debates, especially when the practices they seek to justify involve harms of great magnitude. (shrink)

This fourteenth volume of Collected Papers is an eclectic tome of 87 papers in Neutrosophics and other fields, such as mathematics, fuzzy sets, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, picture fuzzy sets, information fusion, robotics, statistics, or extenics, comprising 936 pages, published between 2008-2022 in different scientific journals or currently in press, by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 99 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 26 countries: Ahmed B. Al-Nafee, Adesina Abdul Akeem Agboola, Akbar Rezaei, Shariful Alam, Marina Alonso, Fran Andujar, (...) Toshinori Asai, Assia Bakali, Azmat Hussain, Daniela Baran, Bijan Davvaz, Bilal Hadjadji, Carlos Díaz Bohorquez, Robert N. Boyd, M. Caldas, Cenap Özel, Pankaj Chauhan, Victor Christianto, Salvador Coll, Shyamal Dalapati, Irfan Deli, Balasubramanian Elavarasan, Fahad Alsharari, Yonfei Feng, Daniela Gîfu, Rafael Rojas Gualdrón, Haipeng Wang, Hemant Kumar Gianey, Noel Batista Hernández, Abdel-Nasser Hussein, Ibrahim M. Hezam, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Muthusamy Karthika, Nour Eldeen M. Khalifa, Madad Khan, Kifayat Ullah, Valeri Kroumov, Tapan Kumar Roy, Deepesh Kunwar, Le Thi Nhung, Pedro López, Mai Mohamed, Manh Van Vu, Miguel A. Quiroz-Martínez, Marcel Migdalovici, Kritika Mishra, Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Mohamed Talea, Mohammad Hamidi, Mohammed Alshumrani, Mohamed Loey, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Shabir, Mumtaz Ali, Nassim Abbas, Munazza Naz, Ngan Thi Roan, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Rishwanth Mani Parimala, Ion Pătrașcu, Surapati Pramanik, Quek Shio Gai, Qiang Guo, Rajab Ali Borzooei, Nimitha Rajesh, Jesús Estupiñan Ricardo, Juan Miguel Martínez Rubio, Saeed Mirvakili, Arsham Borumand Saeid, Saeid Jafari, Said Broumi, Ahmed A. Salama, Nirmala Sawan, Gheorghe Săvoiu, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Seok-Zun Song, Shahzaib Ashraf, Jayant Singh, Rajesh Singh, Son Hoang Le, Tahir Mahmood, Kenta Takaya, Mirela Teodorescu, Ramalingam Udhayakumar, Maikel Y. Leyva Vázquez, V. Venkateswara Rao, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Gabriela Vlădeanu, Michael Voskoglou, Yaser Saber, Yong Deng, You He, Youcef Chibani, Young Bae Jun, Wadei F. Al-Omeri, Hongbo Wang, Zayen Azzouz Omar. (shrink)

Social problems such as racism, sexism, and inequality are often cited as structural rather than individual in nature. What does it mean to invoke a social structural explanation, and how do such explanations relate to individualistic ones? This article explores recent philosophical debates concerning the nature and usages of social structural explanation. I distinguish between two central kinds of social structural explanation: those that are autonomous from psychology, and those that are not. This distinction will help clarify the explanatory power (...) that each type of SSE has, points of convergence with methodological traditions such as critical theory and rational choice theory, and the difficulties that each type of SSE faces. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

To what extent should we focus on implicit bias in order to eradicate persistent social injustice? Structural prioritizers argue that we should focus less on individual minds than on unjust social structures, while equal prioritizers think that both are equally important. This article introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend the equal priority view. The transactive memory framework helps us see how structure can emerge from individual interactions as an irreducibly social product. If this is right, (...) then debiasing interventions are structural interventions. One upshot is that the utility of the individual versus structural distinction is not apparent for the purposes of intervention. (shrink)

It is commonly accepted that what we ought to do collectively does not imply anything about what each of us ought to do individually. According to this line of reasoning, if cooperating will make no difference to an outcome, then you are not morally required to do it. And if cooperating will be personally costly to you as well, this is an even stronger reason to not do it. However, this reasoning results in a self-defeating, yet entirely predictable outcome. If (...) everyone is rational, no one will cooperate, resulting in an aggregate outcome that is devastating for everyone. This dismal analysis explains why climate change and other collective action problems are so difficult to ameliorate. The goal of this paper is to provide a different, exploratory framework for thinking about individual reasons for action in collective action problems. I argue that the concept of commitment gives us a new perspective on collective action problems. Once we take the structure of commitment into account, this activates requirements of diachronic rationality that give individuals instrumental reasons to cooperate in collective action problems. (shrink)

Di er ci Qimeng (The second Enlightenment), by Wang Zhihe and Fan Meijun, is a timely book in Chinese about constructing a philosophical and practical way to contend with China's postmodernization. It combines Whitehead's process philosophy with a focus on Chinese modernity in order to map out a desirable postmodern society. It addresses the problem on several dimensions from policy making to basic value systems. The range of themes can be seen from the topics of the book's twelve chapters: (...) (1) Reverence for Land—Toward a Constructive Postmodern Agriculture; (2) Becoming Fully Human—Toward a Postmodern Organic Education; (3) Survival of the Harmonious-Toward a Constructive Postmodern Harmonious Culture; (4) Beauty .. (shrink)

Plus qu’un régime ou un mode de vie, le véganisme est un mouvement social et politique visant à libérer les animaux du joug humain. S’opposant au carnisme, les véganes renoncent autant que possible à utiliser des produits ou des services issus de leur exploitation. Leurs arguments rencontrent aujourd’hui un écho de plus en plus favorable parmi les consommateurs, alors même que les animaux, sur terre et dans la mer, n’ont jamais été tués dans de si grandes proportions. Cet essai est (...) l’occasion pour ses auteurs de montrer que la société que les véganes appellent de leurs vœux (et préfigurent par leurs pratiques quotidiennes) repose sur une conception élargie de la justice. Une justice qui devrait embrasser l’ensemble des êtres doués de sensibilité. (shrink)

The aim of the book is to encourage discussion among experts on De ira, a text of philosophical nature, by reading it page by page, from a philosophical, philological, and literary perspective (a multidisciplinary choice which is the conditio sine qua non of all judicious research on Seneca). Moreover, the way in which each of these close readings is conducted adds an additional value: they each deal with a section of the text, presenting all the data necessary for its understanding. (...) All together, they cover the whole work. Each of them is also an attempt at a global interpretation of the treatise, examined through the particular framing of the textual passage around which the “Lectures plurielles” are conceived. Around this “polyphonic” analysis of the text, we have built a structure that aims to offer the reader a complete reference work on all the issues of the De ira. Sources, manuscript tradition, images, political and philosophical concepts, posterity – in short, all the aspects that a traditional commentary of the text would not have allowed us to distinguish so clearly – find their place here. This book is therefore aimed at specialists as well as students or anyone interested in the thought of emotions in antiquity. (shrink)

In this paper I introduce a version of constructivism that relies on a theory of practical wisdom. Wise judgment constructivism is a type of constructivism because it takes correct judgments about what we have “all-in” reason to do to be the result of a process we can follow, where our interest in the results of this process stems from our practical concerns. To fully defend the theory would require a comprehensive account of wisdom, which is not available. Instead, I describe (...) a constructivist methodology for defending an account of wisdom and outline its main features. This gives us enough to see what wise judgment constructivism would look like, why it might be an attractive theory, and how it is different from other versions of constructivism. (shrink)

Some theories of well-being in philosophy and in psychology define people’s well-being in psychological terms. According to these theories, living well is getting what you want, feeling satisfied, experiencing pleasure, or the like. Other theories take well-being to be something that is not defined by our psychology: for example, they define well-being in terms of objective values or the perfection of our human nature. These two approaches present us with a trade-off: The more we define well-being in terms of people’s (...) psychology, the less ideal it seems and the less it looks like something of real value that could be an important aim of human life. On the other hand, the more we define well-being in terms of objective features of the world that do not have to do with people’s psychological states, the less it looks like something that each of us has a reason to promote. In this paper I argue that we can take a middle path between these two approaches if we hold that well-being is an ideal but an ideal that is rooted in our psychology. The middle path that I propose is one that puts what people value at the center of the theory of well-being. In the second half of the paper I consider how the value-based theory I describe should be applied to real life situations. (shrink)

This paper reconciles an inconsistency between the benefits of mind wandering and a prominent conception of attention in philosophy and cognitive psychology, namely, the prioritization view. Since we prioritize the information in a task less if we are doing it while mind wandering compared to solely concentrating on it, why does our performance in the task sometimes improve when we are mind wandering? To explain this, we offer a conception of diffuse attention that generalizes from external to internal forms of (...) attention and captures deep commonalities between the two (Chun et al. 2011). We conceptualize mind wandering as an instance of internal diffuse attention that also induces diffuse attention in other concurrent tasks. Moreover, pace the prioritization view, certain tasks are in fact better performed with diffuse attention, which prioritizes information less than focused attention. Our account of mind wandering as an instance of the more general category of diffuse attention improves upon current leading philosophical views of mind wandering (such as Irving 2016) by better explaining the interaction between mind wandering and other tasks. (shrink)

Numerous societal issues, from climate change to pandemics, require public engagement with scientific research. Such engagement reveals challenges that can arise when experts communicate with laypeople. One of the most common frameworks for framing these communicative interactions is the deficit model of science communication, which holds that laypeople lack scientific knowledge and/or positive attitudes towards science, and that imparting knowledge will fill knowledge gaps, lead to desirable attitude/behavior changes, and increase trust in science. §1 introduces the deficit model in more (...) detail and shows that adhering to this model often fails to achieve its aims, which motivates the main question of this chapter: how can Ludwik Fleck’s theory of thinking collectives address the persistent problem of deficit approaches in science communication? I suggest that it can do so by exposing the deficit model’s implicit assumption of an expert-lay divide. Accordingly, §2 lays out Fleck’s theory and §3 contrasts it with contemporary debates about science communication. Following this descriptive work, §4 draws on Fleck’s ideas to make four concrete suggestions for further questioning the expert-lay divide. (shrink)

Through a comparative study of the meanings and origins of justice symbolized in the Greek word dikē and the Chinese word yi 毅, this essay explores an alternative understanding of justice exemplified in Mencius' teaching and illuminates a possibility of social and political justice that originates in the human heart instead of reason. On the basis of a genealogical study of yi that identifies its root meanings as "the dignity of the self" and "amity and affinity," this study recovers and (...) revives a way of justice that may preserve and promote the dignity of the individual and the solidarity of political community at once without succumbing to the violence and rigidity of traditional Western metaphysics. In so doing, it highlights a long overlooked dimension of early Confucian moral practice and establishes its unique relevancy for the contemporary debates on justice. (shrink)

Love is often seen as the most intimate aspect of our lives, but it is increasingly engineered by a few programmers with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Nowadays, numerous dating platforms are deploying so-called smart algorithms to identify a greater number of potential matches for a user. These AI-enabled matchmaking systems, driven by a rich trove of data, can not only predict what a user might prefer but also deeply shape how people choose their partners. This paper draws on Jürgen Habermas’s “colonization (...) of the lifeworld” thesis to critically explore the insidious influence of delegating romantic decision-making to an algorithm. The love lifeworld is colonized inasmuch as online dating algorithms encroach into our romantic relations to the extent that communicative action within romance is replaced by the technocratic rules of an algorithm. (shrink)

Intuitively, there is a difference between knowledge and mere belief. Contemporary philosophical work on the nature of this difference has focused on scenarios known as “Gettier cases.” Designed as counterexamples to the classical theory that knowledge is justified true belief, these cases feature agents who arrive at true beliefs in ways which seem reasonable or justified, while nevertheless seeming to lack knowledge. Prior empirical investigation of these cases has raised questions about whether lay people generally share philosophers’ intuitions about these (...) cases, or whether lay intuitions vary depending on individual factors (e.g. ethnicity) or factors related to specific types of Gettier cases (e.g. cases that include apparent evidence). We report an experiment on lay attributions of knowledge and justification for a wide range of Gettier Cases and for a related class of controversial cases known as Skeptical Pressure cases, which are also thought by philosophers to elicit intuitive denials of knowledge. Although participants rated true beliefs in Gettier and Skeptical Pressure cases as being justified, they were significantly less likely to attribute knowledge for these cases than for matched true belief cases. This pattern of response was consistent across different variations of Gettier cases and did not vary by ethnicity or gender, although attributions of justification were found to be positively related to measures of empathy. These findings therefore suggest that across demographic groups, laypeople share similar epistemic concepts with philosophers, recognizing a difference between knowledge and justified true belief. (shrink)

the problem of estimation of High Hume (NBIC) technogenic evolutionary risks is analysed as part of concept of 3-components evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens.

Despite Donald Davidson's influential criticism of the very notion of conceptual schemes, the notion continues enjoying its popularity in contemporary philosophy and, accordingly, conceptual relativism is still very much alive. There is one major reason responsible for Davidson's failure which has not been widely recognized: What Davidson attacks fiercely is not the very notion, but a notion of conceptual schemes, namely, the Quinean notion of conceptual schemes and its underlying Kantian scheme-content dualism. However, such a notion simply cannot carry the (...) weight of conceptual relativism for it does not catch the essences of conceptual relativism. Consequently, I argue that the very notion of conceptual schemes and conceptual relativism have survived Davidson's attack. Therefore, the failure of the Quinean notion of conceptual schemes and Kantian scheme-content dualism, even if Davidson can claim victory, does not mark the end of the very notion of conceptual schemes.[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

A fundamental entity is an entity that is ‘ontologically independent’; it does not depend on anything else for its existence or essence. It seems to follow that a fundamental entity is ‘modally free’ in some sense. This assumption, that fundamentality entails modal freedom (or ‘FEMF’ as I shall label the thesis), is used in the service of other arguments in metaphysics. But as I will argue, the road from fundamentality to modal freedom is not so straightforward. The defender of FEMF (...) should provide positive reasons for believing it, especially in light of recent views that are incompatible with it. I examine both direct and indirect routes to FEMF. (shrink)

Everyone wants to be happy. Happiness is obviously a good thing and if we can get it without sacrificing other important things, we would. Most people wish not just for their own happiness but also the happiness of people they love; some compassionate souls may even wish for the happiness of all sentient creatures. What exactly is it that we all want? Is it to be pleased or satisfied? To feel tranquil or joyous? To attain certain objective goods? And what (...) role does happiness play in morality? Is the production of happiness the goal of morally right action? Is it the organizing principle of moral theory? Or is it just one contingent value among many? This entry reviews answers to these questions from the perspectives of ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

on how to justify the rationality of sciences.

At the heart of the book - two views (naturalist and humanist) on the dangers of and Prospects of "scientific and technological progress," that defining the face of modern civilization. Its leaders are now the information, genetic cal and biological technology.

In the first Critique, Kant famously holds a novel practical notion of Belief (Glauben) as assent justified not by evidence but by practical considerations. This paper examines the early development of Kant’s practical notion of Belief prior to the first Critique. It aims to make clear what prompted Kant to develop this notion in the first place, and how this notion came to assume its crucial role in Kant’s critical system. This development, I argue, has two main steps. The first (...) is his introduction of a practical notion of Belief in mid-to-late 1760s. I argue that he did so because he regards this notion as a useful tool to get ordinary people to justifiably commit to the existence of God and an after-life. The second step is Kant’s abandonment of the objective validity of his logical proof of God around 1772. This step elevated Belief from a merely useful means to the only justified way to commit to the existence of God and an after-life. This second step, I argue, is closely connected to Kant’s pivot to the view that the objective validity of concepts requires sensibly given objects, and it is motivated by Kant’s concern with subject-cancelling real repugnance. (shrink)

Do laypeople and philosophers differ in their attributions of knowledge? Starmans and Friedman maintain that laypeople differ from philosophers in taking ‘authentic evidence’ Gettier cases to be cases of knowledge. Their reply helpfully clarifies the distinction between ‘authentic evidence’ and ‘apparent evidence’. Using their sharpened presentation of this distinction, we contend that the argument of our original paper still stands.

According to the received translational interpretation of incommensurability, incommensurability is viewed as untranslatability due to radical variance of meaning or reference of the terms in two competing scientific languages. The author argues that the translational approach to incommensurability does not effectively clarify the concept of incommensurability. Since it cannot provide us with tenable, integrated concept of incommensurability, it should be rejected.

Against the received translation-failure interpretation, this book presents a presuppositional interpretation of incommensurability, that is, the thesis of incommensurability as cross-language communication breakdown due to the incompatible metaphysical presuppositions underlying two competing presuppositional languages, such as scientific languages. This semantically sound, epistemologically well-established, and metaphysically profound interpretation not only affirms the tenability of the notion of incommensurability and confirms the reality of the phenomenon of incommensurability, but also makes some significant contributions to the discussion of many related issues, such as (...) the notion of conceptual schemes, the notion of truth-value status and truth-value conditions, and the issue of cross-language understanding and communication. (shrink)

The paper reviews the key tenets from Alexei Losev's magnum opus, A History of Ancient Aesthetics (1963-1994), an eight-volume long, original investigation of the Greco-Roman aesthetic culture, currently available only in Russian.

Nudging is the idea that people’s decisions should be influenced in predictable, non-coercive ways by making changes to the way that options are presented to them. Central to the debate about nudging is the question of whether it is morally permissible to intentionally nudge others. Libertarian paternalists maintain that this can be the case. In this paper, I present the libertarian paternalistic criteria for the moral permissibility of intentional nudges. Having done this, I motivate two objections. The first one targets (...) the moral permissibility of nudging in general. The second one targets the moral permissibility of only a subset of nudges. After evaluating both of these objections, I conclude that although they are unsuccessful, the evaluation of The Manipulation Objection shows that the libertarian paternalistic criteria for the moral permissibility of intentional nudges fails. I end by suggesting a possible revision to the criteria that avoids the problem, considering its limitations, and providing examples of its applications. (shrink)

Why is mutual understanding between two substantially different comprehensive language communities often problematic and even unattainable? To answer this question, the author first introduces a notion of presuppositional languages. Based on the semantic structure of a presuppositional language, the author identifies a significant condition necessary for effective understanding of a language: the interpreter is able to effectively understand a language only if he/she is able to recognize and comprehend its metaphysical presuppositions. The essential role of the knowledge of metaphysical presuppositions (...) in understanding is further strengthened by developing a truth-value conditional theory of understanding. It is concluded that if the interpreter approaches an incompatible alien language from the standpoint of the interpreter's own language by projecting the metaphysical presuppositions of his/her own language upon the alien language, then the mutual understanding between the two language communities is doomed to failure. (shrink)

In order to explain Wittgenstein’s account of the reality of completed infinity in mathematics, a brief overview of Cantor’s initial injection of the idea into set- theory, its trajectory and the philosophic implications he attributed to it will be presented. Subsequently, we will first expound Wittgenstein’s grammatical critique of the use of the term ‘infinity’ in common parlance and its conversion into a notion of an actually existing infinite ‘set’. Secondly, we will delve into Wittgenstein’s technical critique of the concept (...) of ‘denumerability’ as it is presented in set theory as well as his philosophic refutation of Cantor’s Diagonal Argument and the implications of such a refutation onto the problems of the Continuum Hypothesis and Cantor’s Theorem. Throughout, the discussion will be placed within the historical and philosophical framework of the Grundlagenkrise der Mathematik and Hilbert’s problems. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the (...) view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant’s account of propositional content and its implications for the relationship between his notions of knowledge (Wissen) and cognition (Erkenntnis). While previous commentators commonly read Kant as holding a Fregean theory of propositional content, in this paper I argue that Kant’s theory of propositional content aligns more closely with Peter Hanks’ recent account. According to my reading, Kant holds that individual acts of judging are both ontologically and explanatorily prior to propositions or Kantian judgments (Urteil). Furthermore, on (...) my reading, acts of judging for Kant are acts of assertively predicating a property of an object rather than merely acts of neutral predication. This reading challenges the lately popular view that Kant’s notions of knowledge and cognition are not only distinct but also disjunct. I instead suggest that we should regard Kantian knowledge that requires cognitions as its grounds as a species of Kantian cognitions. (shrink)

The current discussions of conceptual schemes and related topics are misguided; for they are based on a tacit assumption that the difference between two schemes consists in the different distributions in truth-values. I argue that what should concern us, in the discussions of conceptual schemes and related issues, is not truth-values of assertions, but rather the truth-value-status of the sentences used to make the assertions. This is because the genuine conceptual innovation between alternative theories or languages does not lie in (...) differences in determining truth-values of their sentences, but turns on whether these sentences have truth-values when considered within the context of a competing one. This new interpretation of the notion of conceptual schemes, which I refer to as presuppositional languages, is not only good in itself—for establishing the intelligibility and tenability of the notion—but quite beneficial in its effect on other related issues. (shrink)

In the thick of the global plague, Richard, Justin and Valery agreed to hold a conversation on the topic of poetics, self-understanding, and health. An analysis and discussion of this trinity requires love of poetry and philosophy. Both supreme human practices take common root in mythology and religion, and also share a notorious categorical divide, that of reason against affect. Is this Platonic divide indeed categorical, given both practices rely on language and creativity to compose their meaning? Interestingly, the practice (...) of poetics does not have the reputation for boosting one's health, in the mainstream understanding of that concept. If anything, poetic practice gained notoriety for corrupting one's mind and, possibly, life. Like philosophy? We touched on these and other classical aporia, on the political struggles in American and Australian poetry. Here is a written record of this encounter, countries and miles apart, three persons simply getting to know one another. (shrink)

Comparative philosophy between two disparate cultural-philosophic traditions, such as Western and Chinese philosophy, has become a new trend of philosophical fashion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Having learned from the past, contemporary comparative philosophers cautiously safeguard their comparative studies against two potential pitfalls, namely cultural universalism and cultural relativism. The Orientalism that assumed the superiority of the Occidental has become a memory of the past. The historical pendulum has apparently swung to the other extreme. The more recent (...) "reverse Orientalism" has started to reclaim the superiority of the Oriental. We have even been told that the twenty-first... (shrink)

Advances in cognitive and behavioral science show that the way options are presented—commonly referred to as “choice architecture”—strongly influences our decisions: we tend to react to a particular option differently depending on how it is presented. Studies suggest that we often make irrational choices due to the interplay between choice architecture and systematic errors in our reasoning—cognitive biases. Based on this data, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein came up with the idea of a "nudge," which they define as a small (...) change in the choice architecture that steers people towards certain choices without limiting their options. Central to the debate on nudging is the question of when, or under what circumstances, it is ethical to nudge someone. Proponents of nudging argue that for ethical nudging, the nudge must be (1) easy to resist and (2) aimed towards the welfare of those nudged (nudgees). In this paper, I argue that this criterion excludes nudges that are both intuitively permissible and broadly accepted. I propose an alternative set of sufficient conditions for ethical nudging that expands the domain for the ethical application of nudges. My “no harm” criterion states that for a nudge to be ethical, the nudge must (1) be easy to resist, and (2) produce no significant harm for the nudgee. I identify three types of such nudges: Choice Architect nudges, Third Party nudges, and “Meh” nudges, and offer examples for each. (shrink)

Kuhn's alleged taxonomic interpretation of incommensurability is grounded on an ill defined notion of untranslatability and is hence radically incomplete. To supplement it, I reconstruct Kuhn's taxonomic interpretation on the basis of a logical-semantic theory of taxonomy, a semantic theory of truth-value, and a truth-value conditional theory of cross-language communication. According to the reconstruction, two scientific languages are incommensurable when core sentences of one language, which have truth values when considered within its own context, lack truth values when considered within (...) the context of the other due to the unmatchable taxonomic structures underlying them. So constructed, Kuhn's mature interpretation of incommensurability does not depend upon the notion of truth-preserving translatability, but rather depends on the notion of truth-value-status-preserving cross-language communication. The reconstruction makes Kuhn's notion of incommensurability a well grounded, tenable and integrated notion.Author Keywords: Incommensurability; Thomas Kuhn; Taxonomic structures; Lexicons; Truth-value; Untranslatability; Cross-language communication. (shrink)

The development of artificial perception technologies has surpassed the limitations of human natural senses, expanding humanity's perspectives on the world and self-awareness. However, it has simultaneously introduced new ethical challenges. These emerging challenges necessitate a philosophical reexamination of concepts such as 'nature,' 'artificial,' and ' invasiveness ' to better address associated issues. The advancement of artificial perception technologies not only involves scientific and practical applications but also profoundly influences human values, social ethics, and the future trajectory of human civilization. Amidst (...) the current transformation and transition in modes of cognition, reevaluating the relationship between technology and humanity becomes a crucial task. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to show how Davidson’s anti-sceptical argument can respond to the closureRK-based radical scepticism. My approach will focus on the closureRK principle rather than the possibility that our beliefs could be massively wrong. I first review Davidson’s principle of charity and the triangulation argument, and then I extract his theory on content of a belief. According to this theory, content of a belief is determined by its typical cause and other relevant beliefs. With this constraint on (...) content, I argue that doubt must be local. Furthermore, since one cannot rationally believe that one’s commitment to the cause of beliefs could be false, our commitment to the denial of a sceptical hypothesis is not a knowledge-apt belief. Therefore, the closureRK principle is not applicable to rational evaluations of this commitment. As a result, the closureRK-based sceptical argument fails while the closureRK principle remains. (shrink)

In this article, we explicate evidence-based nursing (EBN), critically appraise its framework and respond to nurses’ concern that EBN sidelines the caring elements of nursing practice. We use resources from care ethics, especially Vrinda Dalmiya’s work that considers care as crucial for both epistemology and ethics, to show how EBN is compatible with, and indeed can be enhanced by, the caring aspects of nursing practice. We demonstrate that caring can act as a bridge between ‘external’ evidence and the other pillars (...) of the EBN framework: clinical expertise; patient preferences and values. Drawing on an influential EBN handbook, section 1 presents the aims and features of EBN, including the normative principle that EBN should take place within a ‘context of caring’. We aim to understand this context and whether it can be neatly detached from the EBN framework, as the handbook seems to suggest. In section 2, we highlight the grounds for resistance to EBN from the nursing community, before mounting the argument that nursing practices can be understood fruitfully through feminist care ethics and/or virtue ethics lenses. In section 3, we deepen that analysis using Dalmiya’s concepts of care-knowing and care as a hybrid ethico-epistemic virtue, which are ideally suited to the complex practices of nursing. In section 4, we bring this rich understanding of care into conversation with EBN, showing that its framework cannot be adequately theorised without paying proper attention to care. Caring can be neither an innocuous background assumption of nor an afterthought to the EBN framework. (shrink)

Despite a growing interest in and sympathy with Confucianism, there remains a stereotyped conception of Confucian civil order as a form of authoritarian hierarchy that is responsible for various oppressions in ancient China and is reprehensible from a modern egalitarian perspective. One central target of this modern criticism is the Confucian maxim of sangang 三綱, whose underlying idea is essential for regulating the relationship between sovereign and subject, father and son, and husband and wife in traditional Confucian society. Tu Wei-ming (...) translates sangang as the “Three Bonds” and argues that it is the “least defensible legacy of Confucian ethics” from the “modern egalitarian and liberal perspective.” For Tu.. (shrink)