In a recent paper, Takacs and Bourrat (Biol Philos 37:12, 2022) examine the use of geometric mean reproductive output as a measure of biological fitness. We welcome Takacs and Bourrat’s scrutiny of a fitness definition that some philosophers have adopted uncritically. We also welcome Takacs and Bourrat’s attempt to marry the philosophical literature on fitness with the biological literature on mathematical measures of fitness. However, some of the main claims made by Takacs and Bourrat are not correct, while others are (...) correct but not for the reasons they give. (shrink)

The recent discussion of the concept of mental disorder has focused on what makes a mental disorder a disorder. A question that has received less attention is what makes a mental disorder mental rather than somatic. We examine three views on this issue -- namely, the internal cause view, the symptom view, and the pluralist view -- and assess to what extent these accounts are plausible. Three strategies used to pinpoint the mental in psychiatry are identified, namely negative characterizations, exemplification (...) of paradigmatic mental features, and an appeal to intentional content. We also examine different versions of nihilism. Finally, it is observed that the discussion of what makes a mental disorder mental has largely been unaffected by conceptions of the mental in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In recent years, several formalisms for program construction have appeared. One such formalism is the type theory developed by Per Martin-L f. Well suited as a theory for program construction, it makes possible the expression of both specifications and programs within the same formalism. Furthermore, the proof rules can be used to derive a correct program from a specification as well as to verify that a given program has a certain property. This book contains a thorough introduction to type theory, (...) with information on polymorphic sets, subsets, monomorphic sets, and a full set of helpful examples. (shrink)

A so called “weak value” of an observable in quantum mechanics (QM) may be obtained in a weak measurement + post-selection procedure on the QM system under study. Applied to number operators, it has been invoked in revisiting some QM paradoxes (e.g., the so called Three-Box Paradox and Hardy’s Paradox). This requires the weak value to be interpreted as a bona fide property of the system considered, a par with entities like operator mean values and eigenvalues. I question such an (...) interpretation; it has no support in the basic axioms of quantum mechanics and it leads to unreasonable results in concrete situations. (shrink)

. My main claim is that explanations are fundamentally about relations between concepts and not, for example, essentially requiring laws, causes, or particular initial conditions. Nor is their linguistic form essential. I begin by showing that this approach solves some well-known old problems and then proceeds to argue my case using heuristic analogies with mathematical proofs. I find that an explanation is something that connects explanandum and explanans by apprehensible steps that penetrate into more fundamental levels than that of explanandum. (...) This leads to a deeper discussion of what it means to be more fundamental. Although I am not able to give a general definition, I argue that linguistic entities and empirical concepts are usually not fundamental, much relying on the distinction between complete and depleted ideas or experiences. (shrink)

One of the claims sometimes advanced in favour of anti-doping is that allowing doping would lead to a uniform increase in performance in comparison to no doping. The idea is that if all athletes wo...

Harm-reduction approaches are used to reduce the burden of risky human behaviour without necessarily aiming to stop the behaviour. We discuss what an introduction of harm reduction for doping in sports would mean in parallel with a relaxation of the antidoping rule. We analyse what is ethically at stake in the following five levels: (1) What would it mean for the athlete (the self)? (2) How would it impact other athletes (the other)? (3) How would it affect the phenomenon of (...) sport as a game and its fair play basis (the play)? (4) What would be the consequences for the spectator and the role of sports in society (the display)? and (5) What would it mean for what some consider as essential to being human (humanity)? For each level, we present arguments for and against doping and then discuss what a harm-reduction approach, within a dynamic regime of a partially relaxed antidoping rule, could imply. We find that a harm-reduction approach is morally defensible and potentially provides a viable escape out of the impasse resulting from the impossibility of attaining the eradication of doping. The following question remains to be answered: Would a more relaxed position, when combined with harm-reduction measures, indeed have less negative consequences for society than today9s all-out antidoping efforts that aim for abstinence? We provide an outline of an alternative policy, allowing a cautious step-wise change to answer this question and then discuss the ethical aspects of such a policy change. (shrink)

The main question is whether chemically induced mood enhancement is likely to make us happier, or whether it may rather have detrimental effects on our long-term happiness. This question is divided into three: What effects are mood -enhancing drugs likely to have on the long-term happiness of the person who takes these drugs? How would these drugs affect the happiness of the immediate environment of the people who take them, e.g. children or spouses? What effects would a wide-spread use of (...) mood -enhancing drugs have on society as a whole, and how would this affect the long-term happiness of its citizens? My answers to these questions are very tentative, partly because we know too little about what non-hedonic effects these drugs can be expected to have. It is possible that these drugs would have detrimental effects on some determinants of happiness, however, e.g. marriage and friendship, social and physical activity, rational problem-solving and mental effectiveness, political participation and interpersonal trust. But on the other hand, there are also a number of determinants of happiness that might be positively affected by a wide-spread and frequent use of mood -enhancing drugs. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to argue that an explanation is not a logical structure¸ that it cannot be characterised in syntactic terms, but that it is rather an epistemological structure, and, more specifically, a structure organising conceptual content. I will start from a trivial example and systematically look at the effects of making premises more general or more specific or of reshuffling the same content into another set of premises, thereby exposing the implicit suppositions and consequences of some commonly (...) held views and showing their untenability. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to elaborate on the inner connection between three such diverse entities as lifelong learning, globalization and hermeneutics. After placing lifelong learning in a societal context framed by globalization, my intention is to reflect on the prerequisites for introducing a hermeneutical contribution to the understanding of lifelong learning. First, it is stated that globalization is the most profound horizon today for explaining the current interest we experience in both lifelong learning and hermeneutics. Second, from these (...) links to on globalization, we can also expect to find new links between lifelong learning and hermeneutics. Third, the predominant configuration of lifelong learning according to the logics of globalization and virtues of flexibility is demonstrated, and thereafter criticized mainly from the perspectives of philosophical anthropology. Finally, an alternative configuration of meaning and identity formation in lifelong learning is proposed by utilizing a reformulated theory of interpretation made possible thanks to recent metamorphosis inside the hermeneutical tradition itself. (shrink)

Overall assessments and balancing of interests -- Multi-criteria analysis -- Intuition -- Legal examples of decision-making with SAW -- Decision-making under uncertainty -- Evidentiary aspects.

SummaryCertain problems in Quine's philosophy of language are discussed. The first issue is his theory of how an observation sentence is understood. This is part of the more general problem of constructing a theory for how any single cognitive sentence is grasped. Quine's thesis of the inscrutability of reference, according to which it is senseless to ask what the referent of a term is, is our second subject. The content and truth of this thesis is discussed. In this context three (...) rather precise versions of the thesis are presented. The third issue to be treated is the relationship between the inscrutability thesis and theories of observation sentence understanding. The main conclusion of the paper is that the inscrutability thesis can hardly be true. (shrink)

This longitudinal study (1994-1996) used the Gordon Personality Inventory to measure nursing students’ self-image (Gordon A), self-values (Gordon B) and interpersonal values (Gordon C). It was performed with students from three colleges of health in the south of Sweden: Jönköping ( n = 54), Växjö ( n = 24) and Kristianstad ( n = 38). The null hypothesis of the study was that the new academic three-year programme did not have the power to change significantly the students’ self-image and professional (...) values. The hypothesis was tested by paired sample Student’s t-test. The result was that, at Jönköping, self-image changed and increased significantly in the dimensions of ‘cautiousness’ and ‘personal relations’, and decreased in ‘sociability’, and increased in the self-value ‘order’. At Växjö the self-image dimensions of ‘original thinking’ and ‘personal relations’ increased, and, at Kristianstad, the students increased their self-image scores in ‘responsibility’. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present a normative theory of the goals of medicine (a theory that tells us in what respects medicine should benefit the patient) that is both comprehensive and unified. A review of the relevant literature suggests that there are at least seven plausible goals that are irreducible to each other, namely to promote functioning, to maintain or restore normal structure and function, to promote quality of life, to save and prolong life, to help the (...) patient to cope well with her condition, to improve the external conditions under which people live, and to promote the growth and development of children. However, it seems that all these goals need to be qualified in different ways, e.g. it does not seem reasonable to improve physiological function or functional ability unless this is expected to have positive effects on quality of life and/or length of life, or to improve the quality of life in any respect, or by any means. These qualifications all suggest that the proposed goals are, as goals, conceptually, and not just causally, related to one another, and that they should therefore not be regarded in isolation. Instead, we should think of the medical enterprise as having a multidimensional goal structure rather than a single goal. In order to depict clearly how the different goals are related to one another, a multidimensional model is constructed. (shrink)

As part of the conference commemorating Theoria's 75th anniversary, a round table discussion on philosophy publishing was held in Bergendal, Sollentuna, Sweden, on 1 October 2010. Bengt Hansson was the chair, and the other participants were eight editors‐in‐chief of philosophy journals: Hans van Ditmarsch (Journal of Philosophical Logic), Pascal Engel (Dialectica), Sven Ove Hansson (Theoria), Vincent Hendricks (Synthese), Søren Holm (Journal of Medical Ethics), Pauline Jacobson (Linguistics and Philosophy), Anthonie Meijers (Philosophical Explorations), Henry S. Richardson (Ethics) and Hans Rott (...) (Erkenntnis). (shrink)

It is now generally agreed that we have to rely on value judgments to distinguish mental disorders from other conditions, but it is not quite clear how. To clarify this, we need to know more than to what extent attributions of disorder are dependent on values. We also have to know (1) what kind of evaluations we have to rely on to identify the class of mental disorder; (2) whether attributions of disorder contain any implicit reference to some specific evaluative (...) standard; and (3) whether the concept of mental disorder is value laden in the definitional or in the epistemic sense. I will argue that the evaluations we have to rely on are mainly considerations of harm, but that we also need to rely on other evaluations; that there should be no references to specific evaluative standards; and that even though mental disorders are necessarily undesirable, "mental disorder" may well be a descriptive phrase. (shrink)

This anthology focuses on “practical” forms and expressions of knowledge, like thinking through artistic media or by crafting things out of materials. The ten chapters follow and review various tracks in conceptions of contemporary knowledge, exploring human knowledge and experience from the perspective of human activities or practices, professional, artistic, domestic, or whatever. A guiding idea is that human knowledge seldom, perhaps never, fits into the traditional dualism between thinking and doing. -/- The chapters are written by philosophers and musicians (...) – some with a double experience as artists and theoreticians. The themes are philosophical, but above all, they touch on questions that are essential for how we understand ourselves as thinking and playing bodies, indeed as parts of nature. The book does not propose one single “theory of knowledge” but steps towards a more diverse and open attitude to the meaning of knowledge. -/- We hope that the texts will be of interest and useful in both disciplinebased and professional education: in philosophy, art schools, tea cher education, and in other programmes where tacit and practical knowledge are essential for the (future) practitioners. It is possible to independently read, and profit from, most of the chapters. (shrink)

The paper discusses Bayesian convergence when the truth is excluded from the analysis by means of a simple coin-tossing example. In the fair-balance paradox a fair coin is tossed repeatedly. A Bayesian agent, however, holds the a priori view that the coin is either biased towards heads or towards tails. As a result the truth is ignored by the agent. In this scenario the Bayesian approach tends to confirm a false model as the data size goes to infinity. I argue (...) that the fair-balance paradox reveals an unattractive feature of the Bayesian approach to scientific inference and explore a modification of the paradox. (shrink)

:While Bayesian methods are widely used in economics and finance, the foundations of this approach remain controversial. In the contemporary statistical literature Bayesian Ockham’s razor refers to the observation that the Bayesian approach to scientific inference will automatically assign greater likelihood to a simpler hypothesis if the data are compatible with both a simpler and a more complex hypothesis. In this paper I will discuss a problem that results when Bayesian Ockham’s razor is applied to nested economic models. I will (...) argue that previous responses to the problem found in the philosophical literature are unsatisfactory and develop a novel reply to the problem. (shrink)

The basic theory of preference relations contains a trivial part reflected by axioms A1 and A2, which say that preference relations are preorders. The next step is to find other axims which carry the theory beyond the level of the trivial. This paper is to a great part a critical survey of such suggested axioms. The results are much in the negative — many proposed axioms imply too strange theorems to be acceptable as axioms in a general theory of preference. (...) This does not exclude, of course, that they may well be reasonable axioms for special calculi of preference. I believe that many axioms which are rejected here may be plausible if their range of application is restricted by conditions which are possible to formulate only in a language richer than that of the propositional calculus, e.g. in one containing modal operators or probabilistic concepts. (shrink)

Is science in the midst of a crisis of replicability and false discoveries? In a recent article, Alexander Bird offers an explanation for the apparent lack of replicability in the biomedical sciences. Bird argues that the surprise at the failure to replicate biomedical research is a result of the fallacy of neglecting the base rate. The base-rate fallacy arises in situations in which one ignores the base rate—or prior probability—of an event when assessing the probability of this event in the (...) light of some observed evidence. By extension, the replication crisis would result from ignoring the low prior probability of biomedical hypotheses. In this paper, my response to Bird’s claim is twofold. First, I show that the argument according to which the replication crisis is due to the low prior of biomedical hypotheses is incomplete. Second, I claim that a simple base-rate fallacy model does not account for some important methodological insights that have emerged in discussions of the replication crisis. (shrink)

All definitions of mental disorder are backed up by arguments that rely on general criteria (e.g., that a definition should be consistent with ordinary language). These desiderata are rarely explicitly stated, and there has been no systematic discussion of how different definitions should be assessed. To arrive at a well-founded list of desiderata, we need to know the purpose of a definition. I argue that this purpose must be practical; it should, for example, help us determine who is entitled to (...) publicly funded health care. I then propose eight conditions of adequacy that can be used to assess competing definitions (e.g., the ordinary language condition, the coherence condition, and the condition of normative adequacy). These conditions pull in different directions, however, and we must decide which are most important. I also suggest that there is no single definition that can help us deal with all the relevant practical issues. (shrink)

The paper offers a partial vindication of Sterelny’s view on the role of error rates and reliability in his theory of decoupled representation based on modelling techniques borrowed from the biological literature on evolution in stochastic environments. In the case of a tight link between tracking states and behaviour, I argue that in its full generality Sterelny’s account instantiates the base-rate fallacy. With regard to non-tightly linked behaviour, I show that Sterelny’s account can be vindicated subject to an adequate evolutionary (...) model and a suitable notion of reliability. (shrink)