The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a host of ethical challenges, but key among these has been the possibility that health care systems might need to ration scarce critical care resources. Rationing p...

Biomedical and behavioral research is a complex, multidisciplinary, and highly varied enterprise with but a single goal: to produce and disseminate knowledge about the causes, effects, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of human illnesses and impairments. Success requires public trust in the process. When that trust has been shaken (or worse), the response has been to establish offices to exercise oversight of the various actors and to require them to adhere to regulations that specify, with various levels of detail, what they (...) may or may not do.The two regulatory frameworks examined in this report by Barbara Bierer and Mark Barnes began separately, provoked by different scandals and abuses of public trust. (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

Those working in experimental philosophy have raised a number of arguments against the use of conceptual analysis in philosophical inquiries. But they have typically focused on a model that pursues conceptual analysis by taking intuitions as a kind of (defeasible) evidence for philosophical hypotheses. Little attention has been given to the constitutivist alternative, which sees metaphysical modal facts as reflections of constitutive semantic rules. I begin with a brief overview of the constitutivist approach and argue that we can defend a (...) role for conceptual analysis, so understood, in ontological disputes against both the general skepticism about the relevance of intuitions, and against the specific worries raised by experimental results. Finally, I argue that even if the constitutivist view is adopted, experimental philosophy may still have quite a useful role to play, though purely empirical inquiries cannot in principle do the ontological work alone. (shrink)

The basic philosophical controversy regarding ordinary objects is: Do tables and chairs, sticks and stones, exist? This paper aims to do two things: first, to explain why how this can be a controversy at all, and second, to explain why this controversy has arisen so late in the history of philosophy. Section 1 begins by discussing why the 'obvious' sensory evidence in favor of ordinary objects is not taken to be decisive. It goes on to review the standard arguments against (...) the existence of ordinary objects – including those based on problems with causal redundancy, parsimony, co-location, sorites arguments, and the special composition question. Section 2 goes on to address what it is about the contemporary approach to metaphysics that invites and sustains this kind of controversy, and helps make evident why debates about ordinary objects lead so readily to debates in metametaphysics about the nature of metaphysics itself. (shrink)

Sally Haslanger undertakes groundbreaking work in developing an account of structural explanations and the social structures that figure in them. A chief virtue of the account is that it can show the importance of structural explanations while also respecting the role of individual autonomy in explaining many decisions, by demonstrating the way in which social structures may set up a ‘choice architecture’ in which these choices are made. This paper gives an overview of this achievement, and goes on to consider (...) why there may be need to broaden the role of social structural explanations beyond those that involve explicit choice within a choice architecture. It develops the idea, familiar from work by Heidegger and Ingarden, that social artifacts, roles, and nodes in social structures may be constitutively defined by norms. It closes by suggesting that attention to the role of norms in social structures may enable us to broaden the account to include structural explanations of other kinds. (shrink)

Philosophical theories often hinge on claims about what is necessary or possible. But what are possibilities and necessities, and how could we come to know about them? This book aims to help demystify the methodology of philosophy, by treating such claims not as attempted descriptions of strange facts or distant 'possible worlds', but rather as ways of expressing rules or norms.

I have addressed a wide range of topics in my work, from fiction, the ontology of art, phenomenology, social ontology, and work on ordinary objects generally, through more recent work on metametaphysics, modality, and conceptual engineering. On the surface, these themes might seem to have little in common. Here, however, I trace back how this sequence of interests developed, as I kept stepping backwards from first-order ontological concerns, to ask what underlying presuppositions (about language, modality, and the nature of metaphysics) (...) led metaphysicians astray into a range of eliminativist and revisionary views, and into debates that often made metaphysics seem fruitless, epistemologically mysterious, and like a second-rate rival to the sciences. As my work has developed, I have aimed (partly inspired by work in phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy, and neo-pragmatism) to diagnose where much work in recent metaphysics has gone wrong. More importantly, I have sought to develop an alternative, positive view of what philosophy can do, and how we can do it, that makes philosophy clear, epistemologically transparent and relevant to human life. (shrink)

This paper provides a framework, based on Peircean pragmatism and a supplemental metaphysical principle, for reconciling realism and antirealism. Peircean polymorphism, the resultant position defended in the paper, is a realist position, accepting that there is a world that exists and has characteristics of its own, independently of our experience of it. The position denies, however, what I call the uniqueness assumption about truth -- that it is possible for one, unique representational approach to adequately represent reality. While Peirce does (...) not explicitly address the uniqueness assumption, his account is sufficiently ambiguous on this point to have been understood as a uniqueness account. The supplemental metaphysical principle introduced here, that reality is polymorphic, serves to fortify Peirce's pragmatism against uniqueness. Briefly, the paper outlines some implications of accepting the fortified Peircean position, including greater explanatory power and more compelling motivation for continued scientific inquiry. (shrink)

D. W. Mertz provides a "new" competitor in the universals debate by reviving, developing, and defending the medieval doctrine of Moderate Realism. This book is a substantial contribution to ontology and logic, combining interesting new arguments for polyadic relations and unit attributes, careful and thorough historical studies, and a logic that could solve many old problems.

In this paper, we explore the perspectives of expert stakeholders about who owns data in a medical information commons and what rights and interests ought to be recognized when developing a governance structure for an MIC. We then examine the legitimacy of these claims based on legal and ethical analysis and explore an alternative framework for thinking about participants' rights and interests in an MIC.

Arguments that ordinary inanimate objects such as tables and chairs, sticks and stones, simply do not exist have become increasingly common and increasingly prominent. Some are based on demands for parsimony or for a non-arbitrary answer to the special composition question; others arise from prohibitions against causal redundancy, ontological vagueness, or co-location; and others still come from worries that a common sense ontology would be a rival to a scientific one. Until now, little has been done to address these arguments (...) in a unified and systematic way. Ordinary Objects is designed to fill this gap, demonstrating that the mistakes behind all of these superficially diverse eliminativist arguments may be traced to a common source. It aims to develop an ontology of ordinary objects subject to no such problems, providing perhaps the first sustained defense of a common sense ontology in two generations. The work done along the way addresses a number of major issues in philosophy of language and metaphysics, contributing to debates about analyticity, identity conditions, co-location and the grounding problem, vagueness, overdetermination, parsimony, and ontological commitment. In the end, the most important result of addressing these eliminativist arguments is not merely avoiding their conclusions; examining their failings also gives us reason to suspect that many apparent disputes in ontology are pseudo-debates. For it brings into question widely-held assumptions about which uses of metaphysical principles are appropriate, which metaphysical demands are answerable, and how we should go about addressing such fundamental questions as "What exists?". As a result, the work of Ordinary Objects promises to provide not only the route to a reflective understanding of our unreflective common-sense view, but also a better understanding of the proper methods and limits of metaphysics. (shrink)

This article examines Aristotle’s discussion of the Spartan revolt of the Partheniae in Politics V.7. Aristotle appears to use the Partheniae as examples of two sources of instability within so-called aristocracies, but the analysis of this case raises delicate interpretive issues. Sections I–III draw upon surviving accounts of the Parthenian revolt from Antiochus, Ephorus and Myron of Priene in order to illuminate the significance of this example for Aristotle’s ethical and political thought. Section IV reconstructs the state of the Spartan (...) constitution around the time of the revolt in order to understand what Aristotle might have thought about what precipitated the revolt. This article argues that generational politics is at stake in the revolt, and Section V locates the revolt’s politics within its broader historical and cultural context. In the end, this article finds that Aristotle may have intended to leave the interpretation of this example ambiguous due to his own unresolved views towards the politics at stake in this revolt. (shrink)

This challenging study places fiction squarely at the centre of the discussion of metaphysics. Philosophers have traditionally treated fiction as involving a set of narrow problems in logic or the philosophy of language. By contrast Amie Thomasson argues that fiction has far-reaching implications for central problems of metaphysics. The book develops an 'artifactual' theory of fiction, whereby fictional characters are abstract artifacts as ordinary as laws or symphonies or works of literature. By understanding fictional characters we come to understand how (...) other cultural and social objects are established on the basis of the independent physical world and the mental states of human beings. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Range of Views Criteria of Assessment The Road to a Solution.

Amie L. Thomasson; The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics: Thomasson The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art.

This book reclaims psychoanalysis as an ally to critical theory's efforts to restore subjectivity and oppose systemic domination in modernity. The author achieves this aim by reimagining of Freud as a militant optimist, compassionate practitioner and innovator whose work still supports democratic processes contests the dominant scholarly accounts of his work. The most important contribution of this book, however, is the restoration of the radical psychoanalytic foundations of critical theory. A return to its psychoanalytic foundations will restore the compassion of (...) critical theory and grant crucial access to the psychological foundations of domination. Through psychoanalysis, theory can return to the vitally important task of restoring subjectivity against domination and for the emancipation of society. (shrink)

It is often noted that institutional objects and artifacts depend on human beliefs and intentions and so fail to meet the realist paradigm of mind-independent objects. In this paper I draw out exactly in what ways the thesis of mind-independence fails, and show that it has some surprising consequences. For the specific forms of mind-dependence involved entail that we have certain forms of epistemic privilege with regard to our own institutional and artifactual kinds, protecting us from certain possibilities of ignorance (...) and error; they also demonstrate that not all cases of reference to these kinds can proceed along a causal model. As a result, realist views in ontology, epistemology, and semantics that were developed with natural scientific kinds in mind cannot fully apply to the everyday world. In closing I consider some wider consequences of these results for social science and philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that thinking of existence questions as deep questions to be resolved by a distinctively philosophical discipline of ontology is misguided. I begin by examining how to understand the truth-conditions of existence claims, by way of understanding the rules of use for ‘exists’ and for general noun terms. This yields a straightforward method for resolving existence questions by a combination of conceptual analysis and empirical enquiry. It also provides a blueprint for arguing against most common proposals for uniform substantive (...) ‘criteria of existence’, whether they involve mind-independence, possession of causal powers, observability, etc., and thus for showing that many arguments for denying entities (numbers, ordinary objects, fictional characters, propositions…) on grounds of their failure to meet one or more of these proposed existence criteria are mistaken. (shrink)

Talk of the functions of language or concepts plays a central role in developing an appealing pragmatic approach to conceptual engineering. But some have expressed skepticism that we can make any good sense of the idea of function as applied to concepts or language, or argued that the most we can say is that the function of ‘F’ is to refer to the Fs. In this paper, however, I argue that identifying linguistic functions is not hopeless, and that we can (...) make progress by working at the level of system functions, and drawing on work in systemic functional linguistics. For that enables us to develop a better framework for thinking about the functions that language serves, and the ways its subsystems contribute to those functions. This approach to understanding linguistic functions enables us to develop a pragmatic approach to conceptual engineering that provides standards for conceptual engineering without metaphysical mysteries. It also enables us to make progress in figuring out what functions certain philosophically interesting parts of language serve, and how they are introduced into language, in ways that may disentangle us from a range of old philosophical problems. (shrink)

One-level accounts of consciousness have become increasingly popular (Dretske 1995, Tye 1995, Siewert 1998, Thomasson 2000 and 2005, Lurz 2006, McGinn, this volume). By a ‘onelevel’ account I mean an account according to which consciousness is fundamentally a matter of awareness of a world —and does not require awareness of our own minds, mental states, or the phenomenal character of these. As Fred Dretske puts it “Experiences and beliefs are conscious, not because you are conscious of them, but because, so (...) to speak, you are conscious with them”. (shrink)

The critics in this volume raise several important challenges to the modal normativist position developed in Norms and Necessity, including whether the relation I claim holds between semantic rules and necessity claims generates spurious claims of metaphysical necessity, whether the view is circular (implicitly relying on a more 'robust' form of modal realism), and whether it conflicts with truth-conditional semantics. They also raise probing questions about how it compares to other views of modality, including a Lewisian view and an essentialist (...) view. In these replies, I respond to these challenges in ways that precisify the relevant understanding of ‘semantic rules' and the forms they can take, that make clearer the direction of explanation in modal normativism in ways that show the view doesn't rely on a more ‘robust’ form of modal realism, and that give reason for thinking that there is actually no conflict between modal normativism and truth-conditional semantics. I also aim to give a fuller assessment of how it compares to other approaches to modality, including an essentialist approach. (shrink)

In many organizations, subsidiary performance goals are developed remotely by optimistic leaders back at headquarters, leaving deployed managers vulnerable to unrealistic operational expectations on the frontline, unable to follow orders. Most management research categorizes employees’ failure to follow workplace directives as deviant behavior. In contrast, I argue that in some circumstances ‘disobeying orders’ should be considered a virtuous, responsible leadership strategy when facing unachievable tasks. Through a historical analysis of the surrender of the British colony Singapore to Japan during World (...) War II, this paper links pro-social rule breaking, productive resistance, and responsible leadership literatures, developing a process model that explains how some deployed leaders cope with ethical dilemmas in virtuous ways by ‘disobeying orders’. (shrink)

The existence of a social world raises both the metaphysical puzzle: how can there be a “reality” of facts and objects that are genuinely created by human intentionality? and the epistemological puzzle: how can such a product of human intentionality include objective facts available for investigation and discovery by the social sciences? I argue that Searle’s story about the creation of social facts in The Construction of Social Reality is too narrow to fully solve either side of the puzzle. By (...) acknowledging different forms of rules for constructing social reality paralleling rules for creating ‘make-believe’ truths, we can build a more comprehensive social ontology and allow for a more appropriate range of discovery for the social sciences. Nonetheless, I argue that despite the parallels between methods for constructing make-believe and social facts, it would be mistaken to treat talk about social reality as involving a mere pretense to refer. (shrink)

In an earlier paper in this journal I argued that deflationism is preferable to fictionalism as an alternative to both traditional realism and eliminativism. Gabriele Contessa questions this conclusion, denying that fictionalist arguments beg the question against easy ontological arguments, presenting a new argument against easy ontology, and suggesting a response to the challenge I raise for fictionalists. Below I respond to these points in turn. In so doing, I hope to clarify the broader theoretic orientation of easy ontology—in particular, (...) its rejection of a Quinean criterion of ontological commitment and its commitment to a form of functional pluralism about language. (shrink)

I'd like to begin by thanking Katherine Hawley, Daniel Korman and Stephen Schiffer for their extremely interesting and insightful comments, which very much enrich the discussion. I am both honored and grateful that such fine philosophers would spend their time and careful attention on my work. Since there doesn't seem to be significant overlap across their concerns, I will simply respond to each in turn.

Modality presents notorious philosophical problems, including the epistemic problem of how we could come to know modal facts and metaphysical problems about how to place modal facts in the natural world. These problems arise from thinking of modal claims as attempts to describe modal features of this world that explain what makes them true. Here I propose a different view of modal discourse in which talk about what is “metaphysically necessary” does not aim to describe modal features of the world, (...) but, rather, provides a particularly useful way of expressing constitutive semantic and conceptual rules in the object language. The result is a “modal normativist” view that enables us to avoid the epistemic problems of modality and mitigate the metaphysical worries, while also leaving open the possibility of a unified account of the function of modal language. Finally, I address a serious challenge: we have the norms we do in order to track the modal facts of the world, so that the order of explanation must go in the opposite direction. I close by showing how the normativist may answer that challenge. (shrink)

[ES] Los trabajos recientes de Stephen Schiffer en el desarrollo de una explicación pleonástica de proposiciones producen resultados importantes que cambian el significado tanto de la ontología de primer orden como de la meta-ontología. El objetivo del presente trabajo es dejar en claro cuáles son estas consecuencias y por qué son tan importantes. Según mi punto de vista, la mayor amenaza para los partidarios de la metafísica proviene de un punto de vista que yo he llamado en otro trabajo el (...) acercamiento «fácil» a la ontología: los argumentos de Schiffer a favor de proposiciones «pleonásticas», propiedades, estados, eventos y personajes ficticios; los argumentos neo-fregeanos a favor de la existencia de números; y mis propios argumentos a favor de objetos sociales, culturales, y personajes ficticios, y objetos ordinarios como mesas y sillas. El trabajo expande estas tres diferentes formas de ontología fácil, mostrando sus interrelaciones y argumenta que estos acercamientos nos dan un realismo ciento por ciento directo, sobre las entidades en cuestión. A un nivel meta-ontológico, sin embargo, el trabajo sugiere que el debate ontológico serio es confundido porque sus preguntas ontológicas tienen respuestas tan directas. Este acercamiento podría ser la amenaza más importante para la metafísica seria, pero también es extremadamente prometedor como una manera de disolver misterios y clarificar la epistemología de la metafísica. [EN] Stephen Schiffer’s recent work in developing a pleonastic account of propositions leads to major, game-changing results in both first-order ontology and meta-ontology. This paper aims to clarify what these consequences are and why they are so important. In my view, the biggest threat to the metaphysical party comes from a view I have elsewhere called the «easy» approach to ontology: Schiffer’s arguments for «pleonastic» propositions, properties, fictional characters, states and events; the neo-Fregean’s arguments for the existence of numbers; and my own arguments for fictional characters, social and cultural objects, and ordinary objects such as tables and chairs. The paper draws out these three different forms of easy ontology, showing their interrelations, and argues that these approaches really give us a straightforward, out and out realism about the entities in question. On the meta-ontological level however, it suggests that serious ontological debate in metaphysics is confused because its ontological questions have so straightforward answers. This approach may be the most important threat to serious metaphysics but it is also extremely promising as a way of dissolving mysteries and clarifying the epistemology of metaphysics. (shrink)

L’article publié ici se propose d’emprunter une voie qui n’avait pas été empruntée dans les explorations précédentes de l’auteur. En effet, on verra qu’il s’agit ici de surmonter les difficultés auxquelles sont confrontées les théories réalistes de la fiction et en particulier la théorie artefactuelle dont Amie Thomasson est l’auteur. La question principale s’édicte en ces termes : s’il y a des personnages de fiction, comment se fait-il qu’il nous soit naturel de dire que tel ou tel personnage n’existe pas (...) ? Comment rendre compte des affirmations de non-existence des personnages de fiction, en particulier lorsqu’on est un réaliste de la fiction ? L’auteur confronte trois manières de traiter ces affirmations : l’approche par la quantification restreinte et l’approche linguistique et enfin l’approche des conditions d’application, point de vue auquel l’auteur se rallie. La première approche consiste à faire des restrictions spatiales ou catégorielles afin de cerner le champ de la référence. La seconde approche, qui est celle que les théoriciens de la référence directe emploient majoritairement, consiste à passer par le métalangage, c’est-à-dire de passer à un niveau sémantique supérieur. La dernière approche, celle par les conditions d’application, est construite sur les vertus des deux premières approches. Enfin, l’auteur élargira l’apport de cette dernière approche aux débats métaphysiques. (shrink)

ABSTRACTA ‘sceptical’ approach to easy arguments involves reducing our confidence in the supposedly uncontroversial premise with which the arguments begin. Here I address the question: if we accept Yablo's new version of a sceptical proposal, what difference might that make for the relevant meta-ontological debates? I argue that serious difficulties remain for even this ‘best’ version of a sceptical approach. Noting these difficulties might motivate us to look again at the alternative strategy—of reading the uncontroversial premise straightforwardly and thinking that (...) doubts about the conclusion were based on artificial inflation or confusion. (shrink)

Crawford Elder’s Real Natures and Familiar Objects promises to give naturalistically inclined metaphysicians reason to accept an ontology that includes many common sense objects, including persons, organisms, and at least many artifacts, behaviors, customs, and so on. This is a brave book, running against the current of trends towards austerity in ontology, tackling centuries old problems about how modal facts may be empirically discovered, and defending a commonsense ontology from a strictly naturalistic approach rather than via traditional appeals to ordinary (...) language or common sense. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 1. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

Higher-order theories and neo-Brentanian theories of consciousness both consider conscious states to be states of which we have some sort of.

The challenge of handling fictional discourse is to find the best way to resolve the apparent inconsistencies in our ways of speaking about fiction. A promising approach is to take at least some such discourse to involve pretense, but does all fictional discourse involve pretense? I will argue that a better, less revisionary, solution is to take internal and fictionalizing discourse to involve pretense, while allowing that in external critical discourse, fictional names are used seriously to refer to fictional characters. (...) I then address two objections to such realist theories of fiction: One, that they can’t adequately account for the truth of singular nonexistence claims involving fictional names, and two, that accepting that there are fictional characters to which we refer is implausible or ontologically profligate. (shrink)

In Ontology Made Easy (2015), I defend the idea that there are ‘easy’ inferences that begin from uncontroversial premises and end with answers to disputed ontological questions. But what do easy inferences really get us? Bueno and Cumpa (this journal, 2020) argue that easy inferences don’t tell us about the natures of properties—they don’t tell us what properties are. Moreover, they argue, by accepting an ontologically neutral quantifier we can also resist the conclusion that properties or numbers exist. Here I (...) address these two issues in turn—in ways that help clarify both the scope and results of easy ontology.First, it is important to see that easy inferences were never intended to address modal questions. Modal questions are addressed by a different part of the total deflationary view—modal normativism. So understood, metaphysical modal questions nonetheless do not provide a remaining area for serious metaphysical inquiry. Second, I argue that we have reason to resist adopting an ontologically neutral quantifier, if we aim to answer ontological questions (without begging the question). Addressing these issues helps to clarify both what does (and does not) follow from easy inferences, and how they form part of a larger deflationary metametaphysical view. (shrink)

While fights about ontology rage on in the ring, there’s long been a suspicion whispered in certain corners of the stadium that some of the fights aren’t real. Granted the disputants all think they are really disagreeing—it’s not the sincerity of the serious ontologists that’s in question, but rather their judgment that they are engaged in a real debate about genuine issues of substance.

Inequitable access to health care, social inequities, and racist and discriminatory care has resulted in the trend toward poorer health outcomes for Indigenous infants and their families when compared to non‐Indigenous families in Canada. How Indigenous mothers experience care during an admission of their infant to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit has implications for future health‐seeking behaviors which may influence infant health outcomes. Nurses are well positioned to promote positive health care interactions and improve health outcomes by effectively meeting the (...) needs of Indigenous families. This qualitative study was guided by interpretive description and the Two‐Eyed Seeing framework and aimed to understand how Indigenous mothers experience accessing and using the health care system for their infants. Data were collected by way of interviews and a discussion group with self‐identifying Indigenous mothers of infants less than two years of age living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Data underwent thematic analysis, identifying nursing strategies to support positive health care interactions and promote the health and wellness of Indigenous infants and their families. Building relationships, providing holistic care, and taking a trauma‐informed approach to the involvement of child protection services are three key strategies that nurses can use to positively impact health care experiences for Indigenous families. (shrink)

This article presents the ancient Mesopotamian Mīs Pî ceremony as a case study in the relationship between ritual and the natural world using Roy Rappaport’s framework of Ecological Anthropology as a guide. Rappaport’s premise is that human populations do not operate independently but are instead, “ecological populations in an ecosystem that also includes the other living organisms and the nonliving substances found within the boundaries of [their] territory.” In Rappaport’s framework, rituals involving the use of animal, plant, and other organic (...) materials link human communities to the ecosystems in which they dwell and to that which they seek to ritualize. Applying this mode of analysis to the Mīs Pî ritual yields the thesis that, from the perspective of the Mīs Pî, nature is integral to the ritual maintenance and well-being of the divine and human realms, and, in effect, the well-being of the cosmos. (shrink)