Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “witness agreement” by itself implies neither an increase in the probability of truth nor a high probability of truth—the witnesses need to have some “individual credibility.” It can seem that, from this formal epistemological result, it follows that coherentist justification (i.e., doxastic coherence) is not truth-conducive. I argue that this does not follow. Central to my argument is the thesis that, though coherentists deny that there can be noninferential justification, coherentists (...) do not deny that there can be individual credibility. (shrink)

Coherentists on epistemic justification claim that all justification is inferential, and that beliefs, when justified, get their justification together (not in isolation) as members of a coherent belief system. Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “individual credibility” is needed for “witness agreement” to increase the probability of truth and generate a high probability of truth. It can seem that, from this result in formal epistemology, it follows that coherentist justification is not truth-conducive, that it is not (...) the case that, under the requisite conditions, coherentist justification increases the probability of truth and generates a high probability of truth. I argue that this does not follow. (shrink)

Research for this study was served by the hypothesis that the Christian’s lifestyle and witness in a postmodern world will depend on the definition and practice of worship and spirituality. The Old Testament reveals a spirituality that has ‘Yahweh’ involved in all aspects of life. Awareness and experience of the presence of God is linked to obedience to God. New Testament spirituality implies imitation of Christ and an effort to obey Christ's twofold command: to love God and neighbor as (...) self. Christian exhortation (contemplation/meditation) and adoration never take place in isolation from the world because God is active in the world. Adoration leads to action in the world which, in turn, leads to adoration of God. All work done and all life lived for God's sake is, in essence, worship. Being a Christian implies living a life of sacrifice, making a gift of your life to God. As the Christian strives with the Spirit's guidance and empowerment to love God with his/her heart, soul, mind, body - and his/her neighbor as him/her self, in a moment by moment way; as he/she worships God with adoration and action; then he/she is living a true Biblical Christian life and experiencing and practicing true Biblical worship and spirituality. For the postmodernist, religious relativism is incompatible with the objective truth claims of Christianity and the words ‘Christian’ and ‘Church’ mean either empty tradition or abusive totalizing metannarrative. To maintain its identity and practice effective and relevant ministry, the Church should reflect an internal unity in desire, in life, in purpose, and in love. The Church must be the incarnate and engaged love and glory of God to a world that judges Christian truth claims by the lifestyle and witness of Christians. A praxis-orientated apologetic of an incarnational engaged worship and spirituality will demonstrate Christians truth claims. This gives Christianity integrity, credibility, and intelligibility to postmodernists that seek an experiential spirituality in the postmodern era of deconstruction. Evangelism is founded in who God is and what God has done for humanity through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christian’s demonstrate the Gospel as they love their God and their neighbor with devotion and conduct. They proclaim God’s love with plausibility when they reveal God’s love in action as a visual aid for Gods truth. As Christian worship and spirituality produce the actions that give voice to the nature and will of God, Jesus Christ will ‘rise again’ in the postmodern world through an incarnational and engaged Christian faith. Point summary: i. Authentic Biblical Christian worship is a lifestyle that takes place in an interdependent rhythm of both adoration (joyful praise of God) and action (obedient service to God). ii. Holistic spirituality is the lived moment by moment experience of Christian belief in both general and specialized forms (the Christian faith), and the reaction that the Christian’s belief system arouses in religious consciousness and practice moment by moment (the Christian faith). iii. Biblical worship and spirituality is thus conformity of heart and life with the confession and character of Jesus Christ. It is living life in the coram Deo (the presence of God) in obedience to His will out of gratitude for salvation. iv. Worship, spirituality, and the Christian faith become equivalent terms for each other and as defined in i-iii above reflect an incarnational engaged approach to evangelism. v. Worship and spirituality as a praxis-orientated apologetic presented as an incarnational engaged approach (that tells God’s story and your story) in a postmodern world, will be a more effective method of evangelism than rational apologetics and program/method based evangelism. -/- . (shrink)

Resumen: Una de las formas más comunes y menos estudiadas de parcialidad judicial subjetiva es la disminución de la credibilidad otorgada a un testigo debido a un prejuicio identitario implícito del agente judicial. En la epistemología social, este fenómeno ha sido estudiado bajo la rúbrica de la injusticia testimonial. En este ensayo mostramos que para determinar la ocurrencia de un caso de injusticia testimonial en el derecho se deben cumplir tres condiciones que son imposibles de verificar empíricamente y que están (...) basadas en presupuestos psicológicos que han sido puestos en duda en años recientes. Sin la posibilidad de verificar estas condiciones, estamos frente a un tipo de parcialidad judicial indetectable. En su lugar, ofrecemos una nueva forma de entender la injusticia testimonial en el derecho como un fenómeno más general que describe una tendencia comportamental prejuiciosa recurrente por parte de un agente judicial. Entendida de este modo, la injusticia testimonial es completamente verificable. -/- Abstract: One of the most common and least studied forms of subjective judicial partiality is the credibility deficit suffered by a witness due to an implicit identity prejudice in a judicial agent. Social epistemologists have studied this form of partiality under the rubric, “testimonial injustice.” In this essay we argue that to verify the occurrence of a singular instance of testimonial injustice in law three facts must be established, none of which can be established with any degree of confidence. Furthermore, all of them are based on psychological suppositions that have been recently discredited. Without the possibility of establishing these facts, we end up with an undetectable form of subjective judicial partiality. In its place, we offer a new way of understanding testimonial injustice in law as a general phenomenon that describes a recurrent pattern of prejudiced behavior in a judicial agent. Under this characterization, testimonial injustice becomes empirically verifiable. (shrink)

Rules 405(a) and 608(a) of the Federal Rules of Evidence allow the use of testimony about a witness’s reputation to support or undermine his or her credibility in trial. This paper analyzes the evidential weight of such testimony from the point of view of social epistemology and the theory of social networks. Together they provide the necessary elements to analyze how reputation is understood in this case, and to assess the epistemic foundation of a reputational attribution. The result (...) of the analysis will be that reputational testimony is extremely weak from an epistemological point of view, and that in many cases there are more reliable substitutes that achieve a similar purpose. The obvious fix, in my view, is to eliminate the use of reputation testimony to support or undermine the credibility, honesty, chastity or peacefulness of a witness. (shrink)

According to the Christian religion, Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again”. I take it that this rising again—the Resurrection of Jesus, as it’s sometimes called—is, according to the Christian religion, an historical event, just like his crucifixion, death, and burial. And I would have thought that to investigate whether the Resurrection occurred, we would need to do some historical research: we would need to assess the reliability of (...) the New Testament documents and related manuscripts; we would need to look into the credibility of the witnesses to his post-mortem appearances, the empty tomb, and the like. The task looks rather daunting. But, according to David Hume, we don’t have to do anything of the kind. For no matter how strong the testimony in favor of a miracle is—indeed, even if we “suppose…that the testimony considered apart and in itself, amounts to an entire proof”—we have at our disposal a “full proof…against the existence of any miracle”. So we can avoid all that tedious historical work. We can simply use Hume’s shortcut, a proof against the existence of any miracle, and hence a proof against the Resurrection. So Hume says he has a “a decisive argument,” “an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion,” superstitious delusions like the Resurrection. There is good news and bad news in Hume’s proclamation. The good news is that he really has two arguments, not just one—or, at any rate, many scholars discern in his writings two arguments. The bad news is that neither succeeds; at any rate, try as I might, I can’t see how they do. (shrink)

This paper articulates in formal terms a crucial distinction concerning future contingents, the distinction between what is true about the future and what is reasonable to believe about the future. Its key idea is that the branching structures that have been used so far to model truth can be employed to define an epistemic property, credibility, which we take to be closely related to knowledge and assertibility, and which is ultimately reducible to probability. As a result, two kinds of (...) claims about future contingents—one concerning truth, the other concerning credibility—can be smoothly handled within a single semantic framework. (shrink)

How does the monitoring of a testifier's credibility by recipients of testimony bear upon the epistemic licence accruing to a recipient's belief in the testifier's communications? According to an intuitive and philosophically influential conception, licensed acceptance of testimony requires that recipients of testimony monitor testifiers with respect to their credibility. I argue that this conception, however, proves to be untenable when confronted with the wealth of empirical evidence bearing on the ways in which testifiers and their interlocutors actually (...) interact. (shrink)

A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be neutral in the context (...) of colonial administrative violence. We argue that these terms function as mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate that the capacity to be violent (i.e. to be an instrument of violence) is built into these tests, ready to be deployed when an administration wants to stop certain people from certain places from entering without regard to their own ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands. Not only are such practices instruments of violence, but the concept of ‘violence’ continues to be organized, defined, and conceived within settler colonial epistemologies so as to exclude these administrative forms of violence deployed against Indigenous peoples and people of color from recognition and nameability. We argue that this is an intentional strategy of colonial power preservation that is functionalized through social processes that remain structurally stable and self-regenerating across historical and political changes. (shrink)

G.E. Moore alludes to a notion of consciousness that is diaphanous, elusive to attention, yet detectable. Such a notion, I suggest, approximates what Bina Gupta has called `witness-consciousness'--in particular, the aspect of mode-neutral awareness with intrinsic phenomenal character. This paper offers a detailed definition and defence of the appearance and reality of witness-consciousness. While I claim that witness- consciousness captures the essence of subjectivity, and so must be accounted for in the `hard problem' of consciousness, it is (...) not to be confused with the more commonly defended notion of `for-me-ness'. (shrink)

Several philosophers of science claim that scientific toy models afford knowledge of possibility, but answers to the question of why toy models can be expected to competently play this role are scarce. The main line of reply is that toy models support possibility claims insofar as they are credible. I raise a challenge for this credibility-thesis, drawing on a familiar problem for imagination-based modal epistemologies, and argue that it remains unanswered in the current literature. The credibility-thesis has a (...) long way to go if it is to account for the epistemic merits of toy models. (shrink)

I propose that testimony is subject to a norm that is backed by a credibility sanction: whenever the norm is violated, it is appropriate for the testifier to lose some credibility for their future testimony. This is one of a family of sanction-based norms, where violation of the norm makes it appropriate to lose some power; in this case, the power to induce belief through testimony. The applicability of the credibility norm to testimony follows from the epistemology (...) of testimony, in that false or unjustified testimony weakens the reason for belief that is provided by the speaker's future testimony. (shrink)

We explore our role as researchers and witnesses in the context of an emerging partnership with the Penelakut Tribe, the aim of which is to locate the unmarked graves of children who died while attending the notorious Kuper Island Indian Residential School on their territory (southwest British Columbia). This relationship is in the process of taking shape, so we focus on understanding conditions for developing trust, and the interactional expertise necessary to work well together, with a good heart. We suggest (...) that, in some respects, this may be usefully understood as a practice of witnessing on several dimensions. (shrink)

The published works of scientists often conceal the cognitive processes that led to their results. Scholars of mathematical practice must therefore seek out less obvious sources. This article analyzes a widely circulated mathematical joke, comprising a list of spurious proof types. An account is proposed in terms of argumentation schemes: stereotypical patterns of reasoning, which may be accompanied by critical questions itemizing possible lines of defeat. It is argued that humor is associated with risky forms of inference, which are essential (...) to creative mathematics. The components of the joke are explicated by argumentation schemes devised for application to topic-neutral reasoning. These in turn are classified under seven headings: retroduction, citation, intuition, meta-argument, closure, generalization, and definition. Finally, the wider significance of this account for the cognitive science of mathematics is discussed. (shrink)

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women’s sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic—allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions result in the unjust exoneration of (...) people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men. (shrink)

This article draws in particular on existential-phenomenological notions of “witnessing.” Witnessing, often conceived in the context of testimony, obviously involves epistemological concerns, such as how we come to know through the experiences and reports of others. I shall argue, however, that witnessing as a mode of intersubjectivity offers understandings that involve questions about how people come to be. More specifically, I want to consider the positive potential of “witnessing” to disrupt intersubjective completeness or closure, particularly as this relates to work (...) on organizing subjectivities, as well as, in the field of organization studies. (shrink)

The meaning of definite descriptions (like ‘the King of France’, ‘the girl’, etc.) has been a central topic in philosophy and linguistics for the past century. Indefinites (‘Something is on the floor’, ‘A child sat down’, etc.) have been relatively neglected in philosophy, under the Russellian assumption that they can be unproblematically treated as existential quantifiers. However, an important tradition, drawing from Stoic logic, has pointed to patterns which suggest that indefinites cannot be treated simply as existential quantifiers. The standard (...) dynamic semantic treatment of those phenomena, however, has well-known problems with negation and disjunction. -/- In this paper I develop a new approach to (in)definites. On my theory, truth-conditions are classical. But in addition to truth-conditions, meanings comprise a second dimension of what I call bounds. It is at the level of bounds, not truth-conditions, that I locate the characteristically dynamic coordination between indefinites and definites. The resulting system thus has a classical logic. This approach avoids dynamic semantics’ logical problems, and, more generally, yields a new perspective on the relation between truth-conditional and dynamic effects in natural language. (shrink)

The exculpatory rhetorical power of the term “honest belief” continues to invite reliance on the bare credibility of belief in consent to determine culpability in sexual assault. In law, however, only a comprehensive analysis of mens rea, including an examination of the material facts and circumstances of which the accused was aware, demonstrates whether a “belief” in consent was or was not reckless or wilfully blind. An accused's “honest belief” routinely begs this question, leading to a truncated analysis of (...) criminal responsibility, and error. The problem illustrates how easily old rhetoric perpetuates assumptions that no longer have a place in Canadian law. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 32-34.

My objective of this paper is to suggest and workout a more credible form of the Principle of Beneficence from the common essential elements of the three major ethical theories (Deontology, Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics) that will try to overcome the over-demanding objection of Utilitarianism and the rigorism of Kant’s Deontology. After analyzing these three moral systems, I find that beneficence lies within the very essence of humanity. Human beings are superior to other creatures in the world due to rationality (...) and humanity. From the humanitarian ground, a common goodness lies within every human. Beneficence, as a moral principle, is derived from this inner humanity of every individual. Despite their initial differences, utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics recognize this fundamental humanitarian disposition of doing good for all as a part of being a morally better person. The principle of beneficence as I suggest, is different from its consequential utilitarian notion suggested by Mill. This version of beneficence is more credible as it does not impose excessive demands upon an individual to develop any maximum beneficial outcome following utilitarian calculation of beneficence over cost, and it also strives to overcome the rigorous duty-based theory of Kantian deontology by appealing to the fundamental virtue of humanity. Finally, the credibility of this form of beneficence comes from the underlying transcendental humanism which is the chief feature of Indian tradition. (shrink)

Self-authorship is fundamental to respecting the dignity of persons, and epistemic credibility depends upon impartial review. While these claims may seem obviously true, they arguments for them are rarely given. In a supposedly "post-truth" world in which respect for individual rights is under attack, the obvious must be argued for and reiterated. To that end, I mine sources from the European Enlightenment (Bacon, Hume, Kant, and Mill) to make the case for self-authorship and impartial review.

A Bayesian measure of evidence for precise hypotheses is presented. The intention is to give a Bayesian alternative to significance tests or, equivalently, to p-values. In fact, a set is defined in the parameter space and the posterior probability, its credibility, is evaluated. This set is the “Highest Posterior Density Region” that is “tangent” to the set that defines the null hypothesis. Our measure of evidence is the complement of the credibility of the “tangent” region.

Scholastic philosophers can be quite funny. What’s more, they have good reason to be: Aristotle himself lists ready wit (eutrapelia) among the virtues, as a mean between excessive humor and its defect. Here, I assess Scholastic discussions of humor in theory, before turning to examples of it in practice. The last and finest of these is a joke, hitherto unacknowledged, which Aquinas makes in his famous Five Ways. Along the way, we’ll see (i) that the history of philosophy is not (...) so hostile to humor as is commonly supposed; and (ii) that the competing theories of humor like the Incongruity Theory and the Release Theory are not altogether incompatible. We’ll also see at least one example of an apparent attempt by modern translators to excise humor from a medieval text. Our considerations will open a window into what oral discussion and debate at medieval universities was actually like, and how we should understand the relationship between the texts we have now and the exchanges that actually occurred then. (shrink)

The adage, “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter,” is offered as a plausible example of evoking moral relativism. Moral relativists recognize no transcultural moral facts. So, for them, even the concept of harm would be subjective or context-sensitive. Yet one can appeal to cogent transcultural moral reasons to distinguish between deliberately and unjustifiably harming impeccably innocent people and those who might engage in justifiably harming those guilty of grave crimes. In the face of the preventable evil acts that (...) terrorists frequently perpetrate against impeccably innocent people, it is argued that moral relativists have a substantive burden of proof to demonstrate that no cogent transcultural moral reasons exist against the practice of terrorism. In the absence of such a demonstration, it is reasonable to believe that the practice of terrorism, while not totally defeating moral relativism, seems to undermine its credibility. (shrink)

This article shows how the MISS account of models—as isolations and surrogate systems—accommodates and elaborates Sugden’s account of models as credible worlds and Hausman’s account of models as explorations. Theoretical models typically isolate by means of idealization, and they are representatives of some target system, which prompts issues of resemblance between the two to arise. Models as representations are constrained both ontologically (by their targets) and pragmatically (by the purposes and audiences of the modeller), and these relations are coordinated by (...) a model commentary. Surrogate models are often about single mechanisms. They are distinguishable from substitute models, which are examined without any concern about their connections with the target. Models as credible worlds are surrogate models that are believed to provide access to their targets on account of their credibility (of which a few senses are distinguished). (shrink)

Do the changes that have taken place in the structures and methods of the production of scientific knowledge and in our understanding of science over the past fifty years justify speaking of an epochal break in the development of science? Gregor Schiemann addresses this issues through the notion of a scientific revolution and claims that at present we are not witnessing a new scientific revolution. Instead, Schiemann argues that after the so-called Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a (...) caesura occurred in the course of the nineteenth century that constituted a departure from the early modern origins of science. This change was characterized by the loss of certainty on the part of the scientists, by the steadily increasing importance of scientific communities (rather than individuals), and by the systematic intertwinement of scientific and societal development. As to present science, Schiemann admits that important changes have occurred, but he denies the conflation of nature and culture: even the OncoMouse is a natural organism, though a seriously damaged one. (shrink)

When a society is characterized by a climate of distrust, how does this impact the professional practices of news journalism? I focus on the practice of balance, or fair presentation of both sides in a story. I articulate a two-step model of how trust modulates the acceptance of tes-timony and draw out its implications for justifying the practice of balance.

This article offers a Nietzschean theory of digital will to power to conceptualize the temporality of social media feeds run by algorithms. Stylistic and methodological temporalities of Nietzsche are discussed as well as their influence in subsequent social theory of political technologies. The paradox of heavy investment in both subjective expression and nonhuman temporalization in social media milieus is addressed with the concept of an event-without-witness drawn from Nietzsche’s account of himself as the solitary thinker of catastrophe of nihilism (...) and psychoanalytical and deconstructive literatures on the catastrophes of the 20th century. Nietzsche’s fundamental resistance to and fascination with the philosophical and cultural modes of mummyfication, i.e. eternalization as an expression of the will to power is used to think the will to power in the creative algorithmic temporalization of social interactions through the selection, distribution and serialization of data for social media feeds. (shrink)

Understanding science requires appreciating the values it presupposes and its social context. Both the values that scientists hold and their social context can affect scientific communication. Philosophers of science have recently begun studying scientific communication, especially as it relates to public policy. Some have proposed “guiding principles for communicating scientific findings” to promote trust and objectivity. This paper contributes to this line of research in a novel way using behavioural experimentation. We report results from three experiments testing judgments about the (...) trustworthiness, competence and objectivity of scientists. More specifically, we tested whether such judgments are affected by three factors: consulting or not consulting nonscientists, conducting research under a restrictive or non-restrictive governmental communication policy, and the source of a lab’s funding (i.e., government funding, private funding, or a combination of the two). We found that each of these factors affects ordinary judgments of trustworthiness, competence and objectivity. These findings support several recommendations that could help improve scientific communication and communication policies. (shrink)

The following discourse is a brief yet appealing comparative analysis of two viewpoints on the same subject of Karma Yoga (detached 'witness–consciousness' through action) written separately by two stalwarts of Indian philosophy: Rabindranath Tagore (1915) and Swami Vivekananda (1896).

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957), can manipulate their viewers into believing something that they, on some level, know cannot be true. In this case, viewers accept the not guilty verdict by the jury even though (...) “the facts in the case” are “simple” and point to the guilt of the defendant. I show how different versions of Witness for the Prosecution—from Agatha Christie’s original short story (1925) and her subsequent play based on that story (1953), to the Hollywood film (1957), and the BBC mini-series (2016)—trigger our reflective beliefs about the defendant’s innocence, so that we find the verdict satisfying (at least for a short while). I conclude by considering literary payoffs of this manipulation, especially in the context of a culture that subscribes to a view of the mind as, in principle, knowable, and thus readable by skillful others. (shrink)

This essay examines the thematic exploration of the writer’s journey in Toni Morrison’s Burn This Book, a collection of essays by notable authors reflecting on the dualities they navigate as writers—balancing personal identity with the demands of the external world. Through close readings of contributions by Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Pico Iyer, and David Grossman, the essay highlights how each writer contends with the tension between private inwardness and public engagement. These essays illustrate that the journey to becoming (...) a writer involves a process of self-discovery, evolving perspectives, and the maturity to witness the outer world without becoming burdened by it. From Gordimer’s reflections on inner agency to Grossman’s experience of personal loss and resilience, each author reveals the complex journey required to transform outward events into profound inner insights. In doing so, Burn This Book underscores the transformative power of writing and the essential inner clarity that enables writers to bear witness to the world’s tragedies while maintaining their own voice. (shrink)

The essential thought of Eudaimonia prescribes for an intellectual platform in Greek philosophy towards the ultimate happiness in human life; hence, it necessarily intends to emphasise a vast array of moral components such as voluntary actions, internal goods and external goods, capacities and cognitive functions, practical reason, as well as mindfulness or sensory awareness. In addition to these prominent features of Eudaimonia, it certainly demonstrates a few contextual meanings: satisfaction, inner contentment, well-being, and wholesome. In fact, it has commonly been (...) assumed that there appears to be a significant ground for the eternal essence of human life, too. Then, this analytical article explores to what extent the Aristotelian attitude of Eudaimonia could be credible? With regards to this debatable issue, I will, arguably, discuss very limited findings in terms of theoretical and pragmatic applicability of Eudaimonia: the central thesis of Eudaimonia, the analysis of De Anima, the discourse of the mean alongside the role of phronesis. However, due to practical constraints, this paper cannot provide a comprehensive overview of Aristotle’s understanding of Eudaimonia. (shrink)

Millikan's famous oil drop experiment is scrutinized from the viewpoint of the methodological dicta of the credibility revolution.

One of the best-known members of the United Nations Commission which drafted the 1948 "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Jacques Maritain, famously held that the "natural rights" or "human rights" possessed by every human being are grounded and justified by reference to the natural law.' In many quarters today, the notion of the natural law, and arguments for a set of natural rights grounded in the natural law, have come under fierce attack. One common line of attack is illustrated by (...) the arguments of some utilitarians, for whom "natural law thinking" is mistaken insofar as it implies that there is an absolute moral prohibition against violating any human being's "natural rights." Even if there is such a thing as "natural rights," these utilitarians argue, such rights - including even the natural "right to life" - are necessarily relational, and thus have meaning only within the context of a larger social whole. As a result, the argument goes, the supposed "natural rights" possessed by individual human beings are never inviolable or unconditional, but instead always negotiable and subject to being "traded away" for the sake of greater social utility. Consider just one alleged counter-example to the notion that there are inviolable or unconditional "natural rights": it is well-known that approximately 36,000 people in the United States die every year as a result of influenza infections or influenza-related complications.' There is little doubt that hundreds, and probably even thousands, of human lives would be saved every year if local governments were to pass laws requiring flu vaccinations for all members of at-risk populations (e.g., the very young and the very elderly). It would seem that there would be broad support for mandated flu vaccinations- no matter what the expense - if human lives would be saved and if the natural "right to life" is inviolable or unconditional.' And yet no such life-saving laws exist, apparently because citizens and legislators believe that the social costs and inconveniences would be too great. According to the utilitarian position, this demonstrates - contrary to what Ronald Dworkin and others say about rights' - that rights do not trump utility, but in fact are quite regularly and reasonably trumped by utility. In light of such contemporary understandings and policies, can natural law thinking about natural rights be made credible? In what follows, I shall argue that utilitarian thinkers are correct to hold that rights are intrinsically relational; but they are wrong to conclude that the relational character of rights entails that "natural rights" are not inviolable or not unconditional. (shrink)

We discuss the intellectual preparation necessary for a Christian student to reconcile his/her Christian faith with science. -/- .

The author attempts to answer the following question: Why does Christian witness need contemplation? He claims that Christian witness needs contemplation, because contemplation reveals the truth about the nature of reality; it is this truth which is one of the factors that constitute the foundation of Christian faith. In a sense, contemplation is analogical to mysticism: as mystical visions make Christian belief grounded on the immediate experience of (meeting with) the Truth, so the contemplation of the creatures makes (...) Christian belief based on the indirect experience of the Truth (i.e., the meeting with the traces left by the Creator in the world). (shrink)

• A number of reasons have been offered for Vietnam’s success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic during the first four months of 2020, including Vietnam’s experience in fighting epidemics and its single-party system which allows for timely and aggressive infection control. • Contentions that Vietnam’s measures, being dependent on its particular political and social structures, are not replicable elsewhere is incomplete, if not outright wrong. • Vietnam’s successful pandemic control required a high level of preparedness and a host of coordinated (...) efforts to provide accurate and credible information to the public about epidemic risks and ongoing infection control measures. • A proactive communication strategy was in place from the very beginning, utilizing various platforms such as online news sites, low-cost text messaging, user-friendly apps, local community loudspeakers, and pandemic awareness campaigns. • Open communication ensured public understanding of and support for the government response, thereby facilitating effective government-citizen cooperation. This is a lesson for other countries as much as for Vietnam in the post-pandemic period. (shrink)

Any plausible ethics of belief must respect that normal agents are doxastically blameworthy for their beliefs in a range of non-exotic cases. In this paper, we argue, first, that together with independently motivated principles this constraint leads us to reject occurrentism as a general theory of belief. Second, we must acknowledge not only dormant beliefs, but tacit beliefs as well. Third, a plausible ethics of belief leads us to acknowledge that a difference in propositional content cannot in all contexts count (...) as a criterion for belief individuation. In some contexts, we need to individuate beliefs in a different manner, namely in such a way that they have at least part of their causal history essentially. (shrink)

The goal of the present paper is to construct a formal explication of the pluralistic ignorance explanation of the bystander effect. The social dynamics leading to inaction is presented, decomposed, and modeled using dynamic epistemic logic augmented with ‘transition rules’ able to characterize agent behavior. Three agent types are defined: First Responders who intervene given belief of accident; City Dwellers, capturing ‘apathetic urban residents’ and Hesitators, who observe others when in doubt, basing subsequent decision on social proof. It is shown (...) how groups of the latter may end in a state of pluralistic ignorance leading to inaction. Sequential models for each agent type are specified, and their results compared to empirical studies. It is concluded that only the Hesitator model produces reasonable results. (shrink)

The market for environmental, social and governance (ESG) rating and data is expected to grow immensely in the next decades. This brief zooms in both on the integration of ESG risks into “traditional” operations of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) as well as on the emergence of a market exclusively dedicated to ESG rating. As will become clear, the market for ESG ratings suffers from serious shortcomings, a lack of transparency and standardisation, significant biases and conflicts of interests, and a dependence (...) on large, oligopolistic, credit rating agencies. (shrink)

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

From 2009 to 2015, U.S. director, Quentin Tarantino, released three films that were notable for their focus on particular historical events, periods and individuals (Inglorious Basterds 2009; Django Unchained 2012; The Hateful Eight 2015). Together, these films offered a specifically “Tarantinian” rendering of history: rewriting, manipulating and, for some, unethically deploying history for aesthetic effect. With regard to Django Unchained, this article examines how Tarantino’s historical revisionism provides a valuable point of inquiry into the ways in which “history” is depicted (...) on-screen and, more importantly, how depictions of “the past” can prove useful for highlighting underlying contradictions, ambivalences and ambiguities in the “present”. Drawing upon Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian approach to film analysis, it is argued that through a combination of fantasy, subversion and counterfactual possibility – most notable in the film’s final stand-off between its leading black characters – Tarantino is able to render the Real of U.S. slavery as an ahistorical antagonism. This antagonism highlights the ongoing trauma of these events in the present as well as the use of fantasy to explore their traumatic subject matter. Such historical fictions are not fixed to the past but, via an encounter with the Real, can be used to appraise the present. (shrink)

In a recent article, ―The Lacuna of Hermeneutics: Notes on the Freedom of Thought, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback raises an important question regarding the limitations of philosophical hermeneutics to be critical and attentive to the reality of current, concrete socio-political issues. In response, I claim that Gadamerian hermeneutics is well positioned to address current and controversial instances of epistemic injustice. In this article, I focus on the contemporary and controversial example of testimony of those who have been injured by the (...) COVID-19 vaccines. In turning to selections from Gadamer‘s Truth and Method, as well his lectures and essays on health and medicine, I argue that Gadamer‘s emphasis on hermeneutic openness and readiness, as well as an attunement to the linguistic and embodied experience of pain, allow us to consider a responsible approach to testimonies of the vaccine injured. Instead of providing a set of criteria or a particular method for distinguishing true from false testimony, Gadamerian hermeneutics calls for an examination and transformation of one‘s prejudices, especially prejudices which may impede one‘s ability to interpret and understand the subject matter in the first place. (shrink)

Amazon Book Review Series of “Meandering Sobriety”.

The production of sound by the machinery of change is a viral element in the problems of civilization. Conceptual historical paradox involving mind and matter as the recurring source of the problems of civilization is elaborated to expose a space reducing friction residing at the border of conceptual and empirical interpretation involving cause and effect rather than physical form. A visually based mathematical-physical form, is elaborated and discussion, based on a philosophy of motion, volume and processes that is indivisible, unmoved (...) by the willed power of the discourse, is evolved in an analogy to interpreted ancient mathematics of Euclid. (shrink)

Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a volume of secondary literature that dispels common misconceptions about the relationship between Hegelian and Fanonian philosophy, and sheds new light on the connections and divergences between the two thinkers. By engaging in close textual analyses of both Hegel and Fanon, the chapters in this volume disambiguate the philosophical relation between Sartre and Fanon, scrutinize the conflation of Self-Consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and subjectivity in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy (...) of History in light of Hegel’s reception in decolonial thought, and flesh out the pivotal ontological role of violence in Fanon’s work. In particular, this volume underscores the necessity of Fanon scholars to pay heed to the distinction between Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage and Kojève’s master-slave dialectic, as the latter—an anthropological interpretation of a Hegelian epistemological gestalt of consciousness—is what enables Fanon to engage with the former as a historical dialectic. This review emphasizes that Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a pedagogically significant text, and ultimately concludes that this volume is a vital resource for Continental Philosophical scholarship on Fanon and Hegel. (shrink)