The article presents a portrait and analysis of the existential-psychocultural situation in postmodern Sweden. Drawing from recent research exploring psychology of religion and existential worldviews, and the Swedish findings from the international World Values Survey, an argument is made for thinking about existential function and dysfunction as public health issues. This is portrayed against the background of Sweden as one of the most secularized countries and simultaneously a country with one of the most encompassing welfare systems. Psychology (...) of religion's updated role here would be to take responsibility for identifying and assessing the categories of function and dysfunction for an existential public health system. This role would also include the planning of policy for societal existential wellbeing, as well as planning prevention and intervention efforts for avoiding existential epidemiology. This new role fits well with public health's third revolution agenda focusing on health, wellbeing and quality of life. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic broke on a world whose grip on epistemic trust was already in disarray. The first months of the pandemic saw many governments publicly performing reliance on epidemiological and modelling expertise in order to signal that data would be the basis for justifying whatever population-level measures of control were judged necessary. But comprehensive data has not become available, and instead scientists, policymakers and the public find themselves in a situation where policy inputs determine the data available and vice (...) versa. This essay asks how we can live with what Amoore has termed ‘post-Cartesian doubt’ in situations of existential risk, and what kind of approach to science and data can answer the moral and human demands of a situation such as the Covid-19 pandemic. I suggest that science and policy could be able to control the pandemic better by addressing the sources of uncertainty and missing data not as gaps in the information landscape, but as individuals who are likely to be members of less-visible and less powerful groups including low-wage workers, the elderly, migrants, prisoners and others. This would shift both data use and policy toward an ethics of care, an embodied approach which asks what people need and how they behave in relation to each other, rather than how to manage population-level behaviour. This approach, I argue, is more appropriate for pandemic response than a utilitarian calculation of how many people each country should expect to lose as a result of the disease. (shrink)

While the unprecedented lockdown measures were at the heart of the debate in the first year of the pandemic, the focus since then has shifted to vaccination issues. The reason, of course, is that vaccines and vaccinations have become available by now. All experts agree: If mankind had failed to develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the death toll would have been much higher. This issue seeks to explore what could be described as a “generational approach to vaccinations”. The question “What can (...) we do to avoid future pandemics?” is related to different aspects of the failures and successes of humanity’s vaccination strategy against SARS-CoV-2. Pathogens are among the existential risks to humanity that could potentially kill a large part of it in a very short time. For all the tragedy and horror it has brought upon the world, the Corona virus has not been lethal on such a large, all-encompassing scale. But it could serve as a wake-up call for more and better prevention in the future, put differently: as a call to build a “preventive society”. When people look back to the year 2022 from the year 2200, will they think of the absence of mandatory vaccination as a dangerous anachronism? And will the unequal global distribution of vaccines be seen as an unbearable vice of our epoch? And will “human infection studies” still be dismissed as unethical if a dangerous new virus boards human bodies? If intergenerational justice means improving the life chances and living conditions of future generations to the largest possible extent, then its link to (the avoidance) of infectious diseases is obvious. We should protect future generations from foreseeable damage if we have the power to do so. “We” is humankind in its entirety. Politically, humanity is divided into many single nations. But biologically, as members of the same species, we share the same vulnerability regardless of ethnicity. The regular reader of this journal might wonder why this issue of IGJR has a different structure. An unprecedented pandemic calls for an unprecedented reaction and therefore IGJR 1/2021 and 2/2021 are special issues that deal with this disruptive event. We have invited several health experts, politicians and scholars alike to share their perspectives in short opinion pieces (instead of regular peer-reviewed articles). And we are exploring something new: the publication of a FRFG policy paper. This policy paper starts off with a historical overview on how pandemics have afflicted humanity in the past. It separates moral from legal duties and formulates “epidemiological imperatives” – the way of thinking of a responsible and solidary individual facing the task of preventing an outbreak of epidemics in a community. With the discovery of vaccines, and their availability, the catalogue of duties is increased by one more: to get the jabs as an act of solidarity with others, including future generations. This would prevent states from being forced to take disease control measures that bring about drastic collateral damage. During the first two years of the Corona pandemic, states have imposed lockdowns. The closure of schools has put a special burden on the youngest members of society. This could have been prevented during the second and the further waves. The policy paper also calls for more government funding for prophylactic vaccine research and for the designation of vaccines as “global public goods”. The issue then moves on to a section dedicated to opinion papers by various different authors. The first paper, written by Agnes Binagwaho and Kedest Mathewos (both from University of Global Health Equity, Rwanda), focuses on the issue of health inequity, a concern which has gained more and more traction during the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper examines how vaccine distribution during the pandemic was mainly focused on the global north and how such actions might affect future generations’ perception of what is just, fair and morally correct. The second paper, by Samantha Vanderslott (University of Oxford), focuses on the right and wrongdoings connected to pandemic preparedness and response. The third paper, authored by Rajeev Sadanandan (Health Systems Transformation Platform, India), talks about the lessons that can and should be drawn from child immunisations. The fourth paper, by Adriano Mannino (LMU and Parmenides Foundation, Munich), delves into the question how future generations will assess our actions and our response to the current pandemic. The fifth and final paper, written by Jörg Tremmel (FRFG and University Tübingen), is centered around the question whether human infection studies could have been implemented during the early stages of the pandemic to minimise deaths and severe infections. The issue concludes with two reviews on recent books by Alberto Giubilini and Katie Wright. In his review of Giubilini’s The Ethics of Vaccination, Marius Kunte notes that it contains a “thought-provoking plea” for individual, collective and institutional obligations to reach high vaccination rates. Judith Kausch-Zongo concludes her review of Wright’s Gender, Migration and the Intergenerational Transfer of Human Wellbeing with a special emphasis on the book’s empirical findings, and praises it in its entirety as “undoubtedly important”. Both books serve as poignant reminders of how sustainable societies can only emerge once the challenges revolving around its most vulnerable members have been properly addressed. (shrink)

Christopher Boorse’s bio-statistical theory of health and disease argues that the central discipline on which theoretical medicine relies is physiology. His theory has been much discussed but little has been said about its focus on physiology or, conversely, about the role that other biomedical disciplines may play in establishing a theoretical concept of health. Since at least the 1950s, epidemiology has gained in strength and legitimacy as an independent medical science that contributes to our knowledge of health and disease. (...) Indeed, it not only provides important information about disease distribution and aetiology, but the risk-factor approach it employs seems to challenge BST’s binary conception of health and disease. The objective of the article is to show, firstly, how important information deriving from descriptive and analytical epidemiology forms part of our contemporary medical concepts of health and disease, and secondly, that these elements are not taken into account by BST in a satisfactory way. The article’s central contention, therefore, is that if the project of defining the theoretical concept of health is to be maintained, more importance should be accorded to the contribution made by epidemiology—alongside physiology—in defining health. (shrink)

Epidemiologists’ discussions on causation are not always very enlightening with regard to the notion of ‘cause’ in epidemiology. Epidemiologists rightly work from a science-based approach to causation in epidemiology, but largely disagree about the matter. Disagreement may be partly due to confusion of the question of useful concepts for causal inference in epidemiological practice with the question of the metaphysical presuppositions of causal concepts used in epidemiology. In other words, epidemiologists seem to confuse the practical results of (...) epidemiological research at the population level with the metaphysical views about the reality of disease causation at the individual level in their writings on causation. (shrink)

Epidemiology is one of the fastest growing and increasingly important sciences. This thorough analysis lays out the conceptual foundations of epidemiology, identifying traps and setting out the benefits of properly understanding this fascinating and important discipline, as well as providing the means to do so.

Epidemiological studies usually do not pose high risk to participants. At the same time they provide valuable knowledge and improve public and individual health. In many countries, studies involving human subjects are subject to ethics review. Research shows that the process of obtaining ethical approval from institutional research boards or research ethics committees is sometimes costly, time-consuming and seriously delays important research projects. In this article we consider arguments against and in favor of ethics review of epidemiological studies. On the (...) one hand, it seems that minimal risk epidemiological studies should not be a subject to ethics review, since any delay of an important study has its death toll and health costs. In this perspective, the calculus of costs and benefits supports rejecting the whole existing approach. Nevertheless, we argue that institutional research boards or ethics research committees protect research participants from wrongs and up till now are the best tools of social and political control over the research enterprise. (shrink)

The purpose of the book is to clarify the notion of existential dependence and cognate notions, such as supervenience and the notion of an internal relation. I defend the view that such notions are best understood in terms of the concept of metaphysical grounding, i.e. the concept of one fact obtaining in virtue of other facts, where ‘in virtue of’ has a distinctively metaphysical meaning.

This paper primarily argues that Epidemiology is Ecosystem Science. It will not only explore this notion in detail but will also relate it to the argument that Classical Chinese Medicine was/is Ecosystem Science. Ecosystem Science and Ecosystem Science share these characteristics: they do not subscribe to the monogenic conception of disease; they involve multi variables; the model of causality presupposed is multi-factorial as well as non-linear.

Although epidemiology as a scientific study of disease in populations claimed an independent disciplinary status already in the mid–nineteenth century, its history in the twentieth century can be seen as a continuous and often contentious attempt to define the field’s social and intellectual boundaries vis-à-vis a variety of neighboring scientific fields and public health practices. In a period dominated by laboratory biomedical sciences, epidemiologists repeatedly tried to spell out how their discipline met the requirements of scientificity despite its focus (...) on disease as a collective phenomenon and its reliance on nonlaboratory methods. This article asks about the relationship between the changing institutional and intellectual contexts of British epidemiological practice and the epidemiologists’attempts to define both science in general and epidemiology in particular. An examination of the epidemiologists’boundary-making endeavors is also used to reflect on the circumstances in which scientists engage in the discourse of disciplinary demarcations. (shrink)

Written by epidemiologists, ethicists and legal scholars, this book provides an in-depth account of the moral problems that often confront epidemiologists, including both theoretical and practical issues. The first edition has sold almost three thousand copies since it was published in 1996. This edition is fully revised and includes three new chapters: Ethical Issues in Public Health Practice, Ethical Issues in Genetic Epidemiology, and Ethical Issues in International Health Research and Epidemiology. These chapters collectively address important developments of (...) the past decade. Three chapters from the first edition have also been reorganized: Ethicall Optimized Study Deisgns in Epidemiology, Ethical Issues in Epidemiologic Research with Children, and The Ethics of Epidemiologic Research with Older Populations. Instead of standing alone, these chapters have been integrated into chapters on informed consent, confidentiality and privacy protection, and community-based intervention studies. (shrink)

The present article identifies how social determinants of health raise two categories of philosophical problems that also fall within the smaller domain of ethics; one set pertains to the philosophy of epidemiology, and the second set pertains to the philosophy of health and social justice. After reviewing these two categories of ethical concerns, the limited conclusion made is that identifying and responding to social determinants of health requires inter-disciplinary reasoning across epidemiology and philosophy. For the reasoning used in (...) epidemiology to be sound, for its scope and (moral) purpose as a science to be clarified as well as for social justice theory to be relevant and coherent, epidemiology and philosophy need to forge a meaningful exchange of ideas that happens in both directions. (shrink)

In “The Epidemiology of ‘Regrettable Kinship’: Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes' [Safe] and Richard Powers' Gain,” the author analyzes two contemporary cultural texts about women and environmentally-linked illnesses to rethink commonplace understandings of the relationship between gender, disease, and community formation. By reading these narratives side by side, Lynch is able to address difficult issues about gendered subjectivity and the fragile construction of collective political identity. While the female protagonists in the texts Lynch examines relate differently to (...) their illnesses, both portray the ways in which women negotiate the potential and limitations of “illness communities.”. (shrink)

What meaning does epidemiological evidence have for the individual? In evidence-based medicine, epidemiological evidence measures the patient’s risk of the outcome or the change in risk due to an intervention. The patient’s risk is commonly understood as an individual probability. The problem of understanding epidemiological evidence and risk thus becomes the challenge of interpreting individual patient probabilities. I argue that the patient’s risk is interpreted ontically, as a propensity. After exploring formidable problems with this interpretation in the medical context, I (...) propose an epistemic reinterpretation of individual patient probabilities as credences. On this view, epidemiological evidence informs medical uncertainty. (shrink)

The conventional discourse on existential risks (x-risks) from AI typically focuses on abrupt, dire events caused by advanced AI systems, particularly those that might achieve or surpass human-level intelligence. These events have severe consequences that either lead to human extinction or irreversibly cripple human civilization to a point beyond recovery. This discourse, however, often neglects the serious possibility of AI x-risks manifesting incrementally through a series of smaller yet interconnected disruptions, gradually crossing critical thresholds over time. This paper contrasts (...) the conventional "decisive AI x-risk hypothesis" with an "accumulative AI x-risk hypothesis". While the former envisions an overt AI takeover pathway, characterized by scenarios like uncontrollable superintelligence, the latter suggests a different causal pathway to existential catastrophes. This involves a gradual accumulation of critical AI-induced threats such as severe vulnerabilities and systemic erosion of economic and political structures. The accumulative hypothesis suggests a boiling frog scenario where incremental AI risks slowly converge, undermining societal resilience until a triggering event results in irreversible collapse. Through systems analysis, this paper examines the distinct assumptions differentiating these two hypotheses. It is then argued that the accumulative view can reconcile seemingly incompatible perspectives on AI risks. The implications of differentiating between these causal pathways --- the decisive and the accumulative --- for the governance of AI as well as long-term AI safety are discussed. (shrink)

How is scientific data used to represent phenomena and as evidence for claims about phenomena? In this paper, I propose that a specific type of claims – evidential claims – is involved in data practices to define and restrict the representational and evidential content of a dataset. I present an account of data practices in the epidemiology of the exposome based on the notion of evidential claims, which helps unpack the approaches, assumptions and warrants that connect different stages of (...) research. I identify three different strategies to generate different types of evidential claims in this case. The macro strategy, which individuates the dataset that serves as the initial evidential space for research. The micro strategy, which is used to generate evidential claims about the microscopic and individual component of target phenomena. The association strategy, that uses evidence from the other strategies to identify a dataset as representation of the different levels and relations of exposure and disease. Differentiating between these strategies sheds light on the multi-faceted landscape of biomedical research on environment and health; and the roles of data and evidence in the process of inquiry. (shrink)

Epidemiology is a field torn between practices of surveillance and methods of analysis. Since the onset of COVID-19, epidemiological expertise has been mostly identified with the first, as dashboards of case and mortality rates took centre stage. However, since its establishment as an academic field in the early 20th century, epidemiology’s methods have always impacted on how diseases are classified, how knowledge is collected, and what kind of knowledge was considered worth keeping and analysing. Recent advances in digital (...) epidemiology, this article argues, are not just a quantitative expansion of epidemiology’s scope, but a qualitative extension of its analytical traditions. Digital epidemiology is enabled by deep and digital phenotyping, the large-scale re-purposing of any data scraped from the digital exhaust of human behaviour and social interaction. This technological innovation is in need of critical examination, as it poses a significant epistemic shift to the production of pathological knowledge. This article offers a critical revision of the key literature in this budding field to underline the extent to which digital epidemiology is envisioned to redefine the classification and understanding of disease from the ground up. Utilising analytical tools from science and technology studies, the article demonstrates the disruptive expectations built into this expansion of epidemiological surveillance. Given the sweeping claims and the radical visions articulated in the field, the article develops a tentative critique of what I call a fantasy of pathological omniscience; a vision of how data-driven engineering seeks to capture and resolve illness in the world, past, present and future. (shrink)

The paper examines definitions of ‘cause’ in the epidemiological literature. Those definitions all describe causes as factors that make a difference to the distribution of disease or to individual health status. In the philosophical jargon, causes in epidemiology are difference-makers. Two claims are defended. First, it is argued that those definitions underpin an epistemology and a methodology that hinge upon the notion of variation, contra the dominant Humean paradigm according to which we infer causality from regularity. Second, despite the (...) fact that causes be defined in terms of ‘difference-making’, this cannot fixes the causal metaphysics. Causality in epidemiology ought to be interpreted according to the epistemic theory. In this approach relations are deemed causal depending on the evidence and on the available methods. Indeed, evidence to establish causal claims requires difference-making considerations; furthermore, those definitions of cause reflect the ‘variational’ epistemology and methodology of epidemiology. (shrink)

Epidemiology is a core science of public health, focusing on research related to the distribution and determinants of both positive and adverse health states and events and on application of knowledge gained to improve public health. The American College of Epidemiology (ACE) is a professional organization devoted to the professional practice of epidemiology. As part of that commitment, and in response to concerns for more explicit attention to core values and duties of epidemiologists in light of emerging (...) issues and increased scrutiny of epidemiology, the College developed, adopted, and published a set of Ethics Guidelines. The structure of the ACE ethics guidelines is in four parts: (1) a brief statement of core values and duties of epidemiologists, coupled with the virtues important to professional practice; (2) concise statements of key duties and obligations; (3) exposition of the duties and obligations with more applications; and (4) a brief summary and conclusion. The Guidelines have been published on the ACE website and in the official College journal Annals of Epidemiology. The guidelines contain (and maintain) core elements that define the discipline of epidemiology and its fundamental duties, but they are also intended to be dynamic and evolving, responsive to a changing professional and social environment. (shrink)

Epidemiologists’ discussions on causation are not always very enlightening with regard to the notion of ‘cause’ in epidemiology. Epidemiologists rightly work from a science-based approach to causation in epidemiology, but largely disagree about the matter. Disagreement may be partly due to confusion of the question of useful concepts for causal inference in epidemiological practice with the question of the metaphysical presuppositions of causal concepts used in epidemiology. In other words, epidemiologists seem to confuse the practical results of (...) epidemiological research at the population level with the metaphysical views about the reality of disease causation at the individual level in their writings on causation. (shrink)

The standard argument to the conclusion that artificial intelligence (AI) constitutes an existential risk for the human species uses two premises: (1) AI may reach superintelligent levels, at which point we humans lose control (the ‘singularity claim’); (2) Any level of intelligence can go along with any goal (the ‘orthogonality thesis’). We find that the singularity claim requires a notion of ‘general intelligence’, while the orthogonality thesis requires a notion of ‘instrumental intelligence’. If this interpretation is correct, they cannot (...) be joined as premises and the argument for the existential risk of AI turns out invalid. If the interpretation is incorrect and both premises use the same notion of intelligence, then at least one of the premises is false and the orthogonality thesis remains itself orthogonal to the argument to existential risk from AI. In either case, the standard argument for existential risk from AI is not sound.—Having said that, there remains a risk of instrumental AI to cause very significant damage if designed or used badly, though this is not due to superintelligence or a singularity. (shrink)

A central issue confronting both philosophers and practitioners in formulating an analysis of causation is the question of what constitutes evidence for a causal association. From the 1950s onward, the biostatistician Jerome Cornfield put himself at the center of a controversial debate over whether cigarette smoking was a causative factor in the incidence of lung cancer. Despite criticisms from distinguished statisticians such as Fisher, Berkson and Neyman, Cornfield argued that a review of the scientific evidence supported the conclusion of a (...) causal association. Cornfield's odds ratio in case‐control studies — as a good estimate of relative risk — together with his argument of ''explanatory common cause'' became important tools to use in confronting the skeptics. In this paper, I revisit this important historical episode as recorded in the Journal of National Cancer Institute and the Journal of the American Statistical Association. More specifically, I examine Cornfield's necessary condition on the minimum magnitudes of relative risk in light of confounders. This episode yields important insight into the nature of causal inference by showing the sorts of evidence appealed to by practitioners in supporting claims of causal association. I discuss this event in light of the manipulationist account of causation. (shrink)

This paper seeks to determine the significance, if any, of epidemiological evidence to prove the specific causation element of liability in negligence or other relevant torts—in particular, what importance can be attached to a relative risk > 2, where that figure represents a sound causal inference at the general level. The paper discusses increased risk approaches to epidemiological evidence and concludes that they are a last resort. The paper also criticizes the proposal that the probability of causation can be estimated (...) with reference to the RR, such that RR > 2 is necessary and sufficient for causation. It is argued, following arguments by Sander Greenland and others, that RR > 2 is not necessary for proof of specific causation, except under restrictive biological assumptions that are not known to be satisfied for any important disease, and therefore must never be required. However, the paper argues that in some circumstances RR > 2 can be sufficient to prove causation at law. This position is defended against the widely held judicial and academic view that epidemiological evidence must be accompanied by something else, particular to the case at hand, if it is to have probative force for specific causation. It is argued that far from being epistemically irrelevant, to achieve correct and just outcomes it is in fact mandatory to take epidemiological evidence into account in deciding specific causation. Failing to consider such evidence when it is available leads to error and injustice. The conclusion is that in certain circumstances epidemiological evidence of RR > 2 is not necessary to prove specific causation but that it is sufficient. This “sufficiency” is confined to circumstances where there is no other evidence, as a way of getting clear on what the epidemiological evidence says. Once we have worked out what it says, this must be weighed against the other relevant evidence, if there is any. (shrink)

Toxic speech inflicts damage to mental and physical health. This process can be chronic or acute, temporary or permanent. Understanding how toxic speech inflicts these harms requires both an account of linguistic practices and, because language is inherently social, tools from epidemiology. This paper explores what we can learn from two epidemiological models: a common source model that emphasizes poisons, and a propagated transmission model that better fits contagions like viruses.

Epidemiology is a science of disease which specifies rates . Evolution is a science of life which specifies changes . ‘Evolutionary Epidemiology’ is a synthesis of these two sciences which combines the empirical power of classical methods in genetical epidemiology with the interpretive capacities of neo-darwinian evolutionary genetics. In particular, prevalence rates of genetical diseases are important data points when reformulated for the purpose of analysis in terms of their evolutionary frequencies. Traits which exceedprevalences beyond the rates (...) of mutation or evidence unusualrange of phenotypic reaction are of special interest. This is because traits which did not confer advantages in the environment of evolutionary adaptation cannot accede, through natural selection, to anything but low rates of genomic prevalence.Evolutionary epidemiology is, in all of medicine, of particular promise in ongoing efforts to better understand psychopathology. Many complexities of phenotypic adjustment arise when new developmental demands are placed on an ‘old’ genome. The new and complex biosocial ecology of human mass society now evokes different phenotypes than those in the prehistorical ecology to which the genome is structurally and functionally better adapted. Some of these new phenotypes are darwinian failures. In this paper, the theoretical implications of evolutionary epidemiology are extended and some tentative points of clinical application are offered. (shrink)

The importance of legal epidemiology in public health law research has undoubtedly grown over the last five years. Scholars and practitioners together have developed guidance on best practices for the field, including: placing emphasis on transdisciplinary collaborations; creating valid, reliable, and repeatable research; and publishing timely products for use in decision-making and change. Despite the energy and expertise researchers have brought to this important work, they name significant challenges in marshalling the diverse skill sets, quality controls, and funding to (...) implement legal epidemiology activities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has worked to develop cross-cutting research and translation on issues of national priority in legal epidemiology, and has explored ways to overcome some of these challenges. As such, this article describes a case study of the use of law to characterize states' prior authorization policies regarding medication used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, a central component of a broader effort to improve behavior therapy options for young children with ADHD. This article highlights the types of legal epidemiology work we have undertaken, the application of this work to an emerging public health problem, and the lessons learned in creating impactful research for the field. (shrink)

Epidemiological models have played a central role in the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly when urgent decisions were required and available evidence was sparse. They have been used to predict the evolution of the disease and to inform policy-making. In this paper, we address two kinds of epidemiological models widely used in the pandemic, namely, compartmental models and agent-based models. After describing their essentials—some real examples are invoked—we discuss their main strengths and weaknesses. Then, on the basis of this analysis, we make (...) a comparison between their respective merits concerning three different goals: prediction, explanation, and intervention. We argue that there are general considerations which could favour any of those sorts of models for obtaining the aforementioned goals. We conclude, however, that preference for particular models must be grounded case-by-case since additional contextual factors, as the peculiarities of the target population and the aims and expectations of policy-makers, cannot be overlooked. (shrink)

Alex Broadbent’s Philosophy of Epidemiology is the latest volume in Palgrave Macmillan’s New Directions in the Philosophy of Science series. Other monographs in the series focus on mathematics, biology, astronomy, et al.—the usual topics of discourse when philosophers engage science. The present volume is a welcome addition not just to the series but also for the field of epidemiology. As Broadbent notes, “Although a few philosophers have studied epidemiology, there have been no philosophical studies of epidemiology” (...) . There is one now.As noted in the book’s foreword, the core theme of Philosophy of Epidemiology “has to do with the nature and role of explanation and prediction in epidemiological analyses” . These are practical matters which are familiar to epidemiologists, but being largely mechanical in nature, “this explains why philosophers of science have neglected epidemiology” .Broadbent is a young philosopher, trained at Cam .. (shrink)

While the notion of the mind as information-processor--a kind of computational system--is widely accepted, many scientists and philosophers have assumed that this account of cognition shows that the mind's operations are characterizable independent of their relationship to the external world. Existential Cognition challenges the internalist view of mind, arguing that intelligence, thought, and action cannot be understood in isolation, but only in interaction with the outside world. Arguing that the mind is essentially embedded in the external world, Ron McClamrock (...) provides a schema that allows cognitive scientists to address such long-standing problems in artificial intelligence as the "frame" problem and the issue of "bounded" rationality. Extending this schema to cover progress in other studies of behavior, including language, vision, and action, McClamrock reinterprets the importance of the organism/environment distinction. McClamrock also considers the broader philosophical question of the place of mind in the world, particularly with regard to questions of intentionality, subjectivity, and phenomenology. With implications for philosophy, cognitive and computer science, AI, and psychology, this book synthesizes state-of-the-art work in philosophy and cognitive science on how the mind interacts with the world to produce thoughts, ideas, and actions. (shrink)

This article focuses on existential feelings. To begin with, it depicts how they differ from other affective phenomena and what type of intentionality they manifest. Furthermore, a detailed analysis shows that existential feelings can be subdivided, first, into elementary and nonelementary varieties, and second, into three foci of primary relatedness: oneself, the social environment, and the world as such. Eventually, five strategies of emotion regulation are examined with respect to their applicability to existential feelings. In the case (...) of harmful existential feelings, it turns out that none seems fitting except one, attentional deployment. (shrink)

This book critically assesses arguments for the existence of the God of classical theism, develops an innovative account of objects’ persistence, and defends new arguments against classical theism. The authors engage the following classical theistic proofs: Aquinas’s First Way, Aquinas’s De Ente argument, and Feser’s Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Augustinian, Thomistic, and Rationalist proofs. The authors also provide the first systematic treatment of the ‘existential inertia thesis’. By connecting the thesis to relativity theory and recent developments in the philosophy of physics, (...) and by developing a variety of novel existential-inertia-friendly explanations of persistence, they mount a formidable new case against classical theistic proofs. Finally, they defend new arguments against classical theism based on abstract objects and changing divine knowledge. The text appeals to students, researchers, and others interested in classical theistic proofs, the existence and nature of God, and the ultimate explanations of persistence, change, and contingency. (shrink)

A small but growing number of studies have aimed to understand, assess and reduce existential risks, or risks that threaten the continued existence of mankind. However, most attention has been focused on known and tangible risks. This paper proposes a heuristic for reducing the risk of black swan extinction events. These events are, as the name suggests, stochastic and unforeseen when they happen. Decision theory based on a fixed model of possible outcomes cannot properly deal with this kind of (...) event. Neither can probabilistic risk analysis. This paper will argue that the approach that is referred to as engineering safety could be applied to reducing the risk from black swan extinction events. It will also propose a conceptual sketch of how such a strategy may be implemented: isolated, self-sufficient, and continuously manned underground refuges. Some characteristics of such refuges are also described, in particular the psychosocial aspects. Furthermore, it is argued that this implementation of the engineering safety strategy safety barriers would be effective and plausible and could reduce the risk of an extinction event in a wide range of possible scenarios. Considering the staggering opportunity cost of an existential catastrophe, such strategies ought to be explored more vigorously. (shrink)

Cultural epidemiology is a theoretical framework that enables historical studies to be informed by cognitive science. It incorporates insights from evolutionary psychology (viz. cultural evolution is constrained by universal properties of the human cognitive apparatus that result from biological evolution) and from Darwinian models of cultural evolution (viz. population thinking: cultural phenomena are distributions of resembling items among a community and its habitat). Its research program includes the study of the multiple cognitive mechanisms that cause the distribution, on a (...) cultural scale, of representations and material cultural items. By a detailed analysis of the social cognitive causal chain that occurred in the past, one can find out – and specify – which are the factors of attraction that account for cultural stability as well as historical cultural change. After reviewing recent research and developments in cognitive history, I present the concept of cultural attractor and explain why cultural attractors are historically variable. In doing so, I emphasize the role of historically constituted cognitive mechanisms, which account for much of historical cultural developments. I argue that the framework of cultural epidemiology can better account for these important historical phenomena than either evolutionary psychology accounts of culture or dual inheritance theory. I conclude that describing and explaining the history of cultural attractors is a good research goal for historians. (shrink)

By putting existential phenomenology into conversation with virtue ethics, this book offers a new interpretation of human flourishing. It rejects characterizations of flourishing as either a private subjective state or an objective worldly status, arguing that flourishing is rather a successfully negotiated self-world fit – a condition involving both the essential dependence of the self upon the world and others, and the lived normative responsiveness of the agent striving to be in the world well. A central argument of the (...) book is that there is an irreducible normative plurality arising from the different practical perspectives we can adopt – the first, second, and third-person stances – all of which make different kinds of normative claim that we understand ourselves as having reason to meet. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these normative domains (self-fulfillment, moral responsibility, and responsiveness to intersubjective standards) achieved in such a way that success in one domain does not compromise success in another. Existential Flourishing provides a correspondingly transformed interpretation of the virtues as solutions to various existential problems we face in responding to these normative domains. The book also addresses traditional problems in virtue ethics and analyzes the structure of four virtues in detail: justice, patience, modesty, and courage. (shrink)

This paper examines and analyzes five definitions of ‘existential risk.’ It tentatively adopts a pluralistic approach according to which the definition that scholars employ should depend upon the particular context of use. More specifically, the notion that existential risks are ‘risks of human extinction or civilizational collapse’ is best when communicating with the public, whereas equating existential risks with a ‘significant loss of expected value’ may be the most effective definition for establishing existential risk studies as (...) a legitimate field of scientific and philosophical inquiry. In making these arguments, the present paper hopes to provide a modicum of clarity to foundational issues relating to the central concept of arguably the most important discussion of our times. (shrink)

In this paper I apply the epidemiological model of the spread of beliefs and how they become cultural representations to the field of fallacies. The model suggests that beliefs tend to replicate as a virus does in a potential epidemic, and those strains that are dominant in a given socio-cultural sphere become cultural representations. My ultimate aim is to denounce the fact that some presumptive argumentation schemes are widely applied as definitive arguments, but turn out to be instances of common (...) and traditional fallacies. Moreover, some such fallacies have managed to colonise the human mind and become cultural representations in society today. Adopting the approach I advocate here, we could say that the fallacy has become a belief, which has then managed to replicate like a virus, and finally the fallacy has become a cultural representation. One of the great harms that results from this process is that it is very difficult to open up effective lines of argument that expose the fallacious nature of these new and perverse cultural representations. (shrink)

The morbidity of tick‐borne encephalitis (TBE) varies yearly by as much as 10‐fold among the people of Western Siberia. This long‐term variation is dependent on many factors such as the density of the tick populations, the prevalence of TBE virus (TBEV) among sub‐adult ticks, the yearly virulence of the TBEV, and prophylactic measures. Here we highlight the role of small mammal hosts in the circulation of TBEV through the ecosystem. Refining classical models of non‐viremic horizontal transmission, we emphasize the recently (...) understood fact that the physiological and immunological status of the small mammal hosts affects the tick and virus‐host interactions. In addition to its theoretical interest, our approach may lead to some practical improvements in the precision of epidemiological forecasts and perhaps in forestalling the severity of outbreaks of TBE, or, at least, in forewarning medical authorities and the general public of impending TBE outbreaks. (shrink)

ArgumentThe paper argues that epidemic surveillance and state-building were closely interconnected in interwar Poland. Starting from the paper technology of weekly epidemiological reporting it discusses how the reporting scheme of Polish epidemics came into being in the context of a typhus epidemic in 1919–20. It then shows how the statistics regarding nation-wide epidemics was put into practice. It is only when we take into account these practices that we can understand the epidemiological order the statistics produced. The preprinted weekly report (...) form registered Jews and Christians separately. Yet, the imagined national epidemiological space that emerged from it hardly took notice of this separation. Rather, the category that differentiated Polish epidemiological space in medical discourse was the capacity of contributing to the state-making practices of epidemic surveillance. This category divided Poland into two regions: a civilized and modern western region and a backward and peripheral eastern region. (shrink)

In a scenario characterized by unpredictable developments, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiological models have played a leading part, having been especially widely deployed for forecasting purposes. In this paper, two real-world examples of modeling are examined in support of the proposition that science can convey inconsistent as well as genuinely perspectival representations of the world. Reciprocally inconsistent outcomes are grounded on incompatible assumptions, whereas perspectival outcomes are grounded on compatible assumptions and illuminate different aspects of the same object (...) of interest. In both cases, models should be viewed as expressions of specific assumptions and unconstrained choices on the part of those designing them. The coexistence of a variety of models reflects a primary feature of science, namely its pluralism. It is herein proposed that recent over-exposure to science’s inner workings and disputes such as those pertaining to models, may have led the public to perceive pluralism as a flaw—or more specifically, as disunity or fragmentation, which in turn may have been interpreted as a sign of unreliability. In conclusion, given the inescapability of pluralism, suggestions are offered as to how to counteract distorted perceptions of science, and thereby enhance scientific literacy. (shrink)